In January 2018, less than a year after taking office, President Trump disparaged immigrants from Haiti, Central America, and Africa, calling them from “shithole” countries. Why couldn’t he accept immigrants from countries like Norway instead, he lamented in a closed-door meeting?
The uproar stems in part from the widespread recognition that President Trump’s views on immigration are inseparable from his views on race. The then-president tried to back down, but in this case he found himself embroiled in a credibility battle with more trusted elected officials. And the controversy passed.
Over the weekend, he revisited the topic. The New York Times reports that attendees at Trump’s fundraiser Saturday night said the president made similar comments about immigration again, explicitly referencing the 2018 controversy.
Migrants arriving today are “people coming from prisons and detention centers. They’re coming from incredible places and countries, countries that are experiencing disaster,” he said, according to attendees. He then tried to explain his comments from six years ago.
“When I say, ‘Why can’t we let people come in from good countries, I’m trying to be nice,'” Trump said, according to the Times. “Do you know about the wonderful countries Denmark and Switzerland? Is anyone coming from Denmark? What about Switzerland? What about Norway?”
There are two possibilities as to why President Trump still maintains this position on immigration. The first is that he (who, you may recall, once served as President of the United States) is extremely ignorant about immigration. Second, they believe that racist rhetoric is a successful political strategy.
The case of ignorance is simple. There are two reasons why more immigrants to the United States come from Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala than from Denmark and Norway. First, you can get to the United States from El Salvador by foot, car, or train. Second, the Central American countries that attract the most immigrants are among the poorest countries in the world.
President Trump is spending a lot of energy pretending that people are trying to enter the country for nefarious reasons, just as he claimed last week that China is trying to “build an army” inside the United States. . One of the reasons he does this is to reinforce his idea that immigrants are dangerous. The other is refusing to acknowledge that the U.S. economy is doing well under President Biden and is attracting immigrants. But there is no doubt that economic attractiveness is at the heart of why Central Americans and others choose to come to the United States.
Countries like Haiti and Yemen (which he named in a fundraiser, according to the Times) are also where many immigrants come from. because In President Trump’s words, they are “a disaster.” It’s surprising in a way that he presents this as some kind of unanswerable question. Why do immigrants only come from crumbling countries with high poverty rates instead of stable countries with wealthy populations? Well, because of what you just said.
But of course, there’s also the subtext of race. He has been complaining about countries that are largely non-white, and given his rhetorical track record, he believes the act is in part to heighten racial fear among his target audience. I can’t afford not to have it. Mr. Trump has put white grievances at the center of his politics from the beginning, and recently announced that if he wins in November, he will devote some of his presidential energy to building institutions aimed at addressing historic racial inequalities. He promised to focus on demolition.
Trump said countries like Mexico are sending criminals to the United States because it is a useful way to suggest that Biden’s border policies are somehow dangerous. In recent months, President Trump has repeatedly told an anecdote about seeing Congolese immigrants being interviewed on the news and the immigrants telling the interviewers that they had been released from prison. If such an interview exists, I haven’t been able to find it, but it’s very likely that it doesn’t. President Trump knows what his own supporters hear when they hear “criminals from the Congo,” so he keeps letting them hear it.
These two motivations for President Trump’s rhetoric—failure to understand or acknowledge why immigrants come and his own racism, or interest in elevating racist fear—are not exclusive. This could be both because Trump doesn’t understand why people from troubled countries would want to come to a wealthy, stable country, and because he has an affinity for people who are not Hispanic or black. While this is true, it is important to note that these matters also overlap outside of the Trump context. This is partly because many of the regions that are struggling economically or politically have large Hispanic or black populations that have historically been disadvantaged by racist foreign policies. There is.
President Trump often talks about how immigration has increased since he left office. That’s true, in part because he resigned at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, when the U.S. (and other countries) were struggling to rebuild their economies following (or during) widespread shutdowns. This is how it works.
Immigration is certainly a very complex system, but President Trump’s question is easy to answer.
