In an interview on “The Hugh Hewitt Show” on Monday, former President Donald Trump unleashed an offensive new round of disinformation about migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. He falsely claimed that Democrats are allowing huge numbers of migrant murderers to pour across the border and roam freely through the U.S. based on a report about noncitizen crime rates that he has distorted beyond recognition. He then floated a horrible theory: “You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
Trump is conditioning his entire movement to link what it means to belong in America with race.
This reads as classic Trumpian racist insinuation. Using fake statistics about crimes committed by migrants, Trump wrongly implies that Latino immigrants are especially prone to commit homicide, and that they do so because of “bad genes.” Connect the dots and he’s saying Latino immigrants disproportionately have "bad genes." (A Trump campaign official later said that in his Hewitt appearance Trump was talking about “murderers, not migrants.”) By contrast, Trump has praised predominantly white audiences in Minnesota as blessed with “good genes.”
Horrid stuff. But it goes deeper than that.
Something even darker comes into view if you take Trump’s increasingly virulent language portraying migrants as subhuman and look at it alongside his emphasis on a historically large deportation policy. Trump is laying the groundwork for what could be conceptualized as a proto-ethnic cleansing project. He isn’t calling for people to be removed from the country by force based on their ethnicity per se. But his arguments against migrants are predicated on the notion that people from certain ethnic backgrounds are so undesirable that extraordinary resources should be devoted to their expulsion. In the process, Trump is conditioning his entire movement to link what it means to belong in America with race.
This election cycle, Trump’s rhetoric on migrants has become overtly fascistic and Hitlerian: Migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and tainted by “bad genes.” It’s the language of a social Darwinist coming from a guy who has also talked about his subscription to “racehorse theory,” which The New York Times describes as “the idea adapted from horse breeding that good bloodlines produce superior offspring.” And Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, are spreading false stories about Haitian immigrants’ eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, in order to depict them as parasitic savages.
On top of all this, Trump continues to promote the tenets of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which holds that Democrats seek to rig elections and “replace” Americans with nonwhite immigrants. It’s not only false; it’s predicated on the idea that migrants from the Global South are inherently predisposed to oppose or subvert the interests of its true, predominantly white citizens.
What makes Trump’s migrant dehumanization strategy particularly consequential is that it is in service of a plan of action: mass deportations of undocumented immigrants on an unprecedented scale. (Notably, Trump has described his mass deportations as a housing policy, which is absurd.) Trump has also supported the idea of “remigration,” pledging to send Haitian migrants back to Haiti even if they are residing in the U.S. legally. And Trump adviser Stephen Miller has promised that efforts to denaturalize immigrants through an office set up in Trump’s Justice Department in 2020 would be “turbocharged” if Trump enters the White House again. (At the time, The New York Times reported: “Some Justice Department immigration lawyers have expressed worries that denaturalizations could be broadly used to strip citizenship.”) Don’t forget that Trump has pledged to re-institute the ban on people from Muslim-majority countries he put in place when in office.
Trump’s agenda doesn’t match the definition of ethnic cleansing, since the formal basis of deportation would be based on legal status, not ethnic background. But it matters that Trump’s portrayal of migrants from the Global South as an existentially threatening infestation serves as his public rationale for his deportation regime. It also matters that dehumanizing migrants fuels the ferocity and scale of this regime. He is socializing his entire political movement to view migrants — a demographic which has helped define every generation of American growth, prosperity and cultural enrichment — as repulsive. It's concerning to think about where the next leader of this movement could take things.