ABSTRACT
Historically, immigration discourse has proved a most effective site for the construction of whiteness in both the US and England. In this chapter, I am particularly interested in exploring the ways in which immigration debates have helped to forge ‘white interests’ and thus served to consolidate white identities. Rather than assuming that interests are straightforward expressions of different social locations (class, gender, ethnicity), the assumption here is that those locations themselves are internally diverse and always changing and that interests, too, are ever in the process of being constructed. The ideology of ‘white interests’ has been built around and harnessed to ideas of economic security, prosperity, ontological security, and a sense of local and/or national belonging. Such interests and identities will be shown to have been formed in opposition to subaltern white ethnicities as well as those more commonly associated with processes of white racialisation. In the main part of the chapter I will draw on two case studies, one from either side of the Atlantic, to analyse the formation of whiteness through political discourse and the media .
