Democracy and Its Discontents, Ep. 3: Division and Discord

Introduction

In a democracy, all citizens get to participate.

But as Americans become more diverse—and economically insecure—fear of the “other” is growing.

[Zoli Hajnal: “The party that’s pushing an anti-immigrant narrative is also simultaneously pushing an anti-democratic narrative and pushing a set of policies that are trying to exclude certain groups.”]

I’m Lindsay Shingler. This is a special miniseries from Talking Policy we’re calling: “Democracy and Its Discontents.”

Over the course of five conversations, we’ll explore some of the underlying dynamics that seem to be driving polarization and opening the door for aspiring autocrats.

In this episode, we’ll talk with Zoli Hajnal, a professor of political science at UC San Diego. He’s the author of White Backlash: Immigration, Race, and American Politics, and co-author of a new book: Race and Inequality in American Politics: An Imperfect Union.

We’ll talk about how politicians scapegoat immigrants when voters are feeling cultural and economic anxiety—and use that fear to get votes—and how that undermines the values and basis of our democracy.

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Lindsay: Former President Donald Trump has said many questionable—and even vicious—things about various groups of people. But his language has been especially strong when it comes to immigrants.

When he announced his first bid for presidency in 2015, a lot of us remember him accusing Mexico of sending rapists to the U.S. And in a November 2023 interview, he said that immigration is, “poisoning the blood of our country.”

I thought the U.S. was supposed to have moved beyond this kind of language, that we celebrated our diversity. Zoli, what’s going on?

Zoli: The unfortunate reality is that we’re absolutely not there. In some ways things are getting worse.

And in particular, thinking about immigration, thinking more broadly about race, one real concern, dilemma, problem to think about is the increasing diversity of our nation, right? So we’re moving towards a majority-minority nation where more than half of the population will be non-white. That represents, to at least some portion of the public, a threat.

And those comments by Donald Trump are essentially playing on using those threats to try to garner more support.

Lindsay: So we’re a nation of immigrants, but anti-immigrant rhetoric seems to be on the rise, and it’s playing a powerful role, not only in American elections, but in elections in other countries as well. Why is immigration in particular such a galvanizing issue for voters?

Zoli: I think the reason why immigration is powerful is both its size and its visibility.

So, in the American context, as well as in many other nations, there are a lot of immigrants coming into the nation. And now, you know, immigrants and their children represent a quarter of the United States’ population, very roughly speaking. So it’s large.

It’s also visible. In that, at least in the American context and in many other contexts, immigrants look different from the population as a whole. They may be culturally different. That represents a potential threat. So the larger, pre-existing population is worried about that change that might happen.

And in fact, one of the best ways to predict who’s most interested in cutting immigration down—and both criticizing and punishing an immigrant community—are folks who think they’re losing over time.

So you can actually ask folks, Americans, you know, looking at a symbol of power, call—we’ll say it’s a bullseye, and there are these different rings around the bullseye. And you ask someone, “how close were you to the center of power—to the center of the bullseye—50 years ago?” And they might put themselves quite close to the center of power as a white American in a largely white nation.

If you then ask folks, “where is your group now?” The individuals who feel like their group has moved the most from the center to the periphery are the people who are most likely to be opposed to immigration.

That’s the beginning of the process. And then that change, and that anxiety, and fear, represents an opportunity for a political entrepreneur, right? So, they can talk about immigration in negative ways. They can highlight all the negative things that could happen. And by doing that, they can increase the fears about immigration and use those fears to try to garner more votes as perhaps someone like Donald Trump is doing now and has been doing for the last few years.

Lindsay: So let’s unpack some of that. You talked about—that immigration is large and it’s visible. Let’s start with the “large.” We’ve heard in the news or read in the headlines that there’s been a surge of immigration over the last, like, maybe three years, especially.

Can you give us a sense of kind of the trend line? Like, are the numbers dramatically higher in recent years? And is that sense of a surge—is that real?

