Accusing immigrants of poisoning Americans’ blood is one of the most recent attacks by far-right politicians on populations of color in the United States. The disturbing accusation draws on historical processes of “monstrifying” immigrant groups from the global South.
In a 2023 interview with The National Pulse, former president Trump stated that Latin American immigrants “come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. We know they’re terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country. It’s so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have.”
Rhetoric Invoking Blood Purity
This assertion, which mimics Hitlerian rhetoric, has been repeated by Trump in rallies, interviews, and on his social platform. Such a fearmongering description completes Trump’s previous depictions of Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug traffickers. Trump repeated the claim in December 2023 at a rally in New Hampshire, this time as “they’re poisoning the blood of our country,” with “they” referring to foreign immigrants implied to be “of color,” mainly from Latin America, but also “coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”
The idea that Latin American, African, and Asian immigrants can somehow “poison” or “damage” American blood (mainly the blood of white Americans) is a continuation, and an escalation, of what I call a “monstrification” of immigrants. I use the word monstrification to define an extreme process of exclusion of people and communities constructed as monsters, that is, as the embodiment of physical and psychological traits that a given society rejects.
In this sense, Trump and some of his followers have framed immigrants as a radically different, dangerous group that intentionally wants to hurt the American people’s interests. Right-wing discourse dramatizes the apparent threat beyond job stealing or physical “invasion” to paint a more existentially invasive terror: the permanent destruction of the idea of white America.
This apparent threat is one of the bases of the “Great Replacement” Theory, a paranoid conspiracy theory that, as defined by the National Immigration Forum, “states that welcoming immigration policies — particularly those impacting nonwhite immigrants — are part of a plot designed to undermine or ‘replace’ the political power and culture of white people living in Western countries.” (1)[1]
Monstrification from the Past to the Present
A representation of immigrants and foreigners as monstrous is not new or unique to the United States. Several other empires and nations have demonized and monstrified minoritarian groups in order to construct an imaginary homogenous majority: Muslims and Jews were monstrified in Medieval Spain; Indigenous communities in Colonial America; Jews in Nazi Germany; Black communities in the 1960’s U.S.; Muslims in contemporary India. Nonetheless, the practice of publicly depicting immigrants as monstrous invaders in the United States has been particularly notable since Trump’s 2015 presidential campaign.
One of the banners of the campaign was (and still is) the exploitation of existing fears toward immigrants, mainly people from Latin America and the Middle East. These fears have been connected with the monstrous image of the invader and the terrorist, respectively.[2]
In the 2022 midterm campaigns, the monstrification of Latin American and Latinx populations was adopted as a rhetorical weapon by multiple candidates of the Republican party. No longer just a Trumpian diatribe, the idea of the monstrous immigrant became a political platform of many politicians backed by the ex-president. Kari Lake constructed part of her campaign on the idea that Arizona was “under attack” by hordes of invading immigrants.
The promotional videos launched by her campaign depicted images of the U.S.-Mexican border as a battleground between her, as a possible governor, and the invading immigrants. Words such as “under attack,” “declaration of invasion,” and “defend our families” were highlighted through the short video, along with images of the candidate repelling the imaginary attacks with drones and later hugging children.
Something similar occurred with Blake Master’s campaign. A Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Arizona in 2022, his campaign also used promotional videos in which Latin American immigrants were presented as an out-of-control band of invaders. In the video, an aerial image of a large group of people (Haitian immigrants according to the image’s Breaking News information) is shown with the lapidary assertion “20 million illegals.”
Fear as a Tool of Monstrification
The shot is constructed using multiple layers of fear-inducing elements: the image of an army of racialized people, the idea that these people have been “released into U.S.” soil, and the figure of twenty million. None of these elements has a precise context: the viewer doesn’t know where or when the image was taken, if all the people depicted are “Haitians” or even immigrants, or the source of the “20 million” figure.
What matters for the fearmongering campaign –and what is transmitted through the image – is that “20 million illegal black or brown aliens are invading the U.S.” In this context, the aerial image is not randomly picked. It conjures the image of the zombie horde used in multiple films and television series. In series like The Walking Dead (2010-2022) and movies like World War Z (2013), aerial shots have been used to stress the massive size of a zombie crowd, so big that it can only be seen completely from the air.
