The Opinions - Sorry, Trump: ‘There Is No American Race or Blood That Outsiders Can Pollute’

Episode Date: October 21, 2024

Since coming down the escalator to announce his bid for president in 2015, Donald Trump has disparaged and dehumanized immigrants. In this episode of “The Opinions,” the Opinion columnist Carlos Lozada, an immigrant from Peru, reflects on what it means to not just discuss the issue but to be at the center of it.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail]. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. I'm Carlos Lozada. I am a columnist for New York Times Opinion and a co-host of the Matter of Opinion podcast. I'm always a little skeptical of pieces or of arguments that begin with as a, you know, like as a Christian conservative, as a Christian conservative, as a, person of color, as a progressive, as a fill in the blank, I feel there's a sort of assumed authority there that has been granted. And I think people are more complicated than the single overriding identity. So I said I'm a columnist, I'm a podcast host. Those aren't my identities, right? Those, I mean, is that really me? I mean, sometimes it is. I'm a father. I'm a son. I'm a husband. I'm a journalist. I'm a reader. I'm a fan of Notre Dame football. I'm also an immigrant. Well, immigration remains a thorny and top issue with voters this election year. We're going to seal up the border because right now we have an invasion.

We have an invasion of what they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country and look at what's happening. I've never considered the label immigrant to be my calling card, even though it's one I've always carried with me. I landed here as a three-year-old kid in the mid-1970s, and I settled with my family in northern California in a town where the trees were so thick and lush that you could see the branches meeting and mingling high over the roads. My mom would introduce us around the neighborhood, not just as a new family in town, but as a Peruvian family.

She always signed her cards from your Peruvian friends. After some back and forth between Lima and California during my childhood, I've made my home in the United States for decades now. I went to college and graduate school. I passed the citizenship test. I married a native-born American. And we even watched our children born in the nation's capital. I'm an immigrant.

But over the years, that label has moved lower on my drop-down menu. Is immigration something you do or something you are? Is it a step on the way to becoming something else? or does the passage itself forever define you? The longer I'm here, the more it's become a memory, an evocation of some long ago that I share with my children. In recent years, though, the distance has narrowed between memory and identity,

between immigration as a once upon a time versus a here and now. In our politics, the presence of immigrants in the United States is again a contested campaign issue. But it's one thing to ponder and debate issues, as I do in my work, it's another to be an issue. During the presidential debate last month, when Donald Trump said that immigrants were, quote-unquote, eating the dogs.

In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats, they're eating the pets of the people that live there. I was hit by this overwhelming sadness. sadness at the cruelty of the unfounded accusation and at the damage it would inflict on the people in this one town, but also at this relentless diminishing of an American aspiration, an aspiration that I still refuse to dismiss as naive.

Ronald Reagan invoked America's immigrant tradition in his farewell address in 1989 when he reminded the world that if his shining city needed walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will. and the heart to get here. When Trump rejects this parallel heritage, promising bigger walls and locked doors, his words strike at the hopes and insecurities that I always bear.

Even when Trump's words are false, their aim is true. So I've long seen Trump as a challenge for America, for democratic institutions, for honesty, for the immigrant tradition here. But his cacophony of xenophobia, which is built so relentlessly, over this past decade now feels overpowering. And it also feels directed at me, at who I am, at the choices that I've made. It would be wildly a historical

to say that Trump, on his own, has eroded the ideal of America as a nation of immigrants. For all of Trump's particular efforts, the wall, the travel ban, the family separations, now this pledge of mass deportations, he is part of a long tradition

of suspicion and repudiation of outsiders. And I have no doubt that Trump's various statements attacking immigrants strike different people, including other newcomers, in different ways. To me, they show that the man who accuses immigrants of poisoning the blood of America is administering his own brand of venom, one whose cumulative effect is to disfigure a nation, not to exalt it. When Trump announced he was running for president in June 2015, he said, When Mexico sends his people, they're not sending their best.

they're not sending you. They're not sending you. He went on to brand immigrants as drug traffickers as rapists. Then he added the most casually dismissive of caveats, saying, And some, I assume, are good people. But I speak to border. That assumption of criminality became the first of many transgressions that, while seemingly disqualifying,

simply anticipated core elements of Trump's appeal. Yet those words were not the ones that struck me hardest from that statement. To me, Trump's starkest message in that moment was the passivity he implied with one word. They're not sending them their best, he said. Sending. Nobody sent me. No government shipped me,

my parents or my sisters, to LAX, our official port of entry. We chose to leave. We chose this place. My father was obsessed with their education, and he believed his children would receive better schooling in the United States, that we would learn to speak English

well. Sending reflects not just how Trump views immigration, but how he sees the world, all-powerful leaders making decisions unquestioned and unreviewable over people's lives. But sending robs me of agency over my own fate. After seven years in California, we moved back to Lima and I lived there for another seven years until I finished high school. Then I decided to return to the United States for college to make this my home. These were choices, not orders. Sending, renders the immigrant not just unwanted, but submissive. Whether I am the best or worst of immigrants is a matter of opinion, that I chose to come here is not.