Zoli: It is real and not real. So there is not the dramatic surge in immigration that opponents of immigration like to talk about. There are different parts of the immigration story that have maybe changed significantly over time, but for example, the number of immigrants from Mexico is actually declining over time.

One of the important features of immigration in America that we often mistake—or we miss—is that a lot of the current immigration is Asian immigration rather than Hispanic or Latino immigration.

One of the other misperceptions is the degree of illegality or the undocumented nature of immigration in America today. Undocumented immigrants, while they’ve been large in number, have represented a tiny fraction of the immigrants in this country.

It’s overwhelmingly legal, and so that’s one of the things that the public should be aware of, right? That the numbers are not increasing dramatically over time. The nature of who’s coming is changing somewhat over time. And throughout all of this, the degree to which immigrants are undocumented is relatively tiny.

And so that focus on illegality is—is a ruse in some sense. It’s not really what the core issue is about.

Lindsay: I want to ask you about economic concerns.

I was on a road trip recently with my husband and we were driving down the highway in a part of California that is rural and sort of agricultural. And we passed by lots of different billboards that had to do with local elections, the presidential election. And I remember seeing one that was very anti-immigrant, sort of pointing the finger at immigrants as part of the problems that that community was facing.

To what extent are people worried about immigration fearful of immigrants because they’re worried about somehow losing out economically? Like what—what is that all about?

Zoli: I am both not an economist, and I’m not deeply in the heads of these individuals who—who have these fears, but, you know, we have lots of survey data, and really, what I think the heart of the fear or anxiety is, is a sense that the world is changing and I or my group is falling potentially further behind.

So you can think about this from a racial perspective. White Americans worry that their advantages and high status in America are threatened by the change of America moving to a majority-minority nation, or by immigrants coming in.

But more specifically on the immigration front, there’s certainly economic fears that “they’re coming to take our jobs.” There are fears that “they’re—they are coming to take our resources,” as in, using up the government’s generosity in terms of welfare, and educational services, and so on and so forth.

There is a lot of literature and a lot of debate in the media about the role of economic decline in this process. So is it just that people who don’t have jobs or are losing their own individual status—are those the ones who are most opposed to immigration, most supportive of these far-right policies?

And for the most part, it’s not those folks. It’s a broader set of white Americans and their broader group-level interests rather than their own individual interests. And includes folks who aren’t actually losing. They just feel like they’re losing.

Lindsay: In our last episode in this miniseries, we spoke with UCLA political scientist Marty Gilens, a colleague of yours, about money in politics and weak responsiveness of government to ordinary citizens, and government’s attentiveness to the wealthy and their preferences.

And he noted the problem of a lack of a unified working class that could sort of regain power in politics. And that one of the key problems was that the working class is divided along racial and ethnic lines or characterized by racial and ethnic divisions. To what extent is this something that is being constructed?

Zoli: There’s a reality to it, but it is very much something that’s being constructed and used by a set of political actors and—more specifically—the Republican Party.

So, we can go back in time to the 1960s when the Republican Party basically chose a Southern strategy of appealing to whites, and in particular working-class whites. And using race as a way to pull those working-class whites to the Republican side, in particular making the argument that “we will be tougher on Blacks, Blacks are taking advantage of the system, and the Republican Party is the answer to that.”

Of course, then the Democratic Party went to the other side and presented a more racially inclusive agenda. And won over, as a result of that, the vast majority of African American voters in this country. And that divided the working class between the Black working class on one side, the Democratic side, and the white working class on the side of the Republican Party. So that’s a source of the racial division.

And then you add on top of that immigration, right? So, it’s a new fear that the Republican Party has used to try and bring more—and different—whites over to the Republican Party.

So, “if you’re worried about crime, if you’re worried about drugs coming across the border, if you’re worried about folks taking your jobs, you need to support the Republican Party.” And so that further—in some senses—divided the working class.

