Trump: A Warning from History

This week I saw first hand how US politics has long been fuelled by virulent opposition to migration

I spent the last few days in New York. It’s a city I know well. I lived there for a year or so in my 20s. Like so many Irish people, it’s a place I have strong family ties to.

But this time New York felt different. And not just because instead of biting cold it was almost 20 degrees in mid-November. 

New York felt different because the world has fundamentally changed. 

New York shouldn’t be mistaken for the United States. But even here, Trump’s election victory hung over almost everything. 

Street hawkers sold Trump 2024 t-shirts. Around the corner from my midtown Manhattan hotel, MAGA supporters gathered near where the president-elect and Elon Musk were at a UFC fight. 

When Trump won eight years ago I was reporting from New York. My election night was spent amidst far-right flag wavers, Orthodox Jews for Trump and crestfallen Democrats who were already talking about ‘the resistance’.

This time, the mood was very different. Intransigence replaced by weary resignation. I met a human rights activist worried about being dragged before Congress as part of a McCarthyist attack on civil society that is already gaining pace. 

An award-winning journalist told me that she is worried her colleagues could end up in prison. She is right to be concerned. Trump has said that he intends to imprison journalists who publish leaked material. 

“If someone comes to us with information now, how can we protect them?” I had no answer.

As well as meeting colleagues and contacts, I took a morning off to visit the Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Housed in an 150-year old apartment block, the Tenement Museum tells the story of immigration into what was once among the most densely populated places on the planet. 

Over the last two centuries, the Lower East Side has been home to everyone from the biggest German speaking community outside of Berlin and Vienna, to Jews fleeing Russian pogroms at the turn of the 20th century and, more recently, Chinese garment workers and Latino immigrants.

The museum has a novel approach to story-telling. Rather than trooping through a static collection of artefacts, you have to book on one of more than half a dozen guided tours that tell the story of one particular family, and one particular ethnic group.

Showing a distinct lack of imagination, I signed up for the tour that covered an Irish couple - the Moores - who lived in the Lower East Side in the 1860s. The pair were among the quarter of Ireland’s population who emigrated in the wake of the potato famine. (Another quarter starved to death.)

The genius of the Tenement Museum is its ability to conjure up the social world immigrants lived in. The building had been shuttered for decades before being turned into a museum in the 1980s so many of the original features remain: it wasn’t hard to imagine the Moores raising three children in the tiny, one-bedroom apartment most of our tour was conducted in.

But what struck me most was the xenophobic, paranoid political milieu in the US that these Irish immigrants escaped into. We were shown cartoons that depicted the Irish as shillelagh wielding drunks and as wild savages, red-hair framing gorilla-like features. 

A political cartoon by Frederick Burr Opper published in Puck magazine May 1883. (Source: Library of Congress.)

In the 19th century there was no algorithm driving this dehumanisation. Crude depictions of the Irish - or the Italians, the Jews or any number of other ethnic groups - would have slowly permeated US society through the press. Nowadays conspiracy theories about pet-eating Haitians traverse the world in the time it takes Trump or JD Vance to compose a tweet. But the racist intent remains the same.

As I listened to the story of the Moores, I found myself thinking of my own immigrant history. One grandfather born to Irish parents in the Bronx a century ago; the other born in similar circumstances, but in Argentina. My own life lived mostly outside of the country of my birth.

I also found myself thinking that while America is a land of immigrants, US politics has long been fuelled by virulent opposition to migration. 

Trump did not emerge from a vacuum. His German-American father was once arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally in New York. Even Trump’s ‘America First’ catch phrase was coined almost a century ago, by Nazi-curious anti-Semite Charles Lindbergh. 

Trump also understood a lesson from the Lower East Side story: that ethnic groups are not necessarily bound by some sense of collective solidarity. Successive waves of migrants have often aggressively sought to distance themselves from more recent arrivals.

That Trump’s nativist worldview has been moulded by descendants of Irish immigrants like those whose stories I heard in the Tenement Museum - step forward Steve Bannon - is less surprising than it might appear at first glance. (See Noel Ignatiev’s seminal text How the Irish Became White.)

America’s imperfect democratic institutions - from the courts to the Capital - have long been the only guarantor of rights in the country’s immigrant history. No wonder Trump seems so determined to destroy them. 

New York did not vote for Trump. (Although he did unexpectedly well in the state, winning more than 44% of the vote.) But Trump’s policies will arguably bite hardest, and fastest, in New York.

A few days before I travelled across the Atlantic, Trump announced white nationalist Stephen Miller as his deputy chief of staff. Miller is expected to be charged with enacting the president elect’s promise of mass deportations: in New York that could mean deporting more than half a million undocumented workers. Precisely how this will be done remains unspoken.

Possibly the most depressing conversation I had in New York wasn’t actually about the United States. It was about here, in the UK.

A migrant rights expert who has worked with governments around the world, including Britain’s, told me that he had noticed a major shift in Labour’s attitude in recent weeks. Since Trump’s election, Keir Starmer’s team, it seems, is increasingly wary of being seen as ‘soft’ on immigration. 

History - and Donald Trump - tells us what happens when political leaders refuse to make the positive case for migrants, for people. And it’s a dark, dark warning.