How Trump's relentless anti-immigrant focus is tied to his threats to democracy

Donald Trump’s relentless attacks on immigrants and related lies and conspiracies are best thought of as not really about immigration. Trump and his allies are weaponizing the issue to stoke divides and energize the MAGA base, but also to lay the groundwork to undermine trust in our democracy and our electoral process.

For example, the right-wing mainstreaming of the white nationalist “Great Replacement Theory” seeks to promote the idea that brown people, in concert with Jews, are coming to America to take power from white “real Americans." It's not only a dangerous assertion, as seen in horrific acts of domestic terrorism in places such as Charlottesville and Pittsburgh, but also lays the groundwork to argue that the results can’t be trusted should Trump lose the election.

Witness that recently, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) falsely claimed there was an intentional change in immigration policy by the Biden administration to facilitate more migration, asserting this is the case because Democrats “ultimately hope to turn these people into voters.” Read that Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake claimed in an interview that her opponent, Rep. Ruben Gallego, “wants to give nine to twelve million people who poured in illegally who have invaded our country the ability to vote, he wants them all to vote.” Note that Trump himself regularly regurgitates these ideas. In a recent speech, he said, “That’s why they are allowing these people to come in — people that don’t speak our language — they are signing them up to vote.”

While the myth of noncitizens voting has existed for decades, it has usually remained on the fringes, largely because there is no evidence that non-citizen voting is a problem. Further, the penalties of voting for non-citizens are particularly harsh—fines, prison, and revoking legal status and deportation. The intention - and danger - in promoting these ideas now when there is a high level of concern about immigration is twofold: First, using the excuse of this non-problem, GOP-aligned groups want to put into place voting restrictions that would have a disproportionate effect on young people, the elderly, African-Americans, naturalized citizens, and Latino voters. Second, should Trump lose, his followers will logically blame non-citizens. The “replacement” theory and fake non-citizen voting concerns help lay the groundwork for delegitimizing the democratic process, promoting the lie that elections are rigged and bolstering the false grievance of MAGA supporters that the only way to address a supposedly corrupt democratic process is through political violence.

As we saw on January 6, the threat of violence is not a theoretical worry. Further, we at America’s Voice have been sounding the alarm on the increasingly violent language we are hearing from Trump and the right-wing when it comes to immigrants – blaming them for invading our country, drug trafficking, sensationalizing a handful of crimes committed by immigrants, and now even blaming immigrants for rigging the election. Before Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator in 2015 to give his speech calling Mexicans “murderers and rapists,” it would have been unthinkable for any serious American politician to utter these prejudiced and racist accusations. Fast forward nine years, and Trump is running on a dark and dystopian view of immigrants and America - such as his new “border bloodbath” phrase - and most of his party is following suit. The normalization and acceptance of these ideas are beyond troubling.

These lies to set up a pretext for delegitimizing elections are part of the larger political weaponization of immigration by Trump and his allies. As has been on display in recent months, their goal is not to tackle immigration policy or even advance hardline policies on border security. Indeed, the Trump-led effort to scuttle the recent Senate immigration and border bill - stacked with long-time GOP priorities - drove home the point that they want the border in crisis for political purposes.

Yet, their use and reliance on immigration and the border transcends just those issues and also is central to their effort to try and subvert democracy. Note that at the same March Ohio rally at which Trump first uttered his infamous “blood bath” comments and compared immigrants to “animals,” he opened the rally by saluting the January 6th rioters and playing their version of the National Anthem. Those aren’t two disturbing elements of Trump’s stump speech, but two sides of the same coin.

While immigrants by now are accustomed to being the tip of the spear in the GOP’s arsenal of attacks, let's be clear-eyed that the threat now is beyond harming immigrant communities or calling attention to the border. This is about using this issue as a tool to further Trump’s political ambitions, even if that means suppressing the right to vote, undermining our election results, or stoking more political violence.

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