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 J. 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.

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

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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. {snip}

“It’s the demonization of the different,” said Rev. Hank Tuell, the head pastor of St. John’s Episcopal Church on Staten Island, 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.

Ms. 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,” Ms. Beirich said. “These are levels of blatantly racist rhetoric that we have just never seen.”

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

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The use of once-taboo language at the highest levels of the country’s politics spurred a shift in rhetoric, even after Mr. 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, Mr. Trump raised a false claim about Haitian immigrants eating pets during the presidential debate against Ms. Harris {snip}

{snip} Mr. 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!”

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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 percent 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 undocumented immigrants, according to a CNN poll conducted in January by SSRS, a research firm. {snip}

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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.

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