Border: Harsh words whip up fear, experts say
When President Trump responded Tuesday to criticism of his administration’s separation of parents and children at the southern border by saying Democrats want undocumented immigrants to “infest our country,” he returned with vigor to a theme that propelled his political rise.
While decrying the country’s immigration policies as weak and the border as porous, Trump has also repeatedly cast immigrants as different and uniquely dangerous, seeking to stir fear despite a lack of evidence that immigrants have brought higher crime to the United States.
“The separation of children from their parents and detention in makeshift shelters is proving unpopular even on the political right,
and so the president’s language has become more extreme,” said Richard Wilson, a professor of law and an expert on rhetoric at University of Connecticut School of Law.
Referring to people as unwanted pests is dehumanizing, Wilson said, and can set the stage for acceptance of strict policies on immigrants favored by the administration and many of its supporters.
Such rhetoric has animated Trump’s rise since the early days of his presidential campaign, when he said Mexico was “sending people that have a lot of problems ... they’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
In January 2017, after the Trump administration instituted an immediate ban on people from several Muslim-majority countries entering the U.S., thousands of protesters converged at airports across the country. Democrats and some Republicans blasted the move as images spread of chaos and families being separated.
The president, though, cited the potential perils of immigrants coming to the country without his ban.
“If the ban were announced with a one-week notice,” he said, “the ‘bad’ would rush into our country during that week. A lot of bad ‘dudes’ out there!”
More than a year later, a similar wave of outrage has followed the administration’s zero-tolerance policy in prosecuting parents who illegally cross the border, which has caused more than 2,000 children to be separated from their parents since early May. Once again, Trump is pushing rhetoric that invokes danger.
“Democrats are the problem. They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13. They can’t win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters!” Trump tweeted early Tuesday.
Trump compared the situation to Germany, saying — falsely — that crime is up in the European country due to an influx of refugees. Germany says crime last year was at its lowest level in decades.
Critics say Trump’s language on immigrants — saying Mexico was sending its worst residents north, invoking the word “animals” when discussing immigrant gang members, and referring to an infestation — has pushed fringe ideas into the mainstream.
“It has a big impact in two ways — rhetorically to have the president say this and speak about immigrants in this way, legitimates this kind of language about those who are undocumented,” said Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian and public affairs professor at Princeton University. “It will become part of the national conversation — the president has power to inject rhetoric like this in a way no one else can.”
Wilson said Trump’s approach is a classic technique of the “populist demagogue to mobilize political support by identifying foreigners as a threat” and has been used by leaders in the past against Irish, Italians, Chinese and others who had arrived recently.
“However, Donald Trump has legitimized open xenophobia and hatemongering in a way that has not been seen in modern times in America,” Wilson said.
Administration officials believe the strict enforcement at the border is needed in the name of safety. In a speech Friday in Pennsylvania, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said that “unchecked illegal immigration has made the work of police officers all across America tougher and more dangerous than it ought to be.”
Trump, in a speech to the National Federation of Independent Businesses on Monday, said a secure border meant protecting Americans from threats.
“People that come in violate the law. They endanger their children in the process. And frankly, they endanger all of our
children,” he said. “You see what happens with MS-13, where your sons and daughters are attacked violently. Kids that never even heard of such a thing are being attacked violently, not with guns, but with knives because it’s much more painful.”
Edward Schiappa, a professor of rhetoric at MIT, said in an email that Trump is “encouraging citizens to think of ALL immigrants based on the very worst of the worst . ... He clearly is trying to whip up fear of the ‘other,’ as we say, by painting all immigrants as a source of crime in Europe and in the U.S.”
Casting such a wide net, said John Sandweg, the former head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, can be counterproductive.
“What concerns me is that it dilutes focus on the true threats,” he said. “By lumping everyone and characterizing falsely all illegal immigrants as public safety threats, what you do is dilute the emphasis on the bad guys.”