The “Great Wave” immigrants didn’t come to the Dixie regions, where policies and public attitudes toward them remain unfriendly today
For Politico, Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard has written a magazine-length feature about the regional maldistribution of the “Great Wave” immigrants of 1880-1924 and how it’s shaped the world we live in today, including the geography of Christian Nationalism, popular opinion about immigrants and identity, support and opposition to Trump’s mass deportation campaign, regional ideas about national belonging and much more.
The story, published Dec. 13, is based on a Nationhood Lab research article on this topic published last year and on historical research Woodard did for Nations Apart, his new book that showcases the project’s work. It shows that essentially no immigrants from this consequential wave went to the three “southern” regions, which had one-tenth to one-thirtieth the proportion of foreign born people in 1900 as the rest of the regions. Elsewhere in the U.S., legacy Protestant America was forced to accept that Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Jews — at least — could be full-fledged Americans too, but that process did not occur in the Dixie regions because there were no immigrants to force the issue.
“One consequence of all this is political. These are the only regions where white Christian Nationalism — the belief that the United States is a country founded by and for white Christian evangelical Protestants — is sufficiently widespread to influence politics and policy,” Woodard wrote. “In all the other regions, white Protestants, whether evangelical or not, haven’t been a plurality of the population for decades or even centuries, but in the southern nations, evangelicals have been in the driver’s seat since the early 19th century.”
On Dec. 8, ahead of the Politico story’s publication, Nationhood Lab released additional analysis from the enormous Nationscape poll, showing significant regional variations in the public’s favorability toward undocumented immigrants that parallel the divides seen in other metrics of public opinion about immigration.
Woodard previously wrote two magazine-length articles for Politico on the project’s work, brining national attention to its analysis of the geography of U.S. gun violence and the regional disparities in life expectancy and health. Politico, based in Arlington, Virginia, receives an average of 26 million unique visitors to its U.S. site each month, and another 1.5 million to Politico.eu, which focuses on the politics of Brussels and the European Union.
Nationhood Lab, a project at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, delivers more effective tools with which to describe and defend the American liberal democratic tradition and better understand the forces undermining it.