The “immigrant crime wave” narrative peddled by former President Donald Trump and his MAGA minions may have reached its apex with the lie that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, are eating their neighbors’ household pets. But, sadly, there is nothing new about such rhetoric. Lies about immigrants enjoy a very long and rich tradition in the United States.
Students of U.S. history are familiar with the Know-Nothings, a rabidly anti-Catholic political association that sprouted in the wake of Irish immigration in the mid-nineteenth century. Probably less familiar is the American Protective Association (APA), which was founded in 1887 and remained a powerful force for decades.
One of the APA’s biggest targets was Italian Americans, who were frequently characterized as cut-throat criminals and a race of people who liked living in squalor. In an oft-cited magazine 1890 article, “What Shall We Do With the Dago?” Appleton Morgan argued that Italians loved violence:
“The knife with which he cuts his bread he also uses to lop off another ‘dago’s’ finger or ear, or to slash another’s cheek . . . and if a ‘dago’ in his sleep rolls up against another ‘dago,’ the two whip out their knives and settle it there and then.”
Some of this animus owed to the poverty of Italian immigrants. Much no doubt stemmed from the old anti-Catholic bias. Even at the turn of the century, hostility towards Catholics was still prominent in America.
In the early 1890s, in fact, some Protestants in the Midwest were busy preparing for religious war. The police in Toledo stockpiled rifles, while some farmers in Illinois barricaded their homes. The panic over the specter of marauding Catholics was partially triggered by a fabricated edict from Pope Leo XIII commanding Rome’s legions to renounce civic oaths and to “exterminate all heretics.” The order was phony, of course, yet dozens of newspapers printed it and thousands of American readers believed it. Some in the press duly dispelled the hoax, but it didn’t seem to matter to anti-Catholic zealots.
Publications like The American, published in Omaha, Nebraska, and with a slogan reading “America for Americans,” persisted in slandering “Romanists.” It regularly posted fake instructions and oaths for Jesuits in training, complete with daggers, blood, murder, and spycraft.
It wasn’t just the Irish and Italians who were targeted, of course. Extensive xenophobic campaigns were also unleashed against Chinese, Jewish, Japanese, Mexican, and other newcomers. Often, these groups were accused of bringing uniquely virulent diseases (the fictional “Chinese syphilis,” for example), encouraging drug use (Chinese opium, Mexican “loco weed,” and “Negro cocaine”), and of trying to seduce or rape white U.S.-born women. The fact that statistics never supported those claims didn’t matter.
When immigrant scapegoating occurs these days, facts don’t seem to matter much either.
The truth is that the incidence of violent crime declined in 2023 and has continued to do so in 2024, but you wouldn’t know it from watching certain cable TV shows, where it’s a daily marqueed theme. So, too, is talk of a “migrant crime wave” or “migrant crime spree.”
A 2017 study in the Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice that examined four decades worth of research on the topic concluded that immigration is actually associated with less crime, not more. A paper in 2023 found that immigrants’ incarceration rates have been dramatically lower than those of other Americans for the last 150 years.
But that’s not what you hear about on disinformation outlets. There, the emphasis points to a radically false narrative unsupported by any data whatsoever. This rhetoric instead is anecdotal, hyperbolic, and sensationalistic.
Fox News has run nearly 1,000 stories on migrant crime in just the first half of this year. The network’s website devotes as much attention to the subject as it does to “Shark Watch,” its running tally of shark attacks. When you click on its immigration subject tab, the only three categories are “polls,” “migrant crime,” and “channel clips” of isolated incidents meant to stir up fear.
On July 15, an opinion piece by Thomas Homan and Matt O’Brien appeared on the site declaring that regardless of what experts say, “honest analysts have maintained that illegal aliens engage in inordinately high levels of criminal activity.” That line includes a hyperlink, suggesting a source for the “honest analysis.” Yet when you click on it, it contains only a brief self-promotion for the network’s crime coverage and an app for “breaking crime coverage.” The other two citations are to groups whose methodology has been repeatedly criticized and debunked—they’re what some critics call “professional mimics.” Both organizations also have ties to white nationalists and anti-immigration lobbying.
In July 2017, during Trump’s presidency, Alex Nowrasteh wrote an essay for Fox News, of all places, in which he noted that almost no evidence supports claims of an illegal immigrant “crime wave.” He explained the statistical errors, shortcuts, and downright trickery and dishonest tactics that many anti-immigration advocates use.
Immigrants don’t “steal” jobs from native-born Americans, they don’t reduce wages, and they don’t use more government services and welfare. Undocumented immigrants aren’t stuffing ballot boxes and organizing crime sprees. Those are all myths.
The U.S. immigration system is badly in need of reform—the bipartisan legislation that was in the works early this year (but killed at Trump’s behest) was a start. But lying about newcomers does not help bring this needed change about. It only serves to create fear and anger, while derailing any chance to actually improve border security.
One of the most insidious things about all of this lying is that it causes Americans to forget that almost all of us are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. It’s who we’ve always been. And yet that story of diversity, of e pluribus unum, is obscured by disinformation, because that’s who we are as well: newcomers bickering with other newcomers about who really belongs.
Despite our disagreements, though, when it comes to citizenship, shouldn’t we agree that the truth matters?