Former President Donald J. Trump’s third run for the White House has neared its end the same way his first one started: with relentless dehumanizing portrayals of immigrants.
He has cast people crossing the nation’s southern border as criminals, rapists and terrorists. He has warned the United States is under “invasion” and an “occupied country.” He has falsely accused Haitian immigrants in Ohio of eating pets.
Mr. Trump’s nativist message is only the latest example of a longstanding strain of xenophobia in American politics, historians say, one that is sometimes downplayed in favor of reverent evocations of Ellis Island and the promise of the American dream. (Even before the nation’s founding, Benjamin Franklin denigrated German immigrants in a 1753 letter.) Erika Lee, an author and history professor at Harvard University, describes Mr. Trump’s vitriol as central, not exceptional, “to the ways in which Americans have viewed immigration and its impact through the centuries.”
But Mr. Trump, more so than any other former U.S. commander in chief, uses terms redolent of Hitler’s calls for ethnic cleansing, historians said. And the former president has been able to shape his party’s position on immigration in a way no other nativist leader has.
Here is a look at four of Mr. Trump’s recent statements and their echoes through time.
“Kamala has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from prisons and jails and insane asylums and the worst mental institutions anywhere in the world.”
— Oct. 16, 2024, Trump rally in Atlanta
The waves of immigrants who helped build the United States through the 19th and 20th centuries — laying railroad tracks, building bridges and working in mines, mills and factories — arrived with little means and clustered in neighborhoods for safety. That raised concerns among white, native-born Americans who contended the immigrants fueled violence and lived in slums.
The Chinese. The Irish and the Italians. The Mexicans. The Eastern and Southern Europeans. Nearly every major group of newly arrived immigrants in the United States has been smeared with accusations of criminality. Some were labeled dangerous for organizing for better pay and working conditions or for being involved with political movements in their home countries. They were often depicted as vermin fleeing their home countries in waves for American shores.
Cartoons from the late 1800s portrayed Irish immigrants who backed Irish independence from the English as monsters carrying bombs. After World War I, nativists linked Italians to anarchism and Jews to the revolutionary socialist current of Bolshevism.
Tyler Anbinder, a historian who wrote the book “City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York,” said Americans had some historical basis for conflating crime and immigration. This dated to at least the mid-19th century, when, over the course of three decades, German towns paroled as many as 10,000 prisoners who agreed to accept free passage to America rather than remain in prison.
“That has just continued to be in the popular mind, that criminals are a large portion of the immigrants who come to the United States, which isn’t true — it’s never been true,” Mr. Anbinder said. Studies have also shown that, overall, immigrants have not committed crime disproportionate to their population numbers and have almost always been arrested at lower rates than natives.
“People come in, they’re very sick. Very sick, They’re coming into our country, they’re very, very sick with highly contagious disease. And they’re let into our country to infect our country.”
— Oct. 11, 2024, Trump rally in Aurora, Colo.
Fears of infection led to some of the earliest public health and national security measures at the nation’s southern border.
In the early part of the 20th century, people fleeing violence during the Mexican Revolution were believed to carry lice spreading typhus. In January 1917, at an expanded border facility in El Paso, the U.S. health authorities began requiring Mexican migrants to strip so that they could be doused with noxious delousing chemicals before entering the country.
Thousands of Mexican housekeepers revolted in opposition that month and, as The New York Times reported then, “thronged the Mexican side of the bridge, held up street cars and completely blocked traffic for several hours.” But similar practices remained in place along the border into the 1960s under the guest-worker bracero program, which employed Mexican laborers to plant and harvest crops on American fields.
Political rallying cries that immigrants usher in disease date back to the nation’s very first immigration restrictions, before the federal government regulated the nation’s borders. Southern enslavers used fears of “contagion” in passing laws to prevent Black sailors from entering ports in Florida and South Carolina, saying they could bring infectious ideas of Black liberty and autonomy that could lead to a “race war” pandemic, the historian Michael A. Schoeppner wrote in his book “Moral Contagion.” The restrictions were aimed at Black maritime workers from Haiti, where enslaved Haitians were close to overthrowing their French masters.
Through the 1800s, the Irish were often blamed for cholera outbreaks. In the 1980s, the Centers for Disease Control stigmatized Haitians as a particular threat in the spread of AIDS, a debunked belief Mr. Trump repeated as late as 2017 while in office.
“Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
— Oct. 7, 2024, interview on “The Hugh Hewitt Show”
Decades before he ran for political office, Mr. Trump was publicly obsessed with the notion that genes determine a person’s capacity for success or violence. That long-disproved belief is at the crux of the nation’s long history of xenophobia: Underlying many of the aspersions cast upon immigrants are racist, debunked theories that characterize Black people and other groups as genetically or biologically inferior.
Mr. Schoeppner said the Southern enslavers who drafted their states’ first immigration restrictions leaned on those racist tropes, which he called “a recurring motif that sits at the heart of American nativism.”
A.K. Sandoval-Strausz, a history professor at Pennsylvania State University, said pseudoscience had driven a global eugenics movement that peaked in the United States in the 1920s. In Congress, it culminated in strict quotas in 1924 that were meant to encourage immigrants from Western Europe, reject all but a few from Southern and Eastern Europe and entirely bar people from Asia. The bills’ authors were avid readers of literature exalting the superiority of the Nordic race, Mr. Sandoval-Strausz said, and the racial theories underlying their legislation would influence the ideology of Nazi Germany.
Mr. Sandoval-Strausz said Hitler had praised the 1924 quotas for excluding what he called “strangers of the blood,” a phrase historians say parallels Mr. Trump’s repeated assertions that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” In a passage in “Mein Kampf,” Hitler linked “the poison that has invaded the national body” to an “influx of foreign blood.”
Alexandra Stern, a historian who has linked the resurgence of such ideologies in online right-wing spaces with the rise of Mr. Trump, said it was not a coincidence that anti-immigrant fervor was being ratcheted up while immigration and abortion rights were at the forefront of the presidential election. The debate has always been, she said, “about who’s allowed to come into the country and who is not — and who is having babies and who’s not.”
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
— Sept. 10, 2024, presidential debate
Mr. Trump’s false accusation against Haitians drew on another age-old line of attack against immigrants: maligning them for what they eat. Some of the earliest examples of the slur were used against Chinese immigrants who arrived in the 19th century as laborers and helped build the nation’s first transcontinental railroad. Ms. Lee traced it as far back as the 1870s, when minstrel performers sang about how Chinese people ate cats, dogs and snakes.
The anti-Chinese sentiments helped prompt laws that excluded nearly all Chinese migrants and laborers from entering the country in the late 1800s — the nation’s first immigration laws explicitly based on race. In the 1910s, as anti-immigrant activists sought to label Italians the “Chinese of Europe,” accusations that they ate all sorts of “inappropriate foods” escalated, said Maddalena Marinari, a history professor at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota.
During the Philippine-American War, which began in 1899, and the Korean War in the 1950s, American military soldiers vilified Filipinos and Koreans as “dog eaters,” and those rumors made their way back to the United States, said Mae Ngai, an immigration historian at Columbia University. (Dog meat was once commonly consumed in South Korea, and remained so in the decades after the Korean War, when the country was impoverished and meat was scarce, but the practice became shunned in the late 20th century.)
Americans have seen the politics of fear used to rile up voters before and are likely to see it again. Still, Mr. Trump’s language on the debate stage left some historians baffled. “It’s almost as though this discourse has reached its illogical, most absurd sort of end point,” Mr. Schoeppner said.
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