The Trump campaign strategy to demonize Haitian immigrants AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Code Switch

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Episode: The Trump campaign strategy to demonize Haitian immigrants

Author: NPR
Duration: 00:33:33

Episode Shownotes

This week, we're looking into the endgame of the racist and false rumors targeting Haitian immigrants. Are the lies being told about migrants across the country part of a strategy to land a bigger lie: that undocumented immigrants could steal the election?Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Summary

In this episode of Code Switch, hosts B.A. Parker and Gene Demby examine the resurgence of racist stereotypes against Haitian immigrants, specifically analyzing unfounded rumors propagated in Springfield, Ohio. The discussion exposes how political figures like Donald Trump exploit these harmful narratives, linking them to broader strategies manipulating public perception of immigrants. Through personal accounts from Haitian migrants and insights from local economists, the podcast reveals the economic contributions of these immigrants amidst a backdrop of misinformation, racism, and political scapegoating, emphasizing the human consequences of false narratives.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (The Trump campaign strategy to demonize Haitian immigrants) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_09
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00:00:16 Speaker_02
Heads up, there's gonna be some salty language. Hey everyone, you're listening to Code Switch. I'm B.A. Parker.

00:00:25 Speaker_11
And I'm Gene Demby.

00:00:27 Speaker_02
And today we're talking about one of the most unfortunate news cycles we've been plagued with in a while.

00:00:36 Speaker_11
That's saying a lot, Poker, because, you know, I mean, when was the last time there was a steady stream of good news? You know what I'm saying? The news has been pretty bleak for a while now.

00:00:46 Speaker_13
Very true, Gene. But this really takes the cake for me. They're eating the dogs. They're eating the cats. Eat the cat.

00:00:53 Speaker_05
Eat, eat the cat. They're eating the dogs. They're eating the cats.

00:00:58 Speaker_11
Ah, yeah. OK, so this very disturbing viral TikTok song that you're hearing right now is obviously making use of Donald Trump, talking about the unfounded, debunked, and yet somehow still incessant rumors that Haitian immigrants

00:01:13 Speaker_11
Well, you know, I mean, eating people's pets in Springfield, Ohio is very specific.

00:01:18 Speaker_02
These rumors started on Facebook.

00:01:21 Speaker_11
As they tend to do these days.

00:01:23 Speaker_02
And Gene, on the one hand, it's easy to say that these racist claims about Haitian immigrants were just the result of a Facebook post getting out of hand.

00:01:35 Speaker_02
But we've seen so many incidents over the past few years of leaders in the Republican Party targeting Haitian immigrants.

00:01:43 Speaker_11
Yeah, I mean, Donald Trump has made a lot of public claims about, you know, Haitians having AIDS. He notoriously referred to Haiti as a shithole country, one of several that he named. And he said that letting Haitians into the U.S. is like a death wish.

00:01:55 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, all of these comments by themselves are obviously racist and anti-immigrant.

00:02:03 Speaker_02
but they're also wielded at Haitians in a particular way, I think, which goes back a long time because for centuries, Haiti has been seen as a unique threat to the Western world.

00:02:22 Speaker_11
I mean, yeah, it's probably worth reminding people that Haiti was the first Caribbean country to become independent. It won its independence in the late 1700s.

00:02:30 Speaker_11
Haiti was brimming with, like, educated, homegrown political thinkers and leaders, like Toussaint Louverture.

00:02:36 Speaker_11
The people in Haiti were obviously enslaved Africans, descendants of enslaved Africans, and they dreamed and they organized and fought for their freedom.

00:02:44 Speaker_11
And against ridiculous odds, they overthrew the French in 1804 in order to gain their independence.

00:02:50 Speaker_02
And that terrified the world. It completely upset the colonial order. And the fact that Haiti wasn't just any colony, but a Black colony, was the icing on the cake.

00:03:03 Speaker_11
Right. A lot of the ways the slaveholders in the United States dealt with their slaves was because of a fear that Haiti could happen here, too.

00:03:10 Speaker_11
And obviously we're glossing over a lot of history here, but it essentially meant that not only France, but the rest of the colonial powers in this hemisphere would spend the next two centuries trying to find ways to put Haiti back in its place.

00:03:21 Speaker_11
You know, taxes and tariffs through exploitative trade policies, and by embarking on a relentless cultural campaign to demean Haitian society and Haitian culture, and associating Haitians with witchcraft and cannibalism, violence, disease, chaos,

00:03:40 Speaker_02
And those characterizations have filtered into pop culture too. The rare times that Haiti is depicted in US movies, for instance, it's almost always in reference to killer zombies and voodoo. A caricature of voodoo, we should say.

