Failing to challenge Trump on immigration, Democrats have given MAGA free rein to redefine American identity
Too many Democrats don't grasp that the war on immigrants is also a war on non-white American citizens, and in favor of white supremacist rule over all. Opposing both should be non-negotiable.
This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
Earlier this month, Donald Trump erupted in multiple hate-filled diatribes against the presence of Somalis in the United States. He labeled as “garbage” both Somali immigrants and Somali-American citizens, saying that “They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country,” and that “we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.” He also claimed that “Somalis were ‘taking over’ Minnesota and that Somali gangs were ‘roving the streets looking for prey.’” Ominously, Trump’s hate speech was bookended by various presidential tweets and re-tweets of anti-Somali hate in the preceding and ensuing days, which Will Saletan has assiduously documented at The Bulwark.
In using his office to slander and foment hate against a specific nationality, Donald Trump rung a bell that cannot be un-rung. This may or may not be the worst thing he has ever done, but it certainly vies for a top-tier position. His language was fascistic and paranoid, geared to incite Americans into rage and revulsion against Somali immigrants as literal invaders of our country — not only physically endangering them at the hands of deranged followers, but laying the groundwork for our own government to abuse, harass, and illegally deport its members. Indeed, Trump’s remarks came as ICE raids roiled Somali communities in Minneapolis, home to 80,000 Somali immigrants, demonstrating the continuity between his remarks and real-world harm to his targets. He sadistically identified as enemies of the American people those who are nothing of the kind — encompassing not only legal immigrants but actual American citizens as well.
It is deeply shocking, then, that although Trump’s words provoked notable coverage by liberal critics of the administration, they have thus far received pushback only from a relatively small number of Democratic elected officials, and certainly nothing like the coordinated response from the Democratic Party that is clearly merited. This Democratic reticence is still more startling given that Trump’s comments and related tweets didn’t just signal a hate campaign against Somalis, but were simultaneously a specific manifestation of a far broader animus from the president and his right-wing allies against all immigrants from “Third World” countries. This animus is obvious every single day, as ICE and CBP agents arrest and terrorize thousands upon thousands of immigrants, documented or not, and as the president works to halt immigration from an astonishing three dozen nations.
Democratic complacence appears all the more striking given that, as journalist Zack Beauchamp has described, the Trump administration is consciously implementing a white nationalist agenda that seeks to exclude immigrants from the “wrong” places — that is, immigrants who are not white. This white nationalist perspective views darker-skinned immigrants as a threat to American culture and society — people whose native cultures and biological shortcomings allegedly make them not just incompatible with citizenship, but active enemies of American society. At the most extreme, newcomers are seen as actively replacing America’s white population (the Great Replacement theory) in a sinister international plot.
Such radical ideologies have been placed front and center by those involved in running Trump’s immigration agenda, perhaps most importantly by Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller. As New Republic’s Greg Sargent documents in illuminating detail, Miller views American culture and social cohesion as fatally threatened by African, Asian, and Latin American immigrants, based on retrograde beliefs about the nature of Western and American “civilization.” And as historian Thomas Zimmer describes, Vice President JD Vance articulates complementary, twisted ideas about the nature of American citizenship, for instance asserting that the U.S. belongs to those whose ancestors came here long ago — a “blood and soil” perspective that would have us believe that a white man whose great-great-great grandfather fought for the South in the Civil War has far more claim to this country than a Somali-born citizen elected by her compatriots to represent them in Congress.
But this anti-immigrant jihad is subordinate to an even more momentous Trump II effort: the re-establishment of white supremacism as a guiding principle of American government, society, and culture. White Americans aggrieved over the growing diversity of the U.S. population and a perceived decline in white status were key to twice putting Trump in the White House. In his first run for office, outrage at the prior election of our first Black president, Barack Obama, created a white backlash that put Trump over the top. Now, in his second term, even as this administration attacks non-white immigrants as parasitic good-for-nothings who steal what Americans have built for themselves, the president and his far-right allies have engaged in a multi-front effort to roll back civil rights advances of the last half century and more for non-white U.S. citizens, as well as for women and sexual minorities.
