xenophobia

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Source: The Washington Post / Getty
On Tuesday (April 2), GOP candidate and current commander-in-criminal-indictments Donald Trump took the xenophobic bigot tour he calls his presidential campaign to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he called brown people who entered the U.S. illegally “animals” and declared that they’re “not human.”

“A 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia was barbarically murdered by an illegal alien animal,” Trump said in reference to the violent death of Laken Riley, a nursing student at Augusta University who was found dead in a wooded area at the University of Georgia campus in Athens on Feb. 22, and who authorities believe was killed by an undocumented migrant from Venezuela.

“The Democrats said please don’t call them animals, they’re humans. I said no, they’re not humans, they’re not humans, they’re animals. And Nancy Pelosi told me that. She said, ‘Please don’t use the word animals, sir, when you’re talking about these people.’ I said, ‘I’ll use the word ‘animal’ because that’s what they are.’”

Since news of Riley’s death broke, MAGA conservatives have been exploiting her story to craft a racist narrative that migrants coming into the U.S. from our southern border are causing violent crime to spiral out of control because they can’t be bothered to do the bare minimum research it would take to know there haven’t been any surges in crimes in the cities most migrants have come to, and, in fact, in many of those cities, crime rates have fallen.
Trump, in his usual bigoted fashion, is taking things a step further and using this single case of a citizen allegedly being murdered by an illegal immigrant as an excuse to completely dehumanize migrants whether they have done anything wrong or not.

This is, after all, the same orangey-white nationalist who previously likened migrants to Hannibal Lecter and claimed many of them speak languages so foreign (as in “from the planet Mars”)  that no linguists in the developed world can translate. And lest we forget, Trump entered the political arena generalizing Mexican immigrants as “rapists” who are “bringing drugs” and “bringing crime.” (Now, he’s out here slanging $60 Bibles and $400 “Air Treasons” because his own alleged crimes appear to have caught up with him financially.)
A vote for Trump is a vote for the normalization of outright bigotry. This much is clear.