Donald Trump wants everyone to believe immigrants are bad. The formula is simplistic, misleading and false, but it is the sum total of his immigration policy.
The simplicity, the impulsivity, and the emotionalism make Trump so tempting:
- Immigrants are bad.
- Real Americans are white and good.
- Only Trump can save good America from bad immigrants.
Somewhere in the recesses of Mar-a-Lago, there’s a secret room where Donald Trump and Stephen Miller mix conspiracy theories, dark web stories and complete lies into vicious attacks against immigrants. Trump not only takes unbelievable stories from the web — think Haitian immigrants eating the pets of white people in Springfield, Ohio — he also takes normal services provided by our government and turns them into lurid conspiracy theories.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump delivers remarks at a news conference at Trump Tower on September 26, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Trump’s smart phone app theory
In one of his more bizarre claims, Trump insists Vice President Kamala Harris has a secret application that illegal immigrants have on their smartphones. During a speech at Trump Tower on Thursday, Sept. 26, Trump read straight from a prepared script to blame the Biden administration for a migrant crisis. And he said Harris is using a secret smartphone app to transport migrants to states critical to Trump’s election chances.
He seems to have watched too many Harry Potter movies. Magical modes of transportation among wizards like Potter include “floo powder,” and a “portkey.” There is in the wizarding world a lot of magical teleportation.
Screenshot of Harry Potter characters holding onto a boot that is a “portkey” for magical transportation.
The “portkey” for migrants, according to Trump, is an app on their smartphones. He is dreaming up “highly sophisticated, tech savvy immigrants” who are put on secret flights in secret passenger jets by Harris and sneaked into the states crucial for him if he is going to win the election. In Trump’s mind, the really dumb cat-and-dog-eating migrants have been magically transformed into super-secret really smart hi-tech invaders.
Apparently, Trump heard about the app provided by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) mobile application CBP One, launched in 2020. It is available on the Apple App and Google Play stores. The purpose of the app is to provide appropriate services for immigrants and it has been criticized as clunky and inefficient.
As stated on the CBP website: “As part of CBP’s comprehensive effort to improve the security of our nation’s borders while enhancing legitimate travel and trade, CBP One provides increased accessibility and transparency to some of CBP’s most utilized services.”
Trump concocted the rest of the story from thin air. He claims: “In addition, through her phone app, something totally new now, it’s a phone app for migrants, where migrants call in. She’s allowed them to press a button and schedule an appointment to be released into the interior of our county.”
Trump elaborated: “As president, I will immediately end the migrant invasion of America. We will stop all migrant flights, end all illegal entries, terminate the Kamala phone app for smuggling illegals (CBP One App), revoke deportation immunity, suspend refugee resettlement and return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration). I will save our cities and towns in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and all across America. MAGA2024!”
The Trump reversal
If you long ago stopped listening to Trump, you will not know his description of illegal immigrants has changed drastically. Now he tells people to pay no attention to his original lies that immigrants are criminals.
His old lie about immigrants: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. …They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with them. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
Immigrants have gone from being criminals who are dumber than dirt to being high-tech secret agents in cahoots with the vice president of the United States. Harris is an immigrant “mole” in the White House.
The Trump train has left the main track of American politics. Now, it is a runaway train endangering everyone. The strategy is clear: Make up any story. Tell as many lies as you can manufacture. Have your surrogates defend, repeat and expand the lies. Bury the electorate in bluster.
Yet there’s nothing new in Trump’s immigration rants. If he had some new policy capable of helping deal with the immigration issue in positive and helpful ways, why does he resort to demagogic nativism attacks? Because he’s got nothing.
Dismantling the expectation of truth-telling
Here’s what I believe is at stake: Trump has dismantled the fundamental expectation of truth-telling and good faith in America. Until the age of Trump, Americans assumed politicians were acting in good faith until there was definitive proof otherwise. Americans also assumed politicians would accept the value of truth and would act accordingly if they were caught lying.
“There is no longer a standard of truth-telling. Shamelessness has replaced shame.”
When caught lying, the politician would leave office in shame and disgrace. Trump has changed all this. There is no longer a standard of truth-telling. Shamelessness has replaced shame.
When a Trump lie is exposed, if anything, he gains strength and influence. People are impressed he can say such outrageous and crazy stuff, get away with it and still not lose any votes.
If anything, Trump escalates. When the report of Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs was conclusively shown to be false, Trump and Vance didn’t stop telling the lie. They escalated.
Trump’s smartphone apps for the magic transportation of illegal immigrants to a swing state makes Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “Jewish space lasers” look like the work of a kindergartener. This is the master class in humbuggery, foolishness and, yes, stupidity.
The framework of populist nativism
What is going on here? I think for Trump the entire game is wrapped in the framework of populist nativism. Label it Nativism.7 because America has spasmodic outbreaks of nativism — a movement where the white natives get scared and think the African Americans are going to steal their women, the Irish Catholics are going to destroy Protestant Christianity, the Chinese are going to take all the jobs, the Germans and the Japanese are our sworn enemies, Black and brown people coming from an array of what Trump calls “shithole countries.
Pat Buchanan gestures during a speech at the Republican National Committee Summer Meeting in Philadelphia, Friday, July 14, 1995. (AP Photo/George Widman)
Whenever three or more white males are afraid in America, a new nativist movement is born.
