On Friday, we learned that the U.S. added 254,000 jobs in September, bringing the unemployment rate down to 4.1%. When President Obama was elected, the Great Recession had pushed the rate to 7.8%. President Trump inherited a rate of 3.6%, and he gave President Biden a mishandled pandemic and 6.4% unemployment.
Opinion Columnist
LZ Granderson
LZ Granderson writes about culture, politics, sports and navigating life in America.
The next president is likely going to inherit an economy that is strong, even if many Americans aren’t feeling that way. The next president will also bring with them a narrative about the economy. In the case of Trump, it’s a story we’ve heard far too many times: Blame the minorities.
Over the eight years of the Obama administration, wages went up and unemployment reached historic lows, but the subprime mortgage crisis that began in 2007 left a lasting mark on housing. How could it not, when home ownership fell to its lowest point since 1965? Construction slowed, but demand for housing did not, and that’s how we ended up with the affordability crisis we have now.
Trump wants voters to blame desperate migrants for the shortage of affordable housing, but it was his friends on Wall Street who began this cycle.
Just as it was his intentional downplaying of the pandemic during the first few months — something he said he did to prevent panic — that left Americans misinformed and sent the economy into a tailspin. Instead of preparing us, Trump told us to blame China. That rhetoric sparked a wave of anti-Asian hate crimes.
During the Obama administration, more than 2.5 million immigrants were deported. That’s more than any other administration had forced out before, and Americans were still losing their homes — because that housing crisis was caused by corporate greed, not by illegal immigration.
Trump fared well in 2016 by blaming desperate Black and brown people as the root cause of housing problems and any other economic issue, neatly avoiding any context about Wall Street’s role. And because this helped get him to the White House the first time, I understand why there’s a temptation for his campaign now to couch this rhetoric as policy — to claim, for instance, that deporting people will ease the housing shortage or that disaster relief money for victims of Hurricane Helene was diverted to migrants at the border.
But it’s not policy.
It’s just racist.
And we need to just call it out for what it is.
This week, the Trump campaign sent out a press release that read “Kamala’s Open Border Jeopardizes FEMA’s Hurricane Response.” It was in response to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas reiterating that the Federal Emergency Management Agency may not have enough funds to make it to the end of hurricane season in November. The agency initially raised concerns at the beginning of the season in June, and the Biden administration overhauled aspects of FEMA relief to get funds out quicker. From Hurricane Katrina in 2005 through 2021, FEMA has spent more than $12 billion a year. From 1992 to 2004, it was $5 billion.
It was weather, not immigrants, that forced more than 3.3 million Americans out of their homes in 2022, nearly half that number for more than a month. However, the Trump campaign didn’t mention climate change, perhaps because the former president still thinks it’s a hoax. But the data show more funds were needed in response to the sweeping damage caused by natural disasters, not because of any trend in immigration.
And yet, the Trump campaign’s press secretary said: “FEMA has run out of money for the rest of hurricane season because Kamala Harris used the funds for free giveaways to illegal immigrants.”
That’s not true.
During the vice presidential debate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) took every opportunity he could to fault migrants and immigration for economic issues, echoing his boss. For his part, Trump’s comments about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country” echoed Adolph Hitler. No wonder Vance compared Trump to Hitler in 2016 before switching allegiances.
Now the two of them are floating “mass deportation” as a solution … to problems caused by corporate greed. Never mind that deportations would aggravate many problems, including food costs and housing shortages.
In 2019, more than half the farmworkers in the country — 450,000 — were immigrants. In addition to the billions it would cost for the Trump-Vance deportation plan, what do you think would happen to food prices if they had their way? And to housing availability if a huge percentage of construction workers were deported? In Texas, half of the industry’s laborers undocumented.
Blaming Black and brown people might be red meat on the campaign trail, but it just isn’t sound economic policy.
It’s just racism.