Xenophobia and hate speech are spiking heading into the election

The last time there was a presidential election, the country was coming off a summer of protests in favor of greater racial equality. Support for increased immigration was at the highest level ever polled.

This year is different. Former President Donald Trump’s campaign, filled with anti-immigrant rhetoric, is playing out in a country where researchers report seeing particularly high levels of hate speech against minority groups.

A spike that began soon after the George Floyd protests was sustained over four years and has only risen since Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee.

“I certainly don’t remember in my lifetime the rhetoric against immigrants ever getting this strong during an election,” said Yonatan Lupu, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University who leads a team that monitors about 1,000 hate communities across a range of online platforms.

Lupu said that hate speech levels were up about 50% compared with early 2020 before the murder of Floyd that summer.

Immigrants are reporting harassment and false accusations in communities from Aurora, Colorado, to Springfield, Ohio. Extreme rhetoric against migrants has been amplified by Republican politicians and commentators, while the Israel-Hamas war has given rise to increased Islamophobia and antisemitism, including from the left.

Memes and false theories about South Asians and Black Americans have spread into daily discourse as social media companies have failed to block content filled with racism and disinformation. Researchers say they’ve also seen a spread into hate speech against women and LGBTQ+ people.

“It’s the demonization of the different,” said Rev. Hank Tuell, the head pastor of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Staten Island, New York, which pulled out of plans to open a migrant shelter there this year after receiving threats of violence. “And it’s seeming to get much more ingrained into the everyday person.”

The rhetoric has become more mainstream and is no longer just confined to extremist forums like 4chan, said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, a nonprofit that tracks hate speech and extremism.

Beirich said her group was seeing more openly racist comments and the growing use of phrases like an “invasion” of immigrants and migrants “poisoning the blood” of the country.

“The old discussions about the United States being a nation of immigrants and the Statue of Liberty have sort of died,” Beirich said. “These are levels of blatantly racist rhetoric that we have just never seen.”

The rise of two Indian American women onto the national political stage has resulted in a surge of slurs against South Asians in various forums. Some have targeted Usha Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants and the wife of Sen. JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential candidate.

Far more derogatory statements have been directed at Harris, whose mother was also an Indian immigrant, said Sean Long, who is writing a book about the politics of white violence and conducts research at George Washington University.

From January 2023 to August 2024, the volume of anti-South Asian slurs in extremist online spaces doubled to more than 46,000 from nearly 23,000, according to a report released by Stop AAPI Hate last month.

They have appeared on mainstream platforms, too, like when Laura Loomer, a far-right activist and an associate of Trump’s, said on the social platform X that the White House would “smell like curry” if Harris became president.

For decades, racist and extremist speech had been mostly relegated to the dark corners of the internet and private conversations considered unfit for public discourse. That changed with the political rise of Trump, who began his 2016 presidential campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and later referred to migrants as “animals.”

The use of once-taboo language at the highest levels of the country’s politics spurred a shift in rhetoric, even after Trump receded from public view. Now such speech has become a mainstay of Republican talking points on immigration. The word “invasion” to refer to the influx of migrants now regularly appears in campaign ads, speeches and television interviews.

This year, Trump raised a false claim about Haitian immigrants eating pets during the presidential debate against Harris after his running mate, Vance, became the first prominent national figure to promote the debunked story.

Even after Vance acknowledged that the rumors could be false, Trump continued his focus on the Haitian migrants in Springfield, saying during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania in September that “you have to get them the hell out.”

As he spoke, the crowd immediately began to chant, “Send them back!”

Xenophobia has been a particular problem over the last four years, amid the pandemic and a surge in migrants at the southern border.

In Seattle, where nearly 2 in 5 Asian Americans have experienced anti-Asian hate in the last year, some have stopped using their native tongue in public to avoid attacks, according to a recent report published by the Asian American Foundation. In other cities, immigrants have faced public rebuke, most notably in Springfield.

The proliferation has been fueled by social media companies who have reverted from earlier efforts to clamp down on racist rhetoric and disinformation — most notably at X after Elon Musk purchased the company in 2022.

Since then, Musk has not only dismantled the platform’s system for flagging false election content; he has himself repeatedly posted distorted or false notions about illegal voting for noncitizens.

He has also allowed many users to be reinstated who were previously barred for spreading misinformation, inciting violence or otherwise violating its rules, including Trump.

Maya Wiley, the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said that the growing online rhetoric had been a major factor in the surging levels of hate crimes reported in recent years. Even in schools and colleges, the number of reported hate crimes nearly doubled from 2018 to 2022, according to the FBI.

“The rhetoric supports the activity,” said Wiley, who ran for New York City mayor in 2021. “It gives organized talking points to organized hate.”

The rise of xenophobia online is a product of changes on the ground. A growing number of Americans are souring on immigration, which appears to be a reaction to a noticeable surge of migrants at the border in 2022 and 2023 and a consequence of a general sense of economic anxiety.

Even though a majority of Americans still describe immigration as beneficial for the country, 55% now want to curb new arrivals, the highest recorded total since 2001, according to a recent poll from Gallup.

About half of Americans have also said that they would support mass deportations of immigrants living in the country without legal permission, according to a CNN poll conducted in January by SSRS, a research firm. Even some Democratic mayors and governors have complained about the impact on their cities and openly demanded stricter enforcement of immigration laws.

Ultimately, though, immigration remains a partisan issue. Republicans are still far more likely to cite it as a top concern. And replacement theory — the notion that Western elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to “replace” white Americans by encouraging immigration — has increasingly gone from a fringe far-right conspiracy theory to a belief embedded in Republican politics.

By the end of 2021, nearly half of Republicans agreed to some degree that there was a deliberate effort to replace native-born Americans with immigrants, according to an AP-NORC poll.

It remains to be seen how such an atmosphere of rising hate speech and anti-immigrant sentiment might affect how people vote.

“You need to treat people like people,” said Corazon Calvillo, 55, a Filipino American teacher in Las Vegas who became an American citizen in 2018 and is backing Harris even though she prefers Trump’s economic policies. “The only difference is we are citizens, and they are not.”

In an election with razor-thin margins, that could make a difference. Naturalized citizens make up a record number of eligible voters, accounting for about 10% of the electorate.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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