How America Became Afraid of the Other

Time​ Magazine

28-04-2025

The United States has always had a tricky relationship with immigrants and refugees, even if part of the American mythology is that we are a land of newcomers. In this mythology, they—migrants—are a part of us. At the same time, the United States has also gone through periodic spasms of intense anti-immigrant feeling.
So it is now, with the Trump Administration weaponizing the fear of the other and promoting a moral panic about strangers coming to our shores. When these people, including those who are also Americans, become seen as a threat to the nation, they are no longer a part of us. Instead, they become the other to our collective self as a country.
This is not new. In the late 1800s, many Americans believed that Chinese immigrants brought disease, crime, and vice, along with an inhuman work ethic. The result was the burning of Chinatowns, the lynching of Chinese immigrants, and the banning of most Chinese immigration. With his tariffs, President Donald Trump may be targetting the Chinese even more explicitly than when he characterized COVID-19 as the 'kung flu,' but he did campaign on sealing American borders to protect the nation against Mexican 'rapists' in 2015 and alleged Venezuelan gangsters in 2024. His promised deportation campaign recalls the 1920s and 1930s when the government indiscriminately rounded up roughly 1 million Mexicans and Mexican American citizens and dispatched them to Mexico.
Punishing this other takes the form of theater and spectacle, meant to entertain and satisfy some while silencing and disciplining the rest. Thus, renditioning alleged Venezuelan gangsters to El Salvador on flights operated by ICE is flaunted before cameras that record them as subhuman, heads shaved bald, anonymous, and humiliated in infantilizing uniforms of white shirts and shorts.
Renditioning is a more appropriate word than deportation, since many people are being returned not to their country of origin but to somewhere else, like the migrants of many nationalities who ended up confined in a hotel and jungle camp in Panama. Renditioning also evokes the practice inflicted by the CIA on suspected terrorists vanished into so-called black sites, which suits how Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime authority last used to intern Japanese immigrants and Japanese American citizens in World War II, to describe alleged Venezuelan gangsters as 'terrorists' who are 'infiltrating' the United States. (Though, federal judges in both New York and Texas have challenged this action in the court system.)
Presidents and states describing alleged criminals as terrorists should frighten us all because 'terrorist' is a name of infinite flexibility that can be applied to anyone whom the state says is subverting it. What is worse is that a 'War on Terror,' such as the one President George W. Bush declared in the wake of 9/11, can never be won. It is a state of permanent war, inflicted on an unending parade of others while also enforcing domestic conformity in a bipolar world, which Bush signaled when he said, 'You're either with us or against us.'
While it may be possible to win a war against a particular set of enemies, how does one defeat terror? The threat of terror continues because terror has existed as long as curiosity and fear, love and hate, light and dark—as long as the human heart has beat. Communism, or any other ideology the administration in power doesn't agree with, might be defeated—but the terrorist never can, since terror is an unending wellspring, embodied by actual threats but also coming from within us and giving birth to ever-new demons.
The War on Terror might have resonated with Americans because terror has been a part of American life since the first European settlers came to these shores. Perhaps the first terrifying others for these settlers were the Indigenous peoples, followed by the kidnapped and enslaved Africans whose labor and bodies made the United States possible. Or perhaps the first other for the settlers was the vast land itself, promising bounty and threatening disaster. That is still true today, as those invested in fossil fuels promise that the land can be dominated and rendered profitable, just as the particular others who worked the land, from enslaved people to migrant laborers, could be exploited.
Whether it was through other humans or the land, the settlers had encountered what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas called the face of the Other, which Levinas argued could elicit feelings of compassion or terror. These polar opposite reactions continue to define our American political and cultural landscape. As some call for empathy for others, the Trump Administration characterizes these gestures as part of a 'diversity, equity, inclusion' ideology that must be destroyed. Whereas Levinas thought the face-to-face encounter with one's other was a crucial ethical task, Elon Musk believes that the 'fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,' opening it up to be taken over by non-Western and nonwhite people. It is no coincidence that those sent to El Salvador's prison are paraded with their heads forcibly bowed. We are not allowed to see their very human faces.
