Racist anti-immigrant line

Trump Says Migrants Have Brought “Bad Genes” Into “Our Country”

The GOP candidate’s latest racist anti-immigrant line of attack? Race science.

Isabela Dias

It was only a matter of time before former president Donald Trump resorted to race science to further denigrate migrants, who he believes to be “poisoning the blood” of the United States. Speaking to radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday morning, the former president—who once described himself as a “gene believer” and has a known obsession with genetics and bloodlines—accused migrants coming to the southern border of being “criminals” and having “bad genes.”

“When you look at the things that [Vice President Kamala Harris] proposes, they’re so far off she has no clue,” Trump said. “How about allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers. Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. They left, they had 425,000 people come into our country that shouldn’t be here, that are criminals.” (Trump’s claims are false.)

Of course, this isn’t the first time the GOP nominee has spread overtly racist and dangerous lies about immigrants. Immigrant-hating has become his entire brand and ending all forms of immigration his main fixation. But Trump’s latest rant comes as a reminder of one of his lifelong guiding beliefs: that some people are innately better than others. It also begs the question of what Trump might be willing to do to the people he believes to have “bad genes.”

As my colleague David Corn wrote in this magazine in 2016, Trump has repeatedly claimed that success and moneymaking are contingent on genetics.

During a campaign rally in Minnesota in 2020, Trump addressed a crowd of overwhelmingly white supporters in a county that had voted to reject refugee resettlements, “You have good genes, you know that, right?” (On the occasion, he also explicitly referenced the discredited eugenics “racehorse theory” embraced by Nazis and white supremacists that selective breeding can produce genetic superiority.)

“More than anything else,” Trump penned in his The Art of the Deal, “I think deal-making is an ability you’re born with. It’s in the genes.” In 1988, he told Oprah Winfrey, “you have to be born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.”

Trump and his running mate JD Vance don’t disguise their contempt for immigrants, especially those of color. When pressed, they double down on it. Recently, Trump injected into his immigration platform policy the notion of “remigration,” a proposal favored by the European far-right to forcefully repatriate or mass deport non-ethnically European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of citizenship. 

They couldn’t be any clearer about their ideals and desire to make America a “homeland” where, presumably, only those they consider to have the right genetic composition are welcome.