Trump’s slur against the Haitian community is attracting most of the post-debate reaction. It is, of course, absurd. But he’s still saying similar things. Yesterday, he pledged “mass deportations” from Springfield, Ohio, suggesting he’d send migrants to Venezuela, apparently unaware of where they came from, or that most of them arrived in the US legally.

It’s clear that he is now basing almost his entire campaign on racism. Time will tell if he’s punished or rewarded. If the latter, it will be a very sad day for this country and a very worrying one for the world.

But Trump treads in shitty footprints. The appeal to a false sense of nativism is as old as the ethno-settler colony. Almost every newly arriving group of immigrants to the US has been the target of Trump-like bigotry. I’m preparing some materials for a class next week, using period cartoons to make the point. Here are some:

It should be axiomatic that the US is a nation of immigrants. The number of new arrivals in recent years, even allowing for necessarily imprecise counting, is by no means out of kilter with the nation’s history (some detailed data here). I often think about a particular person whose life I’m researching (Abraham Kazan) and his passage to America. He fled anti-Semitic discrimination, the threat of pogroms and economic hardship to travel from Imperial Russia, 1,200 miles overland to Rotterdam, across several borders, then by sea from Liverpool to New York, where he arrived in 1904. There was no concept of “illegals” at that point (there was soon after), but his journey could not have happened without what comfortable, self-righteous politicians refer to as “people traffickers”. I can only assume that they and those who share their prejudices, think Kazan and millions like him, should have stayed in their home countries and awaited their fate.

One hundred and twenty years later, migrant paranoia feels like the latest capitalist crisis induced pandemic. I’m just listening to what’s happening on Germany’s borders. There are frightening parallels with how politicians are whipping up fear, fueled by fake news on social media. It’s no surprise to hear that Trump’s hate-speech has led to the threat of violence in Springfield, an echo of what happened in Britain a few weeks ago. Fortunately, in both cases, nobody has been killed. But these pent-up tensions remain as the Presidential elections approach.

But another parallel with the UK is the counter-offensive against racism here. Some of the sentiments of solidarity from Springfield are very moving. The parents of the young man killed in a road accident used to attack the city’s Haitian community, have utterly rejected Trump’s lies. The city mayor, while acknowledging the need for more resources, has said Springfield needs help, not hate.