It is not simply gangsters who are terrorists in the imagination that fear the other, it is refugees and immigrants, documented and undocumented, who are said to be seeking to replace white people. To protect themselves from the threat of expulsion, migrants are expected to profess uncompromising loyalty. Their difference from the norms of the nation—white, male, heterosexual, Christian—seemingly precludes them from the right to dissent that is supposed to be a part of Americanism. Thus, all of the international students who have so far been arrested and detained incommunicado for protesting what they argue is Israel's genocidal attack on Gaza are nonwhite, with origins in countries like Syria, Turkey, and South Korea.
Whether or not one agrees with their speech, they, too, have free-speech rights as permanent legal residents and international students, protected by the U.S. Constitution. But it's worth asking how much separates a citizen, especially a nonwhite one or a naturalized one, from Columbia-graduate Mahmoud Khalil, who is a permanent legal resident—or Tufts graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, an international student, arrested by masked ICE officers who barely deign to show identification or badges. An erosion of those rights can be extended to citizens as well. As the line between arresting and kidnapping, official police and secret police, is blurred, we—citizen or noncitizen—are meant to be intimidated. We are meant to submit to power, to any masked person saying they are the law, just as the Venezuelans dispatched to El Salvador are meant to crouch before menacing, masked, armored guards.
Domestically, the mechanisms of deportation or the state punishing its enemies are unlikely to stop with Venezuelans or advocates of a Palestinian state, since the mechanism of power is based on paranoia, with one threat metastasizing and expanding. The Trump Administration's crusade against pro-Palestinian students, for example, is enmeshed with its argument that it is defending Jewish people on and off campuses. But this is a weaponization of antisemitism, turning a very real racism into a tool to advance a political agenda whereby Palestinians become the new others, temporarily replacing Jewish people as perpetual others.
Punishing assorted others quells empathy and dissent, for we do not want to be targeted ourselves. Hence the sight of those who might be considered other turning against those already marked as others, as in the case of documented immigrants condoning the deportation of undocumented immigrants.
This goes deeper than paranoia precisely because this is a classic divide-and-conquer political strategy, illustrated by the Trump Administration methodically attacking university after university, law firm after law firm, immigrant group after immigrant group, individual after individual. Each hopes to be spared by the figurative firing squad, but predictably, none will be. The lesson to be learned is that we are not safer by sacrificing others. Authoritarian power will not be satisfied with one sacrifice or one enemy or one other but will require more, since that power thrives on the spectacle of punishment—the rendition. Each punishment further diminishes the ability of everyone else to resist that power. Meanwhile, the more power that authoritarianism accrues in its willingness to break any rule or law, the less power there is in those rules and laws to protect us.
The solution to such an approach has always been the same but bears repeating: unity is our only hope, solidarity our primary strategy. We must refuse to be divided, even as we are offered the temptation of sacrificing others, or the bargain of giving up one right after another in the hopes of securing safety from unending terror. We are at a moment now where Trump is pursuing the idea of eroding, even ending, birthright citizenship, with the idea of sending 'homegrown' Americans to El Salvador's prisons. His Administration is also seeking an expansion of a for-profit immigrant detention system, with a budget of $45 billion. When do detention camps become concentration camps, which is what Franklin Delano Roosevelt initially called the places where Japanese Americans were interned? At what point will enough of us say enough?
What might destroy our society is not immigrants or refugees or Palestinians or women seeking abortions or trans people or any of the other assorted others that have been posited as undermining American society. What might destroy us is our own fear, not just of the other who is a neighbor and a stranger but also of ourselves, of that black hole of abiding mysteries within us that so many of us cannot solve on our own.
What might help us overcome that fear and terror is not to banish others but to keep company with them, to speak with them, to meet them face to face.