Politicians should think twice about demonizing immigrants

The woman was in tears as she told me about being confronted by a total stranger at the bin where a Coralville store sells movies for disc players.

“You know, Biden’s going to lose and you’ll be sent back,” the woman quoted the man as saying.

Back to where? The woman was born and raised in the United States. So were her parents. Same for grandparents on one side of the family. She lives in the northwest part of the Iowa City-Coralville metro area where Coralville, Tiffin and North Liberty are expanding rapidly.

Her distinctly Latina appearance was a dead giveaway, though, to someone who figured that she must be from some god-knows-where, unforsaken place.

“Why would he think he could say that?” the woman asked me, rhetorically. A total stranger. Just like other times someone has assumed she is not a U.S. citizen.

A low-hanging fruit answer came from former President Donald Trump, in his Republican Party national convention nomination acceptance speech: “ They’re coming from prisons. They’re coming from jails. They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums.” Washington Post fact check: fantasy. The proposed solution is what Trump calls the biggest mass deportation in history.

“Mass Deportation Now,” signs by people chanting, “send them back,” stated at the convention.

The fomented fear refers to more than harden criminals.

“A whole Army of illiterate, illegal aliens stealing jobs that Black, brown and blue-collar Americans, they put them right on your front-door step,” Peter Navarro, former U.S. trade and manufacturing policy director, told delegates at the Republican National Convention. He was fresh out of prison earlier in the day for refusing to tell the January 6 committee about his role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election

Kari Lake, a University of Iowa graduate wanting badly to be a political icon in her adopted Arizona, got a turn at the convention. "Just last week, Ruben Gallego voted to let the millions of people who poured into our country illegally cast a ballot in this upcoming election,” she said. False, PolitiFact determined. She was referring to U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego D-Ariz., who voted against the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act.

Picking on Republicans is convenient because they favor mass deportations of all undocumented immigrants far more than Democrats do. The gap is 66% of likely Trump voters in favor, 16% of then-likely Biden voters, according to a Pew Research Center study done in April.

But convenience is a lazy to answers and not always absolute fact. For example, the Pew study showed that the 41% of all voters who say immigrants should not be allowed to stay in this country is up from 24% just four years ago. Trump supporters saying this increased from 42% those same four years. Then-Biden supporters, now likely Kamala Harris supporters, in favor increased from 9%.

A Gallup Poll conducted in June showed that one-half of independent voters say fewer immigrants should be allowed into this country, up 11 percentage points from 39% last year. The poll showed nine of every 10 Republicans want to reduce the number of immigrants coming into the United States, while roughly one of every four Democrats wants a reduction. Both of those numbers are up from 2023, Gallop reported.

Legitimate concern over U.S. immigration policy exists. One-fourth of this country’s immigrants were not here with legal documentation in 2022, a Pew Research study released July 22 showed. Arrests, and thus demand on the U.S. immigration system, grew from 74,000 in fiscal 2022 to more than 203,000 in fiscal 2023 before dropping to a still-counting 32,550 in fiscal 2024, which ends Sept. 30. That data are from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The woman I talked with in that Coralville store nailed it when she named the real culprit when it comes to racism. “It’s not immigration,” the woman told me. “It’s anyone who doesn’t look like you.”

This kind of ignorant hate drives people to place neo-Nazi stickers on back issues of the Iowa City magazine, Little Village, as happened in northside Iowa City early in July. It is why someone thought they should write racist slogans on cars, a sign and the sidewalk, and then others to yell epithets at students of color at Grinnell College in October 2022. Or, in summer 2020, to yell slurs in road games at Latina Storm Lake High School softball players and a Black Charles City high school baseball player.

At its extreme, it is why a white Des Moines woman was sent to prison three years ago for driving over a Des Moines curb in 2019 to hit a 12-year-old Black boy whom she thought was of Middle East descent and a Clive curb to hit a 14-year-old Mexican girl.

Vivid, flammable words feed those who hate, and people wanting political office should think hard about that before dishing out of the slop bucket to satisfy the hunger. Maybe they could consider that people are begging for affirmation of their otherwise insecure, frail, hateful thoughts about people who aren’t like them.

Shakespeare’s Cassius said it well: “ "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."

Lyle Muller is a longtime Iowa news reporter, former editor of The Gazette, Iowa Newspaper Association Distinguished Service Award recipient, and, in retirement, professional adviser for Grinnell College’s student-run newspaper, The Scarlet & Black.