Obsessive Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric in US Politics: WhatGives?
Meet Jan Koum. Having grown up in rural communist USSR, he moved to California as a teenager, using what little federal assistance was offered to him to scrape by. As Koum’s menial blue-collar jobs, as a janitor for example, became insufficient to support his family, their income thankfully became supplanted by welfare, food stamps, and government housing (all these policies are at risk under the Trump administration). Particularly after his mother developed cancer and his father’s premature death in their home country of Ukraine precluded his supporting them in America, social services became his family’s lifeblood. In spite of his turbulent childhood, it was Koum’s self-starter and hardworking attitude that brought him affluence—he taught himself to code, climbed the proverbial ranks to eventually join w00w00 (a secretive cybersecurity think tank), and soon met some of the best coders in the country. Having dropped out of San José State University to work as a security tester at Ernst & Young, he then met his future business partner, Brian Acton, with whom he formed WhatsApp. Several business transactions and billions of smartphone adopters later, both are multi-billionaires (Miller).
Koum’s story is anything but unique. Think Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Alphabet or Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla (and SpaceX, among many others), or Jensen Huang, the co-founder of Nvidia. For all the harsh polarisation that separates views on immigration, the data is remarkably concrete. Researchers from Northwestern University wanted to know the exact numbers, so they analysed the most successful recent startups and the Fortune 500 list of the highest-earning firms. What they found was “immigrants are overrepresented among founders compared to how many immigrants there are in the population,” with 0.46 percent of Americans starting a firm between 2005 and 2010 versus the rate for immigrants, 0.83 percent (Azoulay et al.). They also found immigrant-founded companies tend to reach greater heights, with a higher rate of patents and higher average wages. So, to the Republican populists saying immigrants steal US jobs, study after study has proven that immigrants generate jobs, not take them.
So why is the US president’s language of choice “large-scale invasion” or “hostile actors” (Terkel and Lebowitz) when discussing immigrants? Why has he tried (unconstitutionally) to revoke birthright citizenship (Gowayed)? Why is he cutting back on the programmes like SNAP and Medicaid which keep future changemakers like Koum afloat (Gainor and Luhby)? And why is the Trump administration using its vast platform to obsessively stoke fear against immigrants rather than parade around their bountiful value to the US?
Well, the US’s recent hawkish stance has three key roots. The first is outright racism. In a Republican party which has learnt to unconditionally defend and pardon President Trump’s unpopular xenophobia, taking on his stance about “the other” has become just the right dose of political incorrectness to be a good MAGA Republican. The examples are painfully overt. In 2018, he asked in a meeting with lawmakers why the US should accept immigrants from Haiti and other “sh*thole countries,” and not more from countries like Norway (Viala-Gaudefroy). Trump decided to boycott the 2025 Johannesburg G20 summit over unsubstantiated claims of White Afrikaner farmers being persecuted. Despite South Africa’s president rejecting those claims, Trump continues to promote them (particularly egregious given Apartheid). During the 2024 Presidential debate, he infamously asserted Haitian immigrants were “eating the pets of the people that live” in Springfield, Ohio, to a bemused Kamala Harris (the Democratic nominee)—it’s clear as day: immigrants are not who he’s talking about. Minorities are. And when politicians are one disagreement away from being called a “traitor” by the president (over the fate of the skilled-worker H1B visa for example, recently causing congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resignation), obsessive anti-immigrant rhetoric, and capitulation to Trump’s racist stance on immigration, become increasingly unchecked.
The second root is the political opportunism of making immigrants the target of blame for the country’s ills. When the Trump administration floats banning critical race theory, deporting millions of immigrants, bringing industry back to rural towns, or cutting refugee admissions (all things that sow division between immigrants and the oft-White citizens Trump appeals to), he is managing to attract a very specific voter profile (Gabbatt). A voter to whom expedient solutions like preserving national security by blocking ‘Third-World’ migrants or relieving the labour market by restricting worker visas appeal (Tanna and Jaiswal). And when the principal politician of the right starts to legitimise these anti-immigrant and America-first ideas which hitherto had been confined to the xenophobic fringes, voters soon find these simple solutions hard to resist (Saad).
The third root is the administration’s bizarre clinging to zero-sum economic thinking. While it’s easy to think that by having to compete with immigrants for jobs, wages or jobs become at risk, there are mountains of evidence to the contrary (Azoulay et al.). And as the president has immense power to frame the narrative around immigrants, appealing to voters with simplistic, zero-sum, and racialised language is irresponsible and manipulative. The US would do better to learn to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that migrants don’t drain the country’s prosperity—they help create it—and start treating them like the engines of growth and innovation that they are. If the Trump administration insists on viewing newcomers through the lens of panic and hostility, it will sabotage the very thing ‘America-first’ ideology seeks to bring about—economic dominance. Koum’s journey from a family relying on food stamps to the co-founder of a multibillion-dollar company embodies what immigrants so often bring, as long as they’re given the resources and respect to prosper. Ignoring that reality in favour of racism, political opportunism, and the debunked theory of zero-sum economics doesn’t just misrepresent individual immigrants—it also undermines the US’s own future.
References:
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