Of Migrants and Misconceptions: Where Immigration Narratives Went Wrong
Perhaps counterintuitively, Trump's rhetoric towards immigrants resonated deeply with voters while Harris' strategy proved shallow by comparison.
“They’re not humans, they’re animals.” -Donald Trump on immigrants
The election produced a host of competing and at times sensational narratives about immigrants and immigration. Despite what some would describe as vitriolic rhetoric about immigrants, Trump effectively ran away with the Latino vote, to the shock of many Harris supporters. The plot twist here is instructive, underscoring the power of scapegoating, the importance of understanding your audience’s desires not just their demographics, and the difference between myth and messaging.
Trump portrayed undocumented immigrants as dangerous criminals and animals that were poisoning our country. Then there was that whole Haitian migrants eating pets thing. These are not well-meaning individuals looking for a fresh start in the land of the free. These are threatening, nefarious creatures entering our country to exploit our system, take our jobs, break our laws, and prey on our people. Vice President Harris would open the gates for these savages, letting them flood in by the millions until our communities are overrun with drugs, death, depravity, and destitution. President Trump, conversely, would aggressively deport these barbarians and harden our borders to prevent further invasion.
Harris, despite taking a firm stance on the importance of border control, offered up softer, more balanced rhetoric that celebrated the contributions of immigrants and encouraged compassion for families being torn apart by the border crisis. Her policy proposals were also relatively nuanced, focusing on additional border security and higher asylum thresholds while also expanding pathways for legal immigration.
Given the tenor and tone of each candidate’s vision of immigrants and immigration, it came as a surprise to many that immigrant demographics gravitated towards Trump.
This apparent plot twist provides a few important mythopoeic lessons for storytelling, narrative construction, vision casting, and world-building. These lessons seem obvious in hindsight, but are nonetheless frequently overlooked when those responsible for the narrative of a campaign or a company are in the trenches manufacturing one-liners.
1) Focus on Who versus What
When engaging audiences, campaigns and companies often look to demographics, the characterization of a group of people based on statistically quantifiable qualities such as age, race, sex, location, education, income, and the like. But demographics are always a lagging indicator and almost never tell the whole story. While demographic data can be useful in identifying correlations and trends, the causes behind these trends are already in motion by the time they’re detected since demography analyzes people’s situations but not their motivations. The latter, however, is critical to understanding who people, why they do what they do, and what they may do in the future. A lot of sources claim demographics describe who people are, but a collection of statistical factors is not who you are. These attributes do not constitute your identity. They are things that describe what attributes a person has, but the they are not the foundational beliefs, values, and desires that make people who they are.
The Harris campaign largely missed this distinction in their immigration narrative. The campaign assumed that because their position took a more compassionate stance towards undocumented immigrants that everyone who shared those immigrants’ demography would lean Harris. But this is the danger of demography. Just because people look (statistically speaking) like other people does not mean they share the same motivations and values. Rather than support Harris, many communities that share immigrant demographics voted for Trump. This isn’t surprising when you think about it. If I waited in line for years to get into the U.S., why would I support a candidate who seems sympathetic to line cutters? If I’m an immigrant—even an undocumented one—earning an honest living, why would I support a candidate who wants to open the floodgates to people who will either compete with me for work or take advantage of the system I work hard to pay for? If I’m a law-abiding immigrant, why should I support a candidate who wants to let more criminals in—the very same people I came to the U.S. to escape? The answer: I wouldn’t. They didn’t.
Psychographics—who we are—are more important than demographics—what we are. Demography is valuable and preferable to many because it’s more quantifiable. People’s beliefs, values, and motivations are scary and confusing, but you change behavior by doing the hard ethnographic work of understanding your audience, not by lazily lumping them into monolithic categories. The former respects them as people. One could argue the latter is just another form of stereotyping.
2) Focus on Enmity versus Empathy
Some people assume that the better angels of our nature can be called forth by a unifying and empathetic approach to the Other, that people, when faced with the opportunity to ruin or reconcile with their opponents will choose reconciliation. While this is a noble sentiment, it has very seldom been the case in human history. People need the Other to define their own identities. They need enemies to be against so they can demarcate what they’re for. They need scapegoats to blame so they can maintain their own sense of self worth. It’s classic in-group/out-group bias, textbook Girard. One might say it’s just human nature. The word ‘identity’ even comes from the Latin word idem, meaning ‘same.’ But how do you know what is similar if you have nothing to compare it to? Things are judged to be the same through contrast with that which is different.
But, with difference comes disagreement and with disagreement comes conflict. The Harris campaign maintained that immigration is a problem, but they did not go to the lengths the Trump campaign did to demonize and Otherify immigrants themselves. Yet, clearly identifying a palpable and corporeal enemy is of vital importance for concretizing the identity of a group and motivating that group to take coordinated action. A diffuse, systemic problem such as immigration policy is as unrelatable as it is ethereal. Blaming individual people, however, is far more tangible. I can point at the problem and feel that I can do something about it. Harris’ immigration narrative blamed a nameless foe, but naming your enemy is the first step in making people feel like they are in control, like they can overcome what Hans Blumenberg called the “absolutism of reality.” It’s hard to suppress an amorphous self-organizing movement like QAnon because there is no one to target. But a named enemy is an enemy that can be defeated. If it bleeds, it can be killed.
