Trump and the Politics of Xenophobia

Summary

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The Political Scene | The New Yorker

Episode: Trump and the Politics of Xenophobia
Host: Dorothy Wickenden
Guest: Jelani Cobb
Date: September 8, 2017

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Episode Overview

This episode, hosted by Dorothy Wickenden, explores the Trump administration's decision to end DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and places it in the broader context of American xenophobia and anti-immigration movements. Jelani Cobb, a New Yorker staff writer and historian, discusses historical parallels, the evolution of immigration policy, and the complex political dynamics shaping modern American attitudes toward immigrants. The conversation also touches on the roles of both political parties, the shifting demographic landscape, and the political challenges of framing comprehensive immigration reform.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The End of DACA and Trump-Era Xenophobia

[01:15]–[02:25]

• On September 5, 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the termination of DACA, arguing it was unconstitutional and harmful to American interests.
  • Sessions' statement blends national security concerns with economic and cultural anxieties about immigrants.
• Wickenden frames the discussion against recent events, including the Charlottesville white supremacist rally and Trump’s pardon of Joe Arpaio.
• Cobb: These moves collectively signal "a kind of throwback to an earlier period in American history" of open hostility and suspicion toward immigrants and minorities.

Notable Quote:

"They struck me as being a kind of throwback to an earlier period in American history…where concerns about national security neatly dovetailed with biases that happened to be against particular ethnic groups."
— Jelani Cobb [02:59]

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2. Historical Context: Cycles of Anti-Immigrant Sentiment

[02:36]–[06:22]

• Cobb compares current xenophobic politics to the early 20th-century Red Scare, anti-Catholicism in the 19th and 20th centuries, the Know-Nothing Party, and the Immigration Act of 1924.
• Racial and ethnic exclusion was periodically central to American politics but would sometimes recede from prominence.
• The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, known as the Hart–Celler Act, is identified as a turning point toward broader inclusivity.

Notable Quote:

"…the beginning of the 20th century, we find it like, really strong resemblance to the politics and the social anxieties that we're seeing now."
— Jelani Cobb [04:09]

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3. Political Reaction to Social Change

[06:22]–[07:36]

• The Obama presidency, both as the first Black president and as the child of an immigrant, embodied social and demographic change that triggered backlash.
• The two parties once found more middle ground on immigration; the original DREAM Act was bipartisan.
• The rise of the Tea Party and, later, Trumpism, reflected a shift toward "politics of resentment," making bipartisanship difficult.

Notable Quote:

"Donald Trump's political fortunes were based on his ability to paint Barack Obama not only as an illegitimate president…but someone who was, in effect, immigrant, who was not supposed to have been here."
— Jelani Cobb [07:36]

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4. Populism, Party Politics, and Economic Anxiety

[07:36]–[09:59]

• Cobb outlines how economic anxieties, particularly around deindustrialization and wage stagnation, have been connected to anti-immigrant sentiment.
• Trump’s messaging capitalized on resentment and cultural fears, outmaneuvering even other Republicans like Marco Rubio who attempted bipartisan reform.

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5. Democratic Party and the Limits of Rhetoric

[09:26]–[11:32]

• Discussion of Hillary Clinton’s failed attempts to build broad coalitions, notably her "basket of deplorables" comment.
  • Cobb notes the irony that her damaging comment was essentially true: polling showed substantial xenophobic and racist attitudes among Trump's base.
• Clinton’s long tenure in public life gave opponents fodder for attacks from many chapters of her career.

Notable Quote:

"Hillary Clinton was most significantly damaged by something she said that was basically true when she talked about the basket of deplorables."
— Jelani Cobb [09:59]

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6. Democratic Party’s Internal Struggles

[11:32]–[12:06]

• The party is described as fractured between its progressive ("left wing") and centrist elements, with Sanders supporters remaining skeptical.
• Recent events with figures like Kamala Harris illustrate ongoing discord.

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7. The Prospects and Limitations of Third Parties

[12:06]–[13:39]

• Wickenden asks about the possibility of a third party disrupting the two-party system.
• Cobb reviews American history, suggesting structural barriers like the Electoral College make this extremely difficult.
• The demographic transformation to a majority-minority society is seen as a trigger for the recent backlash.

Notable Quote:

“…we are seeing a population, a society that is becoming more brown, that at some point in the not too distant future [will] be a majority-minority society…"
— Jelani Cobb [13:10]

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8. Trump’s Political Ambiguity and the GOP Dilemma

[13:44]–[14:47]

• Trump’s post-DACA-announcement tweet offering to "revisit" DACA exposes contradictions and political calculations within the GOP.
• Cobb notes the fear within the party of a populist insurrection and a lack of clarity about how to proceed.

