On the campaign trail, Trump has said that immigrants are "animals" and "not human," and implied that millions are crossing the border each month; publicly available data show that the real number has never exceeded 200,000 a month this year. When Vance took to X to declare that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbors' pets, and Trump repeated the lie in a nationally televised debate the next day, those of us who have studied the United States' history of dehumanizing immigrants felt as if the clock had turned back 150 years, to when the same specious claim was used to justify vigilante violence against Chinese Americans, and laws including the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Trump and Vance's claims, along with other copycat assertions meant to imply that nonwhite immigrants are inherently immoral, such as the one about "Haitian prostitutes" aired at a Springfield city-commission meeting, have surfaced throughout American history. This summer, a survey ... found that nearly a quarter of Americans now believe that immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country" and that "many immigrants are terrorists." More than a third of respondents said that "millions of undocumented immigrants illegally cast votes in our elections."

American voters have consistently indicated that they want order at the southern border, yet many economists agree that the large amount of immigration the U.S. experienced in recent years is a major reason the economy bounced back from the COVID-related downturn faster than that of any other nation in the world[EM]. This complex picture of immigration and its implications calls for the hard work of policy making and statesmanship. Again and again, misinformation and fearmongering have only made things worse.