Combating the Nativist Narrative
Week of February 26, 2023
Trump Reprises Racist Rhetoric from First Campaign as He Makes a Strategic Racist Play on Immigrant Criminality:
The tactic is not new, using an individual horrific crime to advance the racist idea of inherent criminality of a disfavored minority in a coded political appeal around anxieties of personal and communal safety. The racist idea of inherent criminality has a long and deadly history in our nation, and the manipulation of this racist idea in dog-whistle politics attacks is also well-worn and understood. See the ads about Willie Horton in the ‘88 presidential campaign for the most infamous example. The racialized villain has shifted, but the tactic remains the same in the GOP’s latest effort to exploit a horrific murder of Laken Riley in Athens, Georgia, allegedly perpetrated by a recently arrived undocumented man. As Will Leitch wrote in the New Yorker, “Laken Riley isn’t dead because she ran into an undocumented immigrant; she’s dead because she ran into a violent man.” But for the strategic racism Republicans are employing, the foreignness of the alleged perpetrator is the sole focus. In a telling move, the Trump campaign released a new video on Thursday, reprising the infamous bigotry of his presidential announcement speech in 2015, seeking to use news clips about individual crimes as validation of his racist remarks that Mexican immigrants are “bringing crime” and are “rapists.” Trump also politicized the horrific murder in Georgia to advance the white nationalist invasion conspiracy. And despite running and losing on xenophobic attacks about immigrant criminality in the New York Special election at the beginning of the month, Republicans appear eager to double down on that particular line of strategic bigotry. Promoting the long-debunked racist myth of immigrant criminality, the nativist narrative machine is looking to make ‘migrant crime’ a tagline in 2024 Republican campaigns. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump reported: “Over the past month, Fox News hosts, guests and video clips have mentioned ‘migrant crime’ nearly 90 times, more than half of those in the past 10 days.” After he earlier noted that Trump laid claim to the brand on Laura Ingraham’s show saying, “I came up with this one. Migrant crime. This crime — there’s violent crime, there’s migrant crime. We have a new category of crime. It’s called migrant crime.” In his speech to CPAC over the weekend, he said, “It’s a new category of crime, and I wanted to call it Biden migrant crime… it’s going to be more severe…it's the silence of the lambs, Hannibal Lecter.” Check out a deeper dive HERE.
COMBATING THE NARRATIVE: Republican’s messaging here is about politics; it's not driven by good faith concern for public safety or about how to reform our deeply out of date immigration system. Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice said, “the way in which the GOP, led by Donald Trump, is using this tragic event for political gain is revolting. It’s strategic racism; a well-worn tactic from a familiar playbook with the sole purpose of turning this tragedy into fodder for a political objective and narrative that migrants and asylum seekers are dangerous threats when the facts demonstrate otherwise.” Jerry Gonzalez, the CEO of the GALEO Impact Fund, similarly weighed in, warning “that anti-immigrant rhetoric is being used by self-serving politicians in our own state to further a white nationalist agenda that seeks to harm Latino and immigrant communities while ignoring the actual needs of working Georgians.”
Leading Republicans Flirt with Dangerous Forces Court Political Violence:
A NBC News headline captured the tenor of the marquee DC event for political right – “Nazis mingle openly at CPAC, spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories and finding allies.” The presence of self-identified Nazis received nothing more than a “yawn” from CPAC’s head Matt Schlapp, and that might be because the bigoted conspiracies recently contained to the ranks of self-identified Nazis and white nationalist were now the mainstage program. As we have documented, the replacement and invasion conspiracy theory has moved from the margins to the main explanation to border and immigration issues inside the Republican party. This racist lie presents an active threat to public safety and to our democracy but was a throughline of CPAC ‘24. (Check out our recap of CPAC HERE.) CPAC is an indication of the type of messaging that will begin to be delivered across the country backed with hundreds of millions of dollars from the Republican political campaigns. The more that the replacement and invasion conspiracy is elevated in the public conversation so too is the threat to public safety. But it is not just the rhetoric alone. Republicans in the Arizona state legislature are advancing legislation that Axios headline described as “Arizona GOP advances bill legalizing killing undocumented migrants on suspicion of trespassing.” Meanwhile, in Texas as they continue their standoff with the federal government based on the invasion conspiracy, impeached Attorney General Ken Paxton is going after the Annunciation House, a Catholic organization helping to resettle migrants that the government has paroled into the county, absurdly accusing their work of facilitating human smuggling. These pieces are not isolated but compounding. They create a climate and permission structure that dehumanizes non-white migrants and encourages violence against them and the communities around them.
