William Michael Schmidli is a US foreign relations historian at the University of Leiden

The deportations carried out by police forces such as the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reflect a familiar pattern in American history: that of a deeply rooted, racially inflected nativism.

At the Munich Security Conference in February 2026, Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned his European counterparts of an existential danger. In the decades after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Americans and Europeans “opened our doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people,” Rubio declared. Describing the United States and Europe as “part of one civilization,” the Secretary concluded that mass migration “is an urgent threat to the fabric of our societies and the survival of our civilization itself.”

Rubio’s warning could hardly have surprised European leaders. On the campaign trail and in the Oval Office, Donald J. Trump has made anti-immigration a defining issue. Indeed, as Rubio spoke in Munich, tens of thousands of Americans were mobilized in frigid Minneapolis, Minnesota, against a massive deportation operation by federal immigration agents, who had shot two protesters to death in the previous weeks.

More broadly, Trump’s anti-immigration agenda reflects a pattern of nativism, which is the idea of promoting or protecting the interests of native-born or indigenous people over those of immigrants, with deep roots in American history. It also reflects the recent bipartisan support for a militarized border patrol. Yet Trump has taken anti-immigration a step further than any of his predecessors, using the specter of mass migration to garner support for his radical political agenda and to weaponize federal immigration agents against political opponents.

Racially inflected nativism

In Munich, even as he warned against mass migration, Secretary of State Rubio lauded the United States as a nation of immigrants. Describing how English colonists, Scots-Irish frontiersmen, German farmers, and French fur traders had forged “our pioneer nation,” Rubio sounded like he had lifted a page from a 1950s high school history textbook. Left out of the Secretary’s remarks was the long history of American nativism. From the colonial era, anti-immigrant sentiment simmered. “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens,” Benjamin Franklin griped in 1751 about the growing number of Germans, who he considered to have a “swarthy” complexion. “The number of purely white people in the world,” Franklin concluded, “is proportionably very small.”

Racially-inflected nativism took on increased significance as waves of migrants entered the United States in the decades after the Revolutionary War. By the mid-19^th century, few would deny that the sons and daughters of the Germans that Franklin had complained about were white; the same was not true, however, for the millions of newly-arrived Irish escaping the Potato Famine. In the raw capitalism of nineteenth-century America, such segmentation kept the working class divided in myriad ways: Protestants against Catholics and Jews, Anglo-Saxons against the Scots-Irish, older-stock Americans of Western and Northern European descent against newcomers from Eastern and Southern Europe.

Mexicans, Chinese and African Americans

Over time, a slow process of assimilation meant that European immigrants and their descendants “whitened,” resulting in less overt discrimination and greater social mobility. The same was not true for African Americans, whose enslaved ancestors had migrated involuntarily and who remained at the bottom of the social ladder, along with non-European migrants such as Mexicans and Chinese.

American nativism surged in the early twentieth century, as the anti-immigration agenda of organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan—better known for its white supremacist terror in the South—attracted millions of followers. The result was the emergence of the modern U.S. immigration regime.

Building on the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 severely restricted immigration through a quota system, which included an almost total prohibition on immigrants from Asia and Africa. Although more than four million Mexican workers joined the Bracero Program as guest workers in the United States during the Second World War, a spike in anti-Mexican sentiment in the 1950s led to a major federal deportation campaign, known by the discriminatory name Operation Wetback.

Escalating deportations

The Trump administration’s anti-immigrant politics is the most recent chapter in the long history of American nativism. In the past half-century, the United States has experienced a major increase in immigration from Asia and Latin America thanks to a 1965 revision of the immigration system. The new rules replaced the strict quota system with a more generous general limit on total immigration levels.  But Congress placed a relatively low cap on immigration from Mexico. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers in the U.S. were designated as illegal.

Correspondingly, bipartisan congressional support for a militarization of the southern border in the final decades of the twentieth century changed a fundamental calculus for Mexican seasonal agricultural workers. As the U.S. ramped up the number of border patrol agents, constructed vast stretches of wall to block crossing points, and dramatically escalated the number of deportations, it became increasingly arduous, expensive, and dangerous for migrants to return to Mexico after the harvest. Fortifying the border, in other words, interrupted decades of circular migration, leading millions of undocumented Mexicans to permanently settle in the United States.

In the 1990s, influential right-wing activists, such as talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, castigated the rising number of undocumented immigrants as part of a broader attack on American liberalism. To be sure, the increasingly draconian U.S. immigration regime was a bipartisan project—annual deportations during the Barack Obama administration, for example, increased to five times the annual average during the 1990s, leading immigration activists to dub Obama the ‘Deporter in Chief’.

‘They love a less white America’

But in an era of increasing income inequality, rising precarity for working and middle-class Americans, and a deepening culture war in which the values of diversity and multiculturalism have been fiercely debated, anti-immigration took an increasingly prominent position in the Republican Party. Moreover, as the populist right has gained ground in the U.S. and Europe, racist fringe views, such as the Great Replacement Theory, asserting that white Americans are being actively ‘replaced’ by non-white immigrants, have moved closer to the mainstream. As right-wing activist Charlie Kirk put it in March 2024, “the American Democrat Party hates this country. They want to see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.”

Donald Trump effectively used the specter of mass migration to play upon voters’ fears in the 2016 presidential campaign. Following in the well-worn path of his nativist predecessors, Trump described Mexican migrants as rapists, drug-dealers, and criminals, and promised to build a “big, beautiful wall” between the U.S. and Mexico. In his first term in office, however, despite heated rhetoric, Trump’s immigration policy deviated little from that of his immediate predecessors; although the administration’s callous family-separation policy generated outcry, the number of annual deportations was actually slightly lower than in the Obama years.

Trumps second administration

If Trump’s nativist agenda in his first administration was marked more by continuity with previous decades than change, the same cannot be said of his second administration. After losing to Joe Biden in the 2020 election, Trump doubled down on anti-immigration in the 2024 campaign, accusing immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.” As president, Trump unleashed federal immigration agents as part of his crackdown on pro-Palestinian activism and sent hundreds of Venezuelan men to a high-security prison in El Salvador based on allegations that they were members of a gang trying to invade the United States.

In early summer 2024, Trump ordered “the largest mass deportation operation of illegal aliens in history,” an initiative that was jump-started by congressional legislation authorizing $170.1 billion in new spending for immigration enforcement, making it the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in history.

Significantly, in his second administration, Trump has attempted to weaponize federal immigration operations against his domestic political opponents. This marks a dangerous departure from previous administrations’ approach to immigration, and fits a broader pattern of Trump undermining the norms and institutions of American democracy. In particular, the president has directed major immigration operations against majority-Democratic cities. The Democrats “use illegal aliens to expand their voter base, cheat in elections, and grow the welfare state, robbing good-paying jobs and benefits from hard-working American citizens,” Trump declared in an official statement in June 2025. “These radical-left Democrats are sick of mind, hate our country, and actually want to destroy our inner cities—and they are doing a good job of it.”

Upcoming midterm elections

Trump’s anti-immigration campaign is thus rooted in a long history of American nativism. But his politicizing of federal immigration agents against his domestic political opponents is unprecedented and serves as a core component of the forty-seventh president’s wide-ranging assault on American democracy. Looking to the future, it is possible that rising public opposition to Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown will fuel a sizeable Democratic victory in the November 2026 congressional midterm elections. It is also conceivable that Trump could use anti-immigrant fearmongering to his advantage, possibly by upending the voting process itself. “These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally,” Trump recently told a right-wing podcaster. “We should take over the voting in at least many—15 places,” he continued. “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

Photo: Wikipedia