Hunting Foreigners

This chapter discusses the hunting of foreigners. It argues that the hunt for foreigners is a hunt for foreign workers. Xenophobic hunts arise from competition for wages. Their logic involves interpredation: the exploited against the exploited, the poor against the poor, workers against workers. Although capitalism did not invent xenophobic violence, it has channeled it toward the powerful interpredatory dynamics that characterizes it. In so doing, it has also endowed it with a redoubtable social power. Certain political movements soon understood this. Over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, the conservative and nationalist right sought to extend protectionism from products to workers to transform popular xenophobia into a political program.