As former President Donald J. Trump warned supporters on Saturday in Wilmington, N.C., that immigrants were “taking your jobs,” his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, campaigned about 500 miles north in Leesport, Pa., where he told his crowd that immigrants were taking their homes — and their children’s homes.
Battling in a tight race, the Trump-Vance team is sharpening the anti-immigrant nativism that fueled the former president’s initial rise to power in 2016, seizing on scare tactics, falsehoods and racial stereotypes. They spread a false claim that Haitian migrants in a small Ohio city were stealing and eating the pets of their neighbors. And they are increasingly failing to draw a distinction between migrants who are in the country legally and those they call “illegal aliens,” whom they blame for a raft of social ills.
Mr. Trump likened the influx to an “invasion” at his rally in North Carolina. “We are going to totally stop this invasion,” he said. “This invasion is destroying the fabric of our country.” He also claimed, falsely, “Every job in this country produced over the last two and a half years has gone to illegal aliens — every job.”
Mr. Vance, at the rally in Pennsylvania, said migrants deserved some of the blame for rising home prices because they were “people who shouldn’t be here, people who are competing against you and your children to buy the homes that ought to be going to American citizens.” He faulted the policies of Vice President Kamala Harris and the Biden administration.
“Our message to Kamala Harris is: Stop giving American homes to foreigners who shouldn’t be in this country,” Mr. Vance said. “Start giving them to American citizens who deserve to be here.”
Both Mr. Trump, who has promised to oversee mass deportations if elected, and Mr. Vance are increasingly questioning the status of Haitian migrants who are in the country legally.
Mr. Vance, who is determined to keep the campaign on offense, became the first national figure to circulate dubious claims that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbors’ pets, claims that city officials quickly said were not true.
Mr. Trump later said at a rally that Springfield would be one of the places where he would start “the largest deportation in the history of our country” — despite the fact that officials say a majority of Haitian migrants in Springfield and elsewhere are in the country legally.
Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, a fellow Republican, has defended the migrants in Springfield and noted that they are legally in the country under Temporary Protected Status, a federal designation to protect people from a country in crisis.
“Their verbal attacks against these Haitians — who are legally present in the United States — dilute and cloud what should be a winning argument about the border,” Mr. DeWine wrote on Friday in a guest essay in The New York Times.
But Mr. Vance said he believed the protected status program was being applied incorrectly — he said he believed the parole process should be applied to individuals on a case-by-case basis — making it illegal in his opinion. “So I’m going to keep on talking about illegal immigration,” Mr. Vance said in Pennsylvania.
With a sizable share of voters concerned about immigration, the border and the recent influx of migrants in many parts of the country, Mr. Trump has made the issue central to his campaign — often describing immigration in dark, apocalyptic terms.
When Ms. Harris speaks about immigration, she rarely addresses the administration’s current policies and instead says she would have signed a bipartisan immigration bill that Mr. Trump urged his party to defeat.
Last week, Mr. Trump unleashed a stunning rebuke of immigration during a rally on Long Island. He opened by attributing his 2016 victory to his focus on border issues, and then quickly declared that “now the border is 25 times worse.” (Illegal border crossings, which reached a record 250,000 in December, dropped to 56,000 in July after President Biden acted to curb people’s right to seek asylum.)
Mr. Trump said at the rally: “I want to be known as your border president — I’m going to be known as your border president.”
Mr. Trump then took a broad swipe at several corners of the globe.
“They’re coming from the Congo. They’re coming from Africa. They’re coming from the Middle East. They’re coming from all over the world — Asia,” Mr. Trump said. “A lot of it coming from Asia.
“What’s happening to our country is we’re just destroying the fabric of life in our country,” Mr. Trump continued. “We’re not going to take it any longer. You got to get rid of these people. Give me a shot.”
Kathleen Belew, an associate professor of American studies at Northwestern University and the author of “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America,” said Mr. Trump’s campaign was taking a page from “an old playbook.”
“It’s straight-up fear-mongering,” Ms. Belew said. “It’s incredibly efficient to demonize people and make others scared of them, and it’s always carried a huge and violent cost.”
Asked about blurring the line between illegal immigration and migrants lawfully in the country, Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said the Republican ticket would “put a stop to this chaos.”
“President Trump and Senator Vance are highlighting the failed immigration system that Kamala Harris has overseen, bringing thousands of illegal immigrants pouring into communities like Springfield and many others across the country,” he said in a statement.
Mr. Vance has been more careful to tie his immigration attacks to specific policies, as he did on Saturday, condemning the Biden-Harris administration for suspending some of the Trump White House’s policies and criticizing the asylum program.
The heated broadsides and harsh imagery recall Mr. Trump’s racially charged bid for the White House in 2016.
He announced his candidacy in 2015 with a call for a crackdown at the border. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said then. “They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
He campaigned on a plan to ban all Muslim immigration while pledging to protect the United States from becoming “a dumping ground for the rest of the world.”
But almost since he started his third campaign for the White House, Mr. Trump has sounded angrier and, at times, more conspiratorial.
Within days of announcing his campaign, he dined at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., with Nick Fuentes, an outspoken antisemite and one of the nation’s most prominent young white supremacists.
“I’m more angry now, and I’m more committed now than I ever was,” Mr. Trump said nearly two years ago during his keynote speech at a New Hampshire Republican Party fund-raiser.
That was his first public event as a 2024 presidential candidate.
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