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      How a Storied Phrase Became a Partisan Battleground

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      A touchstone of political and social discourse, the nearly 100-year-old phrase “the American dream,” is being repurposed — critics say distorted — particularly by Republicans of color.Juan Ciscomani, a Republican who washed cars to help his Mexican immigrant father pay the bills and is now running for Congress in Arizona, has been leaning on a simple three-word phrase throughout his campaign — “the American dream.”To him, the American dream, a nearly 100-year-old idea weighted with meaning and memory, has become something not so much to aspire to but to defend from attack.President Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are, he says in one ad, “destroying the American dream” with “a border crisis, soaring inflation and schools that don’t teach the good things about America.”For decades, politicians have used the phrase “the American dream” to describe a promise of economic opportunity and upward mobility, of prosperity through hard work. It has been a promise so powerful that it drew immigrants from around the world, who went on to fulfill it generation after generation. Political figures in both parties employed the phrase to promote both their own policies and their own biographies.Now, a new crop of Republican candidates and elected officials are using the phrase in a different way, invoking the same promise but arguing in speeches, ads and mailings that the American dream is dying or in danger, threatened by what they see as rampant crime, unchecked illegal immigration, burdensome government regulations and liberal social policies. Many of these Republicans are people of color — including immigrants and the children of immigrants, for whom the phrase first popularized in 1931 has a deep resonance.To politicians of old, “the American dream” was a supremely optimistic rhetorical device, albeit one that often obscured the economic and racial barriers that made achieving it impossible for many. To the Republican candidates embracing it today, the phrase has taken on an ominous and more pessimistic tone, echoing the party’s leader, former President Donald J. Trump, who said in 2015 that “the American dream is dead.” In the same way that many Trump supporters have tried to turn the American flag into an emblem of the right, so too have these Republicans sought to claim the phrase as their own, repurposing it as a spinoff of the Make America Great Again slogan.A crowd at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in Tampa, Fla., waited for former President Donald J. Trump to speak.Todd Anderson for The New York TimesPoliticians have long warned that the American dream was slipping away, a note struck from time to time by former President Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton and other Democrats. What has changed is that some Republicans now cast the situation more starkly, using the dream-is-in-danger rhetoric as a widespread line of attack, arguing that Democrats have turned patriotism itself into something contentious.“Both parties used to celebrate the fact that America is an exceptional country — now you only have one that celebrates that fact,” said Jason Miyares, a Republican and the child of Cuban immigrants. The American dream was a part of his successful campaign to become Virginia’s first Latino attorney general.In Texas, Representative Mayra Flores, a Mexican immigrant who became the state’s first Latina Republican in Congress, ran an ad that declared, “Democrats are destroying the American dream.” Antonio Swad, an Italian-Lebanese immigrant running for a House seat in the Dallas suburbs, said in an ad that he washed dishes at the age of 15 before opening two restaurants, telling voters the American dream does not “come from a government handout.”More Coverage of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsLiz Cheney’s Lopsided Loss: The Republican congresswoman’s defeat in Wyoming exposed the degree to which former President Donald J. Trump still controls the party’s present — and its near future.2024 Hint: Hours after her loss, Ms. Cheney acknowledged that she was “thinking” about a White House bid. But her mission to thwart Donald J. Trump presents challenges.The ‘Impeachment 10’: With Ms. Cheney’s defeat, only two of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump remain.Alaska Races: Senator Lisa Murkowski and Sarah Palin appeared to be on divergent paths following contests that offered a glimpse at the state’s independent streak.Television ads for more than a dozen Republican candidates in statewide, House and Senate campaigns — more than half of whom are people of color — cite the phrase, according to AdImpact, the ad-tracking firm. Several other House hopefuls, many of them Latinas, frequently cite the words in social media posts, digital ads, campaign literature and speeches.“In Congress, I will fight to defend the American dream,” said Yesli Vega, a former police officer who is the daughter of civil-war refugees from El Salvador and who is running for a House seat in Virginia, posted on Twitter.“The American dream” was a marquee theme in two winning Republican campaigns in Virginia last year: the races by Winsome Earle-Sears, a Jamaica-born Marine veteran who is now the first woman of color to serve as the state’s lieutenant governor, and Mr. Miyares, the attorney general.“On the campaign trail, I used to say, if your family came to this country seeking hope there is a good chance that your family is a lot like my family, and it would be the biggest honor of my life to be your attorney general,” said Mr. Miyares.Attorney General Jason Miyares of Virginia during the inaugural celebration in January.Steve Helber/Associated PressThe Republicans relying on the phrase show the extent to which the party is diversifying its ranks and recruiting candidates with powerful come-from-behind stories. But historians and other scholars warn that some Republicans are distorting a defining American idea and turning it into an exclusionary political message.“The Republican Party is using it as a dog whistle,” said Christina Greer, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University. “They are saying here is the potential of what you can have, if we can exclude others from ‘stealing it’ from you.”Republicans dispute that their references to “the American dream” promote exclusion and say they are using the phrase the same way politicians have used it for decades — to signal hope and opportunity. “I think the left is far more pessimistic than Republicans are about the American dream,” said Representative Yvette Herrell, a New Mexico Republican who is Cherokee and the third Native American woman ever elected to Congress.But this latest iteration of the dream has become a rhetorical catchall for Republicans’ policy positions.Barbara Kirkmeyer, a Republican state lawmaker in Colorado running in a heated House race, embraces the American dream as the theme of her personal story. Ms. Kirkmeyer grew up on a dairy farm, the sixth of seven children in a family that often struggled. She paid her way through college by raising and selling a herd of eight milk cows, yearlings and heifer calves.The American dream, Ms. Kirkmeyer said, was not only about economic opportunity but freedom, connecting the words with Republican opposition to Covid-related mask mandates. “I don’t see the mandates as part of the American dream,” she said. “People felt that was an infringement on their rights and personal dreams.”The earliest mention in print of the words “American dream” appears to have been in a 1930 ad for a $13.50 marked-down bed spring from an American mattress company.Historians and economists, however, credit the writer James Truslow Adams with popularizing the phrase in his best seller published a year later in 1931, “The Epic of America.” His Depression-era definition was a “dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone.” To Mr. Adams, it was part of a liberal vision in which government was seen as a force to fight big business. His symbol of the American dream at the time was the Library of Congress.For decades, politicians have used the phrase the American dream to describe a promise of economic opportunity and upward mobility, of prosperity through hard work. Bettman, via Getty ImagesFor later generations, Mr. Adams’ phrase came to be defined by an image — a house with a white picket fence — as presidents, companies and popular culture pushed homeownership. But with the chances of owning a home diminishing after the 2008 economic crash, Democrats and Republicans once more sought to redefine it. Now, much of the phrase’s progressive history has been lost, as Republicans argue that big government is the enemy.“That has been the real shift,” said Sarah Churchwell, the author of a 2018 book, “Behold, America: The Entangled History of ‘America First’ and ‘the American Dream.’”The roots of this more conservative vision of the American dream can be traced to Ronald Reagan, who often invoked the phrase and also used it in his appeals to Latino voters, extolling family, religion and an opposition to government handouts. It was a strategy later followed by George W. Bush.“It married conservative values with economic opportunity: ‘We recognize you for your contribution to America and we will give you the opportunity to get ahead if you are willing to do the work,’” said Lionel Sosa, a retired media consultant in San Antonio who is a Republican and who created ads for Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush.Republicans still use the American dream in the way Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush did, underscoring a strong work ethic, Christian values and entrepreneurialism. But many Hispanic Republicans now add a harder edge — stressing that they came to the country legally, decrying “open borders” and calling for the completion of the U.S.-Mexico border wall.“In all the time we worked on it, we didn’t say anything having to do with building a wall,” Mr. Sosa said of the past messaging aimed at Hispanic Republicans. “There was no message that you have to be here legally or that if you are not here legally, we don’t want you here.”The politicization of the phrase comes as studies show the American public has become more pessimistic about achieving the American dream. Historians say that in recent years Republicans have been using the phrase far more frequently than Democrats in ads and speeches. While more than a dozen Republican candidates across the country cite the phrase in their TV ads this midterm season, only four Democrats have done so, according to AdImpact.One of the Democratic candidates who has relied on the theme in his ads is Shri Thanedar, an Indian American state lawmaker in Michigan and the Democratic nominee for a House seat. “We have ceded that ground to Republicans and other corporate politicians,” Mr. Thanedar said, referring to areluctance by some Democrats to emphasize the phrase.To Gabe Vasquez, a Democratic congressional candidate in Albuquerque, N.M., the American dream is about ensuring that the economic ladder “is there for everybody and that everyone can climb with you.”Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesGabe Vasquez, a Democrat who is facing Ms. Herrell in New Mexico in the fall, has also embraced the phrase. He tells supporters that his late grandfather — Javier Bañuelos, who taught himself to fix broken televisions with an old manual and eventually opened his own repair shop — made it possible for him to run for Congress. The American dream is not about buying a house, but ensuring that the economic ladder “is there for everybody and that everyone can climb with you,” he said.Yet even Democrats find themselves speaking of the dream as pessimistically as Republicans. Just as Republicans blame Democrats for destroying the American dream, Democrats believe the fault lies with Republicans. They say Republicans are making it harder to obtain by attacking the social safety net and blocking efforts to raise the minimum wage, and that they have co-opted the symbols of patriotism — including words like patriot — and turned them into partisan weapons.“That American dream,” Mr. Vasquez said, “is becoming a hallucination.” More

