As we move closer to the election, former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric about immigration has taken on even grimer tones, as have the words of his running mate, J.D. Vance. No longer content to simply critique federal border policies, as other candidates in other elections might do, Trump and Vance have used appalling nativist language to suggest that immigrants are responsible for our country’s every problem, from inflation to crime to recent disaster relief efforts.
According to Trump and Vance, those who are not native born don’t belong in the United States, by which they generally mean black and brown immigrants, judging by how they talk, and by their own personal lives, since both have married immigrants (two different times, for Trump). No, they mean to talk about the ones with “bad genes,” who are “animals,” “vermin,” and “stone cold killers,” and who would, in Trump’s America, be round up into camps and deported, all ten million of them.
Never mind that our economy would collapse without immigrant labor, or that Trump’s rhetoric certainly has echoes of Hitler in Nazi Germany. Millions of the president’s followers are embracing this dark worldview, certain there are people who are not like us (who are not even human, in Trump’s telling) and who are somehow spoiling the world for native-born Americans, whose luck in being born here—rather than, say, into poverty outside U.S. borders—somehow makes them worthy of all God’s greatest gifts.
The Grim Rhetoric of Christian Influencers
To be honest, though, I’m even more appalled by the many Christian influencers who are rationalizing Trump’s ungodly language, using the Bible to argue that immigrants do not deserve basic human rights. Allie Beth Stuckey, whose book about “Toxic Empathy” is out this month, told her 479,000 followers last week that when Jesus talks about “the least of these,” he actually meant persecuted Christians, and that her vote is for a party that doesn’t persecute Christians. (By which she means Republicans, in case anyone wondered.)
The presumption, I suppose, is that immigrants are by their very nature not Christians, and that Jesus’ life and ministry revolved around protecting future believers—a very weird reading of the Gospels, for sure. (Apparently, according to Theologian Denny Burke, this is a reading within the realm of possibility, historically at least. Though church history has consistently gotten some things wrong, it’s the Southern Baptists like Burke who remind me how different my own Christian upbringing was.)
Although this dehumanization of immigrants feels particularly heinous, its success in pitting those “from here” against “foreigners” has gained some traction—so much so that local candidates are also framing their campaigns around the idea that they are protecting their communities from the incursion of outsiders, who are to blame for every societal ill.
The Grim Rhetoric of Local Elections
That’s certainly true in Yamhill County, Ore., where I live, and where a campaign for County Commissioner has become especially divisive. The election is actually a run-off between incumbant Lindsey Berschauer and David “Bubba” King, after King failed to win a required 50 percent of the vote in their original May election.
Berschauer is running to “keep Metro out of Yamhill County,” which is coded language for promising to keep city folk, with their houselessness, and illicit drug use, and citified values away from our pristine land. Portland, Ore., has gotten a bad rap with right-wing media platforms, who have targeted the area as a once-beautiful city now destroyed by Antifa, Black Lives Matter protests, and liberal policies.
Our county commissioner has used this misconception about Portland to her campaigning advantage, arguing that she alone can hold the (county) line against the chaos coming our way from a city located about 30 miles to our northeast. In the last election, she used fear about Portland to kill a rails-to-trails initiative in our country, convincing her followers that a hiking and biking trail in Yamhill County would bring people who are not “like us” to the county; and that in a few years, the trail would be converted to a light-rail line, making it even easier for those who are not like us to invade.
In their 2024 book, Trash: A Poor White Journey, Cedar Monroe writes that “Every single town and city I have lived and worked in claims that people who are homeless are shipped in from somewhere else. Some people might actually believe that, but I do not think they care if it is true or not.” Monroe has seen this dynamic unfold in Grays Harbor, Wash., where they were raised and where they have spent the last several decades ministering to houseless populations there.
I think about Monroe’s observation every time I drive by a Berschauer sign on my way to work (and in Yamhill County, there are a lot of campaign signs). I think about how easy it is to suggest a community’s (or a country’s) problems are caused by outsiders, and if we just keep those we decide are outsiders away, all will be right with our world. Because it’s far easier to decide that our county or our country will be great again, if we just exile some folks who we decide don’t belong, rather than doing the work to make a place better for everyone, whether they were lucky enough to be born here, or came this way from somewhere else.
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