Photo by Fibonacci Blue | CC BY 2.0
In an interview with CBS’s ’60 Minutes’, US President-elect Donald Trump highlighted some campaign promises that he actually plans to keep. Among others, he confirmed that he will build his promised wall on the Mexican border and deport up to three million undocumented migrants.
If the US is serious about kicking out the “bad hombres” from Mexico and Latin America, then it’s important to ask: who, in fact, are these people?
In Trump’s apocalyptic worldview, they’re a hoard of Latino “gang members” and “drug dealers” with “criminal records” who are invading America. But analysis reveals that image is far from reality.
What’s in a name?
First, Mexico and Latin America are not the only sources of immigration to the US. In fact, since 2009 more Mexicans have been leaving the US than coming to it, and China and India have since overtaken Mexico in flows of recent arrivals. Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa also now comprise a significant share of undocumented immigrants in the US.
Still, in his third presidential debate, Trump used Spanish to depict undocumented migrants as wicked lawbreakers. The perverse effect of the “bad hombres” quip is the vilification of Latinos in our own language – albeit with such humorously bad diction that it sounded more like bad hambres – “bad hunger”.
This bigotry is the hashtag version of an old and ugly American tradition. As early as 1829, Joel Poinsett,…