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      A Nigerian Street Vendor Is Beaten to Death in Italy as Witnesses Stand By

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      The killing, in a seaside town on the Adriatic, has shocked Italians because of its brutality and because of the indifference of those looking on.ROME — In May 2021 Alika Ogorchukwu, a 39-year-old Nigerian living in Italy, was hit by a car while he was riding his bicycle, an accident that forced him to use a crutch to move around.On Friday, an Italian man used the crutch to knock Mr. Ogorchukwu to the ground on a major shopping street in Civitanova Marche, a seaside town on the Adriatic Coast, before beating him to death, as a video of the assault shows and police officials confirmed. Moments earlier, Mr. Ogorchukwu, a street vendor, had unsuccessfully pitched his wares to the assailant and his girlfriend.The brutal, senseless murder — which was videotaped by witnesses and shared thousands of times on social media — has shocked Italians, stirred political bickering ahead of national elections in September and spawned fresh debate over racism in Italy, even though, for now, investigators do not believe that the crime was racially motivated.“Let’s condemn the fact itself and the behavior of people who stood by and watched a disabled person get killed with a crutch and filmed it,” instead of intervening, “it is shameful,” said Patrick Guobadia, the vice secretary of an association representing Nigerians in Italy.“This indifference is frightening,” he said.Editorials in major Italian newspapers wrote of the “dusk of civilization.” Politicians across the political spectrum denounced the crime, though concerns emerged that the murder could be used as a political sparring point in the upcoming election in which the right-wing coalition has already singled out immigration as an issue.Rocco Pennacchio, the archbishop of nearby Fermo, said in an interview Sunday in the Catholic newspaper l’Avvenire that he hoped that all the political parties would refrain from stirring such tensions for “a handful of votes.”Mr. Ogorchukwu was killed around 2 p.m. on Friday, shortly after he had approached the suspect, Filippo Ferlazzo, whose identity was confirmed by his lawyer, and his girlfriend to sell trinkets and beg for some change. After being rebuffed, Mr. Ogorchukwu walked away, followed almost immediately by the suspect, who assaulted him. Onlookers filmed the aggression, which lasted less than four minutes, but no one intervened.Charity Oriachi, the wife of Mr. Ogorchukwu, at his memorial on Saturday.Chiara Gabrielli/Associated PressMr. Ogorchukwu had moved to Italy about a decade ago, to join his wife, Charity Oriachi. They lived in the inland town of San Severino Marche, about an hour’s drive from the coast. Eight years ago, their son was born, said Francesco Mantella, a lawyer who has helped the family and is representing Ms. Oriachi. “Now that she’s alone, with a son, you can imagine how hard it will be,” he added.Mr. Ferlazzo, a 32-year-old factory worker, is being held on charges of homicide and robbery because he took Mr. Ogorchukwu’s cellphone after the episode. Matteo Luconi, the chief police investigator in Macerata overseeing the case, said in a telephone interview that an autopsy later this week would establish the cause of death. Nothing has emerged from investigations to suggest “elements of racial hatred,” he added. A statement issued by the police said the “motive for the murder” appeared to be traceable to “petty reasons.”In addition to its violence and the bystanders, the killing touched a nerve because the Marches region, where Civitanova is, has been the scene of heinous crimes against migrants. In February 2018, an Italian right-wing sympathizer shot and wounded six African immigrants in Macerata, some 19 miles inland from Civitanova Marche, marking the city as a bastion of intolerance. Two years earlier, a Nigerian man was killed in the city of Fermo, just south of Civitanova, after he tried to defend his wife from racist slurs.Italians have been leaving bouquets of flowers, potted plants and scribbled notes at the scene of the deadly beating. “Stop racism,” read one note.In an email, Mr. Ferlazzo’s lawyer, Roberta Bizzarri, said her client, his girlfriend and his mother all “felt pain” because of what had transpired, adding that Mr. Ferlazzo had “overt psychiatric disorders, a recognized borderline diagnosis.” She also said that “this very sad story” was “not a case of racism.”Fabrizio Ciarapica, the mayor of Civitanova Marche, met with Mr. Ogorchukwu’s widow on Saturday, and on Sunday, the municipal administration approved a motion to assist the family. Funds have been set aside to help pay for the funeral, and a bank account was opened for donations. “The community is always ready to extend a hand to those in need,” Mr. Ciarapica said in a statement sent on Sunday.The mayor also pledged to “protect the image and values of Civitanova, which has always been a civilized, welcoming, generous, peaceful and supportive city and which is dismayed and grieved by an affair foreign to its character and soul.”Mr. Guobadia, of the Nigerian association, said that an impromptu protest had been held Saturday by Nigerians living in the area but that a bigger demonstration was in the works for next weekend. “What happened could be called an act of underlying racism, or indifference, I can’t say,” he said. “But in any case, it is shameful.”Speaking to the Italian Sky News channel, Ms. Oriachi was distraught. “The pain is too much for me, I need justice,” she said. “I need justice.” More

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      Sometimes the Earth Makes the Rest of the Universe Look Very Good

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      Gail Collins: Bret, we should talk a bit about the passing of Donald Trump’s first wife, Ivana. Any first thoughts?Bret Stephens: A sad moment. She represented immigrant striving, something her former husband should have learned to appreciate — but didn’t. Did you know her?Gail: No, my interactions with The Donald, as Ivana called him, didn’t begin until around the time of their divorce, when I was covering city government and he was trying to squeeze some deals out of the Council.However, I was working then for New York tabloids and I have very vivid memories of the huge headlines on the front page — we called it “the wood” — when he was wrecking their marriage by cavorting with Marla Maples.Bret: Ah, yes: “‘Best Sex I’ve Ever Had,’” if I recall the New York Post headline correctly. If Edith Wharton were alive today she’d write a novel about the period called “The Age of Relative Innocence.”Gail: I know I don’t need to tell you this, but nobody was encouraging all that over-the-top coverage of his sexual adventures more than the man himself. Legend had it that when he finally got Ivana to step away, he asked his press people whether he could get back on the wood if he dumped Marla, too.Bret: Do you think John Bolton ever says to himself, “I’m the Marla Maples of Donald Trump’s national security advisers”? No wonder the coups Bolton suggests he planned didn’t come off.But speaking of getting back on the wood, does some Machiavellian part of you sorta hope Trump runs for president again?Gail: Well, the totally self-regarding part is certainly rooting for it. If anyone else gets the nomination it’s possible we’d have a modestly normal campaign, which would be good for the country but very bad for my career of making fun of politicians.Bret: If anyone other than Trump wins the G.O.P. nomination, that person will likely be the next president.Gail: That’s certainly an underlying Democratic concern but we have to rise above it. Otherwise it’s like those jerks who try to help their candidate by underwriting the campaigns of the most terrible, hate-mongering person on the other side just to improve their chances.Can’t think of a possible Republican nominee that’d actually be worse, but that’s really your department. Any way we’d look back with nostalgia on the Trump era?Bret: Just imagine how nostalgic we’ll be under President Josh Hawley. Even now, there are plenty of middle-of-the-road voters who are looking back on the Trump years and saying to themselves, “Sure, it was crazy-town in the White House, but inflation was low, the stock market kept rising, gas was affordable, and Russia wasn’t invading its neighbors.” If Joe Biden doesn’t turn his administration’s fortunes around, Democrats are going to be facing a tsunami of voter fury.My advice to the president is to triangulate, triangulate, triangulate. What’s yours?Gail: I dunno — kidnap Joe Manchin, lock him in a tower and make it clear he’ll be forced to watch reruns of “My Mother the Car,” until he comes around on Biden’s priorities?Bret: I think we need an alternative plan, Gail ….Gail: Manchin is really sitting on the Democratic agenda, particularly when it comes to global warming. I know he’s in a very tight political situation in West Virginia, but he’s going to go down in history as the guy who helped make the planet a much worse place for future generations.Bret: As the great Tip O’Neill famously said, “All politics is local.” That sentence pretty much sums up everything Democrats got wrong in Congress over the last 18 months.Gail: As it stands, it looks like Biden’s best hope is to get passage of what some are now calling Build Back Manchin — which so far seems to be some modest reforms on drug pricing.Breaks my heart, but am I right in suspecting it makes you do a happy dance?Bret: Well, I’m glad Manchin stood his ground on spending, because inflation would be even worse today if he hadn’t. Now it’s