On December 9th, US Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller went on another xenophobic rant. He claimed that, “If Somalians cannot make Somalia successful, why would we think that the track will be any different in the United States? […] If Libya keeps failing, if the Central African Republic keeps failing, if Somalia keeps failing, right? If these societies all over the world continue to fail, you have to ask yourself, if you bring those societies into our country, and then give them unlimited free welfare, what do we think is going to happen?”
Like so many in the Trump administration, Miller blames America’s failures on immigrants. Why is our educational system faltering? Immigrants. Miller claims that, “If you subtract immigration out of test scores, all of a sudden scores skyrocket!”
Why are Americans unable to get jobs? Immigrants. Last year on the campaign trail, Trump claimed that immigrants are stealing “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs.” (Whatever those are.)
Why are Americans unable to succeed? Immigrants. Vice President J.D. Vance calls “mass migration a theft of the American Dream.”
From housing to the crime rate to the drug crisis to healthcare to affordability, the problem is always immigrants. The Trump administration defends these remarks by, again, blaming immigrants. On December 10th, President Trump remarked that, “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? Let us have a few from Denmark. Do you mind sending us a few people? Do you mind? We always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they’re good at is going after ships.” For Trump, because Somalia is “filthy, dirty, disgusting,” we should not allow Somalis to enter the US. Because Norway, Denmark and Sweden are ‘clean’ countries, we can admit their citizens.
This is the basis of the Trump administration’s xenophobia: immigrants fail here because they come from impoverished countries. Those countries are ‘bad’ because the people are ‘bad.’ If those ‘bad’ people weren’t in the US, then the ‘good’ people could make America great again.
This narrative is extremely popular among MAGA conservatives. However, it is false. This scapegoating narrative relies entirely on two myths: the myth of “American exceptionalism” and the myth of “third world mediocrity”
The Myth of “American Exceptionalism”
“American exceptionalism” refers to the idea that the US is distinct from other countries because its foundation rests on the principles of individualism and freedom. These values uniquely shape the American identity, thereby making Americans exceptional.
Trump often appeals to this notion. For instance, in his 2025 inaugural address, Trump remarked that, “America will soon be greater, stronger, and far more exceptional than ever before.” He further added, “We will be a nation like no other: full of compassion, courage and compassion, courage and exceptionalism.” The promise of the Trump Golden Age is precisely a promise to restore the exceptionalism that America lost due to “migration from all Third World Countries.”
American exceptionalism is, however, an illusion. America’s success relies on many factors including exploiting the poor, slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and immigration. Even the extent to which the US has embraced the ideal of freedom has been largely due to the Civil Rights Movement and other anti-oppression struggles.
Americans do not have some inherent aptitude towards freedom – they are, like any other people, taught to love and embrace others, or to irrationally hate anyone who is different. Freedom is not an exclusively Western ideal. It does not belong to any nation or to any particular people.
The Myth of “Third World Mediocrity”
The second myth is that colonialism, imperialism and racism either never existed or had little impact on poorer countries in South America, Africa and Asia. This revisionist history is the other side of American exceptionalism: the myth of “Third World mediocrity.” The idea is that, if “third world” countries have failed to succeed, it’s not because of external forces that impeded their development, but rather a reflection of the quality of its citizens.
This is apparent in Miller’s comments. In his view, “third world” immigrants will always “replicate the conditions that they left over and over and over again!” We see this myth when Trump refers to Somalia as “barely a country” and Somali immigrants as “garbage.” The two are inseparable to him.
What Trump and his allies fail to recognize (or at least admit) is that the reason why countries like Somalia struggle, and the reason why immigrants of color struggle, is largely due to colonialism, imperialism and racism.
Take Somalia, for instance: during the late 1960s and 1970s, Somalia implemented a number of progressive policies, including widening access to primary education, mass literacy campaigns, and public health initiatives. While these policies were working, the US worried about Somalia’s burgeoning relationship with the Soviet Union. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Somalia and Ethiopia became entangled in Cold War politics, until eventually the US invaded Somalia in 1993. This was done under the auspices of providing humanitarian relief, yet resulted in the massacre of Somali leaders, intellectuals, businesspeople and citizens. According to a New York Times article from December 1993, approximately 6,000 to 10,000 Somalis were killed by the US during a four month period. In 1994, the US withdrew, leaving Somalia in ruin. Fleeing the war and its aftermath, many Somalis came to the US, especially Minnesota. Since then, Somali Americans have faced persistent anti-Black racism and Islamophobia.
