Trump’s Racist Rants against Immigrants Hide under the Language of Eugenics

Trump’s Racist Rants against Immigrants Hide under the Language of Eugenics

By Daniel Vergano

Former president Donald Trump, in his inimitable way, has done at least one service to the cause of honesty. In his blundering ramblings, he regularly exposes the racism, and its science-flavored pseudoscientific companion, eugenics, that still wounds America.

“You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes,” Trump said this month on the Hugh Hewitt radio show, amid one rant against immigrants, by far the most popular target of hate for his fans. “And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now,” he added.

The line is straight out of eugenics, the deeply dishonest scientism that in the early 20th century convinced many people that criminality, poverty and a host of other ills were all inherited. Embraced by many scientists, and publications that included Scientific American, “the science of breeding better men” led to rampant state sterilizations of poor women and inspired Nazi rationalizations for the murder of Jews, Romani, Poles, Ukrainians and others in death camps during World War II.

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Though eugenics has been discredited in science, the language related to it lingers in popular culture, apparent in its psychological classifications-turned-insults—“moron,” “idiot” and “imbecile”—now woven into everyday language. And we see it in the racial designations we still live with today, so deeply embedded in places like the U.S. Census Bureau they almost are taken for granted; the bankrupt notion that people all fall into distinct racial categories spurs the division of people into genetically meaningless groups of “us” and “them.”

We owe an unfortunate, unacknowledged, explanation for much of the ugly language of modern politics in the U.S. to failed, terrible science. Eugenics explains Trump’s claims that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the U.S., a corruption of medical language; or that his political opponents were “low IQ”, with IQ science notoriously dripping with racism. And the same eugenic bleating lies at the heart of his running mate J.D .Vance’s assertion that childless women, cat-owning or not, count less than mothers. Both claims follow in the mold of those made over a century ago of the “perpetuation of a criminal class by heredity” or that Southern and Eastern Europeans were congenital criminals, or stigma and shame then attached to women unable to bear children. All nonsense, then as now.

The politics were disturbingly familiar then, with eugenicists providing the arguments for the 1924 law that sharply curtailed U.S. immigration on racist lines (notoriously keeping Jews out of the U.S. ahead of World War II). The 1927 Buck v. Bell decision saw a biased Supreme Court declare itself the arbiter of women’s reproductive rights based on the testimony of eugenicists.

Eugenics was widespread in science in that era, focused on generating more children from Anglo-Saxon parents and excluding “non-Nordic” immigrants. The Journal of Heredity, published by the American Genetic Association, for example started in 1910 as American Breeders Magazine and was run by ardent eugenicists. The New England Journal of Medicine only stopped publishing eugenics reports in 1948; a pillar of its coverage was endorsing immigration restriction of “undervitalized and undermoralized aliens now crowding into this country,” aimed at protecting the “mental integrity of the race” and barring “tainted stock” from entry, in the words of NEJM editors. The imprimatur of science made its mark on U.S. laws. “The entire [U.S.] system of legally mandated racial segregation was bolstered by eugenic thinking,” noted the legal historian Paul Lombardo in a review article published in 2018 in the journal Genetics in Medicine. The eugenics-derived immigration laws, which allowed in only individuals from certain nations, didn’t end until the mid-1960s, along with racial laws overturned in the Civil Rights era.

Eugenic thinking and attitudes remain widespread in the worst parts of popular culture, however, a relic of the past century plainly evident in calls from Trump for more immigrants from Norway, and in attacks on immigrants from Haiti in Ohio and Pennsylvania, made by Vance and Trump. Racist nostalgia for Jim Crow baked into the “Make America Great Again” movement walks on a throughline from the eugenics era and comes dressed in its language. As does the claim that immigrants are “replacing” white voters, a moral panic born of the eugenics era.

The ugliest thing about the specter of eugenics is why Trump and his fellow immigrant-hating partisans keep spouting its dead, discredited nonsense: because it is popular. To everyone’s shame, racism thrives in a significant part of the population, which cloaks prejudices in the leftover language of eugenics. Just so, Trump and his allies deploy that shameful era of science when he disparages immigrants as murderers with “bad genes.”

“This is eugenics,” said University of California Santa Cruz paleobiologist Beth Shapiro, president of the American Genetic Association, speaking, ironically enough, on X (formerly Twitter), a social networking platform purchased by Elon Musk, an immigrant plutocrat himself consumed by dishonest hate speech about immigrants. “I reject this. We are better than this,” Shapiro said this month.

We can only hope so.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.