Last month I asked, why are we doing this? I was referring to the anti-immigrant wave that is surging around the world, and I asked the question sincerely because I find this movement frightening and also misguided. Immigrants as a broad category are not responsible for any of our country’s social or economic ills, despite loud and constant shouts (and lies) to the contrary on the right. There’s just no evidence for it. Furthermore, the movement to rid the US of immigrants isn’t even pretending it’s about delivering positive returns. How will this make the country better? The proponents of mass deportation can’t answer that question.
It’s arguably the case that anti-immigrant sentiment has been the primary fuel of Trumpism from the beginning1, but Trump didn’t instigate it. He tapped into a current that was already driving politics on the American right2 as well as a number of far-right political movements around the world, especially in Europe. I have spent a lot of time in the last ten years trying to understand this, because I don’t like where it’s leading us, and despite that question I posed last month, it’s not hard to understand the rational drivers of what’s going on.
Before I get into it, I want to note that a phenomenon can be rational without being reasonable. To be rational is to conform to logical explanation. Reasonable, on the other hand, means fair, balanced, open to challenges from other viewpoints, etc. The widespread anti-immigration sentiment driving far-right politics is anything but reasonable in that sense. The cruelty is wholly unjustified.
I also want to note that my thinking here is mostly an attempt to synthesize other people’s insights that made sense to me, which I’ve drawn from their books and other written works, studies and surveys, as well as personal conversations.3 Again, I think about these questions a lot.
Discontent with the status quo
Reactionary movements don’t arise when people feel secure, content, and comfortable, and most people right now are unhappy with the status quo or worried about the future. I think about the many ways the word “crisis” has appeared during the last 20 years—climate crisis, mortgage crisis, border crisis, opioid crisis, student loan crisis, Syrian refugee crisis, etc. There’s an affordability crisis with respect to a lot of stuff people need in order to thrive—housing, healthcare, higher education.
Things aren’t going great for a lot of people and haven’t been for some time. Much has been written for example about the legitimate grievances of folks who live in parts of the country that have been hollowed out by industrial globalization and free trade that took off in the 1990s. I feel like less has been written about the lingering fallout of the 2008 financial crisis (that word again!), but it represented the largest and most widespread loss of wealth in our lifetimes, disproportionately hitting middle and lower income households. And then of course we had a pandemic.
On the flip side, we have also witnessed and experienced incredible progress on certain fronts during the last 30 years. The whole world of news and entertainment is available at our fingertips through magical rectangles we can’t put down. We can have anything we want delivered to our doorstep within days or hours. We can summon a car to take us anywhere, with or without a driver. Assuming one has money to spend on these things, that is. To the extent that this progress is out of reach for swaths of people, it just intensifies discontent.
Even for people who can afford this stuff, it produces a certain amount of cognitive dissonance, like the band playing while the Titanic sank. There isn’t enough affordable housing, and college tuitions are skyrocketing, but there are eleven kinds of Mountain Dew! Furthermore, there are dark sides to some of the magical technologies themselves that we’re either acutely aware of at this point (addictive, feeds on our outrage, ubiquitous advertising) or vaguely aware of (constant surveillance, tons of packaging waste, growing wealth inequality, looming threat of being replaced by AI).
The status quo isn’t serving us. Trust in institutions is at an all-time low. Mental health issues are on the rise. Something ain’t right, and people feel it.
The last thing I’ll say about this is that both major political parties represent the status quo that people are unhappy with, or at least they did as recently as 2015 when Trump first announced his candidacy. It feels like folklore now, but during the two decades before the GOP establishment wholly surrendered to Trumpism, the two parties were basically indistinguishable on most economic issues and pretty closely aligned on immigration.4 Trump ran against that GOP as vehemently as he ran against the left.
Perceived threats
“Economic anxiety” is a phrase that pundits sometimes use to explain Trump support. People on the left tend to scoff at this, but not because economic anxiety isn’t real. It’s all too real. If we scoff, it’s because most of us feel economic anxiety, it just didn’t lead us to Trump. Theres another mythology around MAGA that identifies it as a working class movement, and this turns out to be debatable as well (actually I think we should ditch the term “working class” altogether because it no longer has a useful meaning. Most of us belong to the class of people who work).
What’s important to understand is that a lot of relatively well-to-do people voted for Trump (Trump voters are in fact slightly better off on average than most Americans).5 But also, relatively well-to-do people are not immune to feeling economic anxiety. They might not be discontent with the status quo in the same ways or to the same degree as the less fortunate, but many are anxious nonetheless. Many feel like their relative comfort is precarious and contingent for some of the reasons I’ve already mentioned, especially if they are living at the edge of their means and carrying significant debt like Americans tend to do at most income levels.
This feeling that things are precarious and contingent makes people keenly attuned to possible threats, and full of vague anxiety that wants to latch onto a target.
Zero-sum thinking
Conservative rhetoric frames all kinds of issues in zero-sum terms—taxes, safety-net entitlements, civil rights, and yes, immigration. Across these issues and more, they identify an undeserving them who are looking to take what belongs to you. “More for them equals less for you” is the zero-sum message they repeat over and over, and it has become axiomatic on the right.