COMBATING THE NARRATIVE: This is not the same old hyperbolic rhetoric and legislative political stunts of campaign season. There is a threshold that is being crossed that we all should be concerned about. Disagree about how to best regulate and manage migration to the U.S., but when Nazis rally to your position when you adopt white nationalist and antisemitic lies, and you court deadly political violence, there is a line that has been crossed. The fact that the Republican Party has adopted the replacement and invasion conspiracy as their own doesn’t make the bigoted, anti-democratic lie less dangerous. Its ubiquity makes it more dangerous and as urgent as ever that such rhetoric is pushed out of the mainstream.
New Data and Developments Reveal Opening to Redefine Immigration Debate:
Republicans are proudly campaigning on an ever-extreme and unpopular immigration agenda, despite their investment in strategic nativism repeatedly failing to deliver at the ballot box. The NY-03 special is but the latest example. Nor are they interested in a legislative fix to address the challenges at the border, as they demonstrated by killing the bill they negotiated stacked with their priorities. They are committed to demagoguing politics, not to solutions. Nevertheless, Republicans will not switch their strategy and will make an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars on nativist attacks. They will because they have nothing else, and more importantly, the MAGA base is locked into the lie that non-white immigration is an existential threat. New research from Gallup finds roughly three out of five Republicans naming immigration as their top issue. As Ron Brownstein concludes in a detailed analysis of recent polling, more Republican voters are reporting immigration is their top concern and those voters are solidly backing Trump. Not a shocking revelation but evidence for why the GOP with Trump at the top of the ticket will not switch strategies. However, while the MAGA-base is committed to Trump’s reactionary vision, a closer look at the exit polls of the recent GOP primaries reveals a solid chunk of Republicans, around 30% of GOP primary voters, want pathways to legalization as well as border security measures. This is in stark contrast to the mass deportation regime that Republicans are running on. (More from Gabe Ortíz on the GOP primary exit polling data HERE and HERE.) This segment of Republicans is more in line with the broader majority of the electorate who is largely pro-immigrant Brownstein notes: “Those attitudes raise questions about whether Trump, if he wins the nomination, can sustain public support for the militant immigration ideas that are now helping him consolidate his lead in the primaries.” Moreover, the vast partisan tilt in the sentiment to the issue obscures another reality here. While Gallup finds immigration is the top concern for voters (still under 30%) that number is driven by a 20-point increase from Republicans naming it as their top issue. (For more see a more detailed analysis of recent polling data HERE and check out a recent press call with leading pollsters discussing the issue.)
COMBATING THE NARRATIVE: But what does this all mean? Republicans driven by a MAGA-base obsessed with fears about immigration will invest heavily in the issue. For this reason, Democrats cannot afford to ignore the issue but must have an affirmative response. Fortunately, the extremism and obstruction of Republicans on the issue has ceded the middle creating an opportunity for Democrats to redefine the issue with a “both/and” approach that reframes the need for immigration reforms in terms of improving the prosperity of American families as opposed to reforms need out of a defensive posture. The vast majority of the electorate wants solutions that include both legal pathways and border security and they need to hear this as an alternative vision, but at the same time, they have many other concerns they place as a higher priority. In other words, a limited focus on immigration crackdowns is not going to win over the MAGA voters whose top issue is immigration when Trump-style Republicans are the alternative, but there is an opportunity to contrast that is in line with the majority of the electorate. Call out the extremism and obstruction, present an alternative, affirmative both//and approach, then move on to the other issues that the majority of voters are concerned about.
