The GOP’s Message to Immigrants

Only a few decades ago, Republican presidents would happily evoke the idea of America as a haven for people around the world.

Ronald Reagan, in his farewell speech, declared that “anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.” Reagan was no paragon of racial tolerance—he opposed the civil-rights movement and privately referred to Black people as “ monkeys ”—but he did not regard the presence of nonwhite people as an existential threat to America.

For years the Republican Party insisted that what it wanted was a certain kind of immigrant—highly skilled people who came here legally, or even, not that long ago, those brought to the U.S. as children who lacked status through no fault of their own and had long since assimilated.

That Republican Party no longer exists.

Today the GOP’s view is that almost all immigration—by which the Trump administration seems to mean nonwhite immigration, euphemistically referred to as “Third World” immigration—is bad.

That view can be summed up by Homeland Security’s celebratory announcement on X last week that the country was seeing a decline in naturalizations, as if the decline itself were self-evidently a good thing: “Net negative migration for the first time in HALF a CENTURY.

Americans are amassing victories NEVER seen before thanks to President Trump.” The “right” kind of immigrant seems to have become a much narrower category, one defined not by people’s education, potential, or ties to the country, but simply by whether they are white and Christian.

A recent Fox News headline exulted : “Republican Glee Erupts as White House Boasts Sharp Decline in Immigration From Muslim-Majority Nations.” These people could be doctors, engineers, or artists, but if they’re from a “Muslim-majority country,” these Republicans don’t want them here.

And this week, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin posted that “socialists”—by which he presumably meant leftists sympathetic to immigrants—want to “vandalize American demographics to gain political power.” This is the language of racial purity, and it is not a concept that confines itself to immigration.

It suggests that Americans who do not fit the Trump administration’s preferred “demographics” do not belong.

In the many parts of the United States where the native-born population is declining, communities desperately need immigrants.

This is true in areas of Ohio, where Haitian immigration has contributed to an economic revival .

But to President Trump, Haiti is a “shithole” country, and all Haitians are invaders to be expelled.

To that end, the administration removed the Temporary Protected Status that had allowed Haitian immigrants to stay in the United States, and in July, Haitians in Ohio began being fitted with ankle monitors.