time for Biden to tack right on policy issues like fracking, border security and crime; go hard on Republicans on guns and abortion; then come up with a plan to help Ukraine defeat the Russian army quickly, before Moscow can use energy to blackmail Western Europe in the dead of winter.Maybe Biden can start by having Bill Clinton stop by the White House to offer some pointers on regaining the trust of the moderate center. Or is there someone else he should be talking to?Gail: Well, um, he should talk with someone who disagrees with you about fracking.One critical problem for the economy is the shortage of workers, and that’s in part because many mothers can’t find any safe or affordable place to leave their kids while they’re working. If Biden wants to change the subject, he should get back to high-quality, affordable early childhood education.I know that’s not the direction you were hoping to travel, but couldn’t resist.Bret: If Biden proposed something modest but attainable in that vein he might score a legislative victory, just as he did with the bipartisan gun bill that Senators Chris Murphy and John Cornyn hashed out last month. We also need more immigrants to make up for the labor shortfalls. How about raising the annual refugee cap to 750,000 from the current 125,000 while doing more to curb illegal immigration? That would combine humanity and good economic sense with political savvy.Gail: Sounds good in theory but I’d want to know a lot more about how that curbing of illegal immigration was going to work. No question that we need an efficient border operation, a goal that has eluded every recent president. But nothing good is accomplished by spreading terror in immigrant communities around the country.Bret: Agree. And by opening the door much wider to legal migration, we also reduce incentives for illegal and sometimes fatal border crossings, which in turn eases the pressure on border security.Gail: Speaking of immigration … there’s an upcoming Republican Senate primary in Arizona where that seems to be a big issue. One of the leading Republican candidates, Blake Masters, once called for “unrestricted immigration” — back when he was a youthful libertarian.Bret: He should have stopped there.Gail: And also a guy who in his youth derided American entry into World War I.Bret: Or even there.Gail: And II.Bret: Oh dear.Gail: He’s certainly a walking reminder of how important it is to remind young people on a daily basis that anything you put on the web can come back to haunt you. But here in 2022 he’s the candidate who said the problem of gun violence was all about “Black people, frankly.” And I hardly need mention he’s been endorsed by Donald Trump.This is for the seat that currently belongs to a Democrat, Mark Kelly. So my two questions are: How would you want Arizona to go if it’s a Masters-Kelly contest, and any other nightmare party primaries you see on the horizon?Bret: I wish Arizona still produced intelligent and independent-minded Republicans in the mold of Barry Goldwater, Jon Kyl, John McCain and Jeff Flake. Now it’s just a freak show. I’ll root for Kelly, but it’s a shame that as a senator the formerly cool astronaut has been such a space cadet.Gail: I love the begrudging way you think.Bret: The other race I’m looking at is the one in Wyoming, where Liz Cheney is hoping enough Democrats and independents will vote in the Republican primary to help her defeat her primary rival. I hope she does. She represents my idea of what political courage looks like.Gail: Agreed, yet also very interested to see how her more liberal Democratic constituents work out this problem: Do you reward an elected official for showing extreme courage while voting against practically everything you’d want Congress to do?Bret: Before we go, Gail, I neglected to mention the one government agency whose budget I would immediately double: NASA. I spent some of last week geeking out over the images that the Webb telescope has been beaming back to earth from its cosmic perch. It’s a good reminder that this country is still capable of doing good and mighty things.Gail: Such a jaw-dropping reminder that as self-obsessed as we tend to get, we’re hardly the center of the universe.Bret: Very true. And you’ve reminded me of a few lines of verse from my all-time favorite poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, the only writer who has ever tempted me to truly believe in God:Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes!The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Las elecciones de Texas que reflejan el debate sobre migración en el Partido Demócrata

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      La tensa elección de hoy en el estado refleja la división nacional que hay al interior del partido en torno a las cuestiones fronterizas.LAREDO, Texas — Apenas un mes después de que el presidente Joe Biden llegó a la Casa Blanca con la promesa de revertir las políticas del gobierno de Donald Trump con la intención de implementar una estrategia más compasiva en torno a la migración, Henry Cuellar, representante demócrata por el sur de Texas, comenzó encender las alarmas.Advirtió que la cantidad de migrantes que buscaban entrar al país aumentaría y al poco tiempo dio a conocer fotografías de niños que dormían bajo mantas de aluminio en un abarrotado centro de procesamiento de migrantes en su distrito, ubicado en la frontera de Estados Unidos con México.Ahora Cuellar, de 66 años, es uno de los críticos del gobierno más consistentes en el tema migratorio, ya que ha aparecido en Fox News y en ocasiones coincide con los republicanos, cuando dice que los inmigrantes llegan a raudales a Estados Unidos porque creen que “la frontera está abierta”.Sus críticas se han encontrado con la feroz resistencia de Jessica Cisneros, de 28 años, una abogada migratoria progresista que está tratando de desbancar a Cuellar en una segunda vuelta demócrata este martes.Al igual que otras contiendas de las elecciones primarias demócratas, esta batalla es una guerra subsidiaria por la dirección más amplia de un partido que se encuentra enfrentado por el ala moderada y el ala progresista. Sin embargo, este caso en específico encapsula las fuertes tensiones que la cuestión migratoria genera al interior del partido.En entrevistas con líderes y electores demócratas en el Distrito 28 del Congreso de Texas, que abarca desde Laredo hasta San Antonio, muchos dijeron sentirse sumamente frustrados tanto con los demócratas como con los republicanos que usan la frontera como trasfondo político, pero que no han logrado enmendar las leyes migratorias del país, combatir el narcotráfico ni mejorar las vías legales a la ciudadanía.Y a muchos les preocupa que los demócratas carezcan de un mensaje contundente y coherente para enfrentar a los republicanos, que parecen estar cada vez más decididos a hacer de una “invasión” de migrantes el tema principal de las elecciones intermedias.Cuellar suele estar en el centro del debate. Sus seguidores dicen que solo está tratando de equilibrar a las facciones demócratas opuestas en este tema, mientras que el Partido Republicano abandonó casi del todo el debate centrado en las políticas para enfocarse a los llamados contra la migración. Sin embargo, a Cuellar lo critican también los demócratas, a quienes les preocupa que suene demasiado republicano, ya que le interesa más la aplicación de la ley que ser compasivo.Maxine Rebeles, maestra y activista migratoria, en la sede de campaña de Jessica Cisneros en Laredo, Texas.Kaylee Greenlee para The New York Times“Le está abriendo la puerta a algo que puede ponerse muy muy feo muy muy rápido”, dijo Maxine Rebeles, una maestra de secundaria y activista migratoria de la coalición por los derechos de los migrantes No Border Wall en Laredo.Afuera de una casilla electoral abarrotada en una estación de bomberos de Laredo, donde una ligera brisa daba un respiro en un día abrasador, Cuellar rechazó las críticas de lo que él denominó la extrema izquierda. Afirmó que estaba a favor de las propuestas migratorias para ayudar a los trabajadores y las vías a la ciudadanía para aquellos que fueron traídos sin documentos a Estados Unidos en la infancia.No obstante, Cuellar, cuyo hermano es el alguacil del condado de Webb, afirmó que también estaba atento a las necesidades de los líderes comunitarios y las autoridades migratorias en su distrito, quienes habían dado a conocer su preocupación por la falta de recursos para procesar el mayor número de migrantes que llegaban al país.“Me manifiesto en contra de los republicanos que quieren una valla o un muro, manifiesto mi desacuerdo cuando dicen que es una invasión; no es una invasión”, dijo Cuellar mientras charlaba con sus simpatizantes. Sin embargo, agregó: “Estoy entre la espada y la pared, ya que no estoy a favor de ningún bando”.Cuellar, quien está librando la batalla política de su carrera, está siendo investigado por el FBI, aunque los funcionarios no han dado a conocer los detalles.Cuando se le preguntó sobre si los demócratas carecían de un mensaje migratorio cohesivo, estuvo de acuerdo. Dijo que lo que más le preocupaba era que los republicanos estaban llenando ese vacío con el mensaje de que los demócratas no actuaban con mano dura contra la delincuencia.Cuando se le hizo la misma pregunta, Cisneros criticó a los miembros del Congreso que no están en sintonía con el gobierno de Biden, incluyendo a Cuellar, de quien dijo que recurría al tipo de argumentos de derecha que habían motivado los tiroteos masivos de supremacistas blancos en Búfalo, Nueva York, y El Paso, Texas.El representante Henry Cuellar agradeció a un voluntario de la campaña afuera de un lugar de votación temprana en Laredo, Texas.Kaylee Greenlee para The New York Times“Henry Cuellar está recurriendo a estas líneas de ataques xenófobos que solo nos hacen el objeto de ataques”, dijo Cisneros, quien aseguró que su contrincante era “el demócrata favorito de Trump”. La candidata añadió que aportaría su propia experiencia profesional como abogada migratoria para configurar la política fronteriza.Durante años, los demócratas conservadores que representan a las comunidades fronterizas, incluido Cuéllar, han tratado de lograr un equilibrio: defender los beneficios de la inmigración para el comercio, los negocios y el tejido social de sus comunidades de mayoría latina, mientras hablaban con dureza sobre la necesidad de aumentar los fondos para la vigilancia y la aplicación de la ley a lo largo de la frontera sur.Pero ese equilibrio se ha desvanecido. Los intentos de aprobar leyes migratorias bipartidistas han fracasado durante décadas y el lenguaje y las políticas de mano dura contra la inmigración se han convertido en planteamientos centrales de los republicanos desde el ascenso del expresidente Trump.En este ciclo de mitad de mandato, los republicanos han invertido casi 70 millones de dólares en 325 anuncios únicos sobre seguridad fronteriza e inmigración, muchos de los cuales describen condiciones distópicas en la frontera sur del país y varios utilizan el término “invasión”, según la empresa de seguimiento de anuncios AdImpact.Los demócratas, por el contrario, solo han gastado ocho millones de dólares en 46 anuncios sobre inmigración, y uno de ellos de Cuellar atacaba a Cisneros por sus políticas de inmigración progresistas que, según él, reducirían los puestos de trabajo de los agentes fronterizos y conducirían a “fronteras abiertas”.Jessica Cisneros, la contrincante de Cuellar, dijo que aportaría su experiencia como abogada especializada en inmigración a la hora de diseñar la política fronteriza.Kaylee Greenlee para The New York TimesAl principio, los demócratas parecían inclinarse a la izquierda en respuesta a la dura postura del gobierno Trump en materia de inmigración. Durante las primarias presidenciales de 2020, la mayoría de los candidatos respaldaron una política de despenalización de los cruces fronterizos. Pero desde entonces, algunos en el partido y en las organizaciones proinmigrantes han criticado lo que ven como un retroceso en el tema mientras los republicanos redoblan la apuesta.Marisa Franco, que formó parte del comité de inmigración de un grupo de trabajo de unidad demócrata formado por el presidente Biden y el senador por Vermont Bernie Sanders, califica la postura del partido sobre la inmigración de “capitulación”.