Trump’s National Security Speech Echoes Decades of Nativist Rhetoric
Trump’s national security speech came right out of the organized anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim lobby’s playbook.
Donald Trump delivered his national security speech to an audience in Youngstown, Ohio on Monday in what amounted to little more than a fear-mongering tirade that came straight out of the playbook of the organized U.S. anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim movements. Trump’s policies, such as a calling for a ban on immigration from terrorist (think Muslim) hotspots, equating terrorism with Nazism and Communism, and calling for an ideological screening test, are tropes and arguments long used by nativists. The Trump campaign has not been shy about working with anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant organizations and their staff, and his national security agenda clearly reflects their talking points.
Trump:
“To put these new procedures in place, we will have to temporarily suspend immigration from some of the most dangerous and volatile regions of the world that have a history of exporting terrorism.”
Trump’s call for a temporary ban on immigrants coming from countries that have a history of exporting terrorism is a common argument in the anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim world. In 2010, the editors of The Social Contract (TSC), an anti-immigrant journal that often publishes white nationalists, called for a ban on all Muslim immigration to the United States. In 2015, the anti-Muslim hate group Center for Security Policy (CSP), which serves as the main think tank for the anti-Muslim movement, released an anti-refugee pamphlet, which also called for a moratorium on Muslim immigration. Meanwhile, the anti-immigrant hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) has for years called for a “time out” on all immigration to the United States. FAIR’s founder, white nationalist John Tanton, serves as the publisher of TSC and has a long history of working with racists.
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