In such fictional narratives, the intention is to create an overwhelming sense of fear and hopelessness in the viewer, a strategy adopted by several political right-wing campaigns that visually and narratively equate immigrants to a horde of mindless monsters. The idea of being invaded by zombie-like hordes of immigrants also appeared in ads for Governor Brian Kemp in Georgia and Senator Rick Scott in Florida.
Immigrants are no longer presented only as rapists and invaders but also as terrorists and as physical and mental disease carriers. Right-wing politicians in the United States continue to construct and enunciate Latin American immigrants as beings that are inhuman or are on the fringes of humanity. As president, and again in April 2024, Trump referred to undocumented immigrants as “animals,” dehumanizing everyone who crosses the Southern border without documentation.[3] This intentional dehumanization reinforces the idea of immigrants –documented and undocumented — as inhuman and monstrous beings.
In this sense, monstrification is a particular form of political fearmongering that emphasizes the unknown and barbaric character of both the immigrant and the Global South. The fear that the monstrous immigrant produces is different from the fear of an invading army. The American right and far-right fear presented in these depictions of immigrants seems not to be a cut-and-dried fear of a foreign invading army. After all, the U.S. military might seem to serve as a bastion against such an invasion.
Rather, the fear of the invading immigrant appears to be something less human, more invasive, more existential, and more resistant to control. Immigrants, in this way, are presented as less-than-human, unknown monsters that risk overtaking the U.S. notion of self and whiteness through mysterious, unknown, wild pathways seemingly outside the control of the so-called civilized systems of U.S. law, science, and military might — systems designed to protect white supremacy that are at apparent risk of failure.
For this reason, also, the idea of blood poisoning strikes horror. Following this logic, immigrants are not going to spill the blood of Americans in battle, but, like vampires, they are going to transform it into something that is not recognizable as part of the idea of white America.
Consequences Faced by Latin American Immigrants
The monstrification carried out by a racist and xenophobic right-wing platform has transformed immigrants into scapegoats for many of the social and political problems haunting the contemporary United States (from inflation to crime in big cities). As reported by The Hill on July 8, 2024, the party draft of the Republican National Committee (RNC) declares, as the first point of the document, “seal the border and stop the migrant invasion” and, as point ten “, stop the migrant crime epidemic.”
Representing immigrants as monsters has become a party policy designed to create fear in Republican-leaning voters, despite the fact that several multiyear studies carried out by Standford University, the Cato Institute, and The Marshall Project have consistently shown that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S. born Americans.[4]
The consequences of this monstrification of Latin American immigrants have not only manifested themselves in the form of votes for Republican candidates but also in violent and denigrating attacks that have affected actual human beings. A report published by the Anti-Defamation League in 2018 states that the normalization of extreme anti-immigrant sentiments could put “millions of immigrants, including documented and undocumented immigrants who have been in this country for decades, as well as their American-born children” in extreme danger. (Mainstreaming Hate) On August 3, 2019, this extreme danger was manifested in the horrendous killing of twenty-three people in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.
The El Paso massacre is considered the deadliest assault on Latinos in modern U.S. history and was carried by a 21-year-old white supremacist, who, in a manifest posted on the 8chan website, cited the “cultural and ethnic replacement” and the “Hispanic invasion” as motivations for the crime. As stated by John Eligon, “the threat of the ‘great replacement,’ or the idea that white people will be replaced by people of color, was cited directly in the four-page screed written by the man arrested in the killing of 22 people in El Paso over the weekend.” (“The El Paso Screed”)
Another example of real consequences of the monstrification and dehumanization of Latin American immigrants in the U.S. was the relocation of fifty undocumented Venezuelan immigrants from Texas to Florida and then to Massachusetts’ Martha’s Vineyard in September 2022, by order of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
According to Texas sheriff Javier Salazar the immigrants were “‘lured under false pretenses’ […] They were promised work and solutions to several of their problems,’ Salazar said, but instead, ‘they were unceremoniously stranded’ there.” (‘Lured under false pretenses’) Only through a process that constructs undocumented immigrants as monstrous and inhuman is it possible to “justify” their treatment as livestock, and their use by DeSantis as currency in a political fight against sanctuary cities.
