Xenophobia As the Modern Incarnation of Antisemitism

Now that the economy has gotten too good, Trump and his Republican Party are glomming onto immigration, all the harder. Marc Cooper has a good round-up on this. I would also like to flog my old piece for Jacobin entitled “Send More People!”

This post has little to do with Israel, by the way.

A word more on the economics of my piece, which I would expect not to be controversial among most economists. The politics are another matter. A pedestrian or centrist economic discussion on this subject in today’s environment becomes politically radical. The reason is that the public is rock-stupid. The words “border crisis” should be avoided in public discussion. The real crisis is the stupidity of the current policy debate and related, proposed legislation.

It should be obvious that Democrats caving to this situation with half-measures that are noxious to their Latin constituents just put another pothole before their electoral journeys. Another own-goal.

I’ll have to leave it to others to explore the cultural, psychological, or social benefits of immigration. My spiel here is on the economics, narrowly or even crassly considered. The simple point is that immigrants benefit the U.S. economy. What roils the political debate is the upfront, transitional cost of immigration. New arrivals need food, clothing, and shelter. Once they are integrated into communities, however, there is no reason to doubt that they will be productive citizens, adding to GDP and public revenue.

There have been potted analyses of the negative fiscal impacts on state and local governments which are beside the point in two respects.

First, it really is the responsibility of the national government to see to the transitional costs, That it fails speaks to our broken federal system and the remove of the national government, a result in no small part of the red southern states screaming the loudest about the border.

Second, that there is an upfront cost is not the point. Anyone in business understands you have to spend money now to make money later. So too with national immigration policy. This bias is partly the result of ignorant babble about the public debt, which prejudices public investment. Spending yielding downstream benefits is forced to compete with spending for current consumption that yield popular benefits in the here and now. For this we have the budget hawks to thank, lo for the past thirty-plus years.

What does this have to do with The Jews? For that I propose a dumbed-down take on the profound book by David Nirenberg of Princeton Univ., “Anti-Judaism: the Western Tradition.” My take is that by Nirenberg, antisemitism across the millenia has been mostly about intra-religious, sectarian competition within Christianity and Islam. In other words, struggles among Christians and Muslims tended to deploy aspersions of “Judaism” in the absence of actual Jews.

In medieval times, these struggles took place in parallel with periodic, homicidal pogroms directed at Jewish communities. Christian potentates throughout Europe had a habit of expelling Jews they declined to exterminate. In both cases, justifications rested in part on hysterical tales of Jewish aggression against vulnerable Christians, the blood libels and so on. These days we observe modern versions of the libels from the lines of Qanon and the most rabid MAGA militants, but they are not the main event.

Thing is, Jews in finance especially could also be useful to Christian authorities. In particular, they acted as de facto tax collectors. The way it worked is that authorities were leery of imposing taxes. They had no compunctions, however, of routinely expropriating Jewish wealth acquired in part through money-lending (an occupation restricted to Jews by law). So Jews were identified as exploiters and acted as scapegoats for the avarice of Christian kings.

The dual roles of Jews, as either objects to be expelled (or worse) or useful administrative arms of the state was supported by the long-standing currents described by Nirenberg. In other words, anti-Judaism was a tool more than an unchanging cultural imperative. Antisemitism in general was a blizzard of historical situations and processes.

The contemporary analogy for me is the extent of xenophobia resting on abject lies from the heights of the Republican Party about immigrants (disease, crime, fentanyl and so forth), including in regions of the U.S. where few immigrants can be found. In other words, xenophobia serves political needs unrelated to immigrants themselves.

A contrasting view of antisemitism was offered by Hannah Arendt, in terms of the rhetorical inflation of the anti-social roles held by a minority of Jews through the ages, in finance and commerce. She was accused of blaming Jews for antisemitism.

Nirenberg proposes a more long-standing cultural undercurrent of bias stoked by sectarian religious competition, which bias might be called “essentialist.” But as noted above, Nirenberg’s picture is not ahistorical. He provides the micropolitics to support his intellectual history.

In the U.S. context, debates around race and class always involve a school of thought typified by the 1619 Project that sees anti-black racism as embodied in the founding of the nation. Ta-Nehisi Coates is a leading example of this thinking. Critics of this perspective, especially Adolph Reed, scorn this view as ahistorical sophistry attuned to the needs of black elites. I’m sympathetic to his criticism, reflected in my posts on the neoliberalism of the centrist, dubious anti-racists of the Democratic Party establishment.

I suppose the biggest failure of the 1619 school is its U.S.-centric view. For contrast, I like to cite Cedric Robinson’s book, “Black Marxism.” Racism is much older than the European settlement of the Americas, and as far as I can see, it does not rival the importance of anti-Judaism in European history. It certainly matters for the politics of European imperialism, but in that respect it was not restricted to Africans, or even POC (e.g., the Boers of South Africa).

There was a moment in U.S. history when xenophobia and antisemitism tightly overlapped, in the refusal of the U.S. government to accept Jewish refugees from Nazi-dominated Western Europe. Today the immigrants are not Jewish but ignorant hostility prevails. What horrible fates would await them in the event of a Trump electoral victory? If hostilities with Iran escalate, we could expect the prejudice to embrace Arab and Muslim immigrants as well.

Climate refugees and the continued collapse of failed states described by Cooper south of our border underline the persistence we could expect of this dark future.