Final answer:
The statement about nativism is true as it fosters ethnic or racial preference and often leads to discrimination against immigrants and minority groups. In American history, nativism has influenced immigration policies and societal attitudes, marginalizing non-white and non-Protestant populations, and causing widespread inequality.
Step-by-step explanation:
The best answer to the question concerning nativism is true. Nativism is a socio-political ideology that holds a preferential view of native inhabitants of a country over new immigrants and often espouses xenophobic or racist sentiments. It typically involves a significant bias towards, in the case of American nativism, White Americans with ancestral familial ties predating recent immigrants. Nativism promotes the interests of these native inhabitants against those of immigrants, frequently leading to policies and social attitudes that discriminate against non-white, non-Protestant, and non-Anglo-Saxon populations. This sentiment contributed to a historical pattern in the United States where legislation and social practices were used to advance the interests of native-born Americans of Western European descent over others, leading to the marginalization and oppression of minority ethnic and racial groups.
The practice of nativism in America has often led to the vilification of immigrants and an unfounded association of them with threats to national security and social stability. Examples in history include reactions to the Bolshevik Revolution and the association of immigrants with radicalism and anarchy. An irony of American nativism is its discrimination against even Native Americans, who were not considered part of the nativist vision for an Anglo-Saxon, Protestant America.
Ethnocentric bias, a core element of nativism, distorts views of cultures and promotes inequality within multicultural societies. Nativist policies and actions fail to achieve desirable outcomes if they are rooted in misinformation and prejudice rather than scientific knowledge, historical fact, and meaningful communication. Therefore, nativism has been a source of racial and ethnic tensions and has shaped immigration policy in ways that reflect these prejudices, particularly during the 1920s in America.