In 2019, Trump told four members of Congress to, quote, go back to the countries, quote, from which they came. The president posted this on social media. So interesting to see progressive Democrat congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States the greatest and most powerful nation on earth

how our government is to be run. Why don't they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came? Trump's post suggests that you're lucky to be here, so make no demands. And remember, whatever conditions prompted you or your ancestors to leave the old place will forever be held against you in the new one.

The irony is that I've often thought about going back, not about returning to live in Peru right now necessarily, but about going back to the moment that my family decided to leave. What alternate life could I have lived? What pains and joys and regrets would I have known if that choice had been different? I'm jealous of those Americans who claim one hometown, a place whose rhythms they instantly recognize,

a singular setting that anchors their memory. When I visit Lima, I feel out of place. My cultural references are dated, mental maps are fragmented, I don't quite get the jokes. My longing is for a place that no longer exists, just like that other person that I might have been. Six years before Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, began spreading rumors about Haitian immigrants in Springfield. Trump complained in a noble office meeting about the immigrants he didn't like. These were from Haiti, from El Salvador, or from African countries. He asked, why are we having all these people from shithole country?

come here. And he said this as he rejected a bipartisan immigration proposal. With little subtlety, he said he'd rather draw from Norway. Why do we need more Haitians? he emphasized. Take them out. Why does Trump think people leave their homelands, often at such risk and uncertainty? Some quarter of a billion people live in countries other than those they were born in, and many more wish to join the exile. The burdens of political turmoil, repression, and foreign intervention have not made Haiti a shithole. They've made it a tragedy. My parents enjoyed a comfortable life in Peru, but that life was not enough. My father's American dream was less for himself than for me and my sisters, and we came here to find it.

Later, I chose to return to the United States for college because the Peru of my youth was mired in hyperinflation and terrorism, because I missed the sisters who had made that choice already, and because the taste I'd had of America, even as a child, was hard to forget. That does not make the departure simple. Hoping that the new home will be better than the old one doesn't diminish the pain of truncating the life you've known, leaving a hole so gaping that even a land of opportunity has trouble filling it.

If they were shitholes, they'd be easy to leave. At a rally last December, Trump said, They're poisoning the blood of our country. That's what they've done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world, they're coming into our country from Africa. Should Trump win the election next month? I'll no longer wonder if America regards immigration as something I've done or something I am. He's given us the answer. Immigration is a chronic condition, and the only cure he tells us is a, quote, bloody story, unquote, of mass deportation. In 2016, the wall he called for was supposed to protect America. Now, deportations are supposed to purify it. But there is no American race or blood that outsiders can pollute. How can immigrants poison the blood of the nation when we have always been its lifeblood? The pretences of the people are are growing less tenable.

Politicians can say they're pro-child or pro-family, but when I form a family, I'm befouling the nation. They can say immigrants should not take advantage of social services, but if I work, then I'm stealing someone's job. They say that home ownership is the key to the American dream, but if I dare secure a home,

then I'm distorting housing prices for the native-born. The argument is not just about keeping immigrants out or kicking them out, but about denying the full American experience even to the ones who remain. Almost exactly 10 years ago, I stood up in a Baltimore federal building with dozens of other immigrants

and swore the oath of U.S. citizenship. So not only did I, quote, renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince potentate state or sovereignty, unquote, I also had to give up my green card. Now, this is a document that in different iterations I've had since I was three. It's a wallet-sized golden ticket that protected me and justified my presence here.

I was always terrified of losing it, so I rarely carried it with me, but I did keep a copy in my wallet, just in case I ever had to prove, as it declares on the back, that, quote, person identified by this card is entitled to reside permanently and work in the United States. I remember its laminated feel in my hand, and I can still recite the alien registration number on the card, So when I just had to hand it to an official sitting at a desk that day, and he tossed it in a box behind him with a bunch of others, I panicked. Without this card, how would I ever prove that I belonged here? When you become a citizen, there's no red, white, and blue card to replace the green one. You're just supposed to know.

I guess you're just supposed to start walking through the world with this land of the free swagger. I think my temporary panic was a reminder. It reminded me that there's a difference between lawful and included, between needed and welcomed, between tolerated and truly accepted. If Trump's attacks make me that much more of an immigrant in the eyes of this nation, I'll take that outcome, I'll embrace it. So much of who I am flows from that status.

And the pang of living in between is a common. classic American condition, one that both enriches and complicates this place. I am so grateful to live that life here and to have the same opportunity as anyone else to help perfect this union. I don't have to go home to do that. I'm already here. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Bischakadurba, Phoebe,

Feebillette, Christina Samuelski, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Alison Bruzek, and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Saburo, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amin Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta, Christina Samuelski, and Adrian Rivera. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Dresser.