Nativist Bedfellows: The Christian Right Embraces Anti-Immigrant Movement

A longer version of this article appeared in the Summer 2008 issue of The Public Eye, the quarterly of the progressive think tank Political Research Associates. Ramos is research director and Chamberlain is senior researcher at PRA. The full article can be accessed here.

Many on the Christian Right have become nearly as worked up about undocumented immigrants as about abortion and same-sex marriage. You could hear that in the speeches at last September's Values Voters Summit -- the annual beltway gathering of key Christian Right groups -- and on talk radio before and since. While nativism has long run deep with many conservative white Protestants, this open flirtation with anti-immigrant politics involves a recent, dangerous, shift among the Christian Right's leadership.

Since its resurgence as a social movement in the mid-1970s, Christian Right leaders largely sidestepped immigration -- even when the movement's base generally supported such measures as California's landmark 1994 anti-immigrant measure, Proposition 187. Leaders committed to racial reconciliation between their overwhelmingly white constituency and African American evangelicals understandably have avoided racially charged immigration debates. Another movement objective -- finding common cause with socially conservative Latinos -- is particularly vulnerable to anti-immigrant campaigns. Congressional Republicans' harsh stance on immigration cost their party significant Latino support during the 2006 midterm elections, dropping to 29 percent from 44 percent in just two years.

If the leadership of the Christian Right has attempted to keep the issue of unauthorized immigration at arm's length, their base, increasingly, has embraced anti-immigrant views. A 2006 Pew Research Center Survey revealed that 63 percent of conservative white evangelical Protestants-the base constituency of the Christian Right-view immigrants as a threat to "traditional American customs and values." In a survey of its own constituency, the FRC reported that 90 percent of "values voters" believe deportation of "illegal immigrants" to be consistent with "the requirements of Christian discipleship."

While the Christian Right's growing alignment with anti-immigrant forces began at the movement's base, it seems some of the movement's shepherds have taken to following their flock.

In January 2007 Manuel Miranda, a former aide to Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN), announced the "Families First in Immigration" campaign. This "family values" initiative hewed closely to an immigration paper Miranda developed for the conservative Family Research Council, calling on the one hand for a path to citizenship for any unauthorized immigrant relatives of U.S. citizens and, on the other, for expunging birthright citizenship from the U.S. Constitution. This second provision, a longstanding goal of hard-line anti-immigrant groups, would require eliminating the 14th Amendment's guarantee of citizenship to children born on US soil to noncitizens. The campaign's "split the baby" approach on immigration drew initial support from such heavyweights as Richard Viguerie, Paul Weyrich, Gary Bauer, and Donald Wildmon, but was quickly rejected as being too soft, as smacking of "amnesty."

Meanwhile, 2008 Presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, and others stretched for ways to connect immigration to the Christian Right's core issue: abortion. Here's how Huckabee made the link: "Sometimes we talk about why we're importing so many people in our workforce. It might be because for the last 35 years we have aborted more than a million people [each year] who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973."