The Nativists Are Restless

Kit Brewer doesn’t like immigrants. “While America was harnessing electricity, while America was winning World War I, winning World War II, inventing the computer, inventing nuclear weapons [and] breaking the DNA code, what were the Mexicans doing?” he asks. “They were making tacos.”

He pauses to clarify.

“By Mexicans, that’s kind o’ a generic term for me that also includes Salvadorans, Hondurans, etc…. I don’t want any immigrants from the Third World.” He also mentions Iraq and Sudan. Brewer used to live in Antioch—which he calls “Hispanioch,” because of its large Hispanic immigrant population—but moved after getting tired of his child “having to step over drunk Mexicans in a ditch to get to the school bus.” “Thank God I got out,” he says. “While I could still get something for my house.”

Brewer insists that he doesn’t have a problem with all immigrants, just the “Third Worlders.” “If somebody wants to come here form Western Europe, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, that’s fine. I would have hated to turn away Albert Einstein,” he says. “I don’t think that the next Albert Einstein is going to come from the Sudan, Mexico or Honduras.”

Brewer also thinks that Americans are inherently better and smarter people than those from other nations.

“Like it or not, their I.Q.s, except for Orientals, average seven to 20 points below the average American white.”

When asked how and where he found such a statistic, Brewer cites “the Internet.”

Unlike some other people who have strident opinions about immigrants and the impact that they’re having in the U.S., Brewer doesn’t differentiate between most legal and undocumented immigrants. “A legal immigrant from the Third World is just an illegal immigrant with a green card,” he says. Kit Brewer is not alone in his isolationist leanings. Throughout Tennessee in recent months, there have been many public and private displays of sentiments that closely echo Brewer’s. Some of these have been benign—angry talk radio callers and ugly graffiti. Others have been decidedly less so.

A few months ago in Smithville, Tenn., about 60 miles east of Nashville, Cuban-born police Chief Agustin Clemente Jr. resigned his post after only a few weeks. In his letter of resignation, Clemente claimed colleagues, including the mayor who’d hired him, had used racial slurs against him.

Last year, a Southeast Tennessee man was indicted on charges of building pipe bombs that he planned to put on buses carrying Hispanic workers.

In Maryville, Tenn., just outside of Knoxville, the owners of La Lupita Mexican Store arrived at their shop one Sunday morning to find spray-painted swastikas and other white power missives all over their building. Rocks had been thrown through La Lupita’s windows. An outdoor freezer had been jimmied open, $6,000 worth of meat and vegetables spoiled. The vandals didn’t take a thing.

In Nashville last year, a Koran was found defaced in a predominantly Somali neighborhood. Pages had been torn out of it, rubbed with feces and partially burned.

Last summer, the Espinoza family of Bowling Green, Ky., just over the Tennessee line, awoke to find a burning cross on their lawn. On their doorstep they found a cardboard placard, about 4-by-12 inches with a missive scrawled in black pen. On one side it read, “In my country, maybe. In my Neighborhood never.” On the other: “If you can’t read this. Oddy Ouss!! (sic).”

Nelson Espinoza, a 29-year-old, legal U.S. resident from El Salvador, was stunned by the flaming symbol of hate. “It feels like hell,” he says. “We don’t go outside.”

These incidents, and opinions like Brewer’s, are part of a growing backlash against one of the largest demographic shifts in the history of Tennessee—and the nation. Between 1990 and 2000, the national foreign-born population increased 57 percent, from 19.8 million to 31.1 million according to the Knight Foundation, a non-profit research group. During this same period, Tennessee’s foreign-born population increased 169 percent, four times the national average, ranking the state sixth in the nation overall in immigrant growth.

While one in 10 Americans are now foreign born, the number for Nashville is ever higher: one in seven. And by 2020, Tennessee’s Hispanic population alone is expected to double. In the blink of an eye, we have gained tens of thousand of new neighbors. But not everybody here is in a welcoming mood. There’s a cold and creeping feeling among nativists that the traditional American way of life is under attack. For them, it’s a culture war on a grand scale. It’s about disrespecting the American flag, singing the national anthem in a foreign tongue and salsa eclipsing ketchup as the country’s No. 1 condiment.

Katherine Donato, a demographer and professor of sociology at Vanderbilt who specializes in migration between Mexico and the U.S., explains the roots of this backlash succinctly. “We are in this place in 2006, in large part because of politics.”