Labor and capital blamed immigrants from opposite class directions in a dividing society
Evidence
While labor leaders centered their fire on a special kind of immigration, business leaders were becoming broadly critical of the whole immigrant stream. They did not, of course, share the malice which some workingmen felt toward foreign-born competitors, but the revolution in their attitudes was greater and in terms of policy more significant. After leading the chorus of praise for immigration in the age of confidence, the businessman was now turning almost full circle. This shift, instead of bringing capital into some accord with labor, actually reflected the widening breach between them. Where one saw the foreigner as a tool of oppression, the other discerned an agent of unrest. The two lines of attack had little in common except their origin in a common situation: both reacted to the immigrant as a disruptive wedge in a dividing society. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 293
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The immigrant-as-enemy is doubly constructed: assigned opposite meanings by labor (tool of capital) and capital (agent of unrest), yet unifying each camp. Shows manufactured enemies are positionally determined.
- XREF: Ties to reader’s framing: nativism not a single prejudice but a relational category filled differently by opposed groups. — connects to: People stereotype groups to justify an existing division of labor; Economic-reductionist theories explain racial divisions as byproducts of economic structures; The working and middle classes swapped sides on globalization and nationalism — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 23