“Los republicanos están proponiendo soluciones, y en lugar de contrarrestar sus horribles soluciones, los demócratas no hablan de ello o legitiman por defecto el punto de vista de que la inmigración y los inmigrantes son malos”, dijo Franco, directora ejecutiva de Mijente, un grupo progresista de defensa de los latinos. “Ante cosas realmente desagradables, se escabullen y huyen”.Un ejemplo particularmente evidente de las divisiones demócratas es el Título 42, la política de la era de la pandemia promulgada por el gobierno Trump que rechaza rápidamente a casi todos los migrantes que buscan asilo en la frontera.El gobierno de Biden había mantenido esta política durante más de un año, pero trató de suspenderla a principios de este año, cuando se suavizaron otras restricciones por la pandemia. Esa decisión desencadenó una oleada de demandas y un desfile de demócratas que intentaban distanciarse del presidente. El viernes pasado, un juez federal mantuvo la política.Las críticas al intento del gobierno Biden de suspender el Título 42 han venido de miembros demócratas del Congreso que se enfrentan a duras luchas por la reelección en todo el país, entre ellos Cuellar y los senadores Catherine Cortez Masto por Nevada, Raphael Warnock por Georgia y Maggie Hassan por Nuevo Hampshire.Y los senadores Kyrsten Sinema y Mark Kelly, por Arizona, ambos demócratas, han criticado repetidamente el plan del gobierno de Biden para levantar la política y presentaron el mes pasado un proyecto de ley para impedirla sin un plan detallado para detener el esperado aumento de migrantes en la frontera.La inacción podría resultar costosa este año electoral: algunas organizaciones que ayudaron a ganar estados decisivos para los demócratas en 2018 y 2020 no tienen planes de tocar puertas o llamar a los votantes esta temporada de mitad de periodo, porque están enojados con la postura del partido sobre la inmigración.Entre ellos está Lucha, un grupo de defensa en Arizona ampliamente acreditado por ayudar a asegurar las victorias de Sinema y Kelly, los primeros senadores demócratas que representan al estado en décadas.“Para ese increíble esfuerzo y esa increíble participación, hemos obtenido resultados muy mínimos”, dijo Tomas Robles, su codirector ejecutivo. “Los demócratas están cayendo en la misma trampa: hay una falta de voluntad política y de coraje”.En Laredo, una ciudad de unos 261.000 habitantes en la que las tiendas y los parques del centro parecen casi fundirse con la frontera, la lucha migratoria del país es personal. Los miembros de la coalición apartidista No Border Wall no reparan en señalar que han rechazado con éxito cuatro intentos por parte de gobiernos demócratas y republicanos de construir un muro en la región.Pero los demócratas de Laredo, unidos en su batalla contra el muro, están divididos en su apoyo a Cuéllar y Cisneros y cómo debe abordarse la migración. Cuellar sigue el camino emprendido por el gobierno de Obama, que se basó en una agresiva estrategia de aplicación de la ley en la frontera con el fin de atraer el apoyo de los republicanos a una vía de acceso a la ciudadanía para millones de migrantes que viven en el país sin residencia legal.Sus partidarios tienden a suscribir la misma filosofía, o al menos a aceptarla. “Es mucho más conservador de lo que yo preferiría”, dijo Melissa R. Cigarroa, presidenta de la junta directiva del Centro de Estudios Internacionales de Río Grande. “Pero no deja de trabajar por la comunidad”.Pero los partidarios de Cisneros argumentan que el énfasis en la seguridad fronteriza no ha ayudado a crear vías legales hacia la ciudadanía. También, argumentan, hace poco para contrarrestar un enfoque de “nosotros contra ellos” impulsado por los republicanos que ha puesto a los solicitantes de asilo y a los migrantes en peligro. “Cisneros viene de ese lado, de ayudar a las familias”, dijo Juan Livas, activista de inmigración y cofundador de la Alianza de Inmigrantes de Laredo.Agentes de Aduanas y Protección Fronteriza y miembros de la Guardia Nacional de Texas están estacionados de forma intermitente a lo largo del río Grande, que fluye entre Estados Unidos y México, en Laredo, TexasKaylee Greenlee para The New York TimesLos cismas reflejan la división nacional entre los demócratas, mientras que los republicanos se han mantenido en gran medida unidos a favor de políticas duras destinadas a limitar la inmigración.“Es muy decepcionante, desmoralizante e incluso exasperante”, dijo el representante demócrata de Illinois, Jesús García, quien ha promovido proyectos de ley de reforma migratoria. “Dijimos que si ganábamos la mayoría en ambas cámaras se produciría la reforma migratoria”.Eso no ha sucedido, dijo, y el partido, en cambio, ha asumido una postura defensiva. “Es un cálculo político, y creo que es un error”, dijo.Azi Paybarah More

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      In Texas, a Proxy Fight Over Democrats’ Stance on Immigration

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      LAREDO, Texas — Just a month after President Biden took office, pledging to roll back Trump-era policies in an attempt to take a more humane approach to immigration, Representative Henry Cuellar, a Democrat from South Texas, began to sound an alarm.He warned that the number of migrants seeking to enter the country would rise, and soon released photos of children sleeping under tinfoil blankets at a crowded migrant processing facility in his district at the edge of the U.S.-Mexico border.Now Mr. Cuellar, 68, has become one of the administration’s most consistent critics on immigration, appearing on Fox News and at times echoing Republicans, saying immigrants are pouring into the United States because they believe “that the border is open.”His criticism has been met with fierce resistance from Jessica Cisneros, 28, a progressive immigration lawyer who is trying to unseat him in a Democratic runoff on Tuesday. Like other Democratic primary contests, their race is a proxy battle for the broader direction of a party that is being tugged between moderate and progressive wings. But in particular, it encapsulates the acute tensions within the party on immigration.In interviews with Democratic leaders and voters in Texas’ 28th Congressional District, which stretches from Laredo to San Antonio, many expressed a deep frustration with both national Democrats and Republicans who use the border as a political backdrop but have failed to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws, combat the drug trade or improve legal pathways to citizenship.And many worried that Democrats lack a forceful and coherent message when facing Republicans who have appeared increasingly intent on portraying a migrant “invasion,” making it a marquee issue of the midterm elections.Mr. Cuellar is often at the center of the debate. His supporters say he is simply trying to balance competing Democratic factions on the issue, as the G.O.P. has largely abandoned policy-centered debate in favor of anti-immigrant appeals. But he is criticized just as much by Democrats concerned he sounds too much like a Republican, focused on enforcement rather than a humanitarian approach.Maxine Rebeles, a middle-school teacher and immigration activist, at Jessica Cisneros’s campaign office in Laredo.Kaylee Greenlee for The New York Times“He is opening the door to something that can get really, really ugly, really, really quick,” said Maxine Rebeles, a middle-school teacher and immigrant activist with the No Border Wall immigrant rights coalition based in Laredo.Outside a bustling polling station at a Laredo firehouse, where a light breeze provided respite on a sweltering day, Mr. Cuellar rejected the criticism from what he called the far left. He said he favored immigration proposals to help workers, and pathways to citizenship for people who were brought to the country illegally at a young age.But Mr. Cuellar, whose brother is the Webb County sheriff, said he also was attuned to the needs of community leaders and immigration officials in his district who have voiced concerns about the lack of resources to process increases in arriving migrants. “I speak against the Republicans who want a fence or a wall, I speak against them when they call this an invasion — it’s not an invasion,” Mr. Cuellar said in between bantering with supporters. But, he added, “I am in the middle — speaking against both sides.”Mr. Cuellar, who is in the political fight of his career, remains part of an open F.B.I. investigation, though officials have not released any details.Asked whether Democrats were lacking a cohesive message on immigration, Mr. Cuellar agreed. He said he was most worried that Republicans were filling that vacuum by painting Democrats as soft on crime.Asked the same question, Ms. Cisneros took a shot at members of Congress out of step with the Biden administration, like Mr. Cuellar, who she said was playing into the kind of right-wing talking points that had fueled white supremacist mass shootings in Buffalo and El Paso.Representative Henry Cuellar thanked a campaign volunteer outside an early voting location in Laredo, Texas.Kaylee Greenlee for The New York Times“Henry Cuellar is pivoting to these xenophobic lines of attacks that just create a target on our backs,” said Ms. Cisneros, who called Mr. Cuellar “Trump’s favorite Democrat.” She added that she would bring her own professional experience as an immigration lawyer to bear when shaping border policy.For years, conservative Democrats who represent border communities, like Mr. Cuellar, have sought to strike a balance: espousing the benefits of immigration for trade, business and the social fabric of their predominantly Latino communities, while talking tough on the need to increase funds for surveillance and law enforcement along the southern border.But that balance has slipped out of reach. Attempts to pass bipartisan immigration laws have failed for decades, and harsh anti-immigration language and policies have become central Republican approaches since the rise of former President Donald J. Trump.Republicans in this midterm cycle have poured nearly $70 million into 325 unique ads on border security and immigration, many painting dystopian conditions at the nation’s southern border and several using language of “invasion,” according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.Democrats, by contrast, have spent only $8 million on 46 ads on immigration — and one from Mr. Cuellar attacked Ms. Cisneros for progressive immigration policies he claimed would cut border enforcement officers’ jobs and lead to “open borders.”Jessica Cisneros, Mr. Cuellar’s opponent, said she would bring her experience as an immigration lawyer to bear when shaping border policy.Kaylee Greenlee for The New York TimesDemocrats at first seemed to move to the left in response to the Trump administration’s harsh stance on immigration issues. During the 2020 presidential primary, most candidates backed a policy of decriminalizing border crossings. But since then, some in the party and in pro-immigrant organizations have criticized what they see as backtracking on the issue as Republicans double down.Marisa Franco, who served on the immigration committee of a Democratic unity task force formed by President Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, calls the party’s stance on immigration “capitulation.”