A growing number of Americans are pointing to immigration as a top concern heading into the election. But a substantive debate on the issue has become impossible, given that Donald Trump and his vice-presidential candidate, J. D. Vance, are only escalating their use of outright lies and xenophobia in lieu of anything resembling fact-based policy solutions.
On the campaign trail, Trump has said that immigrants are “animals” and “not human,” and implied that millions are crossing the border each month; publicly available data show that the real number has never exceeded 200,000 a month this year. When Vance took to X to declare that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbors’ pets, and Trump repeated the lie in a nationally televised debate the next day, those of us who have studied the United States’ history of dehumanizing immigrants felt as if the clock had turned back 150 years, to when the same specious claim was used to justify vigilante violence against Chinese Americans, and laws including the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Trump and Vance’s claims, along with other copycat assertions meant to imply that nonwhite immigrants are inherently immoral, such as the one about “Haitian prostitutes” aired at a Springfield city-commission meeting, have surfaced throughout American history. But their prominence in the mainstream political debate, Jesse Rhodes, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me, suggests a society in decline—one where “politicians can speak to the worst aspects of human psychology and human emotions and get a positive response.”
This summer, a survey by Rhodes and some of his colleagues found that nearly a quarter of Americans now believe that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and that “many immigrants are terrorists.” More than a third of respondents said that “millions of undocumented immigrants illegally cast votes in our elections.”
These views are components of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory and fears of white extinction that have enjoyed some support since at least the 1890s. But Rhodes told me that, among political scientists, “there was a belief or hope or conceit—and I think maybe in retrospect it was naive—that we had gotten past that.”
Trump’s bald embrace of xenophobia is upending the long-held belief among political scientists that, since the civil-rights movement, which also involved the elimination of quotas in American immigration laws that were based on eugenics, overtly racist appeals would only harm the electoral chances of anyone running for public office. These researchers believed that the United States had transitioned into an era of “dog-whistle politics,” where appeals that were meant to divide people based on identity alone could succeed only if they were veiled in euphemism, as was the case with references to “welfare queens” and inner cities in decades past. As recently as 2019, Republican Congressman Steve King lost his committee assignments and then a primary after claiming that there was nothing wrong with being a white supremacist. (He later said he rejected the label and the “evil ideology” behind it.)
But the Republican Party’s continued embrace of Trump suggests that the transition was either incomplete or reversible. Rhodes told me it means that America is in danger of falling into “groupism”—meaning a society that is organized around the belief that differences in race or immigration status are absolute and insurmountable, and where individual political decision making is based solely on advancing the interests of one’s own identity group. “Most political psychologists believe that an inclination toward groupism and those orientations, when inflamed, can lead to really bad consequences—raw discrimination and bias and, in extreme cases, genocide,” Rhodes told me. Of course, recent cases of violence motivated by fears about white replacement have already surfaced in mass shootings targeting immigrants and Black people in El Paso, Texas, and Buffalo, New York, for example.
Mae Ngai, a historian at Columbia University who has studied the wave of anti-Chinese violence up and down the West Coast in the mid-to-late-19th century that included dozens of instances of harassment, arson, and lynchings, told me she was “very worried” about the implications of Trump’s language, not so much on the election as in the groundwater of public opinion.
Rhodes told me that the moment we are living in now—one of fast demographic change, an unstable economy, and lots of immigration—is ripe for exploitation by proponents of groupism, because so many Americans are overwhelmed with anxiety about their prospects in life and about where the country is going. He posited that in a counterfactual scenario—an economy and society where everyone was thriving and people felt relatively secure—“folks like Donald Trump would be out there, but they wouldn’t be getting much traction.” He added, “The stuff he’s talking about, neo-Nazis have been talking about for decades.”
To simply say that Americans’ views of immigrants have become wholly and irrevocably negative would be misleading, however. At the same time that respondents to the Amherst poll indicated a growing embrace of ideas rooted in the Great Replacement theory, a majority also said that diversity strengthens the character of our nation, and that they favored allowing people who meet the requirements and have not committed any crimes to become citizens. Those beliefs can be difficult to square with the fact that, according to the poll, 26 percent of Americans would ban all migration from majority-Muslim countries, and about half support deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants, building a wall, and using the National Guard to enforce immigration laws.
To their credit, elected officials in Springfield have been quick and outspoken in challenging the false stories about their town. Perhaps more important, they’ve responded with nuance, acknowledging at once the strain on schools and hospitals that immigrants have brought to their community, the economic bounty that has come from their work in factories for Honda and Dole, and the infusion of joy and vitality into their churches. Numerous American cities now hope to emulate Springfield’s success by drawing in new immigrants.
American voters have consistently indicated that they want order at the southern border, yet many economists agree that the large amount of immigration the U.S. experienced in recent years is a major reason the economy bounced back from the COVID-related downturn faster than that of any other nation in the world. This complex picture of immigration and its implications calls for the hard work of policy making and statesmanship. Again and again, misinformation and fearmongering have only made things worse.