Racist Anti-Immigrant Hysteria Is Aimed At Blinding Voters To Reality

By Marc H. Morial 
President and CEO
National Urban League  

“The bomb outrage in New York emphasizes the extent to which the alien scum from the cesspools of the Old World has polluted the clear spring of American democracy. While hundreds of detectives scour the haunts of the anarchist and the terrorist in the slums and outlandish foreign quarters of American Babels, the doors of Ellis Island stand open to fresh hordes of warped and half-crazed deserters from Europe.”

– The Washington Post editorial board,

Sept. 20, 1920

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Replace the bombing in New York with the death of Laken Riley … “cesspools of the Old World” with “sh**hole countries” … “polluted the clear spring” with “poisoning the blood” and Ellis Island with the southwest border, and a 1920 editorial could be a 2024 presidential campaign speech.

In 1920, the targets of anti-immigration hatred were European, not Central and South American, but were no less targets of the racial and religious bigotry of the era. The newcomers from Italy, Greece and Eastern Europe were considered inferior – dirtier, less intelligent, more criminally inclined – than Americans of northern European and Anglo-Saxon descent.  The current GOP presidential nominee’s own father, the son of a German immigrant, was arrested at an anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan march in 1927.

The racist stereotypes at the heart of anti-immigrant hatred are no more true today than they were a century ago, but bigots and extremists still cling to them just as tightly.

The same baseless hysteria about violent crime that permeated the 2022 midterm elections is front-and-center in this year’s presidential race.

“You have these politicians who are strategically, intentionally, purposefully seeking to exploit people’s unconscious vulnerability by saying welfare queen, illegal alien, terrorist, gangbanger, terms that they know will trigger unconscious racist views,” U.C. Berkely law professor Ian Haney López, who specializes in race and racism, told PBS.

We do need immigration reform. But not because immigrants are fueling a violent crime wave. To the contrary, violent crime rates have fallen sharply since President Biden took office, and  communities with more immigration tend to have less crime, especially violent crimes. One study estimated that about 3 percent of undocumented immigrants had felony convictions, compared to 8 percent of the overall population.

As President Biden noted in his State of the Union Speech, the hypocrisy of right-wing extremists demanding policy changes based on one tragic killing is breathtaking when they continue to block common-sense gun safety measures in the face of tens of thousands of gun deaths every year.

Just as hypocritical was their deliberate sabotage of a bipartisan deal on border security for the contemptable purpose of denying President Biden a victory in an election year. A “popular commentator” told Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, chief negotiator of the compromise, he would “destroy” him if he tried to solve the border crisis “because I do not want you to solve this during the presidential election.”

Meanwhile, the asylum seekers fleeing violence in their homelands are subjected to the cruel whims of publicity-hungry southern governors, who use the chaos they inspire to misrepresent the migrants as disruptive and burdensome.

The bipartisan border agreement would have quadrupled the number of Asylum Officers to process the years-long backlog in asylum claims and added 100 more immigration judges to adjudicate those claims. It would have provided $1.4 billion to the cities and states struggling to provide the migrants with critical services, and expedited work permits so migrants are less reliant on those services.

But the extremists who tanked the bill would rather appeal to voters motivated by racial fear and resentment than the voters motivated by common sense and human decency.

“The tragedy is that Republican leadership and important media outlets have convinced a significant portion of Americans that their best future depends on rejecting and indeed actively fighting against a multiracial democracy,” López said. “But we’re already a multiracial society. What we stand to lose then is our democracy and a society that works for all of us.”