The Immigrant as Bogeyman: Examining Donald Trump and the Right’s Anti-immigrant, Anti-PC Rhetoric

Abstract

This article examines the rhetoric used by President Trump and his administration with respect to immigrants and immigration policy. We argue that Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric can be understood as (1) a response against current norms associated with political correctness, which include a heightened sensitivity to racially offensive language, xenophobia, and social injustice, and (2) a rejection of the tendency to subordinate patriotism, U.S. sovereignty, and national interests to a neoliberal political economy that emphasizes “globalism” and prioritizes “free trade” over the interests of working Americans. In order to highlight how much of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric is developed as a response to political correctness and the neoliberal tendency toward globalism, we employ the concept of “collective action frames” to suggest that Trump’s (and much of the Right’s) efforts to legitimize their strict agenda on immigration relies on frames related to (1) crime and the threat immigrants pose to Americans’ safety, (2) the notion that immigrants and free trade deals lower Americans’ wages and compromise their job security, and (3) the claim that Democrats and other liberals are driven by a politically correct orthodoxy that hurts American workers by being “weak on immigration” and supportive of “open borders.” The article concludes with recommendations for fighting the normalization of scapegoating immigrants.

#NoSnowflakes: The toleration of harassment and an emergent gender-related digital divide, in a UK student online culture

“…1.The term ‘snowflake’ has become a politically charged insult in the United States and the United Kingdom in recent years. Finley and Esposito (2019: 6) observe that Donald Trump and his right-wing political supporters often use the term ‘liberal snowflake’ against people perceived to be on the political left, when they support political correctness and vocalise concerns about social inequalities and human rights issues. Within these contexts, the political right believes ‘liberal snowflakes’ are ‘discarding honest criticism and debate in the name of tolerance and politeness’ (Finley and Esposito, 2019: 6).…”

Trump and Muslims: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Islamophobic Rhetoric in Donald Trump’s Selected Tweets

“…Considine (2017) During the 2016 and the current U.S. Presidential campaigns, many Americans were angry at Trump because of his anti-Muslim policies and this Islamophobic lens has also been seen throughout American history (Blöndal & Gunnarsson, 2017). Trump and his supporters have tried to build sentiments of fear toward the Middle East that already been reinvigorated since 9/11 incidents (Callister et al, 2019;Finley & Esposito, 2019). Renowned scholar Edward Said has also referred in Orientalism to the polarization of "us versus them," from the Western world to the Middle East, in this case, based on the constructed difference in "civilizations" (Said & Jhally, 2002;Saladin, 2016).…”

Freedom of speech is not freedom from ethics: the 2019 Israel Folau media controversy as a case study

“…The framing that has just been described is redolent of the culture wars that have played out throughout the Anglosphere since the late 1980s (Busbridge et al, 2020; Davis, 2019; Robinson, 1997). As Finley and Esposito (2020: 180) argue, culture-wars framing ‘minimize[s] very real concerns and shuts down both conversation and actual action’ against injustices and inequalities (Finley and Esposito, 2020: 180). 2 Furthermore, this culture-wars framing reduces complex issues and specifically, differences of opinion about those issues to rigid binaries: ‘for’ and ‘against’, ‘free speech’ and ‘censorship’, ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’.…”