00:03:57 Speaker_02
that often involves things like animal sacrifice, which brings us back to today and to Springfield, Ohio. Right.

00:04:07 Speaker_11
New place, but same ugly tropes.

00:04:12 Speaker_02
I mean, the more things change, Gene, Anyway, I'm going to get into why that trope resurfaced in Springfield, of all places, with the reporter who broke this pet-eating story, our play cousin and one of NPR's immigration reporters, Jasmine Garst.

00:04:30 Speaker_11
All right, I'm gonna let y'all take it from here.

00:04:32 Speaker_02
Welcome back, Jasmine. Hey, Parker, happy to be back here with you. Yeah, I mean, Jasmine, you did break the story in early August about what was happening in Springfield.

00:04:44 Speaker_04
Yeah. So even though this blew up in the last few weeks, I've been hearing these rumors about Haitians in Springfield bubbling up since at least July.

00:04:54 Speaker_04
And, you know, it was a small percentage of the population that was talking about this compared to everyone I spoke to in Springfield. But it was there and it was vocal. I spoke to one woman affiliated with the local Republican Party.

00:05:10 Speaker_04
Her name is Glenda Bailey. And she very much believes that Haitians in Springfield are bringing in disease, that they're in gangs, and that they are criminals.

00:05:22 Speaker_13
I mean, some of the Haitians are gang members. I mean, I've seen them.

00:05:28 Speaker_02
These are very much the kind of accusations that we hear foisted on Black people in America, which Haitians are. And these are comfortable stereotypes that you'll hear. And I say this with the biggest air quotes imaginable. They're in gangs.

00:05:46 Speaker_02
They're uncivilized.

00:05:48 Speaker_04
This is a familiar trope, right, in America. And it was interesting to see how these rumors started bubbling up over the summer, long before many Americans could even put Springfield on a map. After I spoke to Glenda, I called the Springfield police.

00:06:05 Speaker_04
You know, I did due diligence as a reporter to find out if there were indeed gangs and if they had seen an uptick in crime in Springfield.

00:06:15 Speaker_04
And the Springfield police almost immediately said to me in conversation, is this about the accusations of ducks disappearing from the parks? Because that's not true. What? Yeah, that's what I said.

00:06:29 Speaker_02
I was like, what? And then a few months later, the duck rumor was one-upped by the pet eating rumor, which then got repeated by the former president of the United States on the debate stage.

00:06:42 Speaker_04
You know, I actually find a parallel, like a through line between this idea of they're eating your cats and your dogs and this Hannibal Lecter comparison that Donald Trump keeps making.

00:06:56 Speaker_02
Yeah, I've heard he's been doing this at rallies, comparing immigrants to the infamous and very fictional cannibal from Silence of the Lambs.

00:07:06 Speaker_05
It's Silence of the Lambs. OK, you know that Hannibal Lecter. They're all being deposited. into our country.

00:07:17 Speaker_04
They're here to take what you love. They're here to consume us. And there's an inhumanity, right? I mean, like, we have established norms that eating cats and dogs and pets, this thing you love, is not

00:07:33 Speaker_04
human, and we have established norms that cannibalism has no place, right, in our society. And so when you make those accusations, you are essentially saying these people, these are not human beings, and they are here to take what you love.

00:07:54 Speaker_02
So this week on Code Switch, we look at what's behind the Trump campaign strategy to demonize Haitian immigrants. And migrants across the country.

00:08:08 Speaker_09
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00:08:15 Speaker_09
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00:08:29 Speaker_09
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00:08:44 Speaker_10
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00:09:32 Speaker_02
Ever since these false rumors started being amplified by Republican leaders, there's been a media circus in Springfield. But you were there before all that. Did you get a chance to talk to any of the Haitian people that this media circus is impacting?

00:09:49 Speaker_04
Yeah, absolutely. One of the first stops I made, really, I got to Springfield, Ohio, and it was a Sunday. I almost immediately went to a local church that is offering services in Creole.

00:10:09 Speaker_04
And after mass, I sat with a group of Haitian parishioners, mostly arrived about a year or two ago, although some people had just arrived. And we had a conversation about how they got to Springfield and why and how it was going.

00:10:31 Speaker_04
And there were a couple of things that were really interesting about this conversation that very directly go against the narrative right now, right?