"…it kind of makes you wonder, like, what exactly was the motivation for doing any of this if you intend to revisit it in six months, if it's not addressed through Congress?"
— Jelani Cobb [14:38]

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9. Paths to Immigration Reform: Challenges and Lessons

[14:47]–[17:33]

• Wickenden and Cobb explore what responsible immigration reform could look like.
• Cobb draws a parallel between historical anxieties about African-American labor driving down wages and current arguments about undocumented immigrants.
• He suggests that, as with labor history, the solution may be inclusion (legalization, pathways to citizenship) rather than exclusion.
• The importance of crafting arguments and policies that can persuade economically anxious working-class voters is highlighted.

Notable Quote:

"It took organized labor decades to realize that the solution...was actually inviting more people into the fold of organized labor rather than excluding. And so that might be...the analogy that's applicable here..."
— Jelani Cobb [16:10]

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Memorable Quotes

• "He's not only the first black president, but he is the son of someone who was allowed to come to the country for education. That's not a perspective that very many Americans have." — Jelani Cobb [06:41]
• "There's still a great deal of friction...between I guess, the left wing of the party and...the more centrist wing." — Jelani Cobb [11:36]
• "That's the hard sell." — Jelani Cobb on persuading working class voters of the benefits of immigration reform [17:31]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:15] — Introduction to DACA repeal and political context
• [02:35] — Jelani Cobb joins, discusses U.S. history of xenophobia
• [05:10] — Patterns and causes of anti-immigrant backlash
• [07:36] — Current state of partisanship and rise of resentment politics
• [09:59] — The impact of Clinton's "basket of deplorables" comment
• [12:06] — Party fragmentation and speculation about third parties
• [13:44] — Trump’s reversal on DACA and GOP challenges
• [14:47] — Paths forward for immigration reform
• [17:31] — The difficulty of changing working-class attitudes

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Conclusion

Jelani Cobb and Dorothy Wickenden weave together deep historical perspective and sharp contemporary analysis to reveal how the politics of xenophobia are both an old story in American life and a potent force in the current political landscape. The episode highlights the cyclical nature of anti-immigrant backlash, the political weaponization of demographic anxieties, and the complexity of forging real immigration reform in a time of sharp partisan division and economic uncertainty. Cobb’s reflections tie past and present, emphasizing that the nation’s debates over inclusion, labor, and belonging are far from resolved.

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Transcript

[A]

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[B]

This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about politics. It's Friday, September 8th. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. On Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Trump administration was ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. President Obama created DACA in June 2012 to shield minors from deportation. It currently protects over 800,000 immigrants who were brought to the US as children. In Sessions public statement, he argued that DACA was unconstitutional and undermined the interests of the American people.

[C]

The effect of this unilateral executive amnesty, among other things, contributed to a surge of miners at the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences. It also denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same illegal aliens to take those jobs we inherited from our founders and have advanced an unsurpassed legal health heritage which is the foundation of our freedom, our safety and our prosperity.

[B]

Jelani Cobb joins me to discuss the history of anti immigration policies in the US and how to assess the period we're living through now. Jelani, welcome.

[D]

Thank you.

[B]

This decision came after the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville and Trump's pardon of Joe Arpaio, the former Arizona sheriff infamous for rounding up and detaining Latinos he suspected of being here illegally even. You're an American historian, and so I'm interested in hearing you talk a little bit about previous periods of virulent xenophobia and racism in this country.

[D]

Sure. When you think about it, in those three events that you mentioned, it seems that you can get the kind of broad outlines of where this administration is on these matters of race, and specifically race as it relates to immigration. And I would add one other thing in there, which is the announcement of their support for the Raise act, which is intended to cut authorized immigration by 50%. When you look at all those things together, they struck me as being a kind of throwback to an earlier period in American history, at the beginning of the 20th century, where there was a great deal of concern about subversives and radicals who were in the country, be they anarchists or Bolsheviks. And those concerns about national security neatly dovetailed with biases that happened to be against particular ethnic groups. It was Catholics and Jews, and even.

[B]

Further back than that, in the 19th century, we had the Know Nothing Party, which was devoted to the idea of keeping out Irish Catholics mostly. And then, of course, the birth of the kkk. Those patterns are very obvious, too.

[D]

It's also interesting, too, because we had those two swells of anti Catholic sentiment both in the 19th century and re emerging virulently in the 20th century. So we have those two bites of the apple. And then, of course, kind of lulls of periods where it remains an element of American society, but not maybe a defining element. So much so that Even, you know, 1960, famously, of course, John F. Kennedy had to address it in his presidential campaign, his Catholicism. So I think we can find these kinds of connections. But, you know, the beginning of the 20th century, we find it like, really strong resemblance to the politics and the social anxieties that we're seeing now. And, of course, those ideas found expression in the 1924 Immigration Restriction act, which very famously was calibrated to reduce the number of people who were coming from Southern and Eastern Europe, favoring people who would come from Western Europe. And the kind of racial engineering was implicit.

