Guest Lecture by Dr. Georgiana Banita (University of Bamberg): “Demographic Dystopias: Criminalizing Immigration in US Electoral Rhetoric”

In 1856, U.S. Representative Henry Winter Davis of Maryland, who served as a member of the nativist American Party (previously known as the Know-Nothing Party), contested the validity of James Buchanan’s election by claiming that “vast multitudes of foreign-born citizens ... ignorant of American interests, without American feelings, influenced by foreign sympathies,” “men naturalized in thousands on the eve of the election,” were to blame for the fraudulent outcome. Davis rejected the South’s claim that slavery was a divine institution, and after the Civil War he publicly supported the extension of voting rights to African Americans. But the Irish and German immigrants were a different matter. Davis’s contention echoes throughout the history of U.S. elections in similarly stigmatizing framings employed by candidates and other politicians for political gain. This lecture examines this longer durée of anti-immigrant discourse in U.S. electoral politics, with a specific focus on the criminalization of immigrant populations. The diachronic analysis undertaken here reveals a dogma we may refer to as ‘demographic dystopia’: the cyclical and deliberate construction and dissemination of narratives that shape perceptions of immigrants as inherently criminal.

Zoom link:

https://uni-giessen.zoom-x.de/j/63334806325?pwd=bUJhU2lTd3NwYVcvcUJ3c1lvbFVOQT09