It is no surprise that during the presidential debate on Sept. 10, 2024, Donald Trump engaged in racist rhetoric suggesting that Haitian immigrants were killing and eating pets in the city of Springfield, Ohio. Immigration is a common topic adopted by Republican politicians, most notably Trump, to fearmonger voters into agreeing with xenophobic talking points. And despite being fact-checked by the media, city spoke-persons and the moderators, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are doubling down on their beliefs. These destructive forms of rhetoric don’t exist in a vacuum: They were publicly broadcast to the entire nation.
As a result, residents of Springfield are now victims of the ill-regarded repercussions of baseless rumors that stemmed from now-redacted social media posts. An estimated 33 hoax bomb threats were made to the city of Springfield, Ohio resulting in school, City Hall and state motor vehicle office evacuations—all of which took place after the presidential debate. Immigration did not harm the community, it was the right-wing conspiracy theories that did. Having to evacuate schools over the false claims of immigrants eating dogs shows the cycle of misinformed right-wing echo chambers and the seriousness of calling out racism.
Xenophobia has continuously been a campaigning strategy for politicians to incite fear and call for increased measures of safety with extrapolations or misinformation. But these talking points disregard the safety of the minority groups they target. Issues such as immigration, crime and violence have been improperly prescribed to people of color by the most powerful in America, leading to an almost societal acceptance of racism.
The sheer misrepresentation of immigrants in the United States is not just a current phenomenon, but rather a repetitious cycle of racism in our country. As a country founded upon a history of systemic oppression and white settler colonialism, its impacts are still deeply rooted in our nation.
In the 1940s during World War II, the United States wrongfully seized more than 120,000 Japanese Americans and placed them into internment camps with no regard for immigration status. They were denied due process of law since natural rights could be infringed upon under national security threats. Punishing Japanese Americans for the actions of the Japanese government was a racist presumption that, because someone is Japanese, they must not be American.
The historical practice of “othering” as an excuse for preserving American sovereignty is an illegitimate practice only rooted in racism, not foreign defense. Although the Japanese-American internment camps are seen today as a dark past of how racism has contaminated our justice system, we tend to ignore more recent, and just as clear, examples of xenophobia in America’s political sphere.
The war on terror is one of the most disgraceful practices of Islamophobia because of the lasting impact it has continuously upheld in the United States. After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the United States initiated war in Afghanistan and Iraq in an attempt to “stop terrorists around the world.” But these wars only initiated years of continued antagonization of Muslims within America. Unfair characteristics and biases had been placed upon Muslim Americans during a time of war and at least 37 million people were displaced due to the military efforts of the United States.
These ramifications have seeped into modern-day politics, like Donald Trump’s recent comments on restoring the Muslim ban which vows to refuse refugees from “infested countries,” namely those who are currently in the Gaza Strip. On Sept. 19, during an event aimed at “combatting antisemitism,” he said:
“We will deport the foreign Jihad sympathizers and Hamas supporters from our midst. – We will get them out of our country. I will ban refugee resettlement from terror-infested areas like the Gaza Strip and we will seal our border.”
These comments are both horrifically racist and terrifying coming from a former president and the current Republican nominee. Attempting to fight xenophobia with more xenophobia is a poor strategy that can only be explained by prejudicial motives.
Comments such as these have become so common that they are normalized in politics and don’t faze the American public anymore. Modern-day attempts to scapegoat minority groups who cannot speak for themselves is an abuse of power that all Americans should recognize and reject wholeheartedly. The governmental attempts to demonize non-Eurocentric immigrants should be challenged in all its forms.