00:10:41 Speaker_04
I mean, almost everyone I spoke to went to Springfield, Ohio, because they had heard that there were job openings or job recruiters.

00:10:53 Speaker_04
So, one thing I noticed from speaking to Haitians in Springfield is that a lot of them actually tried other Latin American and Caribbean countries prior to coming to the U.S., so the U.S. wasn't always their first choice at all.

00:11:11 Speaker_04
I spoke to one gentleman named Maxie Jean-Alexandre Actually, I sat with a lot of parishioners, and everyone there was dressed in their Sunday best, and Maxi was quite eager to tell me his story.

00:11:25 Speaker_07
The thing about us immigrants, it's not as easy as they say. But more and more, it's going to get worse for us. Every country that we go to is difficult. from my side and from the other side.

00:11:50 Speaker_07
Because the situation of the immigrants, especially the Haitians, is terrible.

00:11:58 Speaker_04
So what Maxi is saying is that every country he has gone to before the U.S. was difficult for Haitians. In his case, he went to the Dominican Republic first, and then he went to Chile. This is why he speaks Spanish.

00:12:12 Speaker_04
And in both countries, he says he encountered hostility towards Haitians. And so he heard about humanitarian parole into the U.S. about a year ago, and he was hoping it would be different here. Oh, humanitarian parole.

00:12:27 Speaker_04
That means he's here legally, right? Yes. So historically, Haiti is one of the nations that has had certain legal pathways for people to come into the U.S.

00:12:38 Speaker_04
And what's important to know about those legal pathways is that A, well, okay, so they're legal, which B means you can get a work permit. I spoke to one young man named Canol Camelu in that church basement, and he was very stressed out.

00:13:00 Speaker_04
You know, even though he did have the ability to get a work permit, there was like a tiredness to his face. And he explained to me that, yes, he's able to work. He found a job. But the language barrier, it was really quite challenging.

00:13:19 Speaker_04
And he was so eager to learn English and get ahead. OK.

00:13:24 Speaker_02
So most of the Haitians in Springfield can work here legally. But I have to say that people don't actually need to add value to the U.S. economy to be allowed to immigrate and to have the expectation of being treated with basic decency.

00:13:41 Speaker_04
I'm really glad that you brought this up because I think increasingly the rhetoric is like discussing immigrants either as invaders or as valuable workers. And that's you know in Springfield like that's been kind of like the two

00:14:00 Speaker_04
mainstream ways of talking about Haitians, either as this really dangerous invasion or as workers. Now, there is a reality, right? In Springfield, most of the people I spoke to, they went to Springfield because there were jobs.

00:14:17 Speaker_04
Now that market has gotten saturated, and the jobs that are available require more proficiency in English. So a lot of Haitians I spoke to were desperate to learn English in order to access those jobs. I met one woman named Lucette Santimar.

00:14:34 Speaker_04
She was an older woman in her 60s, and she told me that it was getting harder to find work here in Springfield.

00:14:41 Speaker_12
I'm working, but because I don't speak good English, I don't really find a good job that I like.

00:14:49 Speaker_04
And so in some ways, you know, I've been covering the Midwest for a long time.

00:14:53 Speaker_04
And one of the angles I've been covering with immigration in the Midwest is Midwestern business owners and business leaders really needing labor and being very frustrated because many of the migrants coming into the U.S.

00:15:10 Speaker_04
don't have work authorization right now or it takes a really long time. And so in that sense, Haitian immigrants were kind of like really ideal for this region, you know, in that they had a work authorization.

00:15:25 Speaker_02
So then this makes no sense. Like, it benefits no one to bully these group of people.

00:15:34 Speaker_04
Like, so why is this being done? So, it's interesting. I mean, I guess on paper it makes no sense, but I think it actually makes perfect sense. Why?

00:15:45 Speaker_04
Well, I think the story of Haitians in Springfield, Ohio and of migrants in the Midwest and maybe even the larger in the U.S. is, in my opinion, it's a story about labor needs versus political gain.

00:16:03 Speaker_04
And, you know, I think it's proven very politically expedient to say what J.D. Vance is saying, which is migrants like Haitians are going to ruin us economically.

00:16:17 Speaker_00
Now go to Springfield, go to Clark County, Ohio, and ask the people there whether they have been enriched by 20,000 newcomers in four years.

00:16:30 Speaker_04
Like a lot of towns in the Midwest, Springfield's population has been precipitously declining since the 1960s. We know this story, right? Population decline, aging. Over and over again, I speak to business owners in the region who need workers.

