Donald Trump is a race-baiter. He exploits the racial and cultural fears held, unfortunately, by too many white Americans. In a poll conducted just before the presidential election, a bit less than one-half of whites surveyed expressed fear that the growing number of immigrants—not undocumented immigrants specifically, just immigrants overall—posed a threat to “traditional American values.” Nine out of 10 of those who expressed that opinion voted for the Republican nominee, while 60 percent of those who did not feel that way voted for the Democrat. Those numbers may not surprise you. What might is that the aforementioned poll was from 2012, when the Republican nominee was Mitt Romney.
Even before Romney lost, some Republican strategists were talking about how their party needed to break with those anxious whites in order to win elections. Here’s Terry Nelson, a top staffer on George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign, offering his take on the eve of the 2012 election:
The math is not going to add up in the future for us if we continue to be overly reliant on the votes of white voters. Certainly at the presidential level, sticking with this position [on immigration] will eventually put Republicans in a permanent minority position.
Despite these kinds of warnings, the Republican Party in 2016 nominated the man whose campaign centered on hyping that fear of cultural and demographic change. The 2012 poll cited above suggests that Trump didn’t reshape the views of the majority of Republican voters on this. Instead, he simply fit those views better than any of the other 16 people who challenged him. That’s why, even as he has ramped up his racist rhetoric on immigrants and crime while defending his choice to separate children from their parents who have crossed our border without documentation, his support among Republican voters has only grown.
Conservatives will do anything they can to deny the racism on which Trump’s immigration policies rest. When Trump’s racist rhetoric on immigration is pointed out to them, they rant about how unfair that kind of argument is. In a recent cable news interview, I was asked about this, and specifically asked why it is racist for Trump to be “securing the border” when Obama had also secured the border.
My first response was to say that I was glad to see conservatives finally acknowledge that Obama did secure the border. The number of undocumented immigrants crossing the border per month dropped from around 82,000 under G.W. Bush to just over 34,000 under Obama, and have continued to fall since Trump took office to the current figure of about 24,000 per month. I’ve posted video of the full interview at the end of this post.
On comparing various administrations, Trump himself claimed that, in implementing his “zero tolerance” family separation policy—the one he supposedly had no choice but to follow, until of course he chose to end it—he was just following the policies of his predecessors: “Whether it was President Bush, President Obama, President Clinton—same policies.”
Trump supporters like Mr. “Womp-Womp” Corey Lewandowski lied as well: "This is a policy that is implemented under the Obama Administration," and so did American Conservative Union chair Matt Schlapp: “It's the same way Barack Obama did it.” Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen added: “The Obama administration, the Bush administration all separated families. ... Their rate was less than ours, but they absolutely did do this. This is not new.”
As for that “rate” under Obama, Denise Gilman, who runs the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas Law School, called the comparison “preposterous” and noted that a family was separated under Obama approximately “one every six months to a year—and that was usually because there had been some actual individualized concern that there was a trafficking situation or that the parent wasn’t actually the parent. There were not 2,000 kids in two months [NOTE: that’s the rate since Trump implemented his family separation]—it’s not the same universe.” It’s just as important to point out that Barack Obama never demonized undocumented immigrants, in fact he spoke of them with great respect.
After all, most of these immigrants have been here a long time. They work hard often in tough, low paying jobs. They support their families. They worship at our churches. Many of the kids are American born or spent most of their lives here. And their hopes, dreams, and patriotism are just like ours.
[snip] My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too. And whether our forebearers were strangers who crossed the Atlantic, or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like or what our last names are, or how we worship. What makes us Americans is our shared commitment to an ideal, that all of us are created equal, and all of us have the chance to make of our lives what we will.
Compare that to the race-baiting rhetoric now coming from Trump on crime and immigration (which of course didn’t start this month):
Not only is Trump’s rhetoric hateful and divisive, it’s simply false when it comes to crime. Border areas specifically are seeing that there is no uptick in crime, despite what Trump has claimed. Here’s the mayor of Brownsville, Texas, Tony Martinez: “There is not a crisis in the city of Brownsville with regards to safety and security.” Police Chief Orlando C. Rodriguez added: “We see actually a downward trend in crime in Brownsville over the past few years, and the numbers are just getting better every year.” Republican officials disagree, but the overall data is not on their side. For example, in the border state of Arizona, from 1993 to 2016, the crime rate dropped by over 33 percent, despite the number of undocumented people going up by more than 100 percent.
More broadly, according to a peer-reviewed study from the journal Criminology (the findings are summarized in a press release from the University of Wisconsin): "a 1 percent increase in the proportion of the population that is undocumented is associated with 49 fewer violent crimes per 100,000 people." That means, on average, you are safer—less likely to be a victim of violent crime—the higher the percentage of undocumented immigrants there are in your area. Mr. Popular Vote Loser says the exact opposite.
So why does Trump lie? Because doing so is central to the fear-mongering he needs to do to motivate his base. Talking about “Mexican rapists and drug-dealers” and mentioning MS-13 just about every time he talks about undocumented immigrants is designed to generate fear of cultural change. In order to move forward in a productive way as our population changes, America needs leaders who try to bring us together, not divide us—and we need people who tell the truth, not lie. Trump fails on both counts.
Furthermore, Trump’s policies fail because they make it harder—even after ending family separations—to achieve his own stated goal of reducing crime, as revealed in emails (obtained by USA Today) written by the Department of Justice official who supervises the major crimes unit in San Diego. The policy of criminally prosecuting all families who cross the border without documentation “will occupy substantially more of our resources,” and will require “diverting staff, both support and attorneys, accordingly.”
The USA Today reporter who wrote the article, Brad Heath, also noted “there are signs that border authorities are seeking to prosecute drug smugglers in state courts instead, even though the possible sentences typically are harsher in the federal system.” As John Sandweg, former acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the Obama Administration, put it: “The beneficiaries of Trump's policy are drug smugglers, coyotes and gang members. We're burning our resources on families.”
Funny, but I thought Trump’s border policy was based on concern about crime and drugs coming across the border? In reality, that policy is based on politics, on ginning up the Republican base that for years—even before Trump became a candidate—has been fixated on anxiety about immigration and cultural change. Any hope that Republicans would challenge that base and follow the path on immigration reform that their own party officials laid out in 2013 is long gone. The only question is whether those who reject Trumpism will have the courage to join the resistance and fight with us.
Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity (Potomac Books).
Below is the aforementioned video of my appearance on cable news (unfortunately, they’ve edited out the first couple of minutes):