The once-fringe immigration proposals pushed by former President Trump are now the backbone of the GOP’s immigration and border security platform.
Trump, who is leading the race for the 2024 Republican nomination, launched his 2016 candidacy with a speech denigrating Mexican immigrants that at the time was panned as sorely out of touch with the party and the general electorate.
Yet in the 2024 race, GOP candidates are scrambling to outdo each other with statements and proposals ideologically aligned with Trump’s golden escalator speech.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday launched his official immigration and border security platform titled “Stop the Invasion” — a term civil rights organizations associate with the Great Replacement Theory.
Trump’s campaign quickly responded, accusing DeSantis of “copying and pasting” his proposals.
“What we’ve identified is that from Donald Trump, and I think even further after him, we’re seeing a continued escalation that is a like nativist doom loop that Republicans seem to be on further and further escalating those tensions,” said Zachary Mueller, who monitors Republican rhetoric on immigration for America’s Voice, where he serves as political director.
“Where the Republican Party is at now and what they’re pushing isn’t the same Republican Party that they were even in 2018, and the kind of ideas that they were pushing. The foregrounding of what I think are white nationalist slogans like ‘stop the invasion,’ is different even than it was several years ago, as Republicans compete with each other, specifically around that insular base.”
The shift to the right in many ways mirrors the way Trump rattled GOP orthodoxy in 2016, though 2024 dynamics are different, because his immigration rhetoric has been thoroughly audience tested.
DeSantis and other contenders such as former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley have hardened their tone on immigration, aware that appealing to Trump’s base is a necessary prerequisite to be competitive in a national Republican primary.
DeSantis on Monday advocated for the use of deadly force against people crossing the border “demonstrating hostile intent.”
“If you drop a couple of these cartel operatives trying to do that, you’re not going to have to worry about that anymore,” he said.
That strategy comes with risks, as voters outside the GOP base tend to have more moderate positions on immigration and are rarely energized by the issue — only 8 percent of voters cited immigration as their top issue in a recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist National Poll.
But the tough rhetoric is not about addressing policy issues, said Mario H. Lopez, president of the Hispanic Leadership Fund, a conservative advocacy group.
“Most of the politicians that tout anti-immigrant propaganda are not interested in solutions. They’re not interested in a secure border. They’re perpetuating the insecurity of the southern border for their own political benefit and so they can fundraise, scream on Twitter, and get on TV,” said López.
Experts on extremism say the rhetoric is nothing new, although it has grown in scope.
“It’s important to point out that the word invasion has been used for many, many years by various political figures on the right who don’t want undocumented immigrants coming into the country,” said Marilyn Mayo, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.
“It doesn’t necessarily mean that DeSantis is promoting the Great Replacement Theory. It does mean that he has some viewpoints that overlap with that theory,” added Mayo, who described the term “invasion” as “extremely derogatory.”
The Great Replacement Theory is the idea that white people are being systematically replaced by nonwhite immigrants — in its most extreme form, the theory states that Jews are purposely fostering that replacement to gain economic and political power.
“There’s a third version, and this is where I think you have the most overlap … which is that it’s a more subtle version of the Great Replacement Theory,” said Mayo.
“And it claims that, for example, the Democrats or the liberals are purposely allowing for an open border so that immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean can enter the country, receive amnesty and then eventually vote Democratic.”
Though neither Trump or DeSantis’s campaign platforms directly accuse Democrats of purposefully inviting illegal immigration, the idea has become a mainstay of Republican rhetoric on border security.
Pushing for a GOP border bill last month, House Majority Leader Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) panned the administration for opposing the legislation.
“So that tells you exactly where the Biden Administration is. They want an open border. They created an open border,” he said.
Groups including the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an advocacy organization that calls for drastic reductions in immigration, say “invasion” is fair game.
“I don’t think that anything Governor DeSantis said was over any lines or even close to the line,” said Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for FAIR.
“You know, when you have that many people coming across the border, invasion is not an unreasonable term. Other people might choose other terms, but it’s certainly not unreasonable to say that the volume of people coming across the border illegally, that it could be termed an invasion,” added Mehlman.
FAIR is part of a network of restrictionist groups that have worked since the late 1970s to mainstream policy platforms of hawkish immigration restrictions that were once mostly brushed aside, but now form the backbone of GOP immigration orthodoxy.
Until Trump’s 2016 win, the national Republican stance on immigration seemed to be shifting to the center.
Bruised by the 2012 election loss, the Republican National Committee conducted an “autopsy” that concluded the party wasn’t inclusive enough and, among other things, would have to back comprehensive immigration reform to win national elections.
The report convinced the party elite, but the populist Tea Party movement, a precursor to the Freedom Caucus, rejected its findings and played a key role in blocking immigration reform in 2013, backed by groups like FAIR.
And FAIR had other real world effects pre-Trump. For instance, Haley in 2011 signed an immigration bill into law in South Carolina modeled after Arizona’s SB-1070, written by a lawyer working with the Immigration Reform Law Institute, FAIR’s legal arm.
The broader network of restrictionist groups is known as the Tanton Network, after founder John Tanton, a Michigan ophthalmologist who wrote about eugenics and the environmental case for population control.
The group has long been a lightning rod among immigration advocates, both for its ideology and origins and because of its political effectiveness.
In 2007 and 2013, for instance, advocates with connections to Tanton played quiet but key roles in scuttling promising immigration reform initiatives.
But the GOP’s wholesale embrace of restrictionist ideology and rhetoric worries experts such as Mayo.
“There’s definitely an ebb and flow of extremism. I think what’s different now, what we sense in terms of those of us who do this work of looking at extremism, is that there is more mainstreaming of extremist ideas,” said Mayo.
“And what do we mean by that? We mean that you have elected officials and public figures like media personalities promoting things like the Great Replacement Theory, or promoting conspiracy theories about all sorts of things that are current right now, whether it’s the 2020 election, COVID or any one of a number of other things.”
And Mueller said that rhetoric is “inexorably tied” to political violence such as racially motivated mass shootings at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, an El Paso, Texas, Walmart in 2019 and a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket in 2022.
“First and foremost is, if you look at the white nationalists, especially the violent white nationalists who left manifestos, they talk about [invasion and Great Replacement] as the same thing,” said Mueller.
Though Mayo warned against blaming public figures for the actions of violent extremists, she said large public platforms do carry inherent risks.
“People who speak about immigration have to be aware that the language or the rhetoric they use that demonize immigrants who come here for a variety of reasons, that those words will have an impact. And sometimes you can’t predict who might take it further, but it does have an impact.”