U.S. federal immigration enforcement agents detain a protester in Little Village neighborhood, Chicago, Oct. 23.Anthony Vazquez/The Associated Press
Debra Thompson is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
The United States was once a country that proudly proclaimed itself to be a nation of immigrants. That’s always been caveated, of course; the drive to “secure the border” has long obsessed both parties. But attacking pluralism is a full-on ideological anchor of President Donald Trump’s second administration, which has been unwavering in its promised anti-immigrant agenda.
This week, the xenophobic rhetoric reached a fever pitch when Mr. Trump launched into an anti-immigrant tirade, lamenting immigration to the United States from “hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia and many other countries,” which he condemned as “filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.” These comments followed a major shift in immigration policy, what the President called a “permanent pause” on immigration applications from 19 countries, including Iran, Haiti and Sudan, including asylum applications, green card processing and naturalization applications.
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The context informing Mr. Trump’s remarks is twofold. First, they came during a speech that was supposed to be about the state of the economy, which the President rated as “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus” even as inflation and economic stagnation have been the predictable consequences of his belligerent imposition of sometimes retributive, sometimes because-it-was-a-Tuesday tariffs. And second, he has used the tragic shootings of two national guards in Washington, D.C. – allegedly carried out by an Afghan national – to stoke debates about public safety and national security. Mixing economic success with anti-immigrant rhetoric has enabled the President to lay blame as he sees fit on entire groups of people for circumstances for which they bear no responsibility.
This is a familiar form of scapegoating that constantly shadows non-white communities, who are often deemed as somehow responsible for the actions of individual members, while the white men who commit mass shootings or political assassinations are cast as “lone wolves” whose grievances we are asked to better understand.
Recent events have also served as a thinly veiled excuse for restrictive measures that probably would have surfaced in the coming months anyway. After all, Making America White Again has been a longstanding goal of both the President and his deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller.
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Within days of the Washington shootings, the administration paused all decisions for asylum seekers currently in the United States, initiated a reassessment of asylum approvals issued during the Biden administration, and halted immigration from Afghanistan, including immigration applications and entry into the country. It also escalated an increasingly hostile anti-immigrant discourse, including threats to end federal subsidies and benefits to all non-citizens and deport foreigners that the President considers to be “non-compatible with Western Civilization.” Mr. Trump also specifically targeted Somalian immigrants, the state of Minnesota, and its Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar, whom he falsely accused of migrating illegally to the United States.
Meanwhile, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents continue to terrorize residents of Chicago, Atlanta, Baltimore and, more recently, New Orleans. Federal data reveal that less than 10 per cent of immigrants taken into custody by ICE since October had serious criminal convictions. In spite of claims that ICE is targeting gang members or violent criminals, the evidence shows that ICE arrested nearly 75,000 people who have no criminal records at all.
Citizens will not be shielded from the fallout of this xenophobia. The Supreme Court agreed to hear a case challenging birthright citizenship, which could upend nearly 150 years of constitutional law. Moreover, Republican Senator Bernie Moreno recently introduced a bill that would ban dual citizenship, though such a move would directly conflict with Supreme Court rulings prohibiting the forced relinquishment of American citizenship.
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In a July speech at the Claremont Institute, U.S. Vice-President JD Vance suggested that being American must mean something more than believing in its civic ideals. The corollary that went unsaid is how this administration’s immigration and citizenship policies are reviving a narrowly construed vision of ethnic nationalism, wherein only “real” Americans – in other words, white people – can form social bonds naturally and can find commonality with each other. This same logic has informed Mr. Trump’s confessed preference for immigrants from Norway or Sweden, his willingness to give preferential treatment to white South Africans, and his new National Security Strategy, which centred the need to restore “Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.”
States retain the basic ability to determine who can legally enter and stay and under what conditions they must leave. But it has been a longstanding moral and legal norm – in the international system since the post-Second World War era, and in the United States since the 1965 Hart-Celler Act – that race shouldn’t be a determinant in these decisions.
Today, that pretense is gone. The President of the United States is now shouting the quiet part out loud.