Armstrong: Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign echoes the past

“America will soon be lost to immigrant peoples if immigration is not stopped,” Donald Trump said at his Aurora rally.

No, wait. That’s a headline from the May 22, 1925, edition of Boulder’s Ku Klux Klan newspaper, the Rocky Mountain American.

The article comes a few pages after the “Klan Moment” column, in which Jay Hawker bids a “joyful goodbye” to those leaving the Republican Party because it was overrun with “patriotic Americans” from the Klan. It comes after an article announcing a “law enforcement league . . . to aid the officers in bringing about arrest and prosecution of the bootlegger, dope vender, and vice peddler” who would “contaminate the morals of our young people.” The Klan often associated bootlegging with Italian and Catholic immigrants, who used wine sacramentally.

The article against immigrants, whom it calls “strangers by blood,” warns of the “danger of the conquest of America by a foreign mongrel horde, due to the influx of aliens through immigration ports.” The article quotes an English religious leader, who laments “his [American] kinsmen by blood pushed out from their old homes by aliens.”

Another article, from July 24, warns about “the flooding of the United States with the most unassimilable and difficult collection of human being ever gathered together before on this planet.” The article, of course, refers to Italians, who “would undoubtedly have presented to the country a very grave economical and social problem.”

But surely I’m being too harsh. Trump never would sound like a writer for a Ku Klux Klan newspaper, would he? He never would make the overtly racist claim that many immigrants have “bad genes.” He never would call Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists. He never would lie about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs. He never would come to a posh Aurora resort to falsely claim that Aurora is a “war zone” overrun by “migrants . . . bringing chaos and fear with them.”

Except that Trump has said all of those things. Inciting hatred of immigrants is the centerpiece of Trump’s campaign. As the Ayn Rand acolyte and capitalist Robert Tracinski writes for the UnPopulist, Trump’s “obsession . . . is whipping up a hysterical fear of the other—which includes an implicit conception of America as a white-majority ethnostate.”

As the Klan knew, racial hatred goes down better with a few superficial facts. Al Capone was born to Italian Catholic immigrants. Like all big cities, Aurora has seen some crime, some indeed related to violent Venezuelan gangs. (Rural areas too suffer from crime.) But, as Aurora’s Republican mayor Mike Coffman emphasized, “Aurora is a considerably safe city—not a city overrun by Venezuelan gangs.” As Denver7 found, “crimes tracked across the seven major categories by the Aurora Police Department are down by 17.2%.” Yes, the city should do better still, but Trump’s hysterics are intended, not to further reduce crime in Aurora, but to feed hatred of immigrants nationally.

Not that Trump cares about facts, but immigrants, including undocumented ones, commit crimes at lower rates than native-born people.

Good capitalists should notice that the Klan and Trump share a fixed-pie mindset. They see immigrants, not fundamentally as becoming new employees and new customers and new collaborators, not as bringing new energy and ideas and cultural vibrancy, but as competing with and displacing “native born” people. A quick reminder: Every single person now in the U.S. either is an immigrant or the descendant of immigrants.

J. D. Vance, Trump’s running mate (in case you forgot), expressed this fixed-pie mentality when, during the vice-presidential debate, he said that because of immigrants “you’ve got schools that are overwhelmed, you’ve got hospitals that are overwhelmed, you’ve got housing that is totally unaffordable.”

Vance was exaggerating, but he is right that each of these industries has real problems. In each case, the underlying cause of the problems is government controls. Government runs the near-monopoly schools, largely funds and severely regulates medical care and insurance, and enacts zoning laws and other controls that often forbid people to build more housing on their own property.

Modern anti-immigrant Republicans, though, like their soulmates in the KKK of a century ago, rather than work to free up markets so that producers can ably provide people with goods and services, scapegoat immigrants for the problems caused by government.

Obviously we need immigration reform and other improvements in this county. Productive people who long have made the United States home deserve firm legal protection for living and working here. We need good processes for legally bringing in peaceable immigrants looking for their slice of the American dream. We need good border security, not ridiculous show-off walls. We need to stop destabilizing much of Mexico, along with Central and South America, through our cartel-enriching drug war. We need better policing that at the same time respects everyone’s rights while curbing crimes against person and property by perpetrators of all varieties. We need freer markets so that everyone here can find good jobs and housing.

Trump obviously does not care about serious immigration reform. He thrives off of a broken immigration system, he exaggerates problems with it, and often he outright lies about immigrants. His entire campaign is built around demonizing scapegoats. Without that hatred of the “other,” Trump has nothing except for whatever’s fed to him by the Heritage Foundation. Don’t be fooled. Immigrants help make America great.

Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.

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