Republicans can get their way without the fearmongering and racism

The conservative movement is going through some internal struggles, most notably because of the debate between the racists and the reasonable members of the GOP. To recap, Tucker Carlson had a chat with Nick Fuentes and now conservatives can’t decide whether to reject or embrace the racists and antisemites among them. 

Beyond the recent bickering, Republicans have appeared to either endorse or allow bigoted attitudes to motivate the core conservative agenda – primarily their immigration policy. 

Accusations of racism should be levied sparingly – only when there is clear evidence and after alternative explanations have been eliminated. We can observe current conservative bigotry through both policy and the rhetoric used to refer to immigrants, particularly immigrants of color – President Trump has stated that Mexico mostly sends murderers and rapists, that Haitian immigrants were eating people’s pets, and that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of the country.” All Somali immigrants have been blamed for the fraud of a few in Minnesota.

The Trump administration has moved to limit immigrants and refugees from countries with primarily black or brown populations while inviting white South African refugees – Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau even rolled out the red carpet with a formal welcoming of 59 South Africans. Trump has complained about receiving immigrants from “filthy” and “s—hole” countries and later that we do not receive enough immigrants from “nice” countries like Denmark and Switzerland. 

Project 2025, which is being actively implemented, has many of its contributors working in the Trump administration including Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, and many more in important roles. The project openly plans to cut off all immigration and deport as many as possible with its contributors also attending national conservatism conferences where they bond over their dream of a single national identity within a White Christian nation. Trump’s ICE has used the act of speaking Spanish and looking Latino as probable cause for arrest.

After contemplating very deeply and carefully for many long hours attempting to discern a plausible alternative explanation for the rhetoric and the policies, what is the only thing that a reasonable person can conclude? Unfortunately, the most parsimonious explanation is that these people are ailed by that old virus that is ubiquitous across mankind’s history: racism. 

It’s really too bad because many of the goals of the GOP can be motivated and accomplished without sounding like extremists, which would avoid alienating large swaths of the population and legitimizing the misguided attitudes of the morally corrupt. 

It would be quite easy given how often the Democrats serve themselves up on a silver platter for ridicule. Take the brand new mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani who is talking to the press about appointing a “World Cup czar” to make World Cup tickets affordable for everyone. Please, no one tell him that they didn’t schedule any matches for New York City. 

Getting back to the conservative agenda, large-scale immigration restrictions can be supported by color-blind arguments. Without making reference to the content of the characters of immigrants, one could argue that they displace American workers, and suppress wages. It could be argued, without falsely attributing to immigrants peculiar culinary practices, that they increase housing costs by increasing demand and strain public services while stealing from taxpayers. 

Some could even argue that restricting immigration could help other countries by preventing their intelligent citizens from leaving, which over time could help those nations develop and eliminate the need for their people to leave in the first place. 

I don’t find these arguments particularly compelling, but they are available to use while excluding xenophobic fear-mongering. 

It is therefore an interesting question why a significant contingent of conservatives, including Trump, JD Vance, and so many that have been placed atop our institutions, find that they must appeal to our tribal instincts. What has always been true is that there is no rigorous argument that can compete with divisive rhetoric at the level of populations. 

Sometimes we forget why we regard racism and sexism as abhorrent. It’s because it requires the denial of several fundamental ethical principles that we absolutely need in order to have any morals at all. Principles like the moral equality of persons, the principle that everyone deserves dignity and respect, and that people should not be judged on the basis of morally irrelevant features beyond their control. 

What these politicians within the national conservatism movement and the White House are saying by their endorsement of this wave of non-color blind anti-immigrant sentiment is that these fundamental ethical norms are false – note that without the truth of these moral principles, we have no rational basis for condemning almost any wrong that one human can inflict on another.

Every time that you make a moral judgment about some event you witnessed or heard about, you are implicitly citing moral principles like these, and these are the moral principles that our God forsaken politicians are attempting to erode. 

If you must condemn immigration, use the arguments that fail on merely empirical and rational grounds rather than moral grounds and demand that your preferred politicians do the same. 

Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. He is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester. You can reach him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail.com.