As expected, Donald Trump has taken advantage of Thursday’s first presidential debate to regurgitate all the insults against migrants that he has been hurling over the past few months. He mentioned immigration, one of the main pillars of his campaign, in the first 10 minutes, when he accused President Joe Biden of only having created “jobs for illegal immigrants,” in response to the first question of the night about the country’s economy. It was perhaps the mildest, least xenophobic comment of the night, because he then ended up accusing the migrant community of raping, murdering and robbing in the hour and a half that the debate lasted.
The Republican candidate used almost every question, regardless of the topic, to talk about immigration. Unemployment? It remains high because Biden only creates jobs for migrants. Social Security and Medicare? They are on the verge of collapse because migrants “are destroying them.” “They take our schools, hospitals and they will take our social security,” he added. He also claimed that “foreign countries no longer respect the United States, they don’t like us and they think we are stupid” because of how Biden has handled the immigration issue. “What this man has done is criminal,” he said of the Democrat. And he added that “migrants are murdering and raping our women” and that “terrorists from all over the world” are entering through the southern border.
This was all before the immigration-focused question came around the 20-minute mark and Trump launched into his usual monologue. “We had the most secure border in history and now we have the worst in history. And people are dying everywhere,” he said. “People are coming in and killing our citizens. They call it Biden crimebut I call it Biden migrant crimes (crimes committed by immigrants under the Democrat’s mandate).”
While Trump did not specify how he would carry out “the largest internal deportation operation in American history,” as he has promised countless times, he did say he wants to get them all out. “We have to get a lot of these people out and we have to get them out fast, because they are going to destroy our country,” he said. As usual, Trump attacked Biden for his border policies and insisted that prisoners and “people from mental health institutions” are entering the country from across the border.
“We are an uncivilized country,” Trump said. “We are living in rat nests, people are killed at borders, in New York, in California, in every State because of ridiculous policies.” Regarding New York City specifically, Trump criticized that the migrants who have arrived in the city “live in luxury hotels.” He was referring to the shelters that New York City has set up to accommodate the more than 200,000 migrants who have arrived in the Big Apple in the last two years. Some of these centers are hotels, but the conditions inside are far from luxurious. Migrants consulted by this newspaper report that they live in dirt, among cockroaches, mice and garbage.
The Republican stuck to his incendiary rhetoric until the very end, when during his final argument he said that “Biden is a whiner” who “does nothing.” “All he does is make our country unsafe by allowing millions and millions of people to come through our borders,” he concluded.
