A few weeks ago, I argued that Democrats need to figure out a way to engage Trump and the GOP on immigration not only because this is a central line of attack by the GOP that allows them to blame all the country’s ills on newcomers and makes the Democrats look weak, but because attacking “immigration” is actually a proxy for attacking the mere presence and status of non-white American citizens as well. In attacking non-white immigrants, the GOP is also implicitly asserting that the only “real” Americans are white Americans.
Adam Serwer has an incisive piece at The Atlantic that shines a light on Trump’s anti-immigrant smears and racist strategies; in particular, it provides compelling explications of Trump’s specific strategy and the Democratic response that have helped me look at the GOP’s actions with a fresh perspective. Serwer notes that the Trump campaign wants to make race as salient as possible to white people, but offers a nuanced view that goes beyond the idea that the GOP is just appealing to racist sentiment among white Americans.
Rather, he sees Trump and his allies as making two related but distinct appeals. The first is to those with more overtly white supremacist views, for whom invocations of dark-skinned foreigners invading the country are enraging and frightening, and thus motivating in terms of getting them to vote for the Republican ticket. The second, subtler approach is using their attacks on immigrants to spur counter-attacks about Trump’s racism, which “will activate a sense of white solidarity”; white Americans would be provoked to conceive of themselves as constituting a distinct societal group whose interests are being challenged or undermined by undeserving non-whites. In the terms of writer Ashley Jarden, whom Serwer cites, the first can be characterized as appeals to racism, the second to white identity.
I think this one-two racist/white identity-provoking punch of Trump’s anti-immigrant incitement helps explain, though not fully justify, the Democrats’ reluctance and perceived difficulties in forcefully pushing back against Trump’s war on immigrants. As Serwer points out, beyond immigration, the Harris campaign has been fairly muted in its talk of racial discrimination and other race-related issues. It does appear that there is trepidation among Harris and Democratic strategists about condemning Trump’s overtly racist attacks in a way that might galvanize white Americans into feeling that their interests as white people are being attacked. Some white people might think to themselves, “Why is Harris spending so much time defending immigrants instead of normal (white) Americans’ interests?” or “Why does Harris care about people who are coming here to take normal (white) Americans’ jobs?” To the degree that this white identity backlash is a real possibility, the Democrats’ fears are somewhat justified, at least in defensive electoral terms.
But as Jarden tells Serwer regarding Trump’s racist appeals, “I think there’s a segment of the white population who finds this at least distasteful, if not appalling.” In other words, the Trump campaign’s goal of activating overtly racist voters while also activating white identity impulses is hardly an exact science, and carries with it the risk (from Trump’s point of view) of creating a backlash among whites who aren’t overtly racist or don’t want to view themselves as such. This means that when Democrats shy away from calling out Trump’s racism, they essentially help ensure that Trump pays an insufficient price among those white voters upset by such appeals. This Democratic reluctance is particularly frustrating, and I would argue increasingly difficult to credit, when Trump’s racist appeals have become so extreme and violent that they should rightly provoke revulsion in all decent Americans. Here, it’s worth quoting Ron Brownstein, who has also been digging deeply into Trump’s anti-immigrant language and the Democrats’ response, regarding the sheer depravity into which Trump has descended:
More ominous even than the multiplying allegations against migrants may be the language Trump is using to describe them. He has said that they are “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing a formulation used by Adolf Hitler. In Ohio, he said of undocumented migrants, “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases. They’re not people, in my opinion.” Later in the same speech, he called them “animals.” In Wisconsin last month, he said of undocumented immigrants, “They will walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.” Removing some of the undocumented migrants, Trump mused last month, during another Wisconsin visit, “will be a bloody story.”
A potential self-sabotaging consequence of the Democrats’ timidity is that those who might be appalled by Trump don’t find their views validated by America’s supposed pro-equality party, and so might not conclude that their feelings of revulsion are worth acting on when the Democrats don’t seem to share their outrage.
A parallel risk is that a lack of Democratic engagement regarding Trump’s racism — whether directed against immigrants or otherwise — may also allow Trump to evade electoral blowback from non-white citizens as well. Brownstein has dug into this possibility in recent essays, noting that Trump’s anti-immigrant mass deportation plans could wreak havoc with non-white citizens (he points out that a quarter of Latino households include non-citizens, raising the prospect of such mixed communities being torn apart under a second Trump administration). He has also explored how Trump’s supposed tough-on-crime policies, such as encouraging police departments to use discredited stop-and-frisk tactics, would disproportionately affect young, male African-Americans and Latinos. Brownstein talks about how “Trump has seemed to be enjoying a double dividend: He has energized his core support of culturally conservative whites with vehement anti-immigrant language and has gained ground, according to most polls, with Latino voters, even as Latino communities would be the principal targets of his deportation plans.” Brownstein ties the reluctance of Harris in particular to challenge Trump on his outrageous mass deportation plans to her and other Democrats’ feeling that Democrats are on weak ground on immigration, writing, “Some immigrant-rights activists and Democratic strategists believe that Harris is so focused on proving her strength on the border that she has become reluctant to criticize almost any element of Trump’s immigration agenda, out of concern that doing so would support his jackhammer portrayal of her as soft on the issue.”
What’s so frustrating to me, in terms of the Harris campaign’s appeal to both white and Latino voters, is that Trump’s mass deportation plans may be the ultimate example of Trump going too far in a grotesquely racist manner. For instance, Brownstein points to polls that show sharply diminished support for mass deportation once the questions include the idea of family separation and the removal of long-term residents. Having presented immigrants as a pack of disease-bearing killers bent on voting illegally for Democrats, Trump’s own logic leads to the need to expel such people via mass deportation. Under these terms, it seems pretty important that most Americans might well be opposed to the inhumanity and disruption of what he presents as the inevitable solution and end point of his hate-mongering. Conversely, though, if left unchallenged, Trump’s radical “solution” might convince Americans that he must be telling the truth about the crimes and derangement of immigrants — otherwise, why would he be proposing such a staggering remedy?
We also need to ever bear in mind the larger context of Trump’s racist attacks on immigrants: his false assertion that on a range of issues, from high housing costs to health care shortcomings, immigrants are at the root of the problem. Americans are not just randomly concerned about immigration, or even concerned based on the material impact on their lives — rather, immigration has become a prime issue because Trump and the GOP have now spent years lying about how illegal immigrants are a fundamental cause of all our challenges, both economically and culturally (the latter including the whole sordid grab-bag of great replacement theory and fears of white Americans losing their pride of place in American society). Such lies in the first place defy the reality of immigrants’ positive contributions to American society, grossly overstate the harms they do, and, perhaps most critically, draw attention away from the actual reasons for the real challenges Americans face — reasons that all too often have far more to do with the GOP’s tooth-and-nail opposition to workers’ rights, access to health care, the barest limitations on the power of ultra-wealthy individuals and imperious corporations, and continuous race-baiting that would have white Americans see non-whites as predatory enemies rather than as equal partners in a great, mutually-beneficial national project.
That is, the Democrats are reluctant to engage on an issue the Republicans are pushing where the GOP arguments are based on a combination of demonstrably untrue assertions about material reality, and deranged notions of national identity rooted in the primacy of white supremacy. To a startling degree, the Republicans have created a fantasia of threat that bears little relationship to material reality, even as it bears quite a deep relationship to psychological fears and hatreds. And apparently, on any issue that Democrats see as strong turf, like health care, the GOP is ready to assert that illegal immigration is the real culprit for any problems.
Should the former president’s campaign promises around mass deportation be enacted, he and the GOP would fundamentally change the nature of the modern United States by engaging in a campaign of ethnic cleansing that would cripple the economy, harm and very likely kill some of those targeted, inevitably violate the rights of significant numbers of American citizens caught up in a hysterical dragnet, and open the door to even greater scapegoating and cruelties once the initial deportations inevitably failed to make America great again. After all, Trump also talks about the need to discipline the “enemy within,” clearly already thinking beyond mass deportations to the necessity of persecuting a political opposition that seems to include everyone who doesn’t sycophantically support him. The Democrats need to grasp that Trump’s deportation plans would likely be a gateway to analogous horrors to be visited on the internal enemies he sees all around him. It seems increasingly untenable for the Harris campaign to refrain from describing and condemning a bloodthirsty plan to punish millions of undocumented Americans for the crimes of helping build the economy, raise their families, and seek a better life. Dehumanizing some of us is a prelude to dehumanizing many more of us.