Hispanic Republicans shamefully silent as Trump says immigrants ‘poison blood of America’ | Opinion

Where is the outrage of Republican elected officials over Donald Trump’s racist claim that immigrants from Latin America, Africa and Asia “are poisoning the blood” of America? He’s their party’s front-runner. Are they silent out of ignorance, apathy or fear?

Maybe they ignore the fact that Trump’s words echo the language used against Jews and other minorities in Nazi Germany. Maybe they don’t know that, despite Trump’s latest claim that he has never read Adolf Hitler, there is little chance that he wasn’t aware that he had used Hitler’s language.

Trump had made a similar remark in September and was strongly criticized by civil rights groups in the media for taking a page from Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” In that book, the Nazi dictator claimed that minority ethnic groups were poisoning the blood of the Aryan race.

In an effort to both energize the white supremacists within his base and get some free television time, Trump didn’t mince words in his latest speech.

Undocumented immigrants “are poisoning the blood of our country. That’s what they’ve done,” Trump said in a Dec. 16 campaign rally in New Hampshire. “Not just in South America. Not just the three or four countries that we think about. But all over the world they’re coming into our country — from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”

President Biden’s campaign reacted swiftly, saying that Trump had “parroted” Hitler in his speech. Spokeswoman Ammar Moussa added that, in the same speech, the former U.S. president also praised the dictator of North Korea and quoted Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin approvingly.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said in a statement that “poisoning the blood of our country’ echoes nativist talking points and has the potential to cause real danger and violence. We have seen this kind of toxic rhetoric inspire real-world violence before in places like Pittsburgh and El Paso. It should have no place in our politics.”

Domingo Garcia, head of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said in a statement that Trump’s words intentionally create social tensions and “play to the lowest and most sinister human emotions to incite hatred and cause harm or worse to innocent men, women and children.”

In addition to using racist language, Trump is again — as he did in his 2016 presidential campaign — spreading the myth that there is an unprecedented “invasion” of immigrants. Fox News and other right-wing propaganda outlets are happily promoting this claim. Fear-mongering draws attention, and increases ratings.

Problem is, it’s all a myth.

First, the number of immigrants as a percentage of the U.S. population is not a historic record. In fact, today’s percentage is below what it was in the 1890s and the 1910s, according to the Pew Research Center. America has always been a country of immigrants — and still is.

Second, contrary to the Republican Party’s misleading claims, undocumented migrants are not flooding America with fentanyl, the deadliest drug of the moment. Most of the fentanyl smuggled into the United States is brought by U.S. citizens through legal entry points, official data show.

In 2021, more than 86% of drug traffickers convicted for fentanyl were Americans, 10 times more than the number of undocumented migrants convicted for such crimes.

Third, Trump and Republicans’ claim that undocumented migrants commit more crimes than U.S.-born citizens is simply not true. On the contrary, most undocumented people want to keep a low profile. Studies show that they are less likely to get arrested, and that increases in immigration do not result in higher crime rates,

Fourth, it’s a myth that undocumented migrants take away U.S. jobs and don’t pay taxes. The U.S. unemployment rate is at 3.7%, a near record low, and most undocumented migrants do jobs that Americans don’t want to do.

Which brings us back to my original question as to why there isn’t more Republicans outrage over Trump’s racist rhetoric. Why have Latino Republicans, such as Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen. Ted Cruz, Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, failed to put distance between themselves and their party leader’s racism? Couldn’t they have some spine, and at the least remind people that four of Trump’s five children had immigrant mothers?

This is no trivial matter, as some Trump followers want us to believe. Trump is normalizing racist talk, and once you normalize such language against one group, you normalize racist behavior against all groups.

Don’t miss the “Oppenheimer Presenta” TV show on Sundays at 9 pm E.T. on CNN en Español. Blog: www.andresoppenheimer.com