Dehumanized and Excluded
The racist and xenophobic representation of immigrants as inhuman beings whose blood is poisonous to the blood of Americans is part of a process of monstrification intended to rationalize violent actions carried out against immigrants (deportations, verbal and physical attacks, human rights violations, and even murder).
The ultimate goal of this process is for a sizable portion of the American population to view immigrants as monstrous invaders who want to replace the imaginary blood lineage of European white America. This way of showing people who, in the majority of cases, are escaping violent situations in their home countries has allowed right-wing politicians in the U.S. to institute exclusionary policies in line with white supremacy and to continue to push for more strict regulations based on fear of the unknown understood as monstrous.
Endnotes:
[1] The theory is based on 1973’s dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints by French ethno-nationalist writer Jean Raspail. According to the National Immigration Forum, “Raspail’s novel took hold among American white supremacist and anti-immigrant groups in the 1980s and 1990s, and remains a touchstone today for prominent anti-immigration hardliners such as Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon.” (2)
[2] Banking on existing Western fears of Arabs and Middle Easterners (depicted as terrorists in the U.S. since 9/11) on October 22, 2018, Trump twitted that “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed” into the migrant caravan that was moving toward the United States from Central America. The next day he had to publicly admit that he had no proof of Middle Easterners in the caravan – but added “there could very well be.”
[3] After a White House roundtable in May 2018 in which Trump called undocumented immigrants “animals”, LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens) CEO Sindy Benavides asserted that “Trump’s disgusting and dehumanizing comments further prove his clear intentions to incite hatred and fear within the American people. Irrational actions such as these will only fuel division in our country and move our nation further away from resolving our broken immigration system.” (LULAC Denounces)
[4] In their 2023 study, Standford University economist Ran Abramitzky and his team assert that “contrary to [the] anti-immigrant rhetoric, we document that, as a group, immigrant men have had a lower incarceration rate than US-born men for the last 150 years of American history.” (1) The study carried out in Texas by Alex Nowrasteh, Andrew C. Forrester, and Michelangelo Landgrave from the Cato Institute in 2020 concluded that “whether one focuses on criminal convictions, arrests, or the number of individuals convicted or arrested, the results are the same: illegal immigrants have a lower crime rate than native-born Americans in Texas. Legal immigrants have the lowest rates of all, except for some measures of property crime where illegal immigrants are even less crime prone. Native-born Americans living in Texas have the highest criminal conviction and arrest rates in all of the figures above.” (11)
References
Abramitzky, Ran. Platt Boustan, Leah. Jácome, Elisa. Pérez, Santiago. Torres, Juan David. “Law-Abiding Immigrants: The Incarceration Gap Between Immigrants and the US-Born: 1870–2020.” National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2023.
Bernal, Rafel. “‘Migrant invasion,’ mass deportations top 2024 GOP platform.” The Hill, July 8, 2024.https://thehill.com/latino/4760673-migrant-invasion-mass-deportations-southern-border-2024-gop-platform/
Eligon, John. “The El Paso Screed, and the Racist Doctrine Behind It.” The New York Times. August 7, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/us/el-paso-shooting-racism.html
League of United Latin American Citizens. LULAC Denounces President Trump’s Remarks Calling Undocumented Immigrants “Animals.”https://lulac.org/news/pr/LULAC_Denounces_President_Trumps_Remarks_Calling_Undocumented_Immigrants_Animals/
“Mainstreaming Hate: The Anti-Immigrant Movement in the U.S.” Anti-Defamation League. November 20, 2018.https://www.adl.org/resources/report/mainstreaming-hate-anti-immigrant-movement-us
Nowrasteh, Alex. Forrester, Andrew C. Landgrave, Michelangelo. “Illegal Immigration and Crime in Texas.” Cato Institute, October 13, 2020.
“‘Lured under false pretenses’ | Bexar County sheriff investigating after migrants flown from San Antonio to Florida, Martha’s Vineyard.” KENS5. September 19, 2022. https://www.kens5.com/article/news/special-reports/at-the-border/lured-false-pretenses-bexar-sheriff-investigating-migrants-flight-florida-marthas-vineyard/273-5865e3df-021a-444c-9af1-dfff2d8a3988
National Immigration Forum. The ‘Great Replacement’ Theory Explained. https://immigrationforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Replacement-Theory-Explainer-1122.pdf
