How to Disarm the Death Star’s Weaponization of Immigration
By Beatriz Lopez, Director of Communications at the Immigration Hub
At the center of President Trump’s reelection campaign lies their most utilized playbook to mobilize their base and sway swing voters: the weaponization of immigration. As the movement to address systemic racism and police brutality swells, the Trump campaign is stealthily firing off anti-immigrant ads ala 2016.
We saw their practice run in 2018. Wesleyan Media Project had found that on Facebook, between August 1 and September 30, 23.3 percent of the Republican ads on the digital platform discussed immigration. Just like the 80 percent of Republican TV ads on immigration in the same cycle, the bulk of the ads portrayed immigrants as criminals or threats to public safety and national security.
In 2020, it’s already happening. Between May 18 and June 6 of this year — in ONE MONTH ALONE — the Trump campaign has spent over $1.4 million on Facebook ads on immigration. More than anyone else who’s placing ads on the issue, including Democratic candidates.
In what experts are predicting to be one of the most expensive election cycles in history, a recent POLITICO report revealed that Trump and his aides are “planning to rev up their campaign machine in the coming days with an aggressive focus on voters’ perceived fears” on immigration. Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager and former digital director, who boasts about advertising operations as powerful as the “Death Star”, admittedly found ways to disseminate “the race-baiting, the immigrant-bashing, the truth-bending” to effectively galvanize the vote for Trump in 2016.
Parscale has no plans of changing much of that strategy other than putting more dollars than he did in 2016 behind a slew of Facebook and digital ads while optimizing the influential voices of the fringe-right without spending a dime.
On top of the online ads, the campaign is supplemented by typical hate groups, aggressive internet dwellers, white supremacists and bizarre QAnon zealots on Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and sketchy platforms such as 8kun. This army of sycophants have long been churning memes, misinformation, manifestos, and conspiracies to respond to and exploit three types of anxieties often felt by swing voters or what some researchers call an exhausted majority: (1) a scarcity of resources, (2) personal and public safety, and (3) a forgotten or overlooked sense of self and community.
Through the Immigration Hub’s two years’ worth of voter research and digital testing in Colorado, Michigan and Pennsylvania, we were able to profile swing voters and their views on immigration and determine the best messaging strategy to counter anti-immigrant rhetoric and go on offense. Notably, we found that those three anxieties are at the root of reactions against immigrants and pro-immigration policies. Among the laundry list of origins, we found that the most damaging can be attributed to shrinking local news and their ineffective digital engagement, a wild-wild west internet of misinformation and loud online voices, economic and racial disparities, and a lack of saturation of pro-immigrant solutions.
The latter being the greatest sticking point in the Democratic offense: an absence of socializing immigration reform solutions on the left, both in political rhetoric and online ads, has effectively left a vacuum for Trump, his campaign, the GOP, and forces of the dark and dank internet to fill with lies, hyperboles, and draconian resolves.
(You can dig deeper in our polling of battleground states where we found that a majority of voters had no idea where Democrats stood on immigration and were susceptible to Trump’s anti-immigrant messaging.)
To move swing voters away from taking the anti-immigrant bait, we need to counter the opposition with a plate of silver bullets. It’s simply not enough to show how “we’re in this together” or pivot away from the attack and serve a dish of a healthcare fix, or talk immigration in a silo, or worse yet, ignore the issue.
Swing voters’ anxieties must be addressed via a local lens and by exposing the culprits through values-based messaging and soothing away the true source of their anxieties while simplifying immigration solutions (i.e. citizenship, greater accountability at ICE) and portraying the interdependency between immigrants and nonimmigrants, without otherizing or exceptionalizing immigrants. The formula in the simplest terms: soothe anxieties + core values and common reliance + immigration solutions = persuasion or inoculation.
What does this formula look like in practice?
The short version:
(Note: While we have to continue to insist that Facebook and other platforms do better about restricting misinformation, we can’t leave the opposition to fill in the blanks. This online political playbook is also no substitute for organizing on the ground, but rather complementary to phone-banking, door knocking, and other forms of voter outreach.)
Promote or put money behind locally-sourced news articles with headlines and stories that highlight or expose a) neighbors (i.e. white, Black, Latino, Asian, immigrants) coming together or positively contributing to their towns, b) candidates, elected officials or the system exacerbating healthcare, economic, racial, and immigrant injustices (i.e. family separation), and c) illustrate what policy solutions can fix the immigration system. Avoid big named sources like CNN or New York Times. Keep it local.
Oftentimes we wrack our brains to create new content, when all we have to do is put the local story on the feeds of the voter or community that feels overlooked. If you do it on Facebook, it’s cheap, generates high engagement, and counters misinformation through sources swing voters know and trust. Most importantly, it reminds these “moderate” voters of the familiar connection and common reliance they have to everyone in their neighborhood, including and especially immigrants.
Amplifying the right local news stories consistently is the backbone to the persuasive creative content. Use memes (humor and accountability work; so do immigration solutions in this form), factoids on immigration via GIFs or videos less than 10 seconds, and videos that briefly summarize news articles (for the voters who don’t want to click on the headline), and video testimonials of both everyday people and trusted voices (i.e. veterans, small business owners). All of these tools should be used to set the record straight on immigration and bigotry, elevate American values (patriotism, fairness, and responsibility), and portray the familiar connection and mutual reliance between immigrants and nonimmigrants. Let the headlines, stories and creative content do most of the talking; don’t be preachy.
Sequencing this carefully crafted creative content that brings to life tested messaging and polling research provides validation and ammunition for voters to use in countering the loud opposition online and, critically, bring along their friends and family through a “share” or in conversation.
Bottom line: you can’t win over the exhausted majority with one liners or even three videos, but you can take them on a journey away from the dark side of Trump’s xenophobia and disinformation. All we have to do is boldly saturate the mediums to disarm the Death Star.
