nativist

American  

[ney-ti-vist] / ˈneɪ tɪˌvɪst /

noun

1. a person who urges the promotion of the interests of inhabitants born in a country over those of immigrants.

   Nativists advocate a hard line against immigrants, but loud and aggressive efforts have proven to be an electoral bust.

2. a person who advocates or engages in the preservation or revival of an Indigenous culture.

   Some nativists began urging fellow Mi’kmaq to pray to Gluskap, their traditional culture hero, instead of to the “foreign” Christ.

3. Philosophy. a person who argues for the existence of ideas that are not learned but are part of the original constitution of the mind.

   Nativists emphasize genetics, biology, and innate mechanisms, while empiricists insist that babies are born into the world with no knowledge of it.

4. Psycholinguistics. a person who argues for the innateness hypothesis, that humans are born with a knowledge of certain universal elements of language structure that comes into play during first-language acquisition.

   The differences in language ability in subjects with Down syndrome may lie at the level of the brain’s microcircuitry, where nativists locate innate language knowledge.

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adjective

1. of, being, or relating to nativists or their views.

   Many countries have seen the emergence of angry nativist movements aimed at combating further immigration.

Other Word Forms

• nativistic adjective

Etymology

Origin of nativist

nativ(e) ( def. ) + -ist ( def. )

Example Sentences

"It's a very nativist document," argues Karin von Hippel.

From BBC • Jan. 9, 2026

All that goodwill and affection, not just among teammates but between competitors, who represented diversity among and within nations, whatever the peculiarities of their individual governments and nativist movements.

From Los Angeles Times • Aug. 11, 2024

The race pitted antislavery Rep. Nathaniel “Bobbin Boy” Banks, a member of the nativist American Party from Massachusetts, against candidates who were open to expanding slavery to new states and territories.

From Washington Post • Dec. 30, 2022

A third vaguely moderate, nativist party, calling itself the American Party, ran the former president Millard Fillmore, another Northerner sympathetic to the South.

From New York Times • Dec. 21, 2022

It was this nativist philosophy, bolstered by his fear and distrust of foreigners, that prompted Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to pursue policies that brought the Red Scare in America to a head in 1919.

From "1919 The Year That Changed America" by Martin W. Sandler