GOP Is Using White Women Victimhood to Stoke Anti-Immigrant Fear

Republicans who are pushing for more restrictive immigration policy ahead of a pivotal election year continue to lean on an old strategy in their appeal to voters: broadly framing immigrant men as dangerous next to imagery of young white women victims.

In 2015 it was Kate Steinle, a 32-year-old woman who was fatally shot on a San Francisco pier. A year later, Sarah Root, a 21-year-old Iowa woman, was killed in a crash involving a drunk driver. In 2018, 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts was killed while jogging in her rural Iowa hometown. Now, it’s Laken Riley, a Georgia college student killed last month while also jogging.

All were white women, and their deaths, linked to immigrant men, became flash points in Republicans’ push for hard-line immigration policies. Led by Donald Trump, the party is using these deaths to call for policies like mass arrests, detention camps and militarized deportations, and pairing that with violent anti-immigrant language.

The rhetoric — which recalls the nation’s long history of racist attacks against men of color by casting them as threats to white women — also threatens the safety of immigrants, advocates say.  Trump has highlighted the 22-year-old Riley’s death during campaign rallies and on social media, referring to her as an “American daughter.” 

Deborah Kang, an associate professor at the University of Virginia who studies U.S. immigration and border policy, said such language about security highlights a much longer history, especially in the American South, of white supremacists fighting to protect white women from perceived threats posed by men of color. She added that it echoes a kind of nationalist paternalism.  “So for Trump, one could argue that protecting the homeland and protecting so-called White womanhood are two sides of the same fight,” she said.

 Trump, whose administration once orchestrated the separation of immigrant children from their parents at the border as an migration deterrent, has also complicated efforts to address immigration. He publicly denounced the federal immigration bill, which was subsequently tanked by Senate Republicans, arguing that it wasn’t politically advantageous for Republicans to help address issues at the border before the election.

Kang said voters should focus on at least one key fact.  “Multiple studies conducted by demographers, sociologists and economists have shown that historically and in fact, for centuries, immigration is actually associated with lower crime rates,” she said. “Despite that statistic, immigrants throughout history have been routinely scapegoated for a host of problems in the nation at any given time.”

“I think it’s being used politically to get those votes,” Jason Riley, Laken Riley’s father, said in an interview. “It makes me angry. I feel like, you know, they’re just using my daughter’s name for that."   

Rob Tibbetts, the father of Mollie Tibbetts, directly criticized the use of her death to defend conservative immigration policies.  “I encourage the debate on immigration; there is great merit in its reasonable outcome. But do not appropriate Mollie’s soul in advancing views she believed were profoundly racist,” Rob Tibbetts wrote in 2018.

Anti-immigrant messaging continues to fuel concepts like the “great replacement theory,” the belief that there’s an ongoing conspiracy to take power away from white Americans by growing the number of non-white people in the country. That notion has been linked to several incidents of hate-fueled violence, like mass shootings in El Paso, Buffalo, New York and Pittsburgh. It’s also become enmeshed with far-right anti-democracy groups, Cruz said.

“It’s really racist, problematic narratives that I think have become quite popular, especially with some members of the GOP that have continued to spew the great replacement theory,” Cruz said. “It’s incredibly problematic, and we’re trying to keep an eye on it. We get a sense that it’s only gonna get worse as we get closer to the general election.”