Authoritarians are once again trying to racialize citizenship. In Asia, that’s quite normal. The problem is that conservative movements worldwide are similarly trying to shore up their dwindling popularity by undemocratically disenfranchising the very immigrants they had once invited over.

SNA (Tokyo) — News Item: On August 1, 2023, Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad, former prime minister of Malaysia, tweeted his thoughts on multiracial immigration: “It is normal for migrants wishing to become citizens of any country to identify themselves linguistically and culturally with the definitive people of their adopted country. They would break off and reject their links with their countries of origin. Certainly, the children and grandchildren of the new citizens would have forgotten their previous languages and culture.”

This tweet from a world opinion leader isn’t just wrong-headed, it’s dangerous.

Not only is it trying to disenfranchise entire peoples through racialized attitudes towards citizenship, it’s actually threatening democracy itself.

Can’t see it? You’re not alone. The lack of public outcry is part of the problem. I put this down to a world largely untrained in civics. Racialized attitudes towards immigration and citizenship are normal in Asia, and conservatives worldwide are trying to popularize them in their own societies too. Citizenship is the gateway to political enfranchisement in society, and messing with it means reviving old racist policies all over again.

Let me explain from the perspective of a political scientist.

First, it’s surprisingly difficult to get people to see Dr. Mahathir’s tweet for what it is: racist hate speech.

It would be nice if people could see the long-term implications of this proposal without a long, elaborate explanation. But many people dismiss political science as a science at all, one that develops a skill set and a trained eye. Instead, they throw up their hands and see any political opinion as fair dinkum, or too complicated to deal with due to freedom of speech. That blinds them to the fact that Dr. Mahathir is floating a policy trial balloon to willfully exclude people.

Consider the practical application of this proposal: newcomer residents (and their Visible Minority children) must prove their loyalty to a country by giving up the multicultural and multiethnic sides of themselves.

This isn’t just a dick move by some politician taking political pot shots by saying, “You come here, you speak our language.” When Dr. Mahathir demands people become “full Malay” (with arbitrary goalposts determined, naturally, by Malays), that’s a pretty convenient way to keep all the power in the family.

Then we get to the historical revisionism. Dr. Mahathir later argues how Chinese, Indian Muslims, and Pakistanis in pre-independence Malaya properly assimilated (like good little model minorities), but the immigrants who came later “did not want to identify themselves with the definitive people, the Malays.” How dare these newcomers retain their own languages and cultures, fly flags of other nations, even mispronounce Malay words in ways “influenced by their original language”! That’s why he demands they “forget” their previous languages and cultures.

Dr. Mahathir knows better. At age 98, he personally lived a history which he seems to have now forgotten. Even during his halcyon days of docile ethnicities, Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere granted Japanese citizenship to its conquered subjects, but they were never granted the same rights as Japanese even if they fought and died for the Emperor. So, in practice, Japanese never gave up their power, and no amount of self-sacrifice by the second-class subjects in the gaichi (hinterlands) was ever enough. Better to keep them forever striving to become “Japanese” as defined by the “definitive people” of Imperial Japan.

Thus Dr. Mahathir is trying to put bitter old wine in new bottles. By reviving the embedded racism of the past and applying it to worldwide immigration, he’s cobbling together a conservative argument to make “multiracialism” a newfound threat to national integrity.

Dr. Mahathir is a proponent of a grander scheme. In many Asian countries, Japan included, this exclusionary attitude is not only common and unproblematically expressed, but also enshrined in law. They still demand identity sacrifice as part of their citizenship and assimilation requirements, and do it through dick moves of their own like denying birthright citizenship and dual nationality.

But it goes further, as trained political scientists can piece together. Dr. Mahathir is, in fact, making a classic argument advanced by authoritarian systems masquerading as conservative movements. He’s part of the worldwide assault on democracy.

Fact: thanks to unprecedented levels of international labor migration, we are seeing more people moving to other countries, often staying on and becoming residents and immigrants. Societies, particularly many white-majority ones, are becoming demographically browner.

As usual, conservative politicians are decrying this as a threat (e.g., “Great Replacement Theory”) and gaining political power from it. That’s odd, since they were once perfectly happy with letting cheap foreign workers, who just happen to enjoy fewer labor law rights, fill their factories and increase profits in the name of global economic prosperity.

But also a fact is the changing status quo, especially in democracies where majorities elect leaders and influence public policy. Whites are now no longer the majority in many electorates.

So while they still can, conservatives, particularly the white folk in the former colonial powers, are trying to retain their power by advocating minority rule in government. The classic defense is “to protect the majority from the jealous minority,” and it’s been going on for centuries. That’s why even the oldest democracies have bulwarks (such as the US Electoral College and US Senate) to safeguard against “mob rule.”

But now conservatives want it all. They’re essentially arguing that only certain people are, in fact, entitled to power; in Dr. Mahathir’s words, “the definitive people.” And once in power, they design policies (such as impediments to voting) to target people with different skin colors, ethnic origins, even different beliefs on the political spectrum. Their rhetoric is increasingly, “our people are the only ‘real’ citizens.” This is precisely what Trump’s MAGA movement capitalized on: “Real America’s Voice.” And they too want to get rid of birthright citizenship and inclusive national censuses.

In other words, the historical majority in society is supposed to retain power at all times, even if demographics and liberalizing ideas have crowded their camp into the minority.

That’s why there is such a hot-tongued battle over political science tools like Critical Race Theory—because they threaten to expose embedded racial and ethnic safeguards—in some societies taking the form of clear quotas and blood quanta for membership and representation. Those who benefit from this status quo will couch racist debates in hateful and existential terms and largely get away with it under the guise of freedom of speech. And if they succeed, as they have for centuries, they will continue to teach only self-serving and “patriotic” historical narratives, and tip the playing field to favor the enfranchised and definitive.

This is not how democracy is supposed to work. Democracy, at its core, means expansive suffrage that enfranchises as many people as possible in society, and majority rule on elections and policies with one person, one vote. Like it or not, democracy means the majority rules.

That’s why, of all people, Dr. Mahathir should be shouted down as an authoritarian demagogue. In his six terms as prime minister, he undermined Malaysia’s democracy with dick moves like creating tribal political parties, personalizing power and patronage, curtailing civil liberties, eroding judicial independence, and jailing political opponents. He must be widely condemned not only because he’s reviving racialized ideas that would have been dustbinned long ago if people only knew better, but also because he’s part of the push to undermine worldwide democracy.

But seeing all that requires a public actually understanding what terms like “authoritarianism,” “democracy,” and “citizenship” mean, not letting the politicians define them to their advantage. That means training people in civics as a skill set, knowing what democracy requires of its citizens to maintain it, and readily dismissing the Dr. Mahathirs of the world before their toxic ideas are recycled for the next generation.

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