Why America Turned on Immigrants. And How Liberals Helped it Happen.

A formula once used to target Jews was repurposed to help Republicans gain power. To beat fascism, we need to understand what happened.

In the 1920s and 30s, Germans were taught that a foreign invader had destroyed their country from the inside. Yes, the war had also done it. Yes, the elites failed them. Yes, austerity was a betrayal of the people.

But the true cause of their suffering was not any of these things. It was a hidden enemy: a foreign influence destroying the country from within. Foreigners who pretended to belong.

These foreigners had a different set of values, ones that were at the core evil. But because they were accepted into the society and seen as belonging by the German people, they had been allowed to infest and spread this evil into every aspect of society.

The Jews weren’t doing any of this, of course. Today, we know enough to understand not only that the logic here was baseless, but that it was used specifically in order to manipulate the country to believe that Hitler and his minions were the only ones who could protect the people from this supposed malignant influence. The Jews were scapegoats. In other words, the issues the German people were facing was real, but the cause of it was shifted to the Jews instead of to the true sources. We understand how giving even an inch into the logic of scapegoating is so dangerous that it could lead to something as horrific as the Holocaust.

And yet, for the last few years (and well before), we have allowed this same logic to infect not just the right, but the center and center-left. It affected how the last election went. It affected Biden’s presidency and its policies. It affected how many liberals still talk today. And it will affect the upcoming midterms (assuming they are able to happen normally).

Just as in the 1930s, it became so normalized that it allowed the fascists to gain power. And just as in the 1930s, the fascists now have enough power to send those people to concentration camps. Camps where prisoners are beaten upon entry, adults and children are tortured, and the killed are thrown into mass graves.

The issue I’m talking about is immigration. Specifically, black, brown, and Muslim immigration.

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Americans have been bamboozled. Not just Americans as a whole, but much of our elite class who spend more time studying polls than trying to understand what’s happening under the surface.

In the lead-up to the 2024 election, concern about immigration didn’t just rise, it spiked. For the first time since 2005, a majority of Americans wanted less immigration. And it happened almost overnight.

Among Democrats, the percentage who believed immigration should decrease jumped from 18% to 28%. Republicans: 73% to 88%. Independents: 39% to 50%.

The entire country lurched toward restriction. Strategists took these numbers as a mandate. Democrats, especially, responded not by challenging the narrative but by accepting it. If the public was concerned, then the public must be right. The logic followed: if Americans felt immigration was hurting them, then it must be true. And the solution must be to get tougher.

But the concern was not valid nor objectively real. It was a manufactured crisis by the far right and Republicans in a move to grab power. They used immigrants as the scapegoats the same way the Nazis did: distract people from the real sources of their problems and misdirect blame towards a foreign influence destroying the country from within.

The same move used across collapsing democracies: hide the real causes of pain, and create a villain the people can see. Jews then. Immigrants now.

This is not hyperbole. It is a direct parallel, as well as an inspiration for many of those who have pushed forward the policies we are seeing today. And that includes the president.

Trump is infamous for echoing Hitler’s comments on Jews in his references to immigrants. He has repeatedly said that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” a direct quote from Adolf Hitler.

According to his own former Chief of Staff, Trump modeled his vision for the presidency after Hitler. It is the blueprint.

And just as in the 1930s, the fascist movement behind him helped shape the story: immigrants were not just a burden. They were invaders, rapists, criminals, gang members, and terrorists. They were destroying America from within.

And anyone, from Democrats to liberal Jews who supported immigration at all were the traitors who made it all happen.

This may all sound familiar. It is the new packaging of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. The conspiracy theory that asserts that a malevolent force is infecting the country with foreigners in order to destroy it from the inside. But the rhetoric has evolved since the era of the Nazis. No longer are Jews seen as both mastermind and invader. Now, they manipulate Black, brown, and Muslim immigrants as agents of collapse.

But here is the genius of such conspiracy theories when a fascist force relies on populism to take power: if those in power attempt to “solve” the imaginary problem, nothing will get better for the people. Because immigrants, of course, are not the source of these issues. In fact, considering plummeting birth rates, they are essential for the economy.