Somali Americans are not unique in this respect. Whether Haiti, Afghanistan, Libya or so many other countries Trump describes as “hellholes,” a similar pattern persists: the US (or another Western power) destabilizes a country or region abroad. This fuels mass migration. Those migrants move to the US (or another Western country) ready to make a life for themselves only to be met with discrimination and prejudice. This is the truth that Trump and his allies are either entirely ignorant of or, what’s more likely, hoping you’ll never figure out.
Resisting Myths, Lies and Scapegoating
Trump’s scapegoating is racist and xenophobic, but it’s also tactical. The real reason why Americans are struggling is due to wealth inequalities and a lack of robust social safety nets. The problems are material. Immigrants are simply an easy scapegoat that allows Trump to sidestep making any real changes, while continuing to profit from the status quo. It gives his supporters a concrete enemy to distract them from the real systematic problems that plague this country.
In the end, these myths marginalize immigrants and maintain an oppressive status quo for citizens. We need to move past them, and here’s three things we can do to achieve that:
First, those on the political left, especially elected officials, need to change how we defend the rights of immigrants. Arguing that “this is a nation of immigrants” or that immigrants deserve dignity is not enough. While those points are true, our arguments and messaging need to focus specifically on dismantling the myths that underlie the Trump administration’s scapegoating. To this end, we need to bring more attention to the ways that US intervention abroad has fueled the immigration crisis that Trump and his allies now exploit for political gain. We need to force conservatives to grapple with the specific histories of US involvement in Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan and so many other countries. Beyond the question of who built this country or appeals to human rights, we need to make clear that the US owes a debt to the people it has displaced. Immigration is not a privilege; it is just compensation for historical and contemporary wrongs.
Adopting this approach will be particularly important as the US pushes closer to regime change in Venezuela. If the history of US regime change is anything to go by, Trump’s unjust and illegal invasion will cause more suffering, destabilize the region and fuel more migration.
Second, we need to be more specific about how we talk about social inequalities and change. The reason why immigrants are so easily scapegoated is because the narrative is simple – ‘those people are responsible for your problems.’ We need to adopt a similar, but more truthful approach. For example, if Vice President Vance wants to blame immigrants for the affordability crisis at a Uline warehouse, then we should draw attention to the Uihlein family that owns that company. We should point out that they spend millions lobbying for less government regulation and against unions. They have given money to think tanks like the Foundation of Government Accountability that advocates for loosening child labor protections. We should point out that Elizabeth Uihlein blames the Affordable Care Act for giving young people the freedom to leave their employers at their own discretion.
Blaming immigrants is easy when the true culprits of social inequality are largely unknown to the public. We need to expose them. If Trump supporters want specific people to blame, then we should give them the real people who are actively working to grow their own wealth at the expense of the rest of us.
Third, we need to highlight policies that directly aim at tackling issues of affordability, healthcare and housing. This includes New York Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani’s proposal for city-owned grocery stores, Tennessee Representative Aftyn Behn’s call for more robust rent control and increasing wages, House Representative Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez’s advocacy for tuition-free public colleges, New Mexico’s no-cost universal childcare policy, Oregon’s statewide shelter program that helps people transition from homelessness into housing stability, congressional support for Medicare For All, among many other examples.
The Trump administration has to distract their constituents with scary boogeymen because they ultimately lack any solutions. This is why President Trump has to dismiss the affordability crisis as a “hoax.” This is why Vice President Vance – almost a year into the second Trump administration – is still blaming former President Biden for the current state of the economy. By contrast, there are Democrats, whether elected or running in 2026, with concrete plans designed to help the poor and middle class.
Republicans have been blaming immigrants since the 1990s. Yet despite spending billions on more militarized anti-immigrant policing, those issues persist. Immigrants are not the problem. But things won’t change unless we expose these lies, myths and scapegoating, and begin advocating for actual solutions. If we do this, then we can forge a better future for everyone.
Jordan Liz is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at San José State University. He specializes in issues of race, immigration and the politics of belonging.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.