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Donald Trump’s notorious remarks that Mexican immigrants are “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists” have provided a welcome opportunity for many liberals and progressives in the United States to congratulate themselves over their revulsion at Trump’s boisterous, clueless racism. Even corporations such as NBC, Univision, and Macy’s dumped Trump for his “derogatory statements.” While his words are obviously offensive, this narrow liberal focus on language-policing allows pundits, politicians, and comedians to score progressive points while ignoring their complicity in the abuse and exploitation of millions of Latino immigrants.
But where’s the outrage about the rampant wage theft perpetrated against migrant workers out in the fields picking America’s fruit and vegetables? Why didn’t politicians call for a moment of silence for the 817 Latino workers who died on the job in 2013 (mainly in construction) or the 748 who perished the year before? Why aren’t the overcrowded, unsanitary conditions of immigration detention centers as important as the ranting of an unhinged megalomaniac who will never actually hold political office?
The outrage doesn’t materialize and the material conditions of migrant workers don’t capture the headlines in large part because fundamentally Republican and Democratic political and economic elites agree with Trump about the need to militarize the border and deport undocumented immigrants. They just leave out the “derogatory statements” and tack on rhetoric about “earned legal status” or a long and winding “path to citizenship” to corner the Latino vote.
Is there a fundamental difference between Trump’s argument and Obama’s 2012 comment to Univision that his administration’s record-setting deportation of 2 million immigrants targeted “people who generally pose a threat to our communities” as opposed to “hardworking families”? Trump claims most Mexican immigrants are criminals while Obama argued that the 2 million people his administration caged in inhumane prisons without access to a lawyer before being forcibly returned to war-torn, economically destitute countries were endangering “our communities.”
Yet, a recent report from the American Immigration Council found that 1.6 percent of foreign-born men are in prison as opposed to 3.3 percent of U.S.-born men, and most incarcerated immigrants faced immigration-related charges. Only a thousandth of a percent of undocumented immigrants are charged with murder. Life is so precarious for undocumented immigrants that they often make much more of an effort to avoid illegality than citizens. And many of those who turn to legitimately criminal activity are merely trying to survive in a society that denies them fundamental rights in practice even if it says otherwise on some government document collecting dust in the statehouse.
“Somebody’s doing the raping”
In defense of his assertion about the prevalence of rapists among Mexican immigrants, Donald Trump pointed to a 2014 Fusion article reporting that 80 percent of Mexican and Central American women are raped at some point on their way to the United States by coyotes, bandits, other migrants, or government officials. When CNN’s Don Lemon pointed out to Trump that the article states that these migrants were victims of rape, not rapists themselves, Trump glibly replied “somebody’s doing the raping.” In so doing, Trump essentially implied that regardless of who was to blame specifically, the thousands of Latinos pouring through American borders are the products of societies of rampant criminality and should therefore be repelled with the utmost urgency.
But what Trump and the myriad of defenders of the American immigration system fail to acknowledge is that the criminalization of border-crossing fuels this underworld of sexual assault and drug-smuggling by forcing desperate, impoverished people into dangerous situations to survive. Moreover, U.S.-backed neo-liberal trade agreements like NAFTA have devastated local industries forcing countless workers to cross the border in search of work. American corporations have traveled abroad to take advantage of the cheap labor that such agreements have provided, but when those very same workers seek to cross into the United States, they face imprisonment or, at best, a precarious existence of near-constant exploitation without any legal recourse against abuse and exploitation.
If Trump were so concerned about rape, he would take a closer look at conditions for migrant farmworkers. Although it’s impossible to quantify the prevalence of sexual assault among migrants, a 2010 study carried out by UC Santa Cruz among 150 women farmworkers found that about 40 percent reported sexual harassment and 24 percent reported sexual coercion from their boss.
Good Immigrant/Bad Immigrant
While it’s always a risky proposition to give Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt about anything, it’s fair to assume that President Obama knows that most undocumented immigrants are not criminals and have traveled a long, dangerous road out of desperation to seek a better life. Nevertheless, he has felt the need to cloak his anti-immigrant policies under the veil of criminality and national security because the days of being able to justify deportations purely based on a lack of papers has passed. To portray himself as pro-immigrant he granted temporary permission to Dreamers born in the country to remain in the United States. But even Trump acknowledged that “some (Mexican immigrants), I assume, are good people.”
All too often measures designed to improve conditions for migrants who “play by the rules” or find themselves in citizenship limbo because of the immigration “crimes” of their parents reinforce the imaginary dichotomy between a handful of intelligent, motivated, assimilated young students and a mounting tidal wave of criminality poised to crash down upon the southern border. Circumscribing this small space of acceptance allows for the criminalization and persecution of those who fall outside of its parameters. Channeling all of our outrage at Trump’s rhetorical racism gives us enough of a rush of feel-good self-righteousness to satiate our thirst for justice before we even take a look at the truly racist violence being unleashed on the undocumented every day.
Yesenia Barragan is a NYC-based Latina activist and PhD Candidate in Latin American History at Columbia University.
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