“Republicans are putting out solutions — and instead of countering their horrible solutions, Democrats are either not talking about it or they’re by default legitimizing the point of view that immigration and immigrants are bad,” said Ms. Franco, the executive director of Mijente, a liberal Latino advocacy group. “In the face of really nasty stuff, they’re ducking and running.”Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More

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      The MAGA Formula Is Getting Darker and Darker

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      The chilling amalgam of Christian nationalism, white replacement theory and conspiratorial zeal — from QAnon to the “stolen” 2020 election — has attracted a substantial constituency in the United States, thanks in large part to the efforts of Donald Trump and his advisers. By some estimates, adherents of these overlapping movements make up as much as a quarter or even a third of the electorate. Whatever the scale, they are determined to restore what they see as the original racial and religious foundation of America.“While these elements are not new,” Robert Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute, wrote by email, “Donald Trump wove them together and brought them out into the open. Indeed, the MAGA formula — the stoking of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment while making nativist appeals to the Christian right — could accurately be described as a white Christian nationalist strategy from the beginning.”I asked Katherine Stewart, the author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism,” how much Christian nationalism and the great replacement theory intersect. “The answer is complex,” Stewart said. “There is definitely a wing of the Christian nationalist movement that overlaps with the Great Replacement theory and demographic paranoia in general.”At the same time, however, she continued, “there are other wings of the movement that depend less on explicitly racialized thinking and whose concerns are centered more on religious and cultural paranoia. Christian nationalism is making significant inroads among some Latino communities, for example, and there the argument is not that a preferred racial group is being replaced but that a preferred religious and cultural value system (with supposed economic implications) is under threat.”Instead of Christian nationalism, Stewart prefers the use of “religious nationalism,” which she describes asa reactionary, authoritarian ideology that centers its grievances on a narrative of lost national greatness and believes in the indispensability of the “right” religion in recovering that lost greatness. This mind-set always involves a narrative of unjust persecution at the hands of alien or “un-American” groups. The specific targets may shift. Some focus their fears on the “homosexual agenda”; others target Americans of color or nonwhite immigrant groups; still others identify the menace with religious minorities such as Muslims, Jews and secular “elites,” or perceived threats against gender hierarchy and sexual order. And of course, many take an all-of-the-above approach.According to some scholars, there are two versions of Christian nationalism, one more threatening to the social order than the other.Ruth Braunstein, a professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut and the author of the 2021 paper “The ‘Right’ History: Religion, Race, and Nostalgic Stories of Christian America,” wrote by email that Christian nationalism can be describedas adherence to a mythical vision of the United States as a “Christian nation” that must be protected and preserved. This mythology has two dimensions: it offers an account of American history that frames the country’s founding as sacred and rooted in Christian (or Judeo-Christian) values; and it defines a “real” or “good” American today as someone committed to these same values.Within that context, Braunstein continued:We can see how the great replacement theory overlaps with Christian nationalism. Both view some specific population as “real” Americans, whether that is defined explicitly as white Christians or in the more vague and coded language of “real” or “native born” or “legacy” Americans. And both frame demographic change as threats to both that population and to the country’s essential character. Finally, although not all flavors of Christian nationalism include a conspiratorial element, some versions share with replacement theory an imagined cabal of nefarious elites — often Jews, communists/socialists, or globalists — who are intentionally promoting racial and/or religious diversity in order to diminish white Christian power.Braunstein distinguishes between two variants of Christian nationalism. One she calls “white Christian nationalism” and the other “colorblind Judeo-Christian nationalism.”The first, according to Braunstein, “explicitly fuses whiteness, Christianity, and Americanness,” leading to the conclusion that “white Christians alone embody the values on which a healthy democracy rests; and as such, white Christians alone are suited to hold positions of social influence and political power.”In contrast, she continued, colorblind Judeo-Christian nationalismeither ignores race or uses colorblind language to describe ideal Americanness. This has become the predominant form of Christian nationalism among mainstream conservatives. And for many conservatives, like members of the Tea Party that I studied for several years, the invocation of colorblind Judeo-Christian nationalism is intended to distinguish them from groups on the racist right.Why have Christian nationalism and replacement theory moved so quickly to center stage? Robert Jones of P.R.R.I. suggested it was “twin shocks to the system” delivered during the first two decades of this century: “the election and re-election of our first Black president and the sea change of no longer being a majority-white Christian nation.” Both of these developments, Jones wrote,happened simultaneously between 2008 and 2016. White Christians went from 54 percent to 47 percent in that period, down to 44 percent today. This set the stage for Trump and the emergence of full-throated white Christian nationalism. Trump exchanged the dog whistle for the megaphone.Racial and ethnic resentment has grown far beyond the political fringes, Jones argued, citing levels of agreement in P.R.R.I. polling with the statement “Immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.” Among all voters, according to Jones, 29 percent believe that immigrants are invading our country; among Republicans, it’s 60 percent; among Democrats, 11 percent; among QAnon believers, 65 percent; among white evangelicals, 50 percent; and among white non-college voters, as pollsters put it, 43 percent.Not only that, Jones notes:White Americans who agree that “God has granted America a special role in human history” (a softer measure of Christian nationalism) are more than twice as likely as those who disagree with that statement to believe that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” (28 percent vs. 11 percent). And White Americans who agree that “God intended America to be a promised land for European Christians” (a harder measure of Christian nationalism) are four times as likely as those who disagree with that statement to believe that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” (43 percent vs. 10 percent). And white Americans who believe that “Immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic values” are more than five times as likely as those who disagree with that statement to believe that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” (45 percent vs. 8 percent).In their January 2022 paper, “Christian Nationalism and Political Violence: Victimhood, Racial Identity, Conspiracy, and Support for the Capitol Attacks,” Miles T. Armaly of the University of Mississippi and David T. Buckley and Adam M. Enders, both of the University of Louisville, argue: “Religious ideologies like Christian nationalism should be associated with support for violence, conditional on several individual characteristics that can be inflamed by elite cues.” Those characteristics are “perceived victimhood, reinforcing racial and religious identities, and support for conspiratorial information sources.”