[B]

I wonder whether you see the same kinds of underlying causes. Does this kind of thing come about when we've emerged from a relatively progressive era and there's a reaction against it?

[D]

Both instances emerge from a previous context of, you know, significant immigration and a kind of progressive idea and an accepting ideal of who we want to allow into the country. And so in the 1880s, 1890s, driven by industrialization and urbanization and this really significant need for labor, the United States has a much more open policy in terms of admission of immigrants. And then by the 20th century, we start seeing a real pushback and a real backlash against that. And so I think the same thing is now, although we have maybe a little bit of a longer lead time, because the real target, I think, of this administration is repealing the world that was created by the 1965 Immigration act, the Hart Cellars act, which of course, famously liberalized the way American immig works. We got rid of ethnic quotas and allowed a much more broad palette of immigrants to come into the country.

[B]

Obama is alarmed. On Wednesday, he said in a Facebook post objecting to this policy, this is about who we are as a people and who we want to be. And yet you could also see the rise of Donald Trump. In fact, Trump has said this as a reaction to the Obama presidency.

[D]

Sure, he's not only the first black president, but he is the son of someone who was allowed to come to the country for education. That's not a perspective that very many Americans have. And so I think that this goes to the core of not only Obama's presidency, but the changes in American society that made Obama's presidency possible not so long ago.

[B]

The two parties weren't all that far apart on immigration. The original DREAM act was written in 2008, 2001, by Democratic Senator Dick Durbin and Republican Senator Orrin Hatch. And then Hatch in 2012 had to disown the bill because he was facing a right wing challenger in the primary race. And that, of course, came with the rise of the Tea Party. And what do you think has happened culturally to explain that phenomenon and the current iteration of it? We are seeing with Bannonism and Trumpism?

[D]

Yeah, I think that there has been this movement toward the politics of resentment, and it was possible for, I think, Republicans to keep a lid on it for a certain period of time. But certainly by Obama's second term, that was an increasingly difficult undertaking. I also think that it's not coincidental that Donald Trump's political fortunes were based on his ability to paint Barack Obama not only as an illegitimate president, not only as a terrible president, but someone who was, in effect, immigrant, who was not supposed to have been here. I think people didn't see this coming. We look and see how even Marco Rubio was kind of caught in the crosshairs, thinking that it was possible for there to be some sort of consensus on immigration reform and then having to denounce his own ideas on the subject. So I think that's a good part of what we've been seeing. And then the dynamics of deindustrialization and, you know, what we once called outsourcing and all these other things which we've been talking about for 20 years now, have been very succinctly and very specifically tied to our relationship to immigration. And I think that was what Trumpism heralded. He did that more effectively, I think, than anyone else in 2016.

[E]

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[D]

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[E]

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[B]

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[D]

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[A]

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[E]

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[D]

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[B]

What do you think about how the Democratic Party is coming to terms with some of these problems? Hillary Clinton has a book coming out in which she will soon see what she makes of her defeat at the hands of hands of Donald Trump, which many of us did not think was possible. She didn't ever, for her campaign find a way to appeal to working class voters, black or white. And then she made her basket of deplorables comment near the end of the campaign, which to many seemed symptomatic of what was wrong with the Democratic Party.

[D]

It's kind of interesting that Hillary Clinton was most significantly damaged by something she said that was basically true when she talked about the basket of deplorables. One, she didn't say that was everyone voting for Trump, but she did say that there were a kind of significant number of people who harbored these really deplorable ideas. And then when we looked at polling, we saw that very many of them did have racist ideas and they did have very xenophobic ideas about people who come here from abroad. And I think after the there was the poll that showed that I think it was somewhere around a quarter of the Republican electorate thought that black people were less intelligent or something. And so those were things that were really troubling. They should have been. But of course, I think in politics there's, you know, a kind of realization, oh, you should have the ability to determine when you should say something and when you should not irrespective of whether or not it's true. One of the things I think and have consistently thought was a factor in this was simply the length of time that she had been in public life.

[B]

Yes.

[D]

That there were so many points that you could go back to and you could dredge up things from when she was first lady in Arkansas. You could dredge up things from her legal career before that, and then from the Clinton White House and then in the Senate and then as Secretary of state. And we don't typically elect people with, you know, really, really long histories in public life like that for a reason.

[B]

How do you think the Democrats are going about dealing with the Trump presidency?

[D]

I mean, it seems, you know, that there's still a great deal of friction, strikingly so, between I guess, the left wing of the party and I guess what you'd say is the more centrist wing. But the people who were enamored of Bernie Sanders still remain deeply skeptical of the establishment. We some of this with Kamala Harris just within the past few weeks. There doesn't seem to be any kind of detent between those two elements of the party.

[B]

Parties die. Historically, both the Republican and the Democratic Party are in pretty parlous straits at the moment. Do you think that there's a possibility for a third party movement, which has always been a very difficult thing to bring about?

[D]

So I think we're in a really serious, binding. You know, there could very well be a third party movement. But then you run into the difficulties of the Electoral College. And if we kind of go all the way back 1948, when you had a challenge on the Progressive Party on the left and the Dixiecrats on the right, and neither of them really had a chance of actually winning the election. The Dixiecrats were more explicit. They hoped to simply deny an electoral college majority to either candidate, and they would then be able to, you know, broker what they wanted on the platforms of whoever won in exchange for, you know, a deal, essentially a repeat of the Hayes Tilden Compromise of 1876. And so that was the kind of. And that didn't work. But the most wildly idealistic idea of third party candidacies has always wound up being either deny or heavily influence one of the major two parties. That said, I think demographically, there are some interesting things in the United States that we are seeing a population, a society that is becoming more brown, that it will, at some point in the not too distant future, be a majority minority society, which is, of course, one.

[B]

Of the precipitating factors for this terrible Moment we're in right now.

[D]

That's right.

[B]

On Wednesday, Trump did one of his head spinning reversals. After Sessions announcement, he tweeted, congress now has six months to legalize daca, something the Obama administration was unable to do. If they can't, I will revisit this issue.

[D]

I don't know how that would happen. I think the Republican Party is in a heck of a tight spot with this when we think about, you know, the fate of Eric Cantor and people who are, you know, there's real reason for people in the Republican Party to fear this populist insurrection that Trump became the head of. You know, kind of was in existence even before Trump. I guess Trumpism prior to Trump. And on the other hand, there are the tremendous consequences of not acting. So I don't know exactly how that will play itself out. But then I also think with Donald Trump saying he would revisit it, it kind of makes you wonder, like, what exactly was the motivation for doing any of this if you intend to revisit it in six months, if it's not addressed through Congress?

[B]

What does reasonable immigration reform look like? You mentioned at the beginning of the program, people get confused between illegal and legal immigration. Obama's record is mixed. During his administration, you know, more illegal immigrants were deported than under any other president before him.

[D]

One of the things that I would hope to see, I think, in Obama's memoirs, would be some further explication of his thinking on immigration, because early on, it seemed that he was aggressively enforcing deportation in order to kind of come down on the far end as a bargaining chip to maybe come move back to the center with Republicans. And we saw that same thing with him taking the position on offshore drilling that he thought would get him a deal with Republicans on climate change. And it's one of a number of instances where I think he overestimated his ability to strike a deal with the Republican Party. But certainly, I think that a kind of reasonable policy that allows people who have been here to find a route to legalization of their status, whatever that looks like, I think would be a beginning, would be a reasonable beginning for this, especially when we're looking at a point now where we aren't inundated at the border with the kind of crisis that we saw two years ago.

[B]

We've almost forgotten the phrase a pathway to citizenship.

[D]

Right. But I think there's a kind of argument that can be presented to this where a lot of the populist anger has been directed at the idea that, that people who are undocumented are driving down wages. And there's an analogy, I think there's a comparison of this that I found in African American history, which is that very often long ago in the middle and beginning of the 20th century, you saw very much similar arguments being made about African American workers who were, by and large, UN unionized and were being used as labor to drive down the wages of white workers. At least that's what the argument was. And it took, it took organized labor decades to realize that the solution to this was actually inviting more people into the fold of organized labor rather than excluding. And so that might be, you know, the kind of analogy that's applicable here, that if you're saying that there's this issue with people and you really believe, I think economists have some disagreement about this. But if you really believe that this is your main concern about driving down wages, then it's actually an argument for giving people a path to legal status.

[B]

But you have to convince members of the working class who are so terrified about losing their own livelihoods that this is not going to hurt them. And that's, you know, nobody's figured out how to do that yet.

[D]

Yeah, that's the hard sell.

[B]

Thank you so much, Jelani.

[D]

Thank you.

[B]

Jelani Cobb is a staff writer, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, and the author of the Substance of Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress. This has been the political scene from the New Yorker. You can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app and find more political analysis and commentary on newyorker.com feel free to rate and review the political scene on itunes. This podcast is produced by Jill Dubeuff for newyorker.com with help from Hannah Wilentz. I'm Dorothy Wickenden.

[E]

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