Immigrants in the Transnational Far Right: Integration through Racisms and Negotiating White Supremacy in a Migratory Context

Abstract

Despite the historical and contemporary instances of immigrants and their descendants engaging with the far-right, whether through long-distance nationalism or country of residence politics, migration scholarship has surprisingly paid very little attention to this process. In this paper we argue that insufficient engagement with instances of the far-right attracting and mobilizing immigrants and ethnic minorities is a theoretical omission in both migration scholarship and scholarship of the far-right and is related to the reproduction of reified notions of “majority”’ and “minority,” normative assumptions about immigrants’ political activism as inevitably progressive, and methodological nationalism implicit in studying the far-right from a political science perspective. Through an analysis of a case study of Polish immigrants and their descendants in Britain, we demonstrate that these omissions can be bridged by paying more attention to relational processes of constructions of whiteness, the role of systemic racism, and the increasing transnationalization of the far-right. The cases we describe, captured through the notion of integration-through-racisms, are therefore a symptom of both increasing complexities of migration-driven diversity with threatened white privilege as the focus and dynamic changes in global far-right ideologies and strategies.