Watch Donald Trump Go Full Nativist In
Presidential Campaign Launch
By Esther Yu-Hsi Lee
June 16, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "ThinkProgress"
- During a lengthy Tuesday morning
announcement that he would seek the Republican presidential
nomination, real estate mogul Donald Trump claimed that undocumented
immigrants from Mexico are “rapists” who “are bringing drugs” to the
U.S. He also indicated that he would build a “great wall” on the
southern U.S. border and that he would dismantle President Barack
Obama’s 2012 executive action that has shielded hundreds of
thousands of undocumented immigrants from deportation.
Trump is the 12th Republican to enter the 2016
race thus far.
“When do we beat Mexico at the border?” Trump
asked the crowd at his announcement at his namesake Trump Tower in
New York City. “They are not our friend, believe me…The U.S. has
become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems…When Mexico
sends its people, they are not sending their best. They are not
sending you. They are sending people that have lots of problems, and
they are bringing those problems to us. They are bringing drugs and
they are bringing crime, and they’re rapists.”
“Some, I assume are good people. But I speak to
border guards and they tell us what we are getting,” Trump
continued. “They are not sending us the right people. It’s coming
all over South and Latin America and it’s coming probably from the
Middle East. But we don’t know because we have no protection and we
have no competence. We don’t know what is happening and it has got
to stop and it has to stop fast.”
Watch it:
Trump also indicated that he would build a “great,
great wall on the southern border” and that he would undo the
president’s executive action known as the Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
Trump’s claim that undocumented immigrants are
rapists stem from a nativist argument often peddled by
anti-immigrant activists and politicians. For example, Rep. Steve
King (R-IA), who’s introduced
several
pieces of legislation aimed at restricting immigration, has
dedicated an entire webpage to undocumented immigrants who have
killed American citizens. But as the
American Immigration Council found in a report, the crime rates
in the United States fell as the size of the immigrant population
increased dramatically. What’s more, as the AIC report found, the
decline in crime rates also occurred in southern border cities and
other cities with large immigrant populations like San Diego, El
Paso, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Miami.
Trump has a history of making extravagant claims
against certain kinds of immigrants. Notably, he once advocated for
European-only immigration. But when Trump met with undocumented
immigrants who were brought to the country by their parents as young
children in 2013, he
softened his stance and told them that their stories had
convinced him.
It seems particularly surprising that Trump would
criticize immigrants as a hotelier and especially at Trump Tower. In
1990, Trump was sued for hiring and underpaying at least
200 undocumented workers to raze a building that previously
stood where Trump Tower is located at now.
See also
RNC Official Awkwardly
Refuses To Denounce Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Screed:
Hours after Donald Trump launched into an anti-immigrant tirade
during his presidential campaign announcement and claimed that
Mexican immigrants are rapists and drug dealers, a top Republican
party official has done nothing to denounce those comments.
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