Trump’s Racist Anti-Immigrant Agitation In A Nation Of Immigrants

By Lawrence Wittner Photos: YouTube Screenshots In recent days, Donald Trump and his Republican running mate, JD Vance, have doubled down on their& false and defamatory claims about legally-admitted Haitian immigrants& in Springfield, Ohio, thus churning up widespread fears, bomb threats, and school evacuations. Claiming that these migrants were destroying the American “way of life,” Trump promised that, if elected, he would order massive deportations. This statement echoed his astonishing promise, made during the 2024 campaign and previously, to seize and deport between& 15 and 20 million immigrants. Nativist agitation has a long, sordid history in the United States.& In the 1850s, large numbers of American Protestants rallied behind the Know Nothing movement and its political offshoot, the American Party, ventures centered primarily on opposing the influence of immigrant Catholics. In the& latter part of the nineteenth century, hostility toward Chinese immigrants (“the yellow peril”) and, later, Japanese immigrants led to lynchings, riots, and legislation that barred virtually all immigration from the two Asian nations. During the early twentieth century, American xenophobia focused on the alleged dangers provided by the “new immigrants” from Southern and Eastern Europe, predominantly Catholics and Jews. Such people, it was claimed, had a higher propensity...