At a campaign rally in New Hampshire last Saturday, the former president Donald Trump repeated a claim he made back in September: immigrants coming to the United States, he said, are “poisoning the blood of our country”. The phrase is particularly disturbing as it evokes Nazi language about blood and nation.
The last time Trump uttered this “poisoning the blood of our country” phrase, criticism from historians and civil libertarians was swift. This time, Joe Biden’s re-election campaign saw an opportunity and pounced. “Donald Trump channeled his role models as he parroted Adolf Hitler,” a Biden-Harris 2024 spokesperson wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, adding that “Trump is not shying away from his promise to lock up millions of people in detention camps.”
Yes, that’s true, but while Trump’s rhetoric and promises are odious and must be rejected, the Biden campaign is also talking out of both sides of its mouth.
First, to Trump. By now, only a visitor from another planet (who would certainly be locked up by Trump for illegal entry) would be surprised by the ex-president’s rhetoric. Trump’s jingoistic ability to sow fear of foreigners and hatred of others is a large part of his rightwing populist appeal. Over the weekend, Trump also claimed that “drugs, criminals, gang members and terrorists are pouring into our country”. He said the United States was facing something “like a military invasion” from would-be immigrants and asylum seekers and promised to implement “the largest deportation operation in American history”.
Even the cadence of his speech is reminiscent of a reel highlighting the Greatest Worst Things Trump Ever Said. Remember what he said about Mexico in 2015? “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems to us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Today, even the “good people” are gone. Now, Trump describes those crossing the border this way: “They come from prisons. They come from mental institutions and insane asylums. Many are terrorists.” (It’s a 2024 remix!) He also makes a point to say: “They’re coming from all over the world. They’re coming from Africa, from Asia,” as if we should be afraid of Latinos, Africans and Asians, leaving me to wonder whom we shouldn’t be afraid of. I’m not really wondering. The answer is as plain as vanilla.
But far more troubling than Trump’s putrid but predictable xenophobia is hearing the Biden campaign trumpet how morally opposed it is to Trump’s border policies at precisely the same time that the White House is negotiating with Republicans to adopt immigration policies that look suspiciously and horribly Trump-like. There is a word for such a stance: hypocrisy.
The reason for the negotiations is no secret. The Biden administration has been seeking to send US military assistance to both Ukraine and Israel, but the funding bills have stalled in Congress. To vote for the money, Republicans are demanding the administration overhaul its immigration policy to align more closely with theirs, and – disturbingly – the Democrats seem poised to do so.
Put another way, the Democrats are ready to sell out immigration for foreign policy, even though the impact on immigration could be substantial and long-lasting, while Democratic foreign policy goals are both unclear and increasingly unpopular.
Joe Biden entered office with an immigration reform agenda, one that sought to reverse many of the inhuman positions of his predecessor, such as the family separation policy that the Trump administration cruelly deployed. Biden didn’t always succeed, but the aspiration was clear. Early on in his term, he proposed the US Citizenship Act of 2021, which would have offered a path to citizenship for undocumented people, brought Dreamers – undocumented people brought to the United States as children – immigration relief, set up refugee processing centers in Central America and funded more immigration judges, among other things.
It never passed.
Instead of convincing the other side of the aisle of the need for immigration reform, the Biden administration has slowly given up on reform over the years. It’s been happening piecemeal for a while now (such as Biden funding the construction of 20 miles of Trump’s border wall), but reports of the latest negotiations read like a major capitulation to the Republican worldview.
The Biden administration is reportedly discussing rolling back its historical commitments to asylum seekers in exchange for aid to Ukraine and Israel and inducting a new system to apprehend undocumented immigrants already in the country. Being discussed is expanding “expedited removal” of migrants at the border without a hearing, significantly raising the criteria for asylum, making permanent pandemic-era border restrictions (like the public health provision known as Title 42) and mandating immigration detention for some immigrants who are awaiting a court date.
“A return to Trump-era policies is not the fix,” is how Alex Padilla, a Democratic senator from California, has responded. Padilla is the first Latino chair of the Senate judiciary committee’s subcommittee on immigration, citizenship and border safety. “In fact, it will make the problem worse,” he said. “Mass detention, gutting our asylum system, Title 42 on steroids. It is unconscionable.”
Trump’s racist comments about “poisoning the blood of the nation” are typical of Trump’s bigotry, but Biden’s immigration approach reads more like a betrayal. Biden’s willingness to trade away American traditions of asylum protection and meaningful immigration reform for an Israeli military campaign on Gaza that is widely acknowledged – even by Biden himself – as unacceptably dangerous to civilian life, having killed upwards of 20,000 people, makes Biden’s calculation here seem not only cynical but disastrous, both for Gaza’s civilians and for Biden’s prospects for re-election. (Meanwhile, why wouldn’t Israel’s leaders continue to ignore Biden’s pleas to limit their military assault? Ignoring Biden makes him look weak, as they too would almost certainly prefer a Trump presidency.)
The Biden administration wants to have it both ways. Biden officials want to believe they can criticize Trump’s positions but adopt positions close to Trump’s when it’s expedient. To answer this fundamental contradiction, they seem to be throwing their weight behind the appeal of a “lesser of two evils” argument for Democratic voters.
What they don’t seem to realize, or want to acknowledge, is that every time someone asks you to choose between a lesser of two evils, they’re still asking you to choose evil. And that’s a choice some voters simply aren’t willing to make.
Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist
