4 - What Do We Owe Strangers?

Summary

Chapter 4 examines how American religious exceptionalism shapes citizens’ hostile views toward immigrants, and their restrictive immigrant admission and immigration policy preferences. It provides a brief history of American immigration policy and how religion and nationalism have influenced national narratives about who is worthy of becoming an American. The chapter also highlights how cultural concerns have dominated the immigration debate and the policies associated with it, with economic factors playing a secondary role in explaining Americans’ attitudes toward the nation’s newcomers. Ultimately, the nation’s disciples express a uniquely expensive set of hostile attitudes toward the possibility of increasing or keeping immigration at its current levels, narrow conceptions of who should be allowed entry into the nation, and uniformly restrictive immigration policy preferences. American religious exceptionalism largely determines whether or not Americans express the harshest policy preferences, and, in particular, amounts to supportive views of the most restrictive policies suggested by politicians who espouse White supremacist views toward America’s immigrants.