“It’s unlikely that a single orientation or one belief was promoting the type of violent action we witnessed in Buffalo or the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021,” Enders wrote by email. “It’s a toxic blend of extremist orientations, such as Christian nationalism, racism, some expressions of populism and conspiracism, for example, that edges individuals closer to supporting violence.”Enders went on:Christian nationalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, are all about identity conflict — who is morally virtuous and more deserving, who’s “normal” and even what it means to be an American. Each of these orientations is also characterized by an extreme disdain or fear of the “other.” One might look to Christianity for deeper ties between the orientations, but I think the reality is that conspiracy-minded individuals, like the accused Buffalo shooter, can find connections between anything. He saw America as a white, heterosexual, Christian country that was becoming less white, heterosexual, and Christian, thereby threatening (his perception of) the American way of life, which was his way of life. But, racism, sexism, etc. do not have any inherent connection to a desire to build a Christian nation-state.In a separate paper, Enders wrote that he and other scholars have found thatconspiracy theories, of which great replacement theory is an example, are oftentimes undergirded by antisocial personality traits, such as the dark triad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) and a predisposition toward conflict. If you combine all of these dispositions and traits and dial them up to 10, that’s when you’re most likely to find support for violence, which is correlated with (but not determinative of) behavioral violence.Armaly wrote by email that “between 25-32 percent of white Americans support some Christian nationalist ideas. We use six questions to assess the degree to which one supports Christian nationalist ideals,” including agreement or disagreement with “the federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation” and “the success of the United States is part of God’s plan.” Around 32 percent of respondents endorse at least four statements, Armaly wrote, “and 25 percent endorse at least five statements.”Armaly noted that of “the major predictors of support for violence — perceived victimhood, attachment to one’s whiteness, racial animus toward blacks, support for authoritarianism, support for populism, and past or current military service — all, save for military service, are present in the accused Buffalo shooter’s written statement.Buckley wrote by email that6 percent of whites, 11.5 percent of white evangelicals, and 17.7 percent of white weekly church goers fall into the joint top quartile of justification of violence, Christian nationalist beliefs, perceived victimhood, white identity, and support for QAnon. That would represent millions of individuals. It also represents a far greater share of the white American population than surveys find when testing Muslim-American support for terrorism.Christian nationalism, white replacement theory and conspiracy preoccupation overlap, although each has unique characteristics.On May 9, The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released an illuminating study, “Immigration Attitudes and Conspiratorial Thinkers,” based on 4,173 interviews with adults age 18 and over, which breaks down some of the components of hard-line thinking on the right.The A.P. and NORC created two categories, “high conspiratorial thinkers” and “low conspiratorial thinkers,” based on agreement or disagreement with four statements:1) events are the product of plots executed in secret, 2) events are directed by a small group of powerful people, 3) (those people) are unknown to voters and 4) (they) control the outcome of big events like wars, recessions, and elections. The top 25 percent were placed in the high conspiracy category and the remaining 75 percent in the low conspiracy category.Comparison of the two categories of conspiratorial thinkers revealed sharp differences, according to the report:Seven times as many high conspiratorial thinkers agree that our lives are being controlled by plots hatched in secret places (85 percent vs. 11 percent) and that big events like wars and the outcomes of elections are controlled by small groups of people working in secret (89 percent vs. 13 percent) than their low conspiratorial counterparts. High conspiratorial thinkers believe the people who run the country are not known to the voters at triple the rate of the rest of the general population (94 percent vs. 31 percent), and they are about twice as likely to agree that a few people will always run the country (96 percent vs. 48 percent).Among those ranked high in conspiratorial thinking, 42 percent agreed that there is a group of people trying to replace native-born Americans and that native-born Americans are losing economic, political and cultural influence to immigrants, compared with 8 percent of low conspiracy thinkers.In the case of white replacement theory, the report asked two questions: “There is a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views” (agree or disagree), and “How concerned are you that native-born Americans are losing their economic, political, and cultural influence in this country because of the growing population of immigrants?”The survey found significant patterns in cable news choice among those whobelieve in both the questions measuring Replacement Theory. Belief in Replacement Theory is much higher among OANN/Newsmax viewers (45 percent) and Fox News viewers (31 percent) than it is among CNN (13 percent) or MSNBC viewers (11 percent).Who are the people who fall into the high conspiracy theory category? “Nearly 6 in 10 white high conspiratorial thinkers identify as Republicans,” the report says, “and more than half voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.” Based on the racial resentment scale, the survey found that 55 percent of white high conspiratorial thinkers score in the top 25th percentile of racial resentment, compared with 21 percent of white low conspiratorial thinkers.Samuel Perry, a sociologist at the University of Oklahoma who has written extensively about Christian nationalism with Andrew Whitehead, a sociologist at Indiana University, observed in an email that “there is tremendous overlap between Christian nationalism and The Great Replacement theory.”Perry and Whitehead have found:White Americans who affirm Christian nationalist views are quite concerned with whites losing their majority status in the United States. They are also very concerned with low birthrates and believe that we need to return to a day when Americans had more babies. This is related to their fears of immigration and cultural change. White Christian nationalism is also powerfully related with views that true patriots may need to resort to physical violence to save the nation, because they believe the current situation has become so dire.Whitehead elaborated in his own email:Racism is intimately intertwined with white Christian nationalism, and so the great replacement theory is a part of that intersection. We find in study after study that when white Americans strongly embrace Christian nationalism — an ethno-religious political ideology that advocates a close fusion between a particular expression of Christianity and American civic life — they are more likely to (1) fear a time in the future where whites are no longer the majority, (2) oppose interracial marriage, (3) oppose transracial adoption, (4) assume Black Americans are biologically inferior, (5) believe police violence toward Black Americans is warranted, and (6) show more tolerance for “old-fashioned racists” compared to other stigmatized groups.Joseph Baker, a sociologist at East Tennessee State University who together with Perry and Whitehead wrote the paper “Keep America Christian (and White): Christian Nationalism, Fear of Ethnoracial Outsiders, and Intention to Vote for Donald Trump in the 2020 Presidential Election,” noted:Christian nationalist views and xenophobia are very highly correlated with one another. Specifically, when Americans score highly on a comprehensive measure of xenophobia that includes perceptions of racial, economic, criminal, and cultural threat from immigrants, they nearly always also scored highly on a measure of Christian nationalism.Baker cited a statement issued in the summer of 2019 by James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, after Dobson visited the Mexican American border.Dobson’s statement:I can only report that without an overhaul of the law and the allocation of resources, millions of illegal immigrants will continue flooding to this great land from around the world. Many of them have no marketable skills. They are illiterate and unhealthy. Some are violent criminals. Their numbers will soon overwhelm the culture as we have known it, and it could bankrupt the nation. America has been a wonderfully generous and caring country since its founding. That is our Christian nature. But in this instance, we have met a worldwide wave of poverty that will take us down if we don’t deal with it. And it won’t take long for the inevitable consequences to happen.Estimates of the number of Christian nationalists in this country vary widely. Baker wrote that “using a multi-item measure of whether people want to see Christianity privileged in political and public spheres, a good estimate is that about 20 percent of Americans are Christian nationalists, and another 25 percent or so are at least sympathetic to some aspects of these views.”Despite these high numbers, Baker argues, the percentage of Christian nationalists is declining as a proportion of the overall population, “along with white Protestantism more generally,” which may increase the likelihood of violent protests.The decline, Baker wrote,is helping to fuel the renewed fervor with which we are witnessing efforts to impose Christian nationalism. Because these views are necessarily rooted in perceptions of cultural threat, declining numbers further stoke the persecution complex that motivates Christian nationalism. So Christian nationalism’s numeric decline and cultural resurgence are, ironically, directly connected.This “cultural resurgence” and the political clout that comes with it will do nothing to diminish their ambition to restore an imagined past, by any means necessary.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Politics of Fear Show No Sign of Abating