The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer describes a comprehensive effort at resegregation, noting that the president and the far right are attempting to “restore an America past where racial and ethnic minorities were the occasional token presence in an otherwise white-dominated landscape” and which “would repeal the gains of the civil-rights era in their entirety.” Political maneuvers to destroy minority voting power and anti-discrimination laws; attacks on the educational system to whitewash history and restrict access for minority students; and cultural efforts to diminish the contributions of non-whites: these are all pillars of this modern-day resegregation. For MAGA, it’s not enough to stop the flow of immigrants into the United States and expel even those who have been here for years. The Trump White House is intent on curtailing the rights and power of non-white citizens as well; from MAGA’s perspective, the time has come to turn the clock back to when minorities knew their place — or were kept in it when necessary.
Though it might be subordinate to the larger cause of reviving white supremacism as the law of the land, the Trump administration and its far-right allies see the repression of immigrants as essential to the success of white supremacist rule. The war on immigration can be seen as as a proxy war on a diversifying U.S. society. Rather than making the clearly racist assertion that there are too many non-white citizens, MAGA Republicans have most overtly focused on those who are not yet citizens as a more acceptable target. Not only do they curtail the numbers of non-whites becoming part of American society, attacks on immigration serve as a wedge for propagating the most rancid ideas about race, culture, and citizenship that apply to all non-whites in the U.S., citizens and immigrants alike — ideas that lay the groundwork for a white power nation.
In this, they do double or even triple duty: rationalizing the need to end immigration from non-white countries, presenting whites as the “real” or “normal” Americans, and categorizing non-white American citizens as deserving subordination to their white betters. And at a visceral level, telling white Americans that they are under literal attack by immigrant non-whites who do indeed look different from them, speak differently from them, and have cultural backgrounds different from them encourages a volatile us-versus-them mentality, supercharged by existential stakes.
Given how many millions of immigrants have become citizens over the past several decades, denaturalizing recent and not-so-recent immigrants is the necessary next step if the Trump administration has any hope of making a significant dent on America’s changing demographics; not surprisingly, Trump administration officials have indeed been making plans to ramp up denaturalizations. And here, the war on immigrants verges into a war on citizens — for stripping an American of their citizenship would emphasize that citizenship for newcomers is provisional, subject to the whims of an authoritarian Republican presidency. You could even go so far as to say that a provisional citizenship really isn’t citizenship at all; for example, the threat of denaturalization would likely induce many newer citizens not to oppose the Trump regime lest they provoke this life-changing retribution. And the provisional idea of citizenship inherent in an aggressive denaturalization policy is on a continuum with the fundamental white supremacist claim that even those who were born here are not actually full citizens if they aren’t white.
The cultivation of anti-immigrant hatred as a weapon to divide Americans along racial lines, and to unite white Americans in solidarity against non-white “invaders” and advance white supremacism; the use of anti-immigrant tropes to denigrate non-white American citizens; and the appeal to retrograde ideas of citizenship to privilege white power (e.g., as JD Vance has asserted, real Americans are those whose ancestors have lived and died here, the longer, the better): the war on immigration is nothing less than a war on American identity and belonging itself, waged by racists and authoritarians.
All of this means that when the Democratic Party declines to engage in a full-throated defense of immigrants like Somalis; when it concludes from polling and readings of the 2024 election results that Donald Trump “owns” the “immigration issue” and cannot be successfully challenged on it; and when it claims that issues like affordability and health care are more urgent concerns for voters, it is not simply failing to defend immigrants from wanton abuse. Catastrophically, it is also failing to engage in an ongoing existential fight over the nature of American democracy and society. This situation is far more damning than the long-standing trope of Democrats bringing a knife to a gun fight: by refusing to confront Trump not just on immigration but on the broader scaffolding of lies, racist assertions, and anti-democratic claptrap that propels the anti-immigrant purge, the party isn’t even showing up to a central fight over what sort of country we want to be. By blindly accepting that Trump is only talking about border security and public fears of disorder, too many Democrats ignore that Trump and MAGA are engaged in a one-sided conversation as to the nature of citizenship, equality, and freedom. They are leaving the field open to be filled with racist hate and white supremacist paranoia.
