In January 2018, less than a year after he took office, Trump disparaged immigrants from Haiti, Central America and Africa as coming from “shithole” countries. Why, he lamented in a closed-door meeting, couldn’t the country instead receive immigrants from countries like Norway?
A firestorm erupted, in part because it cemented the broad perception that Trump’s views of migration were inseparable from his views of race. The then-president attempted to backpedal, though, in this case, he was engaged in a credibility battle with more-credible elected officials. And then the controversy passed.
Over the weekend, he revisited the theme. The New York Times reports that, according to an attendee at Trump’s fundraiser Saturday night, Trump made similar comments about immigrants once again — explicitly referencing the 2018 controversy.
Immigrants arriving today “are people coming in from prisons and jails. They’re coming in from just unbelievable places and countries, countries that are a disaster,” he said, according to the attendee. He then tried to explain his comments six years ago.
“When I said, you know, Why can’t we allow people to come in from nice countries, I’m trying to be nice,” Trump said, according to the Times. “Nice countries, you know like Denmark, Switzerland? Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?”
There are two possibilities for why Trump still maintains this position on immigration. The first is that he (who, you might recall, once served as president of the United States) is deeply ignorant about immigration. The second is that he believes racist rhetoric is a successful political strategy.
The case for ignorance is simple. There are two reasons more immigrants to the United States come from Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala than come from Denmark and Norway. The first is that you can get to the United States from El Salvador by walking, driving and taking a train. The second is that the Central American countries from which a lot of immigrants come are among the poorest in the world.
Trump spends a lot of energy pretending that people are trying to enter the country for nefarious reasons, as he did last week when he claimed that China is trying to “build an army” inside the United States. One reason he does this is that it heightens the idea that immigrants are dangerous. The other is that he will not concede that the U.S. economy has been faring well under President Biden, drawing immigrants to the country. But that economic pull is unquestionably a core part of why Central Americans — and others — are trying to come to the United States.
Countries like Haiti or Yemen (which he called out by name at the fundraiser, according to the Times) are also a point of origin for many immigrants because they “are a disaster,” in Trump’s phrasing. It’s sort of amazing that he presents this as some sort of unanswerable question. Why are immigrants only coming from collapsing countries with high rates of poverty instead of stable ones with wealthy populations? Well, because of the things you just said.
But, of course, there’s also that subtext of race. He complains about countries that are largely non-White and, given his rhetorical track record, it’s hard not to assume that he does so in part to heighten the racial fears among his target audience. Trump has made White grievance a central part of his politics from the outset and has recently pledged to focus part of his energy as president, should he win in November, on dismantling systems aimed at addressing historic racial inequality.
Trump says that countries like Mexico are sending criminals to the United States because, again, it is a useful way for him to suggest that Biden’s border policies are somehow dangerous. In recent months, Trump has repeatedly told an anecdote about seeing immigrants from Congo being interviewed on the news, with the migrants telling the interviewer that they had been released from prison. If such an interview exists, I couldn’t find it — but the odds are very good that one doesn’t. Trump knows what his followers hear when they hear “criminals from Congo,” so he keeps letting them hear it.
These two motivations for Trump’s rhetoric — a failure to understand or admit why immigrants come and his own racism or an interest in elevating racist fears — are not exclusive. It can be both that Trump refuses to understand why people from struggling nations want to come to this wealthier, more stable one and that he has more affinity for people who aren’t Hispanic or Black. Just as it is the case, I will note, that those things overlap outside the context of Trump. Many of the places that are struggling economically or politically are struggling in part because they are places with large Hispanic or Black populations that have historically been disadvantaged through racist foreign policies.
Trump often talks about how immigration has increased so much since he left office. That’s true, in part because he left office at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, as the United States (and other countries) were struggling to rebuild their economies following (or during) widespread closures. This is how it works.
Immigration is an enormously complicated system, certainly, but the questions Trump asks are uncomplicated ones to answer.
