They are human beings seeking a better life in the land of opportunity but former President Donald Trump calls undocumented immigrants genetically criminal, animals, rapists, impure, dangerous, savage gangsters and slum dwellers and prisoners from back home who are “poisoning the blood of our country” and eaters of neighbors’ pets, who have occupied America and are taking jobs from African Americans and Latino Americans.

“The mass migration invasion has crushed wages, crashed school systems — your systems are a disaster — wrecked the standard of living and brought crime, drugs, misery and death,” Trump charged at a recent rally in California.

There is a reason for such belittling of helpless people. “By casting migrants as agents of ruin and destruction, the Republican nominees are peddling a raft of specious claims that underline the extent to which nativist sentiment has become central to their campaign. But seldom is unauthorized immigration the actual cause of the problems they say plague the country,” The New York Times reported, referring to Trump and his running mate James David (JD) Vance.

It is “the latest instance” of the Republican Party’s “intensifying anti-immigrant rhetoric in the run-up to November’s election, underscoring the degree to which one of America’s two major political parties is sourcing many of its talking points and policy ideas directly from neo-fascists,” HuffPost’s Christopher Mathias reported. Trump says he will deport the millions of undocumented migrants if he wins re-election, labeling his plan “remigration,” a loaded term dating back to 1527 and associated down the centuries with identitarian politics in Europe.

Pat Buchanan, a former Republican presidential candidate and aide to three presidents, used it “to whitewash his own call for ethnic cleansing as early as 2006, in his racist tract ‘State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America,’” Jakob Guhl of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told HuffPost.

Trump brought it back in his continued pandering to nativists familiar with the connotation. Stephen Miller, senior immigration adviser in his administration, who is widely believed to have been behind his policy of separating refugee children from their families, exulted, “THE TRUMP PLAN TO END THE INVASION OF SMALL TOWN AMERICA: REMIGRATION!” It is not something new to Trump. Announcing his presidential bid in 2015, he accused Mexico of exporting drug dealers, criminals and rapists to the U.S. His rhetoric has worsened over the years, finding a receptive audience in the millions of European Americans who see migrants as an existential threat. But the groundwork was laid decades earlier by John Tanton, a Michigan eye doctor and conservationist whose story Gaby Del Valle relates in The Nation’s October issue.

Tanton started out bemoaning unchecked immigration as a danger to the environment. He campaigned for a quota and/or deporting those already here and founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and other anti-immigrant groups. His efforts failed in some instances, such as attempts to derail pro-immigration legislation, and succeeded in others, as well as persuading some states, including Florida, to make English the official language.

Tanton and his allies eventually succeeded in persuading Congress to block at least three bipartisan bills to provide millions of undocumented migrants with a path to citizenship and sparked new interest in books such as “The Population Bomb” by former Stanford University professor Paul R. Ehrlich and former Stanford senior researcher in conservation biology Anne H. Ehrlich and published in 1968, which argued that over-population will lead to starvation and environmental disasters. “The Camp of the Saints,” a 1973 novel by French writer Jean Raspail, “depicts a dystopian future in which Europe and the U.S. are besieged by hordes of dark-skinned migrants,” as Del Valle notes. French philosopher Renaud Camus’ 2018 English-language work has a self-explanatory title, “You Will Not Replace Us!”

Early anti-immigration warriors who joined Tanton’s battle included Kansas Attorney General and former Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who became, Del Valle writes, “one of the foremost attorneys pushing immigration restriction.” Tom Tancredo, a Colorado Congressman, started his tenure by creating the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus. Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa was among them. So, too, was Senator Jeff Sessions, whom Del Valle describes as “the soft-spoken Alabama senator whose diminutive presence belief his virulent racism” and who became Trump’s attorney general.

Sessions hired Miller, then 29, to help him become “a leader in anti-immigration-reform movement within Congress.” Trump later made him a senior adviser and he is poised to play a key role in implementing his “remigration” plan if re-elected.

An anti-immigration pitch failed to help Trump win re-election in 2020 but, as Biden took office, polls were showing that 55 percent of Americans supported restrictions on immigration and, for the first time in 20 years, it became the most important issue for voters. Tanton’s shadow has loomed large in the background. He “more than anyone else, understood the power of harnessing the public’s fears and anxieties in the service of a broader political project.” So, too, does Trump — but not always.

The New York Times reported in 2017 that around 200 undocumented Polish workers pulling 12-hour shifts helped build his 58-story Trump Tower in Manhattan. “The workers were paid as little as $4 an hour for their dangerous labor, less than half the union wage, if they got paid at all,” The Times said.

Undocumented migrants from Costa Rica helped build his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, and Ecuadoreans, El Salvadorans, Guatemalans and Mexicans worked there, The Washington Post reported in 2019. His “recent purge of unauthorized workers from at least five Trump properties contributed to mounting evidence that the president benefited for years from the work of illegal laborers he now vilifies.”

That was then. Trump recently persuaded Republican Congressional leaders to sabotage yet another bipartisan bill to deny a “win” for his re-election opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. He continues to demonize undocumented migrants as a counter to Democrats’ advantage on abortion rights.

But it is not just partisan politicking.

Waging war against undocumented migrants – who are mostly “nonwhites” — has been a tactic of autocrats and fascists such as Benito Mussolini and Silvio Berlusconi of Italy and Germany’s Adolf Hitler, New York University history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes in her 2020 book “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” It is part of a two-pronged strategy to fuel nativist fears, the other being criticizing low birthrates among “whites” – an angle evidently in Vance’s portfolio. He has mocked “childless cat ladies” and pushes racial guilt among women without children generally, just as the “strongmen” did.

“Cradles are empty and cemeteries are expanding,” Mussolini said. “The entire white race, the Western race, could be submerged