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      “The story of the 21st century is less a story about exponential population growth than it is a story about differential growth — marked by a stark divide between the world’s richest and poorest countries,” Jennifer Sciubba, a professor of international studies at Rhodes College, writes in her new book, “8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death and Migration Shape Our World.”In some regions, Sciubba continues,Population pressures are blowing the top off of a pot already boiling with poor governance, civil war and environmental destruction. At best, there’s only dim hope for a peaceful future. When the pot boils over, countries across the globe feel the effects in the form of refugees and terrorist extremism.The resulting turmoil is empowering the ethnonationalist right — propelling Viktor Orban’s re-election to a fourth term on April 3 in Hungary and Marine Le Pen’s 41.5 percent showing in the April 24 French presidential election. In the United States, immigration has become a primary driver of the polarization between Republican and Democratic voters, crucial to Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and his continuing lead in the polls for the 2024 presidential nomination.As far back as 2006, David Coleman, a professor of demography at Oxford, described what he called a “third demographic transition” in “Immigration and Ethnic Change in Low-Fertility Countries”:A third demographic transition is underway in Europe and the United States. The ancestry of some national populations is being radically and permanently altered by high levels of immigration of persons from remote geographic origins or with distinctive ethnic and racial ancestry, in combination with persistent sub-replacement fertility and accelerated levels of emigration of the domestic population.Low fertility and high immigration, according to Coleman, “are significant because they are changing the composition of national populations and thereby the culture, physical appearance, social experiences and self-perceived identity of the inhabitants.”The British demographer Paul Morland, in an interview this year with the BBC, addressed the race issue head on in describing politically volatile population trends:The huge expansion in white populations we previously took for granted is now retreating, and historically majority-white countries are becoming much more diverse. Mass migration into Europe and America has changed the face of those continents, and identities will surely continue to shift in these nations over time. Toward the middle of the current century, the percentage of the U.S. population that belongs to minority groups is expected to be more than 50 percent, and that will surely have an impact. If you look at the ethnic makeup of Trump voters and his slim electoral victory, it’s clear he would not have been elected if America was less white.At the same time, Morland noted,Africa is about to have a huge population explosion — by 2100, there are very likely to be six or seven times as many Africans as Europeans. We’re in the middle of a massive shift in the global balance. The world is set to become much more African, and it will be very interesting to see how that will affect things.In his 2019 book, “The Human Tide,” Morland wrote: “If the biggest global news story of the last 40 years has been China’s economic growth, the biggest news story of the next 40 years will be Africa’s population growth.” It’s striking, Morland continues, “to realize that in the continent as a whole in 1950 there were far less than half as many people as there were in Europe. Today, Africa’s population is around a third larger than Europe’s and by 2100 it is likely to have quadrupled again, while Europe’s will have shrunk.”A graphic in Sciubba’s book illustrates the emergence of below-replacement fertility rates in Europe and North America — rates that have led to what my Times colleague Charles Blow has described as “white extinction anxiety.”Immigration, of course, does not engender only political responses. The psychological reaction to immigration — to the influx of new and unfamiliar populations — varies widely across the electorate.In a 2012 paper, “Tracing the threads: How five moral concerns (especially Purity) help explain culture war attitudes,” Spassena P. Koleva, Jesse Graham, Ravi Iyer, Peter H. Ditto and Jonathan Haidt argued thatindividuals who view illegal immigrants as weakening the U.S. economy (the socially conservative position) might also fear that immigrants will bring in dangerous and polluting foreign elements (Purity) and subvert American traditions and order (Authority).In an email to me, Ditto took this concept a step further:For some people immigration is conceived as akin to contamination, as allowing impure foreign elements into a sacred and pure “American” body politic — and those apprehensions about contamination drive their resistance to immigration — perhaps legal as much as illegal.But, Ditto cautioned, “this should not be taken to mean that these people view immigrants in a dehumanized way (as some kind of vermin) — that would be taking it too far. It is much more implicit than that — just a general valuation of purity and discomfort with contamination.”Along related lines, in 2014, Randy Thornhill, a professor of biology at the University of New Mexico, and Corey Fincher, of the Face Research Lab at the University of Glasgow, published “Democracy and Other Governmental Systems.” They develop a germ-related stress theory that in many respects complements Ditto’s emphasis on the crucial role of purity. “The psychological dimension of xenophobia, ethnocentrism, traditionalism, and authoritarianism,” Thornhill and Fincher contend, joins these features to pathogen-linked threat.Conversely, Thornhill and Fincher argue, “individualism (hence, liberalism), democracy, anti-authoritarianism, and women’s rights and freedom” are found more commonly in countries with relatively low health-related hazard.In an earlier paper, Fincher and Thornhill argued:In contemporary societies, collectivists and individualists differ significantly in their view of the social structure of the society in which they reside. Collectivists emphasize the boundary between in-group and out-group and are distrusting of and unwilling to contact out-group members; individualists make less distinction between in- and out-groups, and are more trusting of and show more willingness to contact out-groups.While it remains the subject of intense debate in academic circles, this line of argument has been gaining adherents.I asked Lene Aaroe, a professor of political science at Aarhus University in Denmark, about growing opposition to immigration, and she wrote back, first citing “two of the classical explanations” that underscore “concerns over cultural integration and competition over economic resources, respectively, as major drivers of attitudes on immigration.”She noted that in addition to these classical explanations there is “a growing line of research that emphasizes that psychological motivations for disease avoidance shape opposition to immigration. I have contributed actively to this line of work.”Aaroe described the premise of her research:That over human evolutionary history pathogens and infections have constituted a central threat to our species. In addition to the physiological immune system which fights infections once they have entered the body, our species has therefore evolved psychological motivations to help us avoid coming into contact with infections in the first place. These psychological mechanisms are typically referred to as the so-called behavioral immune system.These psychological mechanisms, according to Aaroe, “operate automatically at the unconscious level. They work through emotions of disgust and fear of disease and motivate people to respond with avoidance and distance-taking in the face of potential infection risk.” Aaroe noted that the fear of disease is often a misperception not based on reality but on a psychological trait prompting prejudicial judgments.In modern diverse and multicultural societies, Aaroe continued, “facial birthmarks, physical disabilities, or something as innocent as differences in skin color and ethnicity are subconsciously misinterpreted as cues of potential infection risk with skepticism and distance-taking as outcomes.”People vary in the sensitivity of their behavioral immune systems, Aaroe wrote, so “some are more prone to experience disgust in situations that involve potential infection risk (e.g. drinking from another person’s water bottle). Our cross-national research conducted in the United States and Denmark” — “The Behavioral Immune System Shapes Political Intuitions: Why and How Individual Differences in Disgust Sensitivity Underlie Opposition to Immigration” and “The Behavioral Immune System Shapes Partisan Preferences in Modern Democracies: Disgust Sensitivity Predicts Voting for Socially Conservative Parties” — “supports” the idea that “these individuals are also more likely to be skeptical toward immigration and to identify and vote for social conservative political parties that prioritize social conformity, order, and exclusionary policies toward out-groups and unfamiliar others.”Let’s take a look at some of the consequences of the line of reasoning developed by Ditto, Thornhill and Aaroe. Someone with an elevated fear of pathogens, who has more or less unconsciously translated that fear into opposition to immigration, may view liberals who want to open the nation’s doors as a threat to his or her health and, at the extreme, to his or her life.If this logic holds true, we have entered a new moral universe.Morteza Dehghani, a professor of psychology and computer science at the University of Southern California, emailed that he and his colleagues have found that “extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice against marginalized groups could be understood as morally motivated behaviors grounded in people’s moral values and perceptions of moral violations.”In a 2021 paper, “Investigating the role of group-based morality in extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice,” Joe Hoover, Mohammad Atari, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Brendan Kennedy, Gwenyth Portillo-Wightman, Leigh Yeh and Dehghani concluded:Across five studies, ranging from geospatial analysis of 3,108 U.S. counties to social psychological experiments with over 2,200 participants, we found evidence that group-level moral concerns (i.e., loyalty, authority, and purity) are predictive of extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice even after controlling for county-level confounders, such as political ideology.The moral legitimization of violence is the focus of Alan Fiske, a professor of anthropology at U.C.L.A., and Tage Shakti Rai, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, in their 2014 book, “Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships.”They write that violence isconsidered to be the essence of evil: it is the prototype of immorality. But an examination of violent acts and practices across cultures and throughout history shows just the opposite. When people hurt or kill someone, they usually do so because they feel they ought to: they feel that it is morally right or even obligatory to be violent.Fiske and Rai argue that people “are morally motivated to do violence to create, conduct, protect, redress, terminate or mourn social relationships with the victim or with others. We call our theory virtuous violence theory.”Political conflict, scholars have found, can move into the zone of morally justified violence when elected officials and candidates focus their campaigns on grievance. As Ditto put it by email:When groups interact with each other, exchange things, this creates the potential for feelings of grievance to develop — they screwed us in some way. Once you feel that a group has wronged you or your group, then you are in moral territory.In a February 2021 paper, “Populism and the Social Psychology of Grievance,” Ditto and Cristian G. Rodriguez, a professor of psychology at the Universidad de los Andes, in Chile, write: “Populist political movements seek to gain power by leveraging feelings of grievance, a sense that ‘the people’ have been treated unfairly by ‘the elite.’” Evoking past grievance, they write, “has two clear collateral costs: it can be used to justify undemocratic means to gain political power, and its evocation risks initiating a self-escalating cycle of inter-factional political conflict.”As conflicts escalate, so do the