Immigrants against Immigration

Immigration propelled by the neo-liberal order has, on the one hand, encouraged the inflow of foreign nationals, but on the other, has also exposed the limits of the so-called “promised land” in the West. This paradox or tension between hope at a new destination and despair at the “receiving” end of the promised land leads to the inversion of what could be loosely called the xenophobic attitude. In the changing immigration scenario, it is important to understand the basics of shared prejudice in terms of fossilised closed-mindedness against historically discriminated groups such as Black people, religious minorities, and lower-caste groups. An inward-looking individualism seems to overdetermine, for example, those who are alleged to have been opposing affirmative action for Black people in the United States (US). Thus, what one finds is a kind of inversion of xenophobia that is turned against those who, like their new opponents, have immigrated to the land of promise in the West.

One might think that the suggested inversion of xenophobia is different from the old binaries between the White and Black people in the US in terms of the colour of their skin,
Europeans versus Asians, or Americans versus Asians. However, it has to be argued that such a kind of inversion does not suggest a departure from old binaries; on the contrary, it involves the overlap between, for example, racism and xenophobia, as defined earlier.