The more the American public sees of President Donald Trump’s hardline, anti-immigrant policies in action — the deaths, military-style invasions of neighborhoods, and mass detention and deportations — the more his approval on the issue drops.
If this trend sounds familiar, it’s because a similar wave of disapproval played out in Trump’s first term. Despite that backlash, Trump returned to office embracing even more extreme measures.
We must finally confront and uproot the core of the U.S.’s anti-immigrant underbelly, which is largely reflected in the racially motivated notion of criminalization.
Trump was not the first politician to exploit the concept of criminality, and he certainly won’t be the last. Criminalizing narratives are deeply planted in the American psyche, and they have commonly acted as the vessel through which white supremacist rhetoric and policy are ingrained into our culture and laws.
In the late 1980’s, criminalization went mainstream in the form of racist dog whistles, particularly those hinging on vile anti-Blackness deployed by politicians seeking to activate white voters. In the decades since, conservative and liberal leaders alike more purposefully extended this criminality framework to immigration — so much so that it’s now perhaps the primary driver of the public immigration debate.
Consider how Americans of all political stripes are often presented with the binary choice of supporting the “right” type of immigrant. In this oversimplification, immigrants fall into categories like “good” or “bad,” “legal” or “illegal,” “deserving” or “undeserving.”
Trump did not invent these narratives. They’ve underpinned both major parties’ politics of immigration for several decades, despite their basis in fiction and fear-mongering rather than evidence and compassion, or the fact these narratives are weaponized against non-white immigrants who for centuries have disproportionately faced restrictive and punitive policies for the act of seeking relief in this country.
But Trump’s partisan opposition, despite its massive opportunities in the face of unpopular, hardline policies, has repeatedly failed to capture the public’s long-term support on immigration. Too often, Democrats repackage the same old criminalizing narratives — often in softer terms, but always in line with the oversimplified good-or-bad thinking. This lack of imagination is reflected in the nearly annual bipartisan votes to increase funding for federal enforcement agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection, as well as Democratic leaders’ messaging and policies.
Take, for example, former President Barack Obama’s push to deport “felons, not families”; Joe Biden squandering his mandate to reverse the cruelty of Trump’s first term by continuing many Trump policies, like Title 42 and the backing of for-profit immigrant detention; or Kamala Harris, in her presidential bid, focusing much of her immigration rhetoric on “securing” the border.
It’s a toxic cycle: The public rightfully disapproves of the atrocities of anti-immigrant policies; in response, liberals roll out unimaginative plans hinged on outdated narratives; and finally, in the vacuum created by the lack of any tangible, pro-immigrant vision, the right recaptures the public’s attention with fear mongering and a sensationalist focus on crime and the border.