Since the entire issue is manufactured, fascists simply needed to convince the populace that the problems immigration supposedly causes are worsening because the other side hadn’t been tough enough.

But it didn’t stop there.

The same formula was applied to another long-standing tool of fascist fearmongering: crime.

Just as the public was manipulated into believing immigration was the source of their suffering, they were fed the lie that crime, especially violent crime, was spiraling out of control, and that immigrants were to blame for it.

And yet, violent crime sharply dropped in 2024. But 64% of Americans thought crime had increased. And polls show they are far more concerned about the “nation’s” crime than in their own areas.

The issue is contrived. A lie spread by Fox News, Elon Musk, and so many others.

Both of these issues couldn’t be solved because they aren’t problems. Immigration is not destroying the country. Crime is decreasing.

But the sense of crisis was very real. Americans are suffering.

Inequality. A country where institutions are failing them, or at least only exist for their own gain. More than a million dead from a pandemic. From the collapse of culture, trust, opportunity.

And a different form of crime: the rich stealing from them, the powerful (especially Trump) avoiding accountability, and the climate being stripped of its stability and safety.

All the fascists needed to succeed, then, was for those problems to get worse and to convince the people that the sources of the problems were immigrants. Because as long as people kept suffering and blaming their suffering on others, the more the fascists could prop themselves up as the solution.

Many Democrats and most of the media didn’t challenge the lie. Instead of calling it out, they treated it as a legitimate concern. They framed the far right’s scapegoating as a real issue the public needed reassurance about.

The issue went as high as the Biden presidency.

Biden began his term softening the absolute worst of Trump’s policies and working admirably to help refugees, in 2023 to 2024, he and most Democrats reversed course. In essence, he adopted the right’s framework. He even went so far as to use a Trump-era policy that was used to bar Muslims from entering the country to deport asylum seekers who tried to enter the country illegally.

When all was said and done, the US deported as many immigrants during the first Biden administration as the first Trump administration.

This resulted in three things.

First, the true problems weren’t being solved. Fighting immigration or street crime don’t stop inequality or end institutional collapse.

Second, the narrative was now legitimized into the mainstream.

And third, Democrats become the face of failure. Not just on immigration, but inequality and so much more. They are the failing institutions and the failure in fighting crime. It is no coincidence that Trump polled so well on immigration and the economy. Crime and change.

The solution, then, was also legitimized: an outsider strong man to fix things up.

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None of this is new. I’m writing a history that has been written hundreds of times.

The Germans of the 1920s and 30s were also suffering from very real issues. So were the Russians of the early 1900s who popularized the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. So are people the world over where neo-liberal capitalism is collapsing into fascism.

In all these cases and many more, there is one unifying element to the seizure of power: the claim that a foreigner is destroying the country from the inside. Be it Jew or Venezuelan or African or Muslim, the target does not matter as much as the lie.

The answer, then, as we fall further into fascism, is to stop validating the lie. And to stop ignoring its usage if we haven’t spoken up. It is this same silence and validation that we once scoffed at the Germans for participating in.

Just as important: we have to understand the lie at a deeper level. Liberal Americans and Democrats were glad to fight for immigrants the first time Trump was in charge. But once Biden came to power, the issue suddenly took a back seat. It was at this point when it truly became validated and the floodgates to full-blown fascism were opened wide.

We have to see these lies for what they are, whether it is a fascist spreading them or Gavin Newsom.

Because take heed: as the talons of fascism enter the flesh of American democracy, it won’t just be the Republicans and the right who become its enactors. It will be those who are afraid of it. Those who are convinced it is not as bad as it appears. Those who see power as an opportunity. The Newsoms, the Fettermans, the Weisses.

Everywhere, the enablers of fascism are trying to convince you to only focus on the extremes of the issue instead of the core of it. The lie at the heart of it. The fascism beating within it, no matter who speaks it.

You have to fight it everywhere. In your cities. Among your leaders. In the streets and in the courts and the legislatures. In the media and online.

The battle is no less than stopping the usage of concentration camps. And the battle against concentration camps is at its core a battle for democracy. One where no one group is singled out and shorn of due process. One where no leader can simply steal someone from the streets. One where no group can become a scapegoat for real issues.

Fight. Fight. Fight.