00:16:47 Speaker_04
And immigrants have, to a large extent, filled that need. But what we're seeing is they've also been extremely valuable for politicians to scapegoat.

00:16:59 Speaker_04
And I think we're at this crossroads where labor and population realities are clashing with political expediency. So we're seeing these lies being spread about, you know, how people are coming into this country to threaten our very existence.

00:17:18 Speaker_04
And I think it's important to not get caught up in the small lies and be able to see the forest, to be able to see that this is all laying the groundwork to land a bigger false accusation, which I think is really important to keep an eye on, which is that undocumented immigrants could steal the election.

00:17:42 Speaker_02
We're going to get into that. Stay with us.

00:17:52 Speaker_09
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00:18:06 Speaker_09
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00:19:24 Speaker_02
Parker. Jasmine. Codeswitch. So is Springfield a very divided town politically?

00:19:32 Speaker_04
It is divided, but it's really nuanced. And something that I think is very sad is that that is that that nuance got lost in this whole circus of the last few weeks.

00:19:45 Speaker_04
Like, I was able to sit down and talk to people that are conservative, but who also acknowledge the need for immigrant labor. One person I'm thinking of is Jamie McGregor.

00:19:58 Speaker_01
Third generation owner of McGregor Metal.

00:20:02 Speaker_04
And he was telling me, you know, we came out of the pandemic roaring, and it was really hard to find workers. The labor shortage was real.

00:20:13 Speaker_04
And he was saying, were it not for some of these Haitian migrants, I would not have been able to fill these positions.

00:20:21 Speaker_01
So, you know, I think this whole notion of migrants taking American jobs is hogwash. That's just not true. That's spoken like a true person that has never made a payroll or tried to run a business.

00:20:38 Speaker_04
And, you know, he is a registered Republican. And he told me that he felt so embarrassed by the rhetoric. He said, you know, this is rhetoric that is not based in reality, this idea that they're taking jobs. I mean, he was embarrassed.

00:20:57 Speaker_04
And that's – there's a kind of nuance there. But he also – you know, he expressed a real concern over – you have a city of about 60,000 people. And there have been anywhere between 15 and 20,000 immigrants, mostly Haitian, in the last four years.

00:21:17 Speaker_04
is a lot. That's, I mean, in four years, that's significant. Yeah. And so the city is already has a high poverty level.

00:21:28 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:21:29 Speaker_04
It's what we would call kind of like the rust belt. I hope that's not an offensive term, but it's... As someone who's from technically called the rust belt, I'm okay with it.

00:21:39 Speaker_04
I mean, it's cities that are, they've spent decades in economic depression and they're not prepared to handle that kind of influx. And so you, and the people who are arriving do need services, right? Like they need translation services.

00:21:54 Speaker_04
And so, you know, there's this like kind of imaginary conversation that we're having about people eating pets and dogs and cats, which the consequences are very real.

00:22:06 Speaker_04
And then there's like a real constructive conversation, which is about labor needs and infrastructure and how to do this in a way that's intelligent and leads to the revitalization of these areas.

00:22:21 Speaker_02
So, Jasmine, you've been saying that a big part of what people don't understand about this story is the economics of immigration. So what do economists have to say?

00:22:32 Speaker_04
So most economists say migration is ultimately beneficial to a country's economy. One economist I spoke to is Professor Rachel Wilson from Wittenberg University. She's also like a third-generation Springfielder.

00:22:47 Speaker_04
And so she told me, you know, our survival as a city, a city which, again, the population has been going down, our survival depends on workers coming in and people spending money. Migrants don't just exist in a vacuum.

00:23:03 Speaker_04
They don't just come in and consume, right? People rent property. They buy phones. They buy goods. They inject money into the local economy. And she wished more people understood that.

00:23:17 Speaker_08
Yes, so that's my thing is that I wish everyone should take an economics class and understand that like there's two sides to this coin, right?

00:23:26 Speaker_08
So there's them coming in as workers, yes, and that has the potential to depress wages if it was happening in a vacuum and if nothing else was going on, but they are here consuming too.

00:23:37 Speaker_08
and they are demanding goods and services, which is good for our economy.

00:23:42 Speaker_04
Professor Wilson told me that the new immigrants have been a huge boost to the struggling city. She said it would be a lot easier if it had been a gradual increase. And that's also backed up by research.

