No Party Is Standing Up for Immigrants Right Now
Republicans are doubling down on mendacious, racist insanity over Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. But the incident is also a window into how many top Democrats have all but abandoned immigrant rights.
Migrants walk on the US side of the border wall in Jacumba Hot Springs, California, on June 5, 2024, after crossing from Mexico. (Frederic J. Brown / AFP via Getty Images)
It’s hard to think of anything that more perfectly sums up everything warped and wrong with the US immigration debate than the ongoing row over Haitian migrants in an Ohio town.
In case you haven’t been acquainted with this rancid incident, for the past week, right-wing influencers and the Donald Trump presidential campaign have been spreading a rumor that Haitians who immigrated to the Ohio town of Springfield are killing and eating other locals’ pets. They are not. In fact, it is hard to overstate just how much they are not: not a single shred of evidence has surfaced for this made-up story, the claims underlying it have been repeatedly debunked, and it turns out the Trump campaign even directly asked Springfield’s city manager whether there was any truth to the claim and was told there wasn’t, only to push the fake stories anyway.
It would hardly be worth giving this repulsive, racist fantasy any more attention if not for what it says about the ugly state of US politics right now.
Let’s start with Trump, J. D. Vance, the Republican Party, and the entire conservative movement, who breathed this wretched saga to life in the first place. Back in 2016, the one and only time Trump has actually won an election (though, it should always be said, not the popular vote) against the Democrats, he genuinely appealed to struggling Americans by talking about jobs and trade far more than he did about immigration, helping set the stage for years of overwrought claims that Trump had transformed the GOP into the “party of workers.”
Trump’s pick of Vance, some claimed, was another data point suggesting his campaign and Republicans were moving in a bold new economically populist direction, given the Ohio senator’s working-class roots and his alleged secret sympathy for pro-worker economics.
So much for that. On track to lose yet again, Trump and Vance didn’t try to turn their polling woes around by announcing a new pro-worker policy — a $17 minimum wage, for instance, or an expansion of Medicaid — or by substantively speaking to voters’ economic concerns. No, they turned to stoking racist garbage against a group of people trying to go about their lives in peace, which has now resulted in dozens of bomb threats and left Springfield’s Haitian community afraid to leave their houses and considering moving out of the town altogether. And the Trump campaign is now actually doubling down on this, even as polling shows voters find the talk of Haitians eating cats off-putting and not credible.
In a sane world, this would end any talk of Trump and the GOP’s supposed economic populism. Painted into a corner, they simply dig deeper into the well of xenophobia. It’s a sad and appalling new low for a desperate, flailing campaign — and worse, we may not have scraped the bottom quite yet.
“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people then that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance recently told CNN’s Dana Bash. But it’s hard to see how regurgitating literal neo-Nazi talking points to demonize a random group of immigrants is going to do anything for the people Vance claims to be fighting for.
It’s hard to see how the non-Haitian residents of Springfield benefit from bomb threats closing down their schools, hospitals, and festivities, or from the potential departure of the very people whose arrival helped revitalize the formerly dying town. And it’s hard to see how Vance and Trump are doing a favor to the bereaved Springfield father who lost a son in a car accident with a Haitian man, who now says he wishes his son had been killed by an old white guy so that he and his wife wouldn’t “have the worst day of our lives violently and constantly shoved in our faces” by a “group of hate-spewing people.”
It’s hard to see how, because it obviously makes no sense.
But it’s easy (and not wrong) to just condemn Republicans here. The trouble is that their ugly behavior exists, to borrow a phrase, in the context of all in which we live and came before us. And that context is a shameful Democratic retreat on the issue of immigration.
Bigger Than the GOP
Over the past year in particular, Democrats have abandoned the positive arguments for immigration and its benefits and contributions to American life that were standard for both the party and American tradition — a positive vision that was politically successful for them during the Trump years. Instead, they have taken the cowardly option of trying to outdo Republicans over who can be harsher immigration hawks.
Since this is a game Democrats can never win — there is virtually no inhumane policy they could adopt or carry out that will make voters view Republicans as softer on immigration — they have received no discernible political benefit from this. Which, of course, hasn’t changed their thinking an iota.
So now we have the Kamala Harris campaign not just constantly touting a terrible immigration bill and its legally dubious ending of the right to asylum, but even promising to build Trump’s border wall, for years the physical symbol of the cruelty, racism, and stupidity of Trump’s immigration agenda. The Democrats’ promise to clamp down on asylum seekers, incidentally, would negatively affect at least some of the same Haitian migrants in Springfield whom Republicans are inciting violence against.
As we’ve seen so many times in American politics, the appalling behavior of the Right gives the liberal center a largely free pass on its own misdeeds.
The Whole Playbook in a Nutshell
There is one other thing to say about this sordid mess, and that’s the way that xenophobia and racial grievance function in the US political system to divert popular anger away from those who hold the actual power and wealth in society. YouTuber Tyler Oliveira’s visit to Springfield to “investigate” the cat-eating claims is instructive, not because it’s a good piece of journalism — in fact, most of it is Oliveira letting a small number of Haitian-disliking locals spout off rumors and sometimes overt racism — but because it shows this well-known phenomenon in action.
Many of their complaints revolve around the false belief that the Haitian newcomers are receiving extravagant government handouts that are both incentivizing landlords and others to screw over the people who have lived there for years, and siphoning government support away from struggling native-born Americans, who they correctly view as not being taken care of by the United States’ threadbare social safety net. Since the US political system is currently largely devoid of actual ideas for tackling the issues they’re struggling with — like, say, a national rent cap of the kind that Biden briefly adopted out of desperation and that doesn’t seem to have survived into the Harris campaign — these residents turn to the course of action that does get constant play in political discourse: blaming migrants.
This is the Trump and Vance playbook in a nutshell. Contrary to what Vance told Bash, he and his running mate aren’t using the issue of immigration as a way to highlight the suffering of native-born Americans, but the opposite: they’re exploiting the struggles of places like Springfield as a way to drum up resentment against migrants across the board, whose deportation someone as well-educated as Vance well knows is not going to do anything to fix the problems these people are dealing with.
The Springfield affair is a depressing one. It is probably the most nakedly, maliciously bigoted thing Trump and the people around him have run on since his Muslim ban and offers a preview of the dangers of a Republican presidency, one that will resort to cranking up racist division when its program of giving handouts to the rich and letting corporations do whatever they want fails to cure the country’s ills.
It’s tempting to read this as purely about what it tells us about today’s GOP and American conservatism more broadly. But no one gets off easy here. The whole episode is a damning indictment of how shallow and unpleasant the entire spectrum of mainstream US politics has become, in an era of ever-worsening problems and meager crumbs to solve them.