Knowing the name of your enemy reveals them. In many religious traditions, names hold tremendous power. In Judaic tradition, God uses names to bring the named into creation. They are not just ways of identifying things. They create the thing. In Hinduism, a person’s name can influence their destiny. What you are named informs who you become. In Roman Catholicism as in Kabbalistic traditions, knowing the name of a demon or spirit gives you a degree of control over that entity. Unlike Harris, Trump named the enemy and in so doing made the problem real and returned a sense of control and self-determination to his supporters.
Harris perhaps tried to make Trump her scapegoat, but you can’t make a scapegoat of the guy who ~50% of the country favors. He is already familiar to us. He is not Other enough. The fact that most people have not had extremely negative encounters with immigrants is precisely what makes them an excellent foil. It’s an argument from absence. I have no way of disproving the claims Trump is making of immigrants, so they may very well be true. I have never seen God, thus God may indeed exist. Harris needed to have named one or more enemies who were sufficiently Other as to serve as an effective scapegoat. Trump had immigrants and China. Harris had only her opponent. If you’re running a narrowly focused political campaign, your enemy is your opponent, but if you’re trying to build a worldview, build a myth, your enemy needs to be something more existential, something more alien.
Trump engendered enmity for the Immigrant while the Left espoused empathy. But there can be no empathy for the scapegoat. To be effective, the scapegoat must absorb all of the blame, all of the hatred, all of the enmity of a group or society, leaving no room for empathy. An Other for whom we have empathy cannot be an effective scapegoat. “In moments of extreme turbulence,” Girard writes, “we aren’t interested in truth, but a grand lie and founding murder that can grant us catharsis.” Someone needs to get thrown under the bus in order for a group to maintain its collective identity. Trump identified an effective scapegoat, an enemy, an Other that could absorb all of the blame for our problems. The immigrant, having already shouldered so much of our society’s burdens, having already played the scapegoat time and time again, has been once more called upon to serve as the devil of our age, sacrificed at the altar of the great American myth, sent out into the wilderness so that myth might endure.
3) Focus on Myth versus Messaging
A lot of effort goes into the “messaging” of a campaign, the process of determining the specific words and phrases that a candidate and their surrogates say in order to ensure clear, consistent, and compelling communication. The Harris campaign had a consistent (albeit thin) set of immigration messages that clearly articulated her positions on the issue. Trump, on the other hand, deployed a wide assortment of at times inconsistent messages on immigration. Despite their variety, however, these messages worked to paint a dystopian, quasi-apocalyptic vision of a nation under attack, a nation under invasion, a nation that would be overwhelmed by crime and cost if illegal immigrants were not stopped and deported. Nobody remembers the specific talking points of either candidate, but they do remember the overarching narrative vision that Trump told about an America overrun by migrants.
In creating this worldview, this imagined depiction of the future, Trump created a what amounts to a political myth, or an ideology in narrative form. This myth is not a message in itself, but is a platform for a panoply of messages, serving as a roadmap for a system of beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world around us. Trump’s immigration myth (and, again, the term myth here is agnostic of a narrative’s truth or falsehood) cast those in the U.S. as the victims, citizens under attack by a hostile foreign force. It depicted illegal immigrants as the Other, invaders from far off lands intent on doing us harm. It portrayed a world where all the things we love about America are destroyed by the barbarians now at our gates. It is easy to see how this myth, if believed, can elicit justifiably defensive, even hostile, reactions.
While messaging is important to support and proliferate the myth, messaging without an undergirding political myth is just noise, random unrelatable irrelevant factoids. It doesn’t land and it doesn’t stick because it doesn’t inform, support, or relate to people’s belief systems. It doesn’t help us figure out who we are and how we interact with those around us, which is ultimately what politics is all about, structuring social behavior to foster the level of cooperation necessary to build, maintain, and grow a civilization. Messaging does not have the power, the depth and breadth of meaning, required to form and carry an ideology. “Remember the Alamo” became a rallying cry, but it was the idea of independence, the myth that Texas could and should determine its own destiny, that motivated people to arms. The rallying cry serves as a symbolic synopsis of the idea, but the myth is its full expression.
Donald Trump constructed a myth, an ideologically infused vision of America and its problems. While Trump focused on mythmaking, the Harris campaign focused on campaigning. The polity, however, is built on myth. Myth holds all of it together.
This is the second of three posts on myths that influenced the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. The first was on the Myth of Democracy and the next will be on the Myth of Manhood. All observations are intended to be apolitical. I take no normative stance on the outcome of the election.