00:23:56 Speaker_04
Over and over again, economists say immigration is overall good for the economy. It's just the first couple of years can be really bumpy because it is a cohort of newcomers that do need a lot of assistance.

00:24:11 Speaker_02
So how has the arrival of these new immigrants felt bumpy for the city of Springfield?

00:24:17 Speaker_04
There has been a strain on local infrastructure. I mean, like, I was told something like 40 kids that don't speak English coming into the school district every week at some point. And this is a public school system in a city that is already strained.

00:24:34 Speaker_04
And I think something I've also noticed is, like, in general, like, a tendency among liberals to brush off infrastructure concerns in order to not fall into the anti-immigrant narrative.

00:24:50 Speaker_02
I mean, like 40 kids each week, that is significant. But like you said, in the long run, immigrants help the economy, right?

00:25:01 Speaker_04
Exactly. And Rachel Wilson, this local economist I spoke to, she reminded me that without immigrants, local people wouldn't be happy either, right? There would still be a strain.

00:25:16 Speaker_08
I don't think Americans want to pay the prices that they would have to pay with a smaller labor force, right? Because I'll tell you what, if we don't have immigrants, prices will go up.

00:25:29 Speaker_02
But it also seems like in some of the testimonies that you see that are like being shown online, you know, just seem just mournful for a before time, quote unquote, when there wasn't an influx of immigrants.

00:25:46 Speaker_04
Yeah, I spoke to a small fraction of people who could not see the other side of this. They were profoundly completely anti-immigrant. And that fraction of people has really played an outsized role in the media in the last couple of weeks.

00:26:02 Speaker_02
This particular chapter is new, but nothing is really new here. I think of these pockets in the U.S. that become hubs for community. Like, I think of the Somali population in Minnesota or the Caribbean populations in Florida.

00:26:17 Speaker_02
So now it's Haitians in Ohio. Yeah.

00:26:21 Speaker_04
I mean, I think one of the most basic impulses for human survival is to pick up and move when you are in danger. It's interesting, you know, the presidential debate, the political discourse right now is completely focused on U.S.

00:26:39 Speaker_04
border policy and immigration policy as if there were not this massive historic crisis of displacement. And so people are being pushed out by poverty, by violence, by climate change. And again, it's not as unique as we like to think it is.

00:26:59 Speaker_04
Think about the period between like after World War I or after World War II, we have seen these massive displacements of human beings that seek out, you know, a better life.

00:27:13 Speaker_02
I mean, not just internationally. I think about, you know, I'm a product of the Great Migration. So all of a sudden, my family's in Baltimore and that becomes like a hub

00:27:22 Speaker_02
that we found safety in, like the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, at least until a former president calls them out as invaders.

00:27:32 Speaker_04
Yeah, and that's why I think this whole yearning for a time where people didn't seek out safety and a better life in a new place is, you know, it's ridiculous. It's not a real thing.

00:27:49 Speaker_02
It's not a real thing. But the rumors and the memes that have been created out of this have a very real impact on the Haitian community. How do you feel about the memes and the jokes? Oh, I feel uncomfortable about it.

00:28:04 Speaker_02
I feel like there's a discussion about, like, how gallows humor, if it doesn't impact you and you're making fun of someone, then you're simply punching down.

00:28:20 Speaker_02
Then you're just tripling down on, like, the bullying and harassment of a marginalized group that's just trying to work and survive. Right. So, like, these aren't Haitian immigrants who are dancing to their Eatin' Cats and Dogs. Right.

00:28:34 Speaker_02
And so that means you're laughing at someone's trauma.

00:28:39 Speaker_04
Yeah, so on the one hand, I understand the impulse to diffuse something so horrible by saying, this is ridiculous. On the other, You know what I kept thinking about the day after the debate?

00:28:54 Speaker_04
I kept thinking about all the kids going to school and having to sit in the cafeteria. And I think the school cafeteria is obviously this place of, like, great viciousness and where a lot of things that the adults are saying, like, trickles down.

00:29:13 Speaker_04
And I actually remembered other immigrants in our school cafeteria getting bullied for what they ate.

00:29:22 Speaker_04
And I thought about how is that going to play when you are a kid, you're a teenager, you go on TikTok and you see someone dancing to a song about how your parents eat pets.

00:29:36 Speaker_04
We're talking about something so normal, like taking a lunch break and not being harassed. And it reminds me of, like, there was this Haitian man I met at that church basement, um, Barthony Jean-Philippe was his name.

