‘US politicians target immigrants to deflect public attention — yet, they’ll never do mass deportations’
Q. What is the core of your research?
A. I work on administrative and constitutional law — I focus closely on immigration policy and how Latinos, Latinas and other minority groups are treated in America.
We’ve heard Donald Trump recently claiming immigrants were ‘eating pets’ in Springfield, Ohio — what are the roots of such discourse?
It’s intriguing that we’ve just started hearing these claims which were first made in the Presidential debate held last week. This was Donald Trump’s response to a direct question about his plan for immigration. Trump has promised to conduct mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. The question on that was pointed. The answer was a deflection, with Trump claiming immigrants — he was referring to Haitians — were apparently eating pets.
Importantly, the community he targeted is not even undocumented — they are in the US on Temporary Protected Status, given because of political and economic instability in Haiti. These people can stay in the US legally for a certain period and then reapply. There is nothing illegal about them.
However, Trump took a 1988 race baiting tactic from George H.W. Bush, using a criminal called Willy Horton, to the next level, deploying this macabre reference to taint these groups. Ironically, this stemmed from a social media post made by someone who has since stated their post was untrue. However, this allegation, rooted in historic fears of both immigrants and black people, was used when Trump was doing poorly in the polls. The strategy was to create a
