The GOP’s Message to Immigrants

Adam Serwer: “Only a few decades ago, Republican presidents would happily evoke the idea of America as a haven for people around the world. Ronald Reagan, in his farewell speech, declared that ‘anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.’ Reagan was no paragon of racial tolerance—he opposed the civil-rights movement and privately referred to Black people as ‘monkeys’—but he did not regard the presence of nonwhite people as an existential threat to America.”

“For years the Republican Party insisted that what it wanted was a certain kind of immigrant—highly skilled people who came here legally, or even, not that long ago, those brought to the U.S. as children who lacked status through no fault of their own and had long since assimilated.”

“That Republican Party no longer exists. Today the GOP’s view is that almost all immigration—by which the Trump administration seems to mean nonwhite immigration, euphemistically referred to as ‘Third World’ immigration—is bad.”