lettersTo the editor,

Doing migrant farm labor in the Washington state orchards in the 1970s, I had the pleasure of working alongside many Mexican fruit pickers. The Mexicans worked rings around us “Anglos,” and I developed deep respect for their industriousness and skill. The harvests would never have come in on time without them.

I think of that experience when I hear the constant slandering of immigrants by Donald Trump, JD Vance and others in the GOP camp. In the recent vice-presidential debate, Vance shamefully maintained the anti-immigrant drumbeat, vilifying and blaming them at every turn for a host of societal ills.

Vastly inflating the numbers of undocumented immigrants in the US, the Republican candidates for the two highest offices in the land deliberately stoke fear and hatred of people who are generally decent fellow human beings working hard to make a life for themselves and their families in “the land of opportunity.” Recently the candidates’ irresponsible lies about Haitian immigrants have resulted in threats of violence against those legally working in Springfield, Ohio.

This tactic is called scapegoating, an inheritance of our archaic human past. A wrong is identified and a victim is chosen to receive the community’s punishment, irrespective of the victim’s innocence. We can see many things wrong in our present world, many of them consequences of unchecked climate change and militarism to which we as Americans are chief contributors. Instead of facing up to our own role in these enormous problems, we project our fears and anger onto the sacrificial victim, in this case those fleeing from unbearable situations at home often made worse by our indifference and complicity.

A recent email from US Representative Derrick Van Orden headed “We Must Secure Our Borders” jumped on this scapegoating bandwagon and repeated many of Trump/Vance’s falsehoods, claiming that “every American life is at risk” because of “the chaos caused by Border Czar Vice President Kamala Harris.” (“Border Czar,” by the way, is an entirely fictional office made up by the Trump/Vance campaign.) Van Orden suggested that undocumented immigrants are responsible for our fentanyl problem, a claim which has been thoroughly debunked; most fentanyl is smuggled into our country through legal channels and often by US citizens.

Anyone calling themselves “Christian,” as many Trump/Vance supporters do, should reflect on the monumental episode of scapegoating at the heart of their religion. The philosopher Rene Girard says that the recognition of the scapegoat Christ’s innocence was a historical rejection of the ancient habit of sacrificing innocents. Have we come far enough now to stop scapegoating our current sacrificial victims?

Thomas R. Smith

River Falls