I want to try something a bit different this week. I want to specifically address the cynical, calculating, and deeply condescending campaign tactics of Donald Trump on immigration. I’m doing so in order to, I hope, change some minds among those who are either genuinely unsure about voting for Trump in 2020, or even those who lean that way but are open to being convinced otherwise. Yes, there are such folks who come to Daily Kos, and there are more who might see posts from this site on their social media feeds and elsewhere.
Last week, President Individual 1 announced that his administration would “begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States.” (UPDATE: He has since announced the postponement of the deportation raids.) Notice that he said millions. Never mind that this announcement “blindsided” the actual agents who would have to carry out such a threat, as The New York Times explained: “Agents were not clear what specifically Mr. Trump was referring to in his tweet on Monday, which came less than 24 hours before he was scheduled to appear in Florida for a rally to kick off his 2020 re-election campaign.”
And that’s the point. The timing is as far from a coincidence as Trump was from winning the most votes in 2016.
Trump has been using undocumented immigrants as a boogeyman from the day he announced his White House run talking about Mexican “rapists” and “drug dealers” coming across our border—language he used throughout the campaign (including other terms such as "killers,” “murderers,” “drug lords”) and has repeated as president. To the “Maybe Trump” voters, I want to ask you an important question: Why do you think he does this?
While you consider that question, let me offer you my take. Trump knows it gets you angry, and scared, and motivated to vote for him. He tells you he will take care of the problem. Yet the number of undocumented immigrants coming across our border is significantly higher now than under President Obama, and higher than at any point since 2006. Trump will always have someone else to blame, but he has been in charge now for two and a half years, and had two of those years with his party holding a majority in both houses of Congress. He isn’t taking care of it.
Beyond the border numbers, Trump is also lying to you. He’s telling you that undocumented immigrants are making you less safe. The facts show that the opposite is true. As I wrote in January, “undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than the native-born, and...states with higher levels of undocumented immigrants overall had lower crime rates than their counterparts with lower levels.” More recently, a comprehensive look at the available data on property crimes and violent crimes over the period between 2007 and 2016 also found that locations with higher levels of undocumented immigrants saw larger drops in crime than other areas.
In other words, the data shows that you are actually a bit safer if you live in such an area. When Trump or allies such as Rush Limbaugh (in my recent book I examine how Limbaugh’s rhetoric on immigration and other issues exploited white anxiety to “pave the way for Trump”) try to frighten you by bringing up specific crimes to convince you that undocumented immigrants make you less safe, they are deceiving you. The undocumented are more law-abiding when it comes to violent crimes and property crimes than the native-born. Living among them makes you safer, Maybe Trump voter. So ask yourself why Trump would lie to you about this.
The answer is this: Trump wants to make sure you forget the things he has actually done as president. What things? Sent money up the economic ladder through tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit millionaires and billionaires, and have failed to help working people. Threatened health insurance coverage for those with pre-existing conditions. Favored the interests of corporations over consumers. And that’s just a few examples. By yelling and screaming about immigrants—and lying about them to boot—this president thinks he can get you to vote for him even though his policies are directly harming your families. The fact that he’s lying—and please do check the data I’ve provided—will, I hope, get you to question whether he really is on your side.
Here’s something else you might find interesting as you decide whether to trust Donald Trump. His own family business certainly does not operate along the same lines as his political rhetoric when it comes to undocumented immigrants, as Frank Sharry of America’s Voice documented in a USA Today op-ed article:
The Washington Post exposed Trump’s reliance on undocumented immigrants at Trump enterprises in New York and uncovered a “pipeline” of undocumented workers from Costa Rica to build the Bedminster property.
Univision recently reported that Trump’s winery in Virginia hired undocumented workers who worked “long hours from sunrise to sunset, without overtime pay.”
The president’s son Eric, nominally in charge of the family business, has rushed in to cover up the Trump Organization’s misdeeds by discarding the exploited workers, mostly through the introduction of E-Verify, a voluntary program that lets employers check the legal status of employees. Meanwhile, his father has displeased the nativist right by expressing opposition to E-Verify. Evidently, the habits of an old school lawless employer die hard.
Talk about a hypocrite.
Over two dozen of [Trump’s] fired workers are being represented by an attorney, who says he has contacted the New York and New Jersey Attorney General offices to discuss the allegations. To date, no formal investigation has been opened. The Trump Organization denies knowledge of the workers’ illegal status.