00:29:50 Speaker_04
He was the youngest of the group, um, and he just seemed so eager to have a normal life, to move on with his life.

00:30:00 Speaker_06
I went to school, I went to church, and that's how I continued.

00:30:10 Speaker_12
Even if he has that language barrier, he's trying to see if I can go to school and see if he can adapt here.

00:30:18 Speaker_12
But it's because of all this difficult situation in Haiti that they are running from that makes this influx of immigration in Haiti, it's not because we don't like our country or anything like that.

00:30:32 Speaker_04
I think that what Bertone was saying to me resonated because it is it's so normal you know and it's so run-of-the-mill and it's so being lost and all this rhetoric which is a guy saying

00:30:48 Speaker_04
I used to be a student and I worked and I just want to be left alone and I want to get to be a student and work again. That's it. And there's something about something so mundane that can get really lost in all the vitriol.

00:31:03 Speaker_06
We would like to be treated like humans, basically. I mean, at this point,

00:31:16 Speaker_02
Like the town of Springfield has been inundated with bomb threats.

00:31:20 Speaker_13
I know.

00:31:21 Speaker_02
And like hospitals, schools, and city facilities have been forced to evacuate and close following like threats of violence to the Haitian community. And I mean, I was disheartened like they had to cancel their culture fest. Yeah.

00:31:38 Speaker_02
But we still have a few weeks until election. Yeah. Do you see this dying down?

00:31:49 Speaker_04
No, because I think that there was some article about one of the main people who had made an accusation about her cat either being abducted or eaten, retracted.

00:32:03 Speaker_02
I mean, like, wasn't she just in the basement?

00:32:06 Speaker_04
Yeah, but I was just thinking this morning about, like, how incisive rumor is and how, like, it doesn't matter if this is proven untrue or that we know it's untrue. It has taken over the discourse and it has bloated the discourse.

00:32:26 Speaker_04
It's literally all we're talking about. And I think in that sense, it was very effective. And so I can see that continuing. It is continuing.

00:32:39 Speaker_04
They're starting to point to other towns, you know, like Charleroi in Pennsylvania, where there's also Haitian migrants. And it works in that it saturates the conversation. What do you think the end game is here?

00:32:55 Speaker_04
I think it's pretty clear at this point that if, in November, former President Trump loses, the grounds have been set to accuse undocumented immigrants of voting in the election.

00:33:08 Speaker_04
And you've probably heard this accusation, which is that Democrats are, quote unquote, flying in undocumented immigrants so that they will vote. And there's no evidence that that has ever occurred.

00:33:23 Speaker_04
I mean, there's abundant research about this, and many organizations have looked into it. It is not a real thing, but we keep hearing about it over and over again.

00:33:35 Speaker_05
They're not citizens. They're not allowed to do it. It's illegal as hell.

00:33:39 Speaker_08
Former President Trump frequently repeats false claims about migrants voting.

00:33:43 Speaker_05
They can't speak a word of English for the most part, but they're signing them up. That's not true. And there have been few recorded incidents of noncitizens trying to vote illegally.

00:33:52 Speaker_04
You know, people who are watching have made it clear that they're concerned that You know, following this election, we might see challenges to the results if Donald Trump loses.

00:34:03 Speaker_04
And those challenges are very likely going to have to do with allegations of undocumented immigrants committing voter fraud.

00:34:11 Speaker_02
I mean, it's hard to imagine that someone would go through so much to get here. and risk it all just to vote, not to belittle enfranchisement. And again, there's basically no proof that this has ever happened.

00:34:29 Speaker_02
But somehow, the American imagination seems to always come back to this idea of immigrant voter fraud. Well, we're talking about history today, right?

00:34:39 Speaker_04
And I think the idea of voter fraud has such longevity in the US. probably as old as the American voting system itself, you know?

00:34:52 Speaker_04
And I think this is gearing up to be the issue for this election, these false accusations, like all this extra rhetoric about immigrants this and immigrants that.

00:35:02 Speaker_04
I think part of the point is setting up a runway to land another lie, which is they stole the election.

00:35:17 Speaker_03
Desmigars, thank you for talking with me. You keep inviting me and you know that I'm not gonna have good news. Sometimes you do have good news.

00:35:27 Speaker_02
This was just not one of those times. And that's our show. You can follow us on Instagram at NPR Codeswitch. If email is more your thing, ours is codeswitch at npr.org. And subscribe to the podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:35:45 Speaker_02
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00:35:59 Speaker_02
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00:36:15 Speaker_02
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