And the rhetoric is encouraging people not to necessarily vote their economic interests, but to vote based on fear or race, immigration, and so on and so forth.

Lindsay: So you talked about some of the ideas many Americans have about the growth—the increase in the pure numbers—in terms of migration; some ideas or myths about who those people are, whether they’re here legally or illegally; some other kind of myths about the economic impact of migration—that it’s a zero-sum game, you know, that it automatically disadvantages native workers and drains, you know, services away; and some other ideas we might call myths around the decline in power of the in-group.

So it sounds like when it comes to immigration, it’s a galvanizing issue, but it also hinges on a lot of ideas that may not have a solid basis in evidence. And I’m curious what you think about that, and how you would deconstruct those myths.

Zoli: So, they are myths. There’s no doubt about it, right?

Certainly the notion that they’re an economic drain, that—that immigrants are taking our jobs, is not true. The net financial benefits of having a growing population, a hard-working immigrant population, are clear and have been documented over and over again.

Fears of crime are also not true, right? Immigrants, statistically, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. We know that, and that’s been documented as well.

And you can go on and on, you know, taking advantage of welfare, any number of different economic fears, are just simply disproven by the data.

Now, how do you convince people not to be scared of what they think is a real problem? That’s, I think, something that we have—as scholars—been less successful at figuring out.

Lindsay: Let’s talk about what these fears—regardless of whether they’re based on myth or not—what these fears do to our politics.

I think we can all—any of us who, kind of, read the newspapers can think of different policies that might be passed that directly target immigrants, bills that are passed that give police officers an ability to stop and search people suspected of being undocumented, that kind of thing.

But what—what impact does fear of immigration or immigrants have more broadly on politics?

Zoli: The answer is all kinds of consequences. But, you know, I think the most obvious is this kind of partisan consequence that I’ve already been talking about.

So number one, those who have fears about immigration are now increasingly supporting the Republican Party. In fact, we can watch people over time and an individual Democrat—say two years ago or 10 years ago—who had relatively negative views of immigrants at the time but were still a Democrat, is the kind of individual that’s most likely to switch over to the Republican Party. So preexisting views about immigration leading to more Republican support, more support for candidates in general that are espousing an anti-immigrant policy agenda.

And that of course then puts those individuals in power and then they pursue that more explicitly anti-immigrant agenda. And then perhaps a host of other conservative policies that may not be in the interest of that individual voter—and say if they’re a working class white—they may or may not be in their interest.

But it also—hearing about these myths changes their policy views on immigration, right? So, if you hear that they’re taking our jobs, then you don’t want them to come. And you then might want to limit their rights, interests, and services.

So, for example, we can talk about California. California was in some ways the forefront of the anti-immigrant movement in the early 1990s. And in part as a result, we dramatically reduced educational spending. And the argument there is, “well, there were more immigrants in the schools. They’re taking that money and we don’t want to give it to them.”

We then also dramatically increased prison spending in the state at that time. And we got harsher in terms of our criminal justice penalties. And that was thinking about, “well, they’re undocumented, they’re illegal, they’re committing crimes, we want to punish them,” quote unquote.

So it affects attitudes on immigration. It affects attitudes on other policies, and that then impacts how governments spend their money on—again, not just immigration-related issues, but on a whole host of broader policy issues like education, criminal justice, healthcare, welfare, and so on and so forth.

So, you see this at the national level and then you see it at the state level. So states with larger, growing immigrant populations are more punitive in their policies and more punitive in their spending than states that don’t have that high rate of immigration.

Lindsay: How would you expect the trends that you’ve just described—about what fear of immigrants does to us to our politics—how do you expect those trends to develop, given that the Republican Party itself is changing and moving further to the right?

Zoli: Things are going to get worse before they get better.