Several of these former employees spoke out in a press conference before Trump’s 2020 kick-off campaign in Orlando to shed light on the “hypocrisy and cruelty” of Trump and his attacks on immigrants. They also demanded immigration reform for millions of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. “No one knows better than Trump himself that immigrants are hardworking individuals who support a multitude of industries across the country, including his restaurants, golf courses, wineries, and hotels,” said the attorney. “And no one knows better than the undocumented workers who worked for Trump, how urgent it is for Congress to pass humane and sensible immigration laws so that immigrants can continue contributing to their communities and to our nation, just like they did for Trump and his family.”
Let’s address the politics of this. First of all, it’s not at all clear that this kind of demagoguery on immigration will actually help Trump (remember, he did lose in 2016 by 3 million votes, and would almost certainly have lost by more if not for James Comey’s unconscionable pre-election actions). Natalia Salgado, a senior political strategist with the Center for Popular Democracy, a progressive organization, warned that Trump is misjudging the political effect his policies will have: “What he doesn’t understand is that in communities of color, that sort of raising of the temperature and fear-mongering is also going to bring us out.”
But either way, Trump thinks that fear-mongering about immigrants will help him win. We progressives have to counter his hateful rhetoric. I wrote this post the way I did because I believe in persuasion. I believe that one of the things progressives—in particular campaigns, but also the rest of us, when we are able and willing—need to do is persuade those who can be reached.
Moreover, there’s research data from Demos showing that the kind of message I used above actually works. On immigration, we need a message that not only calls out Trump and Republicans on their divisive, hateful rhetoric and policies, but also makes clear that they wave those policies like a red flag with a specific purpose, namely to distract middle- and working-class voters from the reality that GOP economic policies amount to picking their pockets while lining those of millionaires.
It’s not enough to say, “Trump’s a racist, don’t vote for him.” That didn’t win enough votes in 2016 to defeat him. We have to expose the true meanings of his racist dog-whistles and show why he does what he does, and how it serves the interests of the economic elites who are his real, true, and eternal constituency. He doesn’t give a shit about middle-class whites, or unemployed factory workers, or the “poorly educated” (whites) he pretends to love.
Ian Haney López and Anat Shenker-Osorio, the authors of the aforementioned Demos study, explained the general conclusions progressives can draw from their research, and provided some specific examples:
The race-class message describes racism as a strategy that the reactionary rich are using against all people. By moving away from conversations about racial prejudice that implicitly pit whites against others, the race-class message makes clear how strategic racism hurts everyone, of every race. It signals to whites that they have more to gain from coming together across racial lines to tackle racial and economic injustice than from siding with politicians who distract the country with racial broadsides. “The politicians,” a white guy in our Ohio focus group said, are “telling us you have to hate the black man because he does all the bad stuff . . . They’re dividing us so they can conquer.” A white woman in the group responded, “If we would all come together, the politicians wouldn’t have the strength they have.”
Beyond the political benefit of exposing Trump, and beyond the benefit to the country we love of defeating him and replacing him with a Democratic president—as absolutely vital as that is for all of our futures—exposing what Trump and Republicans are doing on issues such as immigration serves another purpose. We must do so in order to help America strengthen its sense of national community, the ties that unite all Americans into a single people, a single family (to use one of President Obama’s favorite terms).
As Obama himself put it in 2014:
Over the past years I’ve seen the determination of immigrant fathers who worked two or three jobs without taking a dime from the government, and at risk any moment of losing it all just to build a better life for their kids. I’ve seen the heartbreak and anxiety of children whose mothers might be taken away from them just because they didn’t have the right papers. I’ve seen the courage of students who except for the circumstances of their birth are as American as Malia or Sasha, students who bravely come out as undocumented in hopes they could make a difference in the country they love.
[...]
My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too. And whether our forbearers 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.
Perhaps some of those people who feel anxious or scared or even angry about demographic changes that result from immigration might question those feelings as a result of seeing that those feelings are being exploited by Trump and his fellow Republicans. Perhaps they’ll change those feelings, and learn to be more comfortable about immigration and about those changes.
We can do our part as well, as progressives and advocates for immigrants, by continuing to emphasize our support for a strong, unified, inclusive American national identity that reflects pluralism and respects difference while also encouraging everyone to integrate into and adopt a mainstream political culture that centers on our shared democratic ideals, traditions, and aspirations.
Donald Trump, by using and exacerbating hate, anxiety, and fear, is corroding not only our politics, but also the bonds of our nationhood. The promise of America is that a diverse population that counts members of just about every culture, ethnicity, and religion found the world over can not only live within the same borders, but can come together and see one another as, yes, members of one family.
That kind of feeling is at the heart of the progressive belief that we do have a responsibility to one another, a responsibility to make sure no one in our community is treated unjustly or lacks the basic things every human being should have as a right, a responsibility to make sure that everyone receives an equal opportunity to reach their full potential. That’s what it means to be one American family.
Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)