perils of grievance politics:Feelings of grievance can lead people to feel licensed to abandon previous moral and procedural constraints. Although sometimes these constraints feel arguably bendable, abandoning other moral rules, such as adherence to democratic political tactics or prohibitions against violence, can be substantially more problematic. Research on highly contentious and moralized political environments has found them to foster an increased willingness to condone undemocratic means to achieve desired political ends, up to and including violence. In the U.S., partisan anger is associated with tolerance of cheating, lying and voter suppression as acceptable political tactics.I asked Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, how partisanship can become moralized, legitimating opposition and even violence. He replied:Politics plays a tremendous role in this. It is politicians who give action to latent attitudes and can organize collective action or even harness the power of the state. For example, Trump supporters might have had a latent tendency to be opposed to immigration but when Trump comes along and tells them that we need to “build a wall,” this made them think that immigration must really be a problem and, so, this latent tendency is activated. Then, when the state gets involved in building this wall and aggressively enforcing immigration, it brings power and action to these tendencies.Hostility to immigration, Enos wrote,seems to be tightly related to a person’s larger worldview, so that a person that tends to be right-wing will also tend to have hostility to immigration and a person who is left-wing will tend to be more open. Scholars don’t agree on how to characterize the differences between these worldviews, but notice that much of the language used to describe the differences has implications for acceptance of immigrants — for example, people on the right are described as seeing the world as ‘threatening’ or having a ‘closed’ worldview.Peter Howley, a professor of behavioral economics at Leeds University, shared Enos’s view of the crucial role of closed- and open-mindedness. “Openness is strongly correlated with immigration attitudes,” he wrote in an email, “and our own research demonstrates how openness strongly moderates the relationship between inflows of migrants into one’s local area and the self-reported well-being of existing residents.”This openness, Howley continued,captures the degree to which people are attracted by novel stimuli and entails a preference for variety and new experiences. For people comparatively low on openness, demographic change and all it entails from exposure to new cuisine, music and amenities may be a daunting prospect, but for people with high scores on openness, demographic change offers the potential for exciting new experiences.The political scientists Christopher D. Johnston of Duke and Howard G. Lavine and Christopher M. Federico, both of the University of Minnesota, write in their book “Open Versus Closed”:As partisan conflict has been extended to cultural and lifestyle issues, engaged citizens have organized themselves into parties by personality, a process we refer to as “dispositional sorting.” In particular, those with “closed” personality traits have moved into the Republican column over the past few decades, and those with “open” traits have become Democrats. More generally, open citizens now take their economic policy cues from trusted elites on the cultural left, while closed citizens adopt the positions of those on the cultural right.The conflicts within this country reflect in miniature the global tensions of the 21st century. Sciubba puts the predicament in context in her introduction to a new collection of essays, “A Research Agenda for Political Demography.”At one extreme:In high- and middle-income countries, the most recent transition is to extremely low fertility and low mortality, leading to a shift in the composition of various age groups — far more elderly than youth and declining proportions of those in the middle ages. For the world’s most developed countries, national goals of economic growth of 2 percent or more are mismatched with shrinking populations — the idea of infinitely expanding economies is rubbing up against demographic reality. In some states with low fertility, immigration is eroding the advantages of longtime ethnic majorities and political tensions are high. Rising support for anti-immigrant far-right parties and populists, particularly in the U.S.A. and Europe, are demonstrations of the connection between demographics and politics.At the other extreme:In lower-income countries, fertility remains high, but declining mortality means that these populations are growing exponentially — a different transformation. Population density is increasing as the amount of available land stays constant and the number of people who inhabit it grows two- or threefold. Climate change is accelerating strains on the land itself, and economic forces like globalization are restructuring economies, often toward production for export, rather than for subsistence. Economic crises too often turn into civil conflict, which then pushes populations into new communities and across borders, and creates a new set of problems for both senders and receivers.By this reasoning, the prospect, globally, is for worsening conflict between rich and poor countries and between the rich and the poor within countries. In many respects, politics is about organizing fear. Democracies break down and republics dissolve when fear is used too often as a motivating tool, a partisan weapon. The issue now is whether the political system can begin to organize our fear of one another in a constructive fashion that resolves rather than exacerbates conflicts.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      French Lessons for the Biden Administration

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      You probably breathed a deep sigh of relief when you heard that Emmanuel Macron trounced Marine Le Pen by a 17-point margin in Sunday’s French presidential election. A Le Pen victory would have been a boon to Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban and Steve Bannon and a disaster for NATO, Europe and France.The center held, thank God — because Macron governed from the center. He was hated by the far left and the far right and never entirely pleased those closer to the center. But he also became the first president to be re-elected in France in 20 years.There’s a lesson in that for the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress, especially when it comes to immigration.It has become an article of progressive faith in recent years that efforts to control immigration are presumptively racist.A border wall is “a monument to white supremacy,” according to a piece published in Bloomberg. The “remain in Mexico” policy is “racist, cruel and inhumane,” according to the Justice Action Center. An essay published by the Brookings Institution calls U.S. immigration policy “a classic, unappreciated example of structural racism.”It wasn’t long ago that Bernie Sanders was an avowed restrictionist on the view that immigration depresses working-class wages. Did that position make him a racist? The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, where I once worked, used to make the case for open borders with Mexico. Were we left-wing progressives? People of good will should be able to take different and nuanced views on immigration — and change their minds about it — without being tagged as morally deficient.But that’s no longer how it works in progressive circles. The results are policy choices that are bad for the country and worse for Democrats and are an unbidden gift to the far right.The issue is now acute with the Biden administration simultaneously seeking to end the Trump administration’s “remain in Mexico” policy in a case before the Supreme Court while accepting a recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to let the use of Title 42, which allowed border authorities to expel illegal immigrants as a public health measure, expire on May 23.There’s not much doubt as to what will happen if the administration gets its way: An already straining southern border will burst. In fiscal year 2020 there were 646,822 “enforcement actions” at the border. In 2021 the number was a little shy of two million. Without the authority of Title 42, under which 62 percent of expulsions took place in 2021, the number of migrants being released in the United States will increase drastically. You don’t have to be opposed to immigration as a general matter to have serious doubts about the administration’s course.Is there a practical and available legal alternative to regulating immigration through Title 42 enforcement? Where is the logic of ending Title 42 even as the administration seeks to extend mask mandates because the pandemic is far from over? Given housing shortages, how much capacity is there to absorb the next wave of migrants? Even if an overwhelming majority of migrants are merely seeking a better life, what system is there to find those with less honorable intentions?More to the point: What does the administration’s utter failure at effective control of the border say about its commitment to enforcing the rule of law?To raise such questions should be an invitation to propose balanced and practical immigration legislation and try to win over moderate Republicans. Instead it tends to invite cheap accusations of racism, along with policy paralysis in the White House. As Politico reported last week, some think the administration’s secret policy is to call for an end to Title 42 to satisfy progressives while crossing fingers that the courts continue it — which a federal judge did on Monday, at least temporarily.Leading from behind Trump-appointed judges is probably not what Americans elected Joe Biden to do.Which brings us back to the example of France. When Jean-Marie Le Pen made his first presidential bid on an anti-immigration platform in 1974, he took 0.75 percent of the ballot in the first round — fewer than 200,000 votes. When his daughter Marine ran on a similar platform this year, she took 41.5 percent in the second round, or more than 13 million. The Le Pens are thoroughgoing bigots.But decades of pretending that only bigots had worries about immigration only made their brand of politics stronger.As president, Macron tacked right on immigration — not to weaken France’s historic position as an open society, friendly to newcomers, but rather to save it. He has cracked down on some asylum seekers, demanded that immigrants learn French and get jobs and taken a hard line against Islamic separatism. But he’s also tried to make France a more welcoming place for legal immigration. The left thinks of him as Le Pen lite, the right as a feckless impostor. Maybe he’s both. Then again, he also saved France for the free world.Democrats could stand to brush up on their French.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More