We are, demographically, again, moving towards a majority-minority nation, and that means that more and more places are having more and more racial and ethnic minorities in them, more areas with a large immigrant population, and that is just going to give political operators like Donald Trump, like the Republican Party, the opportunity to try and stoke those fears even more than they have. And they have been largely successful in doing so, and I expect them to continue to do so.

The other political imperative in this is the Republican Party, in order to win, needs more and more white voters. They’re not garnering much in the way of support from racial and ethnic minorities. The white population is not growing.

The racial and ethnic minority population is growing, so if you want to continue to win elections, you have to stoke more fears and get more of the pre-existing white voting subset of the population than you have. Or you have to limit the voting power, exclude the vote, from those who might oppose you—racial and ethnic minorities.

So the Republican Party is trying to do both of those things. And by doing both of those things, they are likely to foment more fear and potentially more violence moving forward.

At the end of the day, the more positive story is that eventually, America will become a majority-minority population. And at least in many instances, once you’ve moved past this fearful transition, things get better.

Lindsay: In what ways are racial and cultural anxiety, which immigration is—is this emblem for, animating politics in other countries?

You know, in what ways is what we’re seeing in the U.S. unique and kind of special to the U.S., and in what ways is what we see happening here actually part of a bigger phenomenon that we see around the world?

Zoli: I think it’s very much part of a bigger phenomenon. So, in most ways, what we see in the U.S. is not unique at all. You know, if what we’re seeing in the United States is a response to growing diversity, growing racial and ethnic diversity, a growing immigrant population, and the fear of that population, the reaction that that fear causes, that’s something that’s happening elsewhere around the world as well.

So a lot of the conflict that occurs in Europe is about much of the same set of issues. So the immigrant population itself might be slightly different. The fears might be slightly different. So France might be, you know, more of a Muslim immigrant population and a different set of fears related to that.

And a different set of immigrants in Germany and—and in different countries in Scandinavia. But in—in Europe and elsewhere, fear of the other is leading to more and more support for right-wing and far-right-wing parties.

The one way in which America might be unique or special, is that we’re a little further along this process than many other countries. So we’re closer to becoming a majority-minority nation than most of the other, developed OECD countries. And so we may be currently in a more divided, conflictual state.

And again, looking for hope for the future, we may be able to demonstrate to other countries how to overcome that and move to, you know, a truly multiracial democracy.

Lindsay: It’s interesting. You mentioned the role that immigration plays in different countries from France, to Germany, to the UK, and beyond—Netherlands, in driving voters to far-right parties, some of which, you know, are elected and go on to chip away at what we think of as democracy in those countries. And part of the premise of this miniseries is to look at this question of disenchantment with democracy and democratic backsliding.

How do you think this phenomenon, fear of immigration, all of this anxiety around—economic anxiety, cultural anxiety, the way that it is motivating and animating voters in our politics—what impact does that have on American democracy?

Zoli: The concerns about immigration and the, sort of, end of democracy are not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination. But certainly in the American context, the party that’s pushing an anti-immigrant narrative is also simultaneously pushing an anti-democratic narrative and pushing a set of policies that are trying to exclude certain groups.

So there’s a logic to both of those things and that logic is related: more anti-immigrant agendas and narratives mean, maybe, more support for those parties. And then moving against democracy is almost saying, “well, we’re still going to lose because our country is becoming more diverse. And so one way to continue to stay in power is to exclude the groups that are against us.”

And we’ve already seen that being done in different ways at the state level, by Republican-led states. We’re now, of course, seeing some of that coming to the fore at the national level, with Trump trying to ‘stop the steal’ and—and basically, in different ways, criticize American democracy and try to usurp the democratic process.

So, two distinct, but two very related phenomena that are each leading to problematic and concerning outcomes.

Lindsay: We’re obviously heading into an election season that promises to be high stakes. Thinking about the voters that are going to make choices in November, what would you want them to know?

Zoli: I’d want them to know some of the facts and lies or the—you know, the misinformation and truth to what’s going on.