Trump is dragging up nasty, discredited history from the garbage dump of Gehenna. He is carrying on an old family tradition rooted in nativist populism. Nativism is the frame of Trump’s rhetoric. Trump is a populist in the paranoid tradition of such aberrations as Joseph McCarthy and Patrick Buchanan. America rejected McCarthy and Buchanan, but Buchanan is still important because of his influence on Trump.
In State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, Buchanan’s anti-immigrant positions are clear and threatening. While it is doubtful Trump has ever read Buchanan, he imbibed his ideas.
For example, Buchanan said, “It needs to be said again: If we do not solve our civilizational crisis — a disintegrating culture, dying populations and invasions unresisted — the children born in 2006 will witness in their lifetimes the death of the West. In our hearts we know what must be done. We must stop the invasion. But do our leaders have the vision and the will to do it?”
Buchanan had a plan for immigration.
- Stop all immigration
- Eliminate amnesty for immigrant workers
- Build a permanent fence (Trump’s wall)
- No more “anchor babies” — don’t grant citizenship to babies born in the USA
- Stop “chain migration” — family reunification policy
- End dual citizenship
- Remove the “magnets” — end the incentives for illegal immigrants
- Remigration
Trump is Pat Buchanan in more expensive suits, a greater television persona and a charismatic leadership style. Trump is Buchanan with makeup and lipstick and orange hair.
Here’s a better story
Instead of drowning in Trump’s rage, rhetorical scholar Robert L. Ivie says, there needs to be an “affirming gesture of concurrence. There needs to be a picture of partners, family, friends, neighbors, networks, the common good and other humanizing images of diversity, interdependence, mutual regard, mutual action, mutual influence and mutual benefit.”
A different story needs to be told. Not a made-up story like those of Trump and Vance, but real life stories of the value of immigrants to the American story.
“Trump is sowing the seeds of racial division in an attempt to win the election.”
There is a better, healthier, more truthful immigrant story. Heather McGee, in The Sum of Us, challenges Trump’s apocalyptic vision of destroyed American cities and small towns by recounting how immigration has proved to be a win-win for locals as a means of repopulating and revitalizing small towns across the country.
Trump says the governors and mayors are embarrassed to tell the truth about the devastation caused by immigrants. Listening to Trump, you would think illegal immigrants have invaded small towns like hordes of swarming locusts from the Old Testament.
It’s a carefully packaged apocalyptic set of lies. Trump is sowing the seeds of racial division in an attempt to win the election. He is exploiting the fears of Americans who are anxious about a nation being created “with no racial majority.”
Trump singled out Springfield, Ohio, for his big lie about immigrants. I offer a trip to Lewiston, Maine, as an alternative story. The secret to Lewiston’s success: thousands of refugees from the Somali Civil War were resettled in the Atlanta suburbs of Georgia. Word of mouth got some to Portland, and then to Lewiston, where the quiet streets offered more peace and the low rents more security. Soon other African refugees — from The Congo, Chad, Djibouti and Sudan — moved to Lewiston. City planner Phil Nadeau said, “The refugee arrivals … are filling apartments that were vacant for a long time. They’re filling storefronts on Lisbon Street that were vacant for a long time. They’re contributing to the economy.”
Nadeau is passionate about the value of the “new Mainers,” as he calls them, to the revitalization of Lewiston. He boasts that while other Maine small towns had plummeting real estate values, fleeing young people and shuttering schools, Lewiston is building new schools — and creating the jobs that come with that. He can’t say enough about the benefit of migration to small towns like his. A bipartisan think tank calculated that Maine’s African immigrant households contributed $194 million in state and local taxes in 2018.
Immigrants are repopulating once-dying small towns. Pick a state, and you’ll find this story in one corner or another. Kennett Square, Pa., is now 50% Latinx, mostly from Mexico, and it’s a community given new life by the families of migrant workers at the local mushroom farms.
Towns across the Texas Panhandle have been drying up and losing population for years, but the potato farming stronghold of Dalhart grew by 7% from 1990 to 2016 because of Latinx families. Once immigrants have moved to a small town, as European immigrants did a century ago, they have started businesses, gained education and participated in civic life.
“In the decade after 2000, people of color made up nearly 83% of the growth in rural population in America.”
According to McGhee, a study of more than 2,600 rural communities found that over the three decades after 1990, two-thirds lost population. However, immigration helped soften the blow in the majority of these places, and among the areas that gained population, one in five owes the entirety of its growth to immigration. In the decade after 2000, people of color made up nearly 83% of the growth in rural population in America.
The truth
Here’s the bottom line, honest-to-God truth: Trump is lying about what is happening to the small towns in the U.S. Trump’s apocalyptic story is as full of holes as a premillennial evangelist going on about a fictional rapture. His vision is a dark, fearful and distorted one.
Americans have a clear choice. We made this same choice when we rejected the nativism and anti-immigration of Buchanan. Now, we need to emphatically reject it again.
Trump has had his moment in the sun. Like a bad reality television show, it is time for him to recede into the shadows. As the unknown writer of Ecclesiastes knew: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to break down, and a time to build up.”
In America, it is a time to laugh and dance in the glory of diversity and inclusion.
It is a time to throw away the misinformation and lies of Trump and keep the values of character and truthfulness.
It is time to tear down the wall of hatred, racism, division and a time to stitch together the common good of Americans.
It is time to speak, to love and to make peace.
It is a time to reject the dark apocalyptic language of Trump and embrace the newness of opportunity provided by so many different peoples and cultures.
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer in New York state. He is the author of 11 books, including his latest, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit.
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