What follows is an extended and revised version of two talks I gave recently in Oberlin. Feel free to use any part of this, or the whole thing, in your own presentations, classes, blogs, or door-knocking opportunities.

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As I write this, the election is fast approaching and for candidate Trump, immigration has displaced the economy as the “No. 1” issue. “That beats out the economy. That beats it all out to me, it’s not even close,” he concluded in mid-October. And, while more voters rank the economy and the high cost of living as their most important issue, 82% of Trump supporters and a whopping 61% of all voters put immigration as the most important challenge facing the country.

This is odd, one could even say weird. Whatever you think about immigration, it is unlikely to directly impact most lives, certainly not to the extent that, say, health care or education does. And immigration hardly represents an existential threat to the nation’s future (unless, of course, you think that America’s future rests in its enduring whiteness). If we wanted to talk about existential threats, we would be talking about climate change.

But immigration has become a serious issue for our future – not because of who immigrants are or how many are here, but because of how we as a nation have responded to them. A recent poll found that more than 60% of Republicans and nearly one-third of all Americans agree with Trump’s denunciation that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country. Let’s repeat that: 3 out of every 5 Republicans are in agreement with one of the central underpinnings of both Nazism and white supremacy: the ideology of blood purity. The conviction that our blood contains not just cells and plasma but race, nationality, and “purity,” is a fiction that led to the murder of millions of Jews in Europe and the perpetuation of slavery and Jim Crow in America. Trump has introduced this abomination into his campaign, and, it appears, a considerable segment of US voters is buying it.

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