So, as we’ve talked about today, immigrants are not a threat. They’re not an economic threat. They’re not a criminal justice threat. They’re not a welfare threat. So the reality is immigrants tend to help grow the American economy and make America, essentially, better.

The other piece of misinformation that’s going around a lot is that America is struggling. For example, that crime is going through the roof that, you know, the country’s falling apart. The reality that the American economy is doing relatively well, and that, for example, crime is flat or going down, generally speaking.

So the reality of America today is actually relatively positive. Ao that doesn’t tell individual Americans who to vote for, but it does say, you know, step back a little bit, and recognize, see that some of the fears and myths that are out there are inaccurate, and that the reality is generally relatively positive, and then vote based on that, not on the myths and misinformation that you’re being subjected to.

Lindsay: You’ve been studying and writing about race and immigration in America for a long time. Tell us where this interest came from, like, thinking way back. To devote a career to this topic, there must be some—some deeper motivation, and I’m curious what yours is.

Zoli: I probably didn’t recognize it, but early on as a kid, I was very much interested in looking at, understanding, and helping the—we’ll call it the little guy, but the disadvantaged person. And over the years, have increasingly just wanted to help. And help meant, I think, early in my career, understanding the barriers to the representation of these groups. And then in later years, and—and continuing today, trying to come up with solutions, ways of reducing those barriers and getting us closer to an effective, equal, inclusive, multiracial democracy.

Lindsay: The story that you’ve told us about the role that that cultural anxiety—as viewed through the lens of immigration and the debate around immigration, is—is that anxiety is growing and is being manipulated for political purposes, to advantage, sort of, a certain point of view about what American democracy should look like.

And one of the questions that underlies this series is: if American democracy is at risk, if some American voters are questioning just how democratic we really are, and whether it’s worth it to even bother, given how many problems we have, we want to answer the question, you know: is our democracy worth saving? And if it is—and we obviously think it is—why? Like, why is that important?

Zoli: I absolutely think American democracy is worth saving. American democracy is flawed in all kinds of different ways, which, you know, I would love to see it reformed in. But I think the simple way to maybe answer the question is to say: democracy delivers, right?

So, irrefutably, democracy leads to better outcomes than its alternatives, right? So we see more economic growth in democracies. We see better, longer lives, better educational outcomes. A whole host of individual outcomes that are better in democracy than they are in the alternative.

But even maybe more fundamental than that is democracy delivers core rights and freedoms. So, in our democracy and in other democracies, you are free to speak out and say what you want. You’re free to organize in different ways. You have inalienable rights and freedoms, and those are essential to humankind—autocracy is going to take those things away.

Lindsay: Well, Zoli, thanks for being with us on Talking Policy.

Zoli: Thanks for having me.

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Outro

In our next episode, we’ll talk with UC San Diego professor Steph Haggard about how some aspiring leaders take advantage of division on their quest to undermine democratic norms.

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Credits

Thanks for listening to “Democracy and Its Discontents,” a special miniseries from Talking Policy. I’m your host, Lindsay Shingler.

Our production partner for this mini-series is CitizenRacecar. This episode was produced by Anna Van Dine. Mixing and sound design by Alex Brouwer. Special thanks to Tyler Ellison.

Talking Policy is a production of the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

 

The UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) is a research network comprised of scholars from across the University of California and the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories that conducts policy-relevant research to mitigate conflict and promote a more peaceful world order. Our focus is on challenges that have the potential to lead to wide-scale conflict, and that can benefit from global cooperation to solve. Our portfolio includes both traditional security issues—defense innovation, strategy and deterrence, nuclear weapons policy, and security cooperation—and emerging and non-traditional challenges such as climate change, geoeconomics and great power competition, and threats to democracy. In each of these areas, IGCC builds diverse, multidisciplinary research teams that analyze the causes and consequences of global conflict—and help develop practical solutions.