The immigrant is the sum of all MAGA fears

 December 3, 2025

Fairfield Daily Republic 

The Other Side 

The immigrant is the sum of all MAGA fears

By Kelvin Wade

“Caste” author Isabel Wilkinson was at a party years ago when a white conservative political consultant told her that the 2016 election was about 2040.

Census data has indicated that around 2040 the United States will become a majority minority country. And if you view MAGA in this context, everything we’re seeing makes sense.

MAGA is the confluence of a New York conman, white Christian Nationalists and a majority of white Americans upset at a changing country they no longer recognize. It’s been a backlash to the first black president, the marriage equality decision, trans rights and the feeling that nonwhite immigrants were devouring an even larger piece of an undeserved pie.

Millions of Americans felt they were losing their country, their culture and identity, and in came a New York grifter who exploited this division, surrounded himself with white Christian Nationalists and here we are.

Why else is immigration MAGA’s main animating feature? Why did ‘build the wall’ and the Muslim ban resonate so well?

Why did he call African and Central American countries “s***hole countries” and opine that we needed more people coming here from Norway? Why has President Donald Trump said immigrants are “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of the country” if this isn’t the corrosive beating heart of MAGA?

Since 2016, more white Americans die every year than are born. More black and Hispanic Americans are born every year than die. Also, Asian and Hispanic immigration is helping drive our population growth. This is why there are “MAGA accounts” in Trump’s big ugly bill.

Every eligible child born between Jan. 1, 2025 and Dec. 31, 2028 will receive a one time $1,000 deposit from the government in an investment account to spur native born American birth rates.

This desire to combat the browning of America is why Trump signed Executive Order 14160 on Jan. 20, basically overturning the 14th Amendment saying children born here from undocumented mothers were not citizens. The Constitution disagrees.

Trump’s mass deportation was supposed to focus on getting bad people out, yet ICE’s own recently released numbers show that nearly 75% of detainees have no criminal record and only 5% have violent criminal convictions.

They’re not solely after violent offenders. but all undocumented brown people. 

He’s terminating temporary protected status for 600,000 Venezuelans, 330,000 Haitians, as well as other places black and brown people come from.

This is why Trump is exploiting the murder and attempted murder of National Guard members in Washington D.C. last week by an Afghan national who the Trump administration granted asylum to. Trump proclaimed he’s permanently pausing immigration from “Third World countries.”

But he goes a step further posting “Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation.”

Trump’s Department of Homeland Security recently tweeted, “Remigration now.” The term remigration is used by far right European groups who not only want to deport undocumented immigrants but legal immigrants, naturalized citizens and people born of foreign parents who are deemed insufficiently assimilated.

Trump has said he plans to strip citizenship away from naturalized citizens who “undermine domestic tranquility” and those determined to be “non-compatible with Western civilization.” Wait until he finds out federal law and the Supreme Court says he doesn’t have such power.

Last week, Trump announced he would be pardoning former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez (JOH) who was convicted of drug trafficking 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S., enough doses to get half the population of the planet high. JOH was sentenced to 45 years in prison by an American court. Why would Trump, who has been extra-judicially murdering people off the coast of Venezuela supposedly to save us from drugs, be pardoning a drug trafficker? When JOH was president of Honduras he was very helpful in stifling immigration to the U.S. To this administration the one thing worse than drugs coming into the U.S. are minorities.

It’s no accident that part of achieving the aims of making America white again is erasing nonwhite history, resurrecting Confederate monuments that have been torn down, extinguishing diversity, equity and inclusion, banning books by and about minority groups, pushing the LGBTQ+ community back into the closet, restricting reproductive rights and promoting traditional families and the manosphere.

The authoritarian playbook isn’t unique. The Nazis and other regimes have used it. Vladimir Putin of Russia and Viktor Orban of Hungary are using it. And it’s happening here right now in America.

Trump didn’t cook up this plan. Trump is motivated by greed and grievance, but his bigotry and xenophobia appears to have dovetailed nicely with plans dreamt up by the Heritage Foundation and people like political theorist Curtis Yarvin, Project 2025 author Russ Vought, tech billionaire Peter Thiel, Thiel’s disciple JD Vance, Steve Bannon, Christian Nationalist Paula White and of course, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

The goal is to replace democracy with a wealthy ruling technocratic elite class keeping minorities in their place. That elite class pits us against each other so we don’t notice that they’re picking our pockets and eroding our rights.

Judging by Trump’s 36% approval rating in the latest Gallup Poll, millions of Americans are waking up to the fact that they’ve been suckered by a conman. Instead of rubbing their faces in the fact that we were right about Project 2025, extend a hand. Join with us to help fight it.

2016 and everything since then has been about 2040. Isn't it obvious by now? Peace.

Kelvin Wade’s column has appeared in the Fairfield Daily Republic for more than three decades. Reach him at kelvinjwade@outlook.com.