The right's new boogeymen: investigating the demonization of immigrants and trans people in political discourse

Illustrations by Grace McKenna

Immigrant populations and transgender people have always been a target of societal mistreatment. Today, though, they face a new wave of political villainization so overt that it has caused even the staunchest of conservatives to waver in their support for their parties’ agendas. Much of the world is watching in horror as the Trump Administration carries out the “largest deportation operation in history”. Even the ostensibly more progressive Labour Party is currently orchestrating the highest ever volume of raids to catch undocumented workers in the U.K., leading to an 83% increase in arrests. Meanwhile, the U.K. has dropped from its first-place ranking as the most LGBTQ+ friendly country in Europe in 2015 to 22nd place this year, in part because of the recent ruling by the UK Supreme Court that transgender women do not fall under the female “sex” category of the 2010 Equality Act and therefore cannot claim the Act’s protection. Similar attacks on transgender rights can be seen all around the U.S., spearheaded by conservatives who strangely do not mention women’s rights in any other facet of their political agendas. 

Of course, it would be counterintuitive to suggest the homogeneity of these two diverse populations, or to arbitrarily lump them together. However, I feel compelled to interrogate why immigrants and trans people in particular are similarly framed as political enemies, and what they have in common that makes them such palatable scapegoats. 

Firstly, they are quite small. Making up a relatively minimal portion of the population, the so-called societal usurpers that have been plastered on front pages and consistently cornered in political discourse are not very large at all. About 1% of the U.S. and 0.5% of the U.K. identify as transgender. Reports similarly indicate that less than 2% of the U.K. population is undocumented; this figure is around 3% in the U.S., says Pew Research Center. If no overlap between the groups is assumed—although some definitely exists—-these supposed perpetrators make up about 4% of the U.S. population and 2.5% of the U.K.’s. Immigrants and trans people, though relatively scarce in number, weak in political power, and marginalized in society, have become politics’ most popular buzzwords, littered throughout right-wing speeches and media that all cry the same monolithic accusation: danger.

It’s easy to point to a rustling in the bushes and cry wolf. Especially when states would like to distract from the real wolves in sheep’s clothing—corrupt government officials and wayward law enforcement officers—who pose a larger threat to society. Immigrants are dubbed national security issues; trans people a threat to safety. But are trans people and migrants actually raising crime rates as they are so often said to? The short and long answer is no. No correlation has been found between allowing transgender people to access sex-segregated spaces based on their gender identities and any increase in crime rates. Similarly, a study by the American Immigration Council determined that immigrants—including undocumented immigrants—are less likely to commit crimes than U.S. nationals. Even with the reasonable understanding that immigrants—especially those belonging to an ethnic or racial minority group—are more likely to be accused of crime due to systemic bias, Stanford economist Ran Abramitsky reports that immigrants are still less likely to be incarcerated than American citizens and have lower rates of felony arrest. These findings hold true for undocumented immigrant groups as well. Amidst patterns of institutionalized racism and mistreatment of LGBTQ+ people by police, it is reported that trans people and immigrants are more likely to be victims of crimes than cisgender people or country nationals.

Instances of real-life overlap in these groups are also indicative of their statuses as victims rather than perpetrators; almost all U.S. asylum claims by LGBTQ+ refugees (98.4%)  were found by immigration officials to present a “credible or reasonable fear of persecution or torture”. Nonetheless, queer people and immigrants are framed as issues of safety in single gender spaces or to British and American society as a whole. Gender identity and migration have been securitized–-artificially linked to security concerns to justify their disparagement in political discourse.

Engineering panic over borders and bathrooms is a useful method of reframing attitudes of racism, xenophobia, transphobia, and sexism into more viable issues of national security. In much of mainstream politics, it’s not okay to boastfully subscribe to norms of patriarchy and racism anymore—therefore, proponents of these ideologies must do so in another way, finding suitable enemies at whom to point accusatory fingers. Maintaining British nationalism by simply claiming the superiority of its people over foreign-born immigrants isn’t as palatable today as it was a century ago; however, falsely claiming that one in twelve Londoners are undocumented migrants usurping the capital stirs up similar sentiments (this statistic was rescinded by the Telegraph after press regulators proved it inaccurate). It’s also much easier for Donald Trump to reinforce incorrect patriarchal standards about women’s bodies—even for cisgender women, such as boxer Imane Khelif who was “transvestigated” for her success—by framing sexist commentary as a crackdown on transgender issues. 

Our eyes are on the wrong people; those who are already marginalized, outnumbered, and victimized do not deserve our social exclusion or our political blame. It’s convenient that our flailing politicians kick the people who are already down and frame it as our protection rather than oppression. As put by trans Ukrainian refugee Ayman Eckford, “the erosion of human rights always begins with minorities”. Bigotry rooted in patriarchy and racism does not stop at easy targets.