openpolitics.com

The Republican Conflation of Immigration and ISIS

But it’s also because they repeatedly turned questions about immigration into questions about Muslims and ISIS.

.. Megyn Kelly asked Marco Rubio about the problem of undocumented immigrants. He responded that, “I’m going to tell you exactly how we’re going to deal with it when I am president. Number one, we’re going to keep ISIS out of America.”

 .. But politically, it serves a purpose. By putting ISIS at the center of their immigration rhetoric, Republican candidates make immigration seem more threatening and less ambiguous. It’s one thing to depict immigrants as people who depress wages and crowd schools. It’s another to depict them as potential killers. That utterly dehumanizes them.

.. The answers by GOP candidates also play into a larger conservative effort to depict Mexican immigrants as, if not ISIS members, then at least dangerous. Immigrants actually commit crime at a lower rate than native-born Americans.