During a White House meeting on Tuesday, surrounded by his Cabinet, President Donald Trump referred to Somali immigrants as “garbage” and said, “We don’t want them in our country.” No one in Trump’s Cabinet stood up to this expression of gutter racism, although Vice President J. D. Vance enthusiastically banged on the table. The president’s remarks were ostensibly in response to real events—in Minnesota, dozens of members of the Somali diaspora have been implicated in fraud related to social services—but the community does not bear responsibility for the actions of those individuals.
Similarly, white Americans as a whole are not responsible for Trump largely dismantling the federal government’s capacity to fight white-collar crime and corruption, his doling out of pardons for people who donate money or commit crimes on his behalf, or his scandalous profiteering. I don’t believe that there is something inherent in white culture that causes Trump to act this way; he is simply a particularly reprehensible human being.
The next day, at an Oval Office event, Trump again disparaged Somalis, claiming that Somali immigrants have “destroyed our country” and that the Somali American congresswoman Ilhan Omar “should be thrown the hell out of our country.” None of the people around him had the courage to ask who “our” referred to. Given the president’s plunging approval ratings, one wonders whether these slurs are yet another attempt to shore up his support through appeals to racism.
Watching Trump’s repeated attacks on Somalians—the latest group of Black immigrants to be targeted by the president—I can’t avoid the conclusion that the government of the United States of America is in the hands of people who believe that they can apply a genetic hierarchy to humanity, and that American laws and customs should recognize and serve that hierarchy.
This commitment is most visible in the Constitution-shredding program of mass deportation being carried out across the country by federal agents, who, in order to meet their quotas, are arresting and deporting immigrants who have been following the rules and showing up for their court dates, rather than those committing crimes. Gregory Bovino, a top Border Patrol commander, told a reporter outright that agents were arresting people based in part on “how they look.” This is racial profiling—a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection—and yet it has been condoned by the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court. In September, an emergency-docket decision effectively legalized racial profiling by lifting an order preventing it. Although “apparent ethnicity alone” isn’t enough to detain someone, it can be “a “relevant factor,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a lone concurring opinion, calling that only “common sense.”
After the horrendous shooting of two members of the National Guard by an Afghan immigrant last week, Trump declared on Thanksgiving Day his intention to halt immigration from “Third World” countries, a neuron-thin euphemism for nonwhite immigrants. His remarks about Somalis being “garbage” are consistent with his referring to African nations and Haiti as “shithole” countries in his first term. Trump also announced an intention to strip U.S. citizenship from “migrants who undermine domestic tranquility,” and to “deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization”—arbitrary, subjective criteria that could serve as pretext for denaturalizing anyone for any reason.
The Trump adviser Stephen Miller, a fervent supporter of the racist and anti-Semitic immigration restrictions of the 1920s, declared on X that “migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” Miller’s contention that one’s supposed inferiority to and incompatibility with Americans are inherited and unalterable is consistent with Trump’s past remarks about how immigrants with “bad genes” are “poisoning the blood” of the nation.
The logic of this racism is relatively simple—the individual bears the guilt of the whole, and the whole bears the imprint of some alleged crime that deserves collective punishment. Blaming the egregious behavior of men such as Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on their German or Norwegian backgrounds would sound comical to the same people who treat the president vomiting out similar generalizations about Somalis as sound observation.
That a crime by an Afghan former CIA recruit or Somali fraudsters can be laid at the feet of all “Third World” immigrants shows how arbitrarily such lines are drawn. What matters is not what individuals do, but who they are, and whether or not they fit Trump and Miller’s narrow, racially defined view of who Americans can be. Whatever individualism used to mean to American conservatives, their movement is now led by adherents of the most foul collectivism humanity has ever known.
Among the original English settlers, of course, were not only religious refugees and indentured servants but criminals Britain did not want. Many German immigrants to the United States came after the failed liberal revolutions of 1848. Irish immigration was spurred by famine and British imperialism; Italian immigration was driven by the bloody post-unification chaos and, especially in the south and Sicily, by lawlessness, brigandage, and Piedmontese repression. Let us not forget the Eastern Europeans, among them Jewish families—including Miller’s own—who fled the autocratic regimes and ethnic violence of their homelands.
Most Americans of European descent are the children of such “broken” societies, by one standard or another, and America would not have become wealthy and powerful without them. No reason beyond bigotry exists to apply different standards to immigrants because they came from Nigeria or Mexico instead of Ireland.
There is a difference between inheritance and action. I cannot help who my ancestors are, but I can make my own choices. That so many Americans chose to place in power a man who holds people in contempt on the basis of race, religion, and national origin; that so much of the mainstream media conveys this bigotry through tired, obfuscating euphemisms; that there is so low a political price for the president’s racism that he and those around him see little risk in its expression—well, that does say something about America, and Americans. Immigration isn’t breaking our society. That’s a job Americans can do on their own.
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