‘Going backward’: How demonising migrants remains fertile ground in US

Washington, DC – Farah Larrieux watched this week’s presidential debate between former United States President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, first from her home in the suburbs of Miami and then online as she headed to a late-night job.

Within minutes of the event starting, Trump had trumpeted a sensational — and false — claim about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating pets in the town of Springfield, Ohio.

Larrieux, herself a Haitian immigrant in the US on a precarious temporary status, found the amplification of the debunked tale both shocking and reprehensible.

But she was also struck by another fact: “It wasn’t even what the question was about,” Larrieux told Al Jazeera.

Trump’s false rhetoric underscored a clear campaign strategy from the Republican presidential candidate: He has been trying to hammer Harris on an issue that the Democrat is perceived to be vulnerable on.

It also highlighted how anti-immigrant talking points have been used for political purposes, experts said, while also fuelling dangerous consequences for the communities being targeted.

For Larrieux, who advocates for the Haitian community in the US, Trump’s amplification of the outlandish lies about Haitian immigrants during the debate — watched by more than 67 million viewers across the country — pointed to something deeper.

“Using migrants and Haitians as weapons for the political agenda, it’s not just frustrating,” she said. “It shows that we don’t have progress in the United States. The United States is going backward.”

Defining ‘who we are’

The days since the debate have seen flippant, AI-generated memes portraying Trump as a protector of pets being shared by the former president and his allies.

During a speech on Thursday in the state of Arizona on the border with Mexico, Trump described a “military invasion” of migrants that is seeing the country “occupied by a foreign element” while again repeating the false claim about Haitian immigrants in Ohio.

Harris’s muted response to Trump’s false claims during the debate has also stoked criticism after the Democrat laughed off her opponent as “extreme” but took no time to defend those coming to the US.

It is perhaps a familiar sentiment in modern US elections, in which outsized caricatures of refugees and migrants continue to dominate the national discourse.

Demonising foreigners has been interwoven throughout US history, explained Alexandra Filindra, a professor of political science and psychology who studies immigration at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

That includes Benjamin Franklin’s concerns that the country was becoming “Germanised” in the 18th century; discrimination against Irish and Italian immigrants in the 1800s; the surveillance of Muslims and Arabs, which surged in the early 2000s in particular; and the “crisis” at the US border with Mexico, Filindra noted.

Anti-immigrant rhetoric has been a mainstay of Trump’s political career in particular, however.

In 2015, when he launched his first presidential campaign at Trump Tower in Manhattan, he launched into a screed against Mexico for sending “people with lots of problems to the US”.

“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” Trump said, drawing widespread rebuke.

His enduring embrace of debunked claims about immigrants underscores that basic concepts of group psychology continue to be ripe for political exploitation, Filindra told Al Jazeera.

“The way identities within groups work is by creating a sense of positive attachment and attributions to the group, the ‘who we are’,” she said. “We are all the good things: the virtuous, the law-abiding, the taxpaying, the kind to each other.

“In order to maintain that boundary and politicise and strengthen the links within the group, leaders can use out-group animosity as a weapon essentially,” she said.

“It’s very effective, and it’s very easy.”

‘Symbolic threats’

The rhetoric comes amid years of mounting frustrations over Washington’s failure to put better systems in place to process and accommodate large numbers of migrants and refugees travelling to the US.

The arrivals have fuelled real logistical and resource challenges for smaller jurisdictions across the country as they grapple with the growth of new and vulnerable populations. Springfield, Ohio, is a key example of such stresses.

But evidence continues to suggest that Trump’s bellicose approach resonates far beyond areas dealing directly with the complexities of immigration, experts said.

Nour Kteily, a professor at Northwestern University outside Chicago who studies social psychology and group interaction, said Trump’s approach emphasises “symbolic threats”, which helps his message ring far beyond communities where it may be most relevant.

A symbolic threat, Kteily explained, is something “related to the nature of the composition of my country and the symbols that I associate with it”.

“These symbolic threats can be pretty motivating, even for people who aren’t necessarily dealing with any of this firsthand,” he told Al Jazeera.

“In fact, to some extent, when you’re not seeing it firsthand, that also allows your brain to fill in the picture in a trumped-up way, so to speak.”

Amid his hardline stance on immigration and incendiary rhetoric, Trump continues to maintain widespread support as many voters across the US cite migration as a top election concern.

Filindra attributed this to the fact Trump speaks of an “undefined immigrant Other”, cycling through several nationalities of origin but never resting on one.

Trump portrays “someone who doesn’t look like us, who is violent, who doesn’t behave like us and that will even eat our pets”, she said.

“And that part is especially significant because we know from psychology that behaviours that are outside the norm like that make people disgusted but also very, very mad and upset,” Filindra added.

“Those feelings last.”

‘Dehumanising’ norms

It is unclear just how resonant Trump’s particularly degrading depictions of immigrants are or if they are turning voters outside of his base against him. Trump has proved to be a particularly impervious political figure with little shaking his most ardent supporters.

Blatant dehumanisation also remains “surprisingly prevalent” in the US, according to Kteily’s research, while subtler, “more implicit” forms of dehumanisation are more widespread.

Less clear is what effect Harris’s deprioritisation of the issue of immigration will have.

Democrats in both 2016 and 2020 sought to present a more welcoming vision of the US as a counterpoint to the one put forth by Trump and other Republicans. The party has since lurched rightwards on border issues amid Republican attacks.

“One of the things that happened after the [2016] election of Donald Trump is even when people didn’t themselves change their own dehumanising attitudes or prejudicial attitudes towards other groups, they came to believe that those attitudes were more normal in US society,” Kteily said.

“We take our cues to a large extent from what we believe others in our surroundings themselves believe,” he added.

“So anytime you allow something like that to go unchecked, on the margin, it starts to shape some of those norms.”

Precursor to violence

Meanwhile, experts stressed that the stakes for those being dehumanised are real.

“This type of dehumanisation, the literature suggests, is a precursor to social and political violence,” Filindra said.

A reminder of that came on Thursday when several buildings in Springfield, Ohio, were closed due to a series of bomb threats. Mayor Rob Rue told The New York Times that the threats were a “hateful response to immigration in our town”.

“It’s frustrating when national politicians, on the national stage, mischaracterise what is actually going on and misrepresent our community,” he said.

Since the debate, Harris has yet to specifically speak out on the issue although President Joe Biden, who dropped out of the presidential race in July, on Friday called the targeting of the Haitian community “simply wrong”.

“This has to stop, what [Trump’s] doing. It has to stop,” Biden said.

For Haitian community advocate Larrieux, the situation has been a grim reminder of past instances when immigrants from the Caribbean country were demonised for political gain, including during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.

More recently, Amnesty International last year decried the particularly “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” of Haitians throughout the Americas.

“This has been giving me nightmares,” Larrieux told Al Jazeera. “Those who have the power cannot continue to play with our lives.”