POLITICS UPDATES
GOP Senate Leadership: Long-time GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell announced that he will give up his role in November. Throughout his career, though he was married to an immigrant, McConnell has never been an ally for immigrant rights. He was the main architect behind the abuse of the filibuster to block progressive legislation, including immigration reform. Ironically, it was McConnell’s embrace of the bipartisan border security legislation that may have been the death knell for his tenure as leader. McConnell was a strong proponent of the bill, but his caucus abandoned him under orders for the GOP’s actual leader, Donald Trump. That defeat was a blow that showed McConnell’s newfound weakness.
Texas primaries: Texas is holding primaries on Tuesday. Democrats will choose a candidate to oppose Ted Cruz. The leading contenders are U.S. Rep. Colin Allred and State Senator Roland Guiterrez. On the GOP side, there’s mayhem up and down the ticket. The Texas Tribune wrote about the intra-party battles over school vouchers - and corrupt Attorney General Ken Paxton. Billionaire Tim Dunn’s superPAC, “spent more than $2.5 million as part of their campaign to oust incumbent Texas House members who voted last summer to impeach Paxton, a key ally of the state’s right wing. Paxton was acquitted by the Senate.” Of note, “Paxton, who has endorsed the roughly one-third of House Republicans who resisted his impeachment on corruption accusations, didn’t spend any money on those races. Most of his cash is going to legal fees, according to campaign finance reports.” After years of delay, Paxton faces a trial for state felony securities fraud next month. He’s also under investigation by a federal grand jury.
WI-Sen: Republicans got a top recruit, Eric Hovde, who lives in California but is rich, to run against Tammy Baldwin. Wisconsin Examiner took note of his “incoherence” on the immigration issue. “Hovde began his announcement speech with a lengthy retelling of his family story, invoking his impoverished immigrant great-grandparents and their ‘bold decision to go pursue that American dream,’ like other immigrants to the U.S. who made this country what it is by fleeing ‘tyranny and oppression’ and pursuing ‘the dream to have some prosperity and to make a better life for your children.’ Then he pivoted to his plan to pull up the drawbridge. ‘We don’t have the housing nor the medical services and infrastructure to care for our own citizens, much less nine to 12 million [new immigrants] — that’s basically double Wisconsin in three years.’ Hovde didn’t seem to notice the dissonance between his romantic invocation of his own family’s immigrant past and his hard-headed declaration that we must close the door on the immigrants who are coming here now, fleeing tyranny and seeking a better life.” Of course, Hovde is using the GOP’s inflated numbers and following their rhetoric. It’s their main campaign issue.
WEEKLY STATS OF NATIVIST NARRATIVE
Of the 525 GOP Twitter accounts we track, this week, they sent:
1113 original tweets peddling anti-immigrant attacks mentioning “border”
276 original tweets about “open borders,” with Speaker Mike Johnson tweet having the most reach with 2.7M Views, 6.5K Retweets, and 25K Likes.
53 original tweets that used “Biden Border Crisis” with Sen. Ted Cruz tweet having the most reach with 158.6K Views, 498 Retweets, and 3.4k Likes.
32 original tweets that mentioned both “fentanyl” and “border” with Gov. Greg Abbott tweet having the most reach with 207.3K views, 2.4K Retweets and 16K Likes.
Top Articles on social of the week: (Right-wing media still dominating the conversation online)
This past week there were 878K interactions, an increase of 49% and 18.7K articles published, an increase of 58% from last week.
Fox News: “Georgia student murder suspect confirmed to be illegal immigrant” - 14.7K Facebook Interactions and 1.6K X Shares
The Atlantic: “Why Is Trump Trying to Make Ukraine Lose?” - 1.4K Facebook Interactions and 13.2K X Shares
The Babylon Bee: “Biden Arrives At Border To Address His Voters” - 4.9K Facebook Interactions and 8.8K X Shares