nativist

[ney-ti-vist]

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.

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

Word History and Origins

Origin of nativist¹

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

Example Sentences

I think of it as what we call in anthropology a nativist movement, a foregrounding of the people in the land.

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The man’s terrible fate haunts Robert for the rest of his life, reflecting a country where immigrants are often targeted by nativist fury.

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“How can you pretend to be a white nativist politician who will ‘bring america back to it’s golden age’ ... when your wife is an indian immigrant?” wrote one poster.

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Simultaneously, broad nativist fear of immigrants, and their labor, led to 1921 and 1924 acts creating restrictive quota systems basically eliminating immigration from anywhere but northwest Europe and the New World.

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Combine “There Will Be Blood’s” voracious oil baron and “The Master’s” manipulative spiritual guru with this movie’s America-first nativists and you have Anderson’s unholy trinity of characters who have corrupted our founders’ ideals.

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