Xenophobes Either Way

Xenophobia seems to be on the rise everywhere. It is obviously connected to the question of immigration, of “aliens” taking “our” jobs and making us feel as strangers in our own land. In Britain, the alarm was once directed against the Irish, then against the Jews, then the West Indians, and then against the Indians and Pakistanis. In Germany, it is the Turks; in France, the North Africans, in Italy, it was southern Italians, then Africans.

According to polls, more than half the population in Austria, Belgium, Hungary, France, Greece, Germany, and Italy are anxious about foreign workers. Muslims are particularly feared, though this does not correlate with the number of Muslims or immigrants in the country. According to a Chatham House 2017 survey, majority opposition to Muslims presence was highest in Poland (71%). Yet Poland has few immigrants, and these, even before the Russian invasion, came mainly from Ukraine.

Anti-immigration feelings in the USA are generally directed against Mexicans and so-called “Latinos” (i.e. Spanish-speaking). Donald Trump promised and is still promising to build a wall to contain them, but he also sought, in 2017, to ban entry of Muslims in the USA. His Executive Order, known as the “Muslim ban,” was called “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.” It excluded entry from many countries with Muslim majorities, with the exception of those the USA did not want to offend: Egypt, Turkey, and, of course, Saudi Arabia (though Osama Bin Laden and most of the terrorists of 9/11 were Saudis).

In India, Narendra Modi owes part of his successes and those of his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party), to his anti-Muslims policies. Soon after his 2019 election victory, Modi ratcheted up the anti-Muslim card by enacting the Citizenship Amendment Act, which grants undocumented migrants from neighboring countries Indian citizenship, unless they are Muslim. In the Netherlands the far-right party, led by the Islamophobic Geert Wilders, has just entered a coalition government with conservative parties. In Finland and Sweden, similar xenophobic parties are already in power in coalition governments.

In France, Marine Le Pen could be the next president, having obtained 41% in the second round of presidential elections of 2022. She is no longer the most xenophobic French politician: Éric Zemmour (whose Jewish parents had left Algeria) obtained 7% in the first round and has been condemned many times for incitement to race hatred. Le Pen and Zemmour were in harmony with alarmist literature, which, over the last twenty years, has resuscitated ancient racist trope. The essayist and commentator Alain Finkielkraut, whose father survived Auschwitz, known for his denunciation of antisemitism, in his bestseller L’Identité malheureuse (2013), lamented the dangers that immigration would bring for French identity (as if that had ever been a stable construct). A year later, he entered the Académie française. Renaud Camus, a former socialist, now on the far-right, in his Le Grand remplacement (2011), denounced the “plot” to replace the “real” French population with that of Africa.

The celebrated Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci – in her bestselling and widely translated La rabbia e l’orgoglio – produced texts full of hysterical insults towards “the sons of Allah.” The title of Melanie Phillips’s Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within (2006) says it all (like Fallaci, she has journeyed from left to right). A more recent exemplar of this genre was The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017) by the British journalist Douglas Murray. The Canadian journalist Mark Steyn, in his America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (2006), lamented the “fact” that soon Muslims will outnumber whites in the USA: “They breed with gusto.” They will have to breed a lot since Muslims are only 1.3% of the American population.

In Britain anti-immigration feelings were determinant in the narrow victory achieved by Brexit in the 2016 referendum. In Germany, the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany), which seriously considered mass deportations of foreigners, is second in the polls (though recent scandals may have harmed it). The party may well win state parliament elections in Saxony, Brandenburg, and Thuringia this September – all in former Eastern Germany.

In Italy the Prime Minister belongs to a party not dissimilar, when it comes to immigration, from what was called Lega Nord, once hostile toward southern Italians, now against foreigners.

Jews, anywhere in the world, can ‘return’ to Israel after some 2,000 years, but not the descendants of Palestinians who left during the war of 1948. In 2018 a new law was promulgated making Israel a ‘Jewish’ state, symbolically relegating non-Jewish Israeli citizens (twenty per cent of the population) to second-class status. For the liberal daily Haaretz, it was ‘the single most gratuitously hateful legislation in the nation’s history’. The celebrated conductor Daniel Barenboim, himself an Israeli, concurred.

Xenophobia has expanded as the global movement of people has expanded. The presence of foreigners is often seen as a threat to national culture. The notion of a national culture is highly questionable. In reality, most countries are a recent invention and are internally divided by religion, languages and dialects, food, and music. Identity is fluid, because concepts such as culture, history and collective self-perceptions are never fixed. They are in a constant state of flux and revision.

Yet fear of aliens and foreigners is old. In ancient Greece the word xenophobia involved fear of non-Greeks even though Greeks fought each other regularly. Modern xenophobia can be traced back to the 19th century was more economic than cultural: the fear that foreigners will take the jobs of natives.

In the USA the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act blocked immigration from China but Chinese workers had been decisive in the development of western railways. This was supported by the trade unions. Samuel Gompers, the AFL leader (and a Jew from London’s East End), declared in 1905 that ‘…the Caucasians are not going to let their standards of living be destroyed by negroes, Chinamen, Japs, or any others.’

Xenophobia in the trade unions was rife in France reflecting the worries about the influx of Belgians and Italians workers (in 1886 there were over one million foreign workers in France). Between 1881 and 1893, some thirty Italians were killed in the south of France in what can only be described as a series of pogroms.

In Great Britain, under prime minister Arthur Balfour, the Aliens Act 1905 was principally aimed at restricting Jewish immigration from the Tsarist Empire. It was the same Balfour whose famous 1917 declaration advocated a home for Jews in Palestine.

Today, blocking immigration in advanced countries makes little sense. Europe has an ageing population and needs to expand its base of productive (and tax-paying) workers. For example, Germany has now some a massive shortage of workers (some 700,000 according to government estimates which may grow to seven million by 2035). The health of capitalism requires a significant level of immigration. The losers are the countries from where the immigrants come from: they lose skilled workers. An Indian nurse in London hospital means one less in Delhi.