Now Trump Is Threatening Naturalized Americans
He’s not just bashing refugees and illegal immigrants. He’s going after U.S. citizens born in other countries.
DONALD TRUMP’S WAR ON IMMIGRANTS has crossed another line. First, he targeted illegal immigrants. Then he went after legal immigrants. Now, he’s attacking naturalized Americans: citizens of this country who were born elsewhere, particularly in what Trump contemptuously calls the “third world.” He’s trying to turn white Americans against nonwhite Americans.
Trump has practiced and promoted bigotry for decades. In the past four months, he has casually dismissed at least five black people as “low IQ”—a term he rarely applies to whites. He gets a kick out of mocking names like “Barack Hussein Obama” and “Zohran ‘Kwame’ Mamdani.” He has prioritized white South Africans in U.S. refugee policy, boycotted a G-20 meeting in that country, and banned it from next year’s G-20 meeting based on what he claims (falsely) is a “genocide” against “white people.”
On November 7, Trump hosted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at the White House. He congratulated Orbán for restricting immigration, unlike other European governments. “Their whole fabric has changed,” Trump said of the other European nations. “You go to some of the countries, they’re unrecognizable now because of what they’ve done. And Hungary is very recognizable.”
In case anyone had missed the key word, Trump repeated it again. “If I didn’t win the election, we might not have a country,” he said of the United States. “Not a recognizable country.”
A week later, in an interview with Britain’s GB News, Trump expounded on his ethnic and cultural views. “Europe is not the same place,” he lamented. “You have Sharia law” in some locations, he asserted. He praised Orbán for allowing “zero” people into his country, except for Ukrainians. That exception made sense, said Trump, because “the Ukrainians, they blend in.”
Then, on Thanksgiving Day, Trump turned his attention to cleansing the United States. After the shooting of two National Guard troops the day before, allegedly by an Afghan national, the president posted two screeds on Truth Social. In one post, he claimed that refugees were “the leading cause of social dysfunction in America, something that did not exist after World War II (Failed schools, high crime, urban decay, overcrowded hospitals, housing shortages, and large deficits, etc.).” He added:
The official United States Foreign population stands at 53 million people (Census), most of which are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels. They and their children are supported through massive payments from Patriotic American Citizens . . .
Trump’s reference to the census, coupled with the number 53 million, signaled a broader agenda. The number came from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Surveys, which define the “foreign-born population” as “anyone who is not a U.S. citizen at birth. This includes persons who have become U.S. citizens through naturalization.” Trump wasn’t just trashing foreign nationals. He was trashing a subset of Americans.
In a second Thanksgiving post, the president promised to act against these Americans. He vowed, among other things, to (1) “denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility,” (2) “deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization,” and (3) “remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States.” By offering no definitions of these terms, Trump gave himself flexibility to strip people of their citizenship and deport them based on vague allegations of burdening the country or undermining “tranquility” or “Western civilization.” The term “Western,” combined with Trump’s simultaneous pledge to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries,” underscored his fixation on ethnicity.
On Sunday, during an exchange with reporters on Air Force One, Trump made it clear that his plan was to bar all people from certain countries based on the behavior of some people from those countries. “We don’t want those people,” he scoffed, referring to Somalis. “You know why we don’t want ’em? Because many of ’em are no good.”
A reporter asked the president, “What do you mean by ‘those people’?” Trump replied: “The people from different countries that are not friendly to us, and countries that are out of control themselves.” He continued: “They’re countries that don’t register from the standpoint of success. And we frankly don’t need their people coming into our country telling us what to do.”
In other words, he didn’t want people from poor countries—or from dangerous countries, the kind that might warrant an application for asylum. And he didn’t want those people coming here to exercise American privileges such as freedom of speech.
TRUMP IS ALREADY AT WORK on his nativist agenda. On Tuesday, at a two-hour cabinet meeting staged for the media, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer bragged that Trump was creating jobs for “native-born workers. And that is the difference between this presidency, this administration, as opposed to the Biden administration, where mostly foreign-born” workers benefited. Apparently, she was referring to the Trump team’s boast, issued in a White House statement two weeks ago, that “Under President Trump, all job gains have gone to native-born Americans—reversing the Biden-era trend. Over the past year, more than 2.5 million native-born Americans gained employment, while 670,000 foreign-born workers lost employment.”
That White House statement, in turn, linked to a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which explained that “foreign born” workers included naturalized citizens. The administration was counting their job losses as a success.
Trump wrapped up the cabinet meeting with another diatribe against Somali-born people living in the United States. “They contribute nothing. I don’t want ’em in our country,” he fumed. “I could say it about other countries, too. We don’t want ’em.” He went on: “We’re gonna go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.”
In particular, he lambasted Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a naturalized American who was born in Somalia and who, according to Trump’s Thanksgiving rants, is “always wrapped in her swaddling hijab” and should be thrown “the hell out of our country.” In front of the cameras, the president told his cabinet on Tuesday: “Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people that work. . . . These are people that do nothing but complain. . . . We don’t want ’em in our country. Let ’em go back to where they came from and fix it.”
With that, the president ended the meeting, and his cabinet vigorously applauded. There’s no need for dog whistles anymore. The government of the United States now openly stands for bigotry. It’s not just closing our borders; it’s targeting Americans. And depending on where you came from, you might be next.
“These aren’t people that work. . . . These are people that do nothing but complain. . . . We don’t want ’em in our country.” If we’re going to throw out people who do nothing but complain Donny and the maga grievance party should be the first to go. I’ve known a lot of immigrants and worked with many. I’ve never met one that wasn’t hard working and many were entrepreneurial, starting businesses as well as working day jobs until those businesses could take off. My heart aches for my country.
We have a president who is increasingly unmoored from the legal and moral principals of a democratic society. His recent actions and rhetoric are further trending towards violence and repression. Calls for violent retribution after the Kirk assassination followed by demands for the execution of members of Congress. This week he labeled fifty million citizens garbage. All this from the same man building a personal militia and prison system. He is not distracting us from the latest scandal. These are the actions of an authoritarian preparing to dissolve democracy.