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 dwelling 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 non permanent standing, discovered the amplification of the debunked story each surprising and reprehensible.
However she was additionally struck by one other reality: “It wasn’t even what the query was about,” Larrieux informed Al Jazeera.
Trump’s false rhetoric underscored a transparent marketing campaign technique from the Republican presidential candidate: He has been attempting to hammer Harris on a difficulty that the Democrat is perceived to be susceptible on.
It additionally highlighted how anti-immigrant speaking factors have been used for political functions, specialists 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 through 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 reveals that we don’t have progress in the US. America goes backward.”
Defining ‘who we’re’
The times because the 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 “navy invasion” of migrants that’s seeing the nation “occupied by a international component” whereas once more repeating the false declare about Haitian immigrants in Ohio.
Harris’s muted response to Trump’s false claims through 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 fashionable US elections, during which outsized caricatures of refugees and migrants proceed to dominate the nationwide discourse.
Demonising foreigners has been interwoven all through US historical past, 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 towards 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 profession particularly, nevertheless.
In 2015, when he launched his first presidential marketing campaign at Trump Tower in Manhattan, he launched right into a screed towards Mexico for sending “folks with numerous issues to the US”.
“They’re bringing medicine. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And a few, I assume, are good folks,” Trump mentioned, drawing widespread rebuke.
His enduring embrace of debunked claims about immigrants underscores that fundamental ideas of group psychology proceed to be ripe for political exploitation, Filindra informed Al Jazeera.
“The way in which identities inside teams work is by creating a way of optimistic attachment and attributions to the group, the ‘who we’re’,” she mentioned. “We’re all the great issues: the virtuous, the law-abiding, the taxpaying, the type to one another.
“In an effort to preserve 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 simple.”
‘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 giant 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 susceptible populations. Springfield, Ohio, is a key instance of such stresses.
However proof continues to counsel that Trump’s bellicose method resonates far past areas dealing immediately with the complexities of immigration, specialists mentioned.
Nour Kteily, a professor at Northwestern College outdoors Chicago who research social psychology and group interplay, mentioned Trump’s method emphasises “symbolic threats”, which helps his message ring far past communities the place it could be most related.
A symbolic risk, 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 will be fairly motivating, even for individuals who aren’t essentially coping with any of this firsthand,” he informed Al Jazeera.
“In actual fact, to some extent, while you’re not seeing it firsthand, that additionally permits your mind to fill within the image in a trumped-up means, so to talk.”
Amid his hardline stance on immigration and incendiary rhetoric, Trump continues to take care of widespread assist as many citizens throughout the US cite migration as a high election concern.
Filindra attributed this to the very fact Trump speaks of an “undefined immigrant Different”, biking by way of a number of nationalities of origin however by no means resting on one.
Trump portrays “somebody who doesn’t seem like us, who’s violent, who doesn’t behave like us and that can even eat our pets”, she mentioned.
“And that half is very vital as a result of we all know from psychology that behaviours which might be outdoors the norm like that make folks disgusted but additionally 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 towards him. Trump has proved to be a significantly impervious political determine with little shaking his most ardent supporters.
Blatant dehumanisation additionally stays “surprisingly prevalent” within the US, in accordance with 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 occasion 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 folks 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 had 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 enable 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, specialists careworn that the stakes for these being dehumanised are actual.
“The sort of 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, had been closed attributable to a sequence of bomb threats. Mayor Rob Rue informed The New York Instances that the threats had been a “hateful response to immigration in our city”.
“It’s irritating when nationwide politicians, on the nationwide stage, mischaracterise what is definitely occurring and misrepresent our group,” he mentioned.
Because the debate, Harris has but to particularly converse out on the problem though President Joe Biden, who dropped out of the presidential race in July, on Friday known as the concentrating on of the Haitian group “merely mistaken”.
“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 situations when immigrants from the Caribbean nation had been demonised for political acquire, together with through the AIDS epidemic of the Eighties.
Extra lately, Amnesty Worldwide final yr decried the significantly “merciless, inhuman or degrading therapy” of Haitians all through the Americas.
“This has been giving me nightmares,” Larrieux informed Al Jazeera. “Those that have the ability can’t proceed to play with our lives.”