Trump and MAGA could not be clearer about their intention to wreck American democracy, tear apart our multi-racial society, and undermine our collective wealth and power by obsessively pursuing white dominance. This is not some side issue in American politics; the idea of who counts as an American, and whether one group can rule over all others, will have a direct, overriding impact on the resolution of all other issues, from affordability to health care to the national defense.
Trump’s recent anti-Somali hate speech allows us to see the folly of the Democrats’ universal disarmament in chilling detail. Not only did the Democrats pass up a non-negotiable responsibility to defend Somali-Americans and Somali immigrants against dehumanization and prospective brutalization, they passed up a prime opportunity to expose and attack a white supremacist vision whose successful implementation would render the U.S. a shadow of its former self. They passed up an opportunity to redefine for Americans what we talk about when we talk about immigration, and to remind Americans that when Trump attacks Somalis, he is tugging a thread that leads straight to a diminishment of American citizenship and democracy for all outside the MAGA and Republican faithful, and into the establishment of a white supremacist order in the United States.
We have seen unvarnished white nationalism in the vast application of government force against immigrants across the country over the last year. From Los Angeles to Chicago, from New York City to New Orleans, ICE and CBP agents have terrorized immigrant communities, conducting aggressive sweeps, brutal arrests, and racial profiling newly legalized by the right-wing Supreme Court. Immigration authorities regularly issue statements and memes making it clear that their targets are dark-skinned immigrants, and that these people are not desperate folk looking to make a better life for themselves, but actual invaders whose very existence threatens the American “homeland.”
Yet the large numbers of U.S. citizens affected by immigration enforcement violence, up to and including both harassment and arrests, provide an important clue to the intended nature of this white nationalist offensive against immigrants. As we’ve seen in Portland, Los Angeles, and other cities, this present administration draws no clear line between its efforts to abuse and deport immigrants, and its efforts to provoke and abuse people who oppose the Trump regime. From a broader perspective, no clear distinction between citizens and immigrants is ultimately possible when the Trump administration and the right-wing media make race the central component of the war on immigrants. You cannot tell Americans that interchangeable brown-skinned interlopers threaten our security, our economy, and our culture, and incite the most atavistic feelings of fear and hate, without also targeting U.S. citizens who fit this ominously vague description.
But this is no accident. For, as I noted above, the racist war on immigrants is the central component of a broader push by Trump and MAGA to re-establish white supremacist rule in the United States. Targeting immigrants allows them to try to normalize a fundamental aspect of white supremacism — that people who look “different” (i.e., who aren’t white) just aren’t real Americans the way white people are. And reinforcing the idea both among whites and non-whites that the latter are suspect could have all sorts of malign consequences: more white people may begin to really believe that they’re the real Americans who are under threat by anyone who doesn’t look like them, while non-white Americans receive the message that their rights are not the same as their lighter-skinned fellows (a message all the more readily received given the reality of racial disparities across multiple aspects of American society).
Arresting Americans as supposed collateral damage of a campaign to rid the country of ethnic minorities is intrinsically unacceptable, and points to the incompatibility between these mass deportations and the rule of law. Such detentions — and certainly any accompanying abuses — devalue the meaning of U.S. citizenship, which if it means anything means freedom from arbitrary harassment and arrest by masked secret police.
There really is no point pulling punches in seeking to protect Americans from a tyrannical government. Among other things, the Democrats should unsparingly highlight these abuses, portray them as abominations against the citizenry, and emphasize that Trump’s war on immigrants is inevitably a war on the American people, with Exhibit A being that actual citizens are being harassed and arrested. Particularly for Democrats who fear Trump is baiting them into appearing to prefer immigrants’ rights to those of citizens, a vociferous defense of Americans against ICE and CBP outrages would help drive home that doing both is possible, and that in fact you can’t defend Americans without defending immigrants’ humanity and civil rights.
Citizen arrests also provide an obvious entry point into highlighting the essential racism of the anti-immigrant purge (as the leading reason Americans are taken into custody is that they are ethnically Latino or whatever other group immigration agents have decided to target that day), and helping delegitimize the cruel campaign against peaceable immigrants in our country. The targeting of American citizens as a more or less intentional practice provides a rhetorical opening to discuss and expose the white nationalist impulse to purge the nation of non-whites, and to subject those who remain to demeaning and disempowering forms of state harassment.
Whether or not most Democrats choose to believe it, the nation is engaged in a struggle over the very definition of who gets to be an American — by dint of the fact that Trump and MAGA have launched an all-out war to restrict this definition in radical ways. The war on non-white immigrants is the key line of attack in this fascistic effort. As Thomas Zimmer puts it:
These are not separate policy initiatives. These are manifestations of a worldview defined by white nationalism as its organizing principle. They are tied to a much broader rightwing attempt to reconceptualize national identity and drastically narrow the boundaries of who gets to belong. They are actualizations of the Right’s defining project: To roll back any progress towards egalitarian pluralism, to vanquish the very idea that America should aspire to be a nation defined by equal citizenship in a pluralistic, multiracial society, and to fight instead for white Christian male supremacy at home and in the world.
The Trumpists desire to drastically narrow the boundaries of who gets to belong, they seek to purge all others from the “homeland.” Those who are left would be living in a society that is not only unequal but has ostracized egalitarian aspirations as heresy. The coercive powers of the state would be mobilized to curtail the rights of those who dare to deviate and entrench a tiered system of participation defined by hierarchies of race, gender, religion, wealth, and ancestry. A segregationist policy would restore white male dominance in elite institutions as well as across all spheres of American life.
Taken to its logical conclusions, or simply pushed far enough along, an effort to re-create a retrograde political system and society in which white people sit firmly atop a racial hierarchy would amount to a dismantling and destruction of the modern United States. The overturning of equality in favor of overt whites-first policies, with rollbacks of what progress has been made over the last half century and more, would dynamite our already-struggling democracy. And by reducing the economic, educational, and political opportunities for millions of Americans, it would, ironically enough, help transform the United States into one of those “Third World” countries Donald Trump is always complaining about. When you throw in the depopulation of the U.S. that would result from years of mass deportation, the U.S. would be left in a crippled state that couldn’t have been engineered better by its worst enemies.
By failing to mount a party-wide and strident campaign to undermine and expose the white nationalist impulses of Trump’s mass deportations, the Democratic Party has allowed the president and his allies to not only advance their case for tiered and diminished citizenship, but to begin making this vision a reality. Rather than dismiss immigration as a Trump strength, Democrats should understand the broader immigration fight as a major Trump vulnerability — and as an unavoidable, central arena of political conflict. There is no possibility of compromise with a vision that sees the abuse and removal of legal residents and naturalized citizens as a gateway to a white nationalist America. And there is no possibility of compromise with a vision of a white nationalist America in which non-white citizens are consigned to second-class status.
For months now, polling has backed up the argument that a strong majority of the public does not back Trump’s extremist anti-immigrant measures. A new Quinnipiac poll shows disapproval of Trump’s immigration policies at 54%, with 44% in support; it also shows 55% opposed and 44% in support of his deportation policies. And an AP poll from last week shows 38% approval for his immigration policies, down from 49% in March. It is no wild leap to conclude that Americans who thought they were voting for strong border controls have been repulsed by what they’ve actually gotten: a full-fledged campaign to abuse peaceable immigrants, break apart families who have lived here for years, and subject bystanders to beatings and tear gas. It is hard to believe this support won’t slide further in the coming years, as the onslaught against immigrants worsens with massive new federal funding under the One Big Ugly Bill.
The single best way to undermine and defeat MAGA’s corrosive white supremacist vision is for Democrats to proudly and systematically advance their own vision of a multi-ethnic, egalitarian democracy, one in which all citizens are considered and treated as fundamentally equal. Alongside this, they must make a forthright case for the essential contributions of immigrants to our collective flourishing, and take dead aim at fascistic schemes to deport millions of law-abiding, contributing members of our society without giving them a path to citizenship. Just as the United States has assimilated countless nationalities over the last two and a half centuries, it will continue to do so successfully for the next 250 years, whether they hail from Italy and Ireland, or from Somalia and Haiti.