Washington, DC – Farah Larrieux watched this week’s presidential debate between former United States President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, first from her house within the suburbs of Miami after which on-line as she headed to a late-night job.
Inside minutes of the occasion beginning, Trump had trumpeted a sensational — and false — declare about Haitian immigrants stealing and consuming pets within the city of Springfield, Ohio.
Larrieux, herself a Haitian immigrant within the US on a precarious temporary status, discovered the amplification of the debunked story each stunning and reprehensible.
However she was additionally struck by one other reality: “It wasn’t even what the query was about,” Larrieux instructed Al Jazeera.
Trump’s false rhetoric underscored a transparent marketing campaign technique from the Republican presidential candidate: He has been making an attempt to hammer Harris on a difficulty that the Democrat is perceived to be weak on.
It additionally highlighted how anti-immigrant speaking factors have been used for political functions, consultants mentioned, whereas additionally fuelling harmful penalties for the communities being focused.
For Larrieux, who advocates for the Haitian group within the US, Trump’s amplification of the outlandish lies about Haitian immigrants during the debate — watched by greater than 67 million viewers throughout the nation — pointed to one thing deeper.
“Utilizing migrants and Haitians as weapons for the political agenda, it’s not simply irritating,” she mentioned. “It exhibits that we don’t have progress in america. The USA goes backward.”
Defining ‘who we’re’
The times for the reason that debate have seen flippant, AI-generated memes portraying Trump as a protector of pets being shared by the previous president and his allies.
Throughout a speech on Thursday within the state of Arizona on the border with Mexico, Trump described a “army invasion” of migrants that’s seeing the nation “occupied by a overseas factor” whereas once more repeating the false declare about Haitian immigrants in Ohio.
Harris’s muted response to Trump’s false claims in the course of the debate has additionally stoked criticism after the Democrat laughed off her opponent as “excessive” however took no time to defend these coming to the US.
It’s maybe a well-recognized sentiment in trendy US elections, through which outsized caricatures of refugees and migrants proceed to dominate the nationwide discourse.
Demonising foreigners has been interwoven throughout US history, defined Alexandra Filindra, a professor of political science and psychology who research immigration on the College of Illinois, Chicago.
That features Benjamin Franklin’s considerations that the nation was turning into “Germanised” within the 18th century; discrimination in opposition to Irish and Italian immigrants within the 1800s; the surveillance of Muslims and Arabs, which surged within the early 2000s particularly; and the “disaster” on the US border with Mexico, Filindra famous.
Anti-immigrant rhetoric has been a mainstay of Trump’s political career particularly, nonetheless.
In 2015, when he launched his first presidential marketing campaign at Trump Tower in Manhattan, he launched right into a screed in opposition to Mexico for sending “individuals with a number of issues to the US”.
“They’re bringing medicine. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And a few, I assume, are good individuals,” Trump mentioned, drawing widespread rebuke.
His enduring embrace of debunked claims about immigrants underscores that primary ideas of group psychology proceed to be ripe for political exploitation, Filindra instructed Al Jazeera.
“The best way identities inside teams work is by creating a way of constructive attachment and attributions to the group, the ‘who we’re’,” she mentioned. “We’re all the nice issues: the virtuous, the law-abiding, the taxpaying, the sort to one another.
“To be able to keep that boundary and politicise and strengthen the hyperlinks inside the group, leaders can use out-group animosity as a weapon basically,” she mentioned.
“It’s very efficient, and it’s very straightforward.”
‘Symbolic threats’
The rhetoric comes amid years of mounting frustrations over Washington’s failure to place higher programs in place to course of and accommodate massive numbers of migrants and refugees travelling to the US.
The arrivals have fuelled actual logistical and useful resource challenges for smaller jurisdictions throughout the nation as they grapple with the expansion of latest and weak populations. Springfield, Ohio, is a key example of such stresses.
However proof continues to counsel that Trump’s bellicose strategy resonates far past areas dealing instantly with the complexities of immigration, consultants mentioned.
Nour Kteily, a professor at Northwestern College outdoors Chicago who research social psychology and group interplay, mentioned Trump’s strategy emphasises “symbolic threats”, which helps his message ring far past communities the place it could be most related.
A symbolic menace, Kteily defined, is one thing “associated to the character of the composition of my nation and the symbols that I affiliate with it”.
“These symbolic threats could be fairly motivating, even for individuals who aren’t essentially coping with any of this firsthand,” he instructed Al Jazeera.
“Actually, to some extent, whenever you’re not seeing it firsthand, that additionally permits your mind to fill within the image in a trumped-up manner, so to talk.”
Amid his hardline stance on immigration and incendiary rhetoric, Trump continues to keep up widespread help as many citizens throughout the US cite migration as a prime election concern.
Filindra attributed this to the very fact Trump speaks of an “undefined immigrant Different”, biking by means of a number of nationalities of origin however by no means resting on one.
Trump portrays “somebody who doesn’t appear to be us, who’s violent, who doesn’t behave like us and that can even eat our pets”, she mentioned.
“And that half is particularly important as a result of we all know from psychology that behaviours which are outdoors the norm like that make individuals disgusted but in addition very, very mad and upset,” Filindra added.
“These emotions final.”
‘Dehumanising’ norms
It’s unclear simply how resonant Trump’s significantly degrading depictions of immigrants are or if they’re turning voters outdoors of his base in opposition to him. Trump has proved to be a particularly impervious political determine with little shaking his most ardent supporters.
Blatant dehumanisation additionally stays “surprisingly prevalent” within the US, based on Kteily’s analysis, whereas subtler, “extra implicit” types of dehumanisation are extra widespread.
Much less clear is what impact Harris’s deprioritisation of the problem of immigration can have.
Democrats in each 2016 and 2020 sought to current a extra welcoming imaginative and prescient of the US as a counterpoint to the one put forth by Trump and different Republicans. The get together has since lurched rightwards on border points amid Republican assaults.
“One of many issues that occurred after the [2016] election of Donald Trump is even when individuals didn’t themselves change their very own dehumanising attitudes or prejudicial attitudes in direction of different teams, they got here to imagine that these attitudes have been extra regular in US society,” Kteily mentioned.
“We take our cues to a big extent from what we imagine others in our environment themselves imagine,” he added.
“So anytime you permit one thing like that to go unchecked, on the margin, it begins to form a few of these norms.”
Precursor to violence
In the meantime, consultants harassed that the stakes for these being dehumanised are actual.
“Such a dehumanisation, the literature suggests, is a precursor to social and political violence,” Filindra mentioned.
A reminder of that got here on Thursday when a number of buildings in Springfield, Ohio, have been closed on account of a series of bomb threats. Mayor Rob Rue instructed The New York Occasions that the threats have been a “hateful response to immigration in our city”.
“It’s irritating when nationwide politicians, on the nationwide stage, mischaracterise what is definitely happening and misrepresent our group,” he mentioned.
For the reason that debate, Harris has but to particularly communicate out on the problem though President Joe Biden, who dropped out of the presidential race in July, on Friday called the concentrating on of the Haitian group “merely flawed”.
“This has to cease, what [Trump’s] doing. It has to cease,” Biden mentioned.
For Haitian group advocate Larrieux, the scenario has been a grim reminder of previous cases when immigrants from the Caribbean nation have been demonised for political acquire, together with in the course of the AIDS epidemic of the Eighties.
Extra lately, Amnesty Worldwide final yr decried the significantly “merciless, inhuman or degrading remedy” of Haitians all through the Americas.
“This has been giving me nightmares,” Larrieux instructed Al Jazeera. “Those that have the ability can not proceed to play with our lives.”