Sometimes it even drifts into negative-sum territory. I’ve had conversations about healthcare with conservatives, for example, where I argued that universal healthcare would cost less than the system we have now, and instead of trying to refute my argument, a few said they don’t care about higher healthcare costs if it means they don’t have to pay for other people.6
Need for an enemy / scapegoat / sacrifice
Ressentiment is a term from 19th-century philosophy that refers to a particular kind of frustration, resentment, and hostility:
…directed toward an object that one identifies as the cause of one's frustration, that is, an assignment of blame for one's frustration. The sense of weakness or inferiority complex and perhaps even jealousy in the face of the "cause" generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one's frustration.7
This feels like a pretty good encapsulation of anti-immigrant sentiment. A lot of people are unhappy. Those who are relatively okay are worried that things might change at any moment. Human nature wants someone to blame.
Immigrants are perhaps the most natural target to the extent that they fit our preconception of an “other.” It’s not a big lift for conservative media to exploit peoples’ natural biases and build a narrative where immigrants represent the undeserving and possibly dangerous them: They want to take from you. They are taking from you already by the simple fact of their presence here. They will replace us. Democrats plan to take more from you to give to them. Democrats are bringing them here. Democrats are handing your country to them.
It’s a squirrel
The narrative that paints immigrants as the enemy is a distraction encouraged by segments of the status quo to protect itself. We could remove all the immigrants from the country, and our problems wouldn’t go away. Things would be worse actually, and then people would just look for the next convenient them to blame. This is the essence of Pastor Martin Niemöller’s poem, First They Came. We all know how the poem goes. Or at least we think we do.8
It’s interesting that the same people who direct so much hostility towards immigrants also tend to speak so reverently about the billionaire plutocrat class:
This is not an accident. Both of these narratives—immigrants are bad and dangerous; billionaires are good and create jobs—are endlessly aired on conservative media. Only one group of people has done extremely well during the last forty years, and it isn’t Latin American immigrants. If the GOP succeeds in enacting huge cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, and many other government services in order to fund tax cuts for the wealthy, it will become even clearer who benefits and who suffers from the narrative that, actually, immigrants are the problem.
How we can start fixing this
I realize that this is not revolutionary stuff: People are unhappy and anxious and want someone to blame. Conservative media exploits this in bad faith. Immigrants are an easy target. Yeah yeah.
I am hopeful though that the anti-immigrant fever will begin to break as reality sinks in. One reality I’m talking about is the fact that DHS has raided businesses and rounded up people who have valid work permits and even some who have green cards. This impacts business owners obviously, but it also impacts customers. And if it leads to businesses shutting down, it will affect whole communities. Another reality is the fact that rather than targeting the “worst criminals” as they promised, DHS is tearing families apart, threatening college students and other legal residents, and even harassing tourists in highly visible, gratuitously cruel ways.
It’s true that all this was easily predictable via Trump’s campaign rhetoric, and many people tried to raise alarms about the cruelty we’re seeing now. It’s also true that some of the “mass deportations now” crowd are thrilled with what’s the consider to be promises kept, but not all of them. Some are not on board with the lack of due process, the lies, the defiance of the courts, or the cruelty.
As the fever breaks a little, there may be opportunities to bridge divides. To make the most of this, we can’t indulge in I told you so’s. I think it will help if we focus conversations on our shared discontent with the status quo and the anxiety we feel about our current circumstances. We need to really attend to that, really listen and share, because we’re all in the same boat when it comes to that stuff. That’s the common ground.
It’s important to call out lies and cruelty, but if we pivot too quickly to our different beliefs about causes and threats, or we devolve into judgements of each others’ character or morality, then we’ll just retreat to our respective trenches.
I’m talking of course about Trump’s speech in 2015, announcing his campaign for president, now infamous for its characterization of Mexican immigrants.
One early indicator I remember was the stunning defeat of Eric Cantor in the Virginia congressional primary in 2014. The winner, Dave Brat, was a political upstart who made immigration a central issue of his campaign and painted Cantor as soft on the issue for his past support of immigration reform.
The sources that come most quickly to mind are Hannah Arendt, Erich Fromm, Pankaj Mishra, John Ganz, Timothy Snyder, and Heather Cox Richardson—along with the many references they cite in their footnotes and bibliographies. Unfortunately it has all become a unified blob in my mind, rendering me unable to map specific points here to sources with any precision.
Remember the “autopsy” that the GOP conducted on itself after Romney lost to Obama? Trump and Trumpism killed it. The two parties are still pretty similar on economic issues though, which is a story for another time.
This was true in all three elections where Trump was a candidate. Here’s an analysis from 2016. It’s also important to note that the working class is disproportionately nonwhite relative to total US demographics, and it was specifically the subset of white working class people who overwhelmingly voted for Trump. Finally, the term “working class” should probably go away entirely, because it’s no longer clear what it’s supposed to mean. It doesn’t refer to some kind of downtrodden underclass. Plenty of “working class” people make good money, and almost all of us have to work for a living.
The irony of course is that the whole premise of health insurance, like every other kind of insurance, involves paying for other people.
The original poem begins, “First they came for the Communists,” but this is often left out of American translations because of US anti-Soviet and anti-Communist sentiment after WWII. It’s ironic of course to cut any group out of this poem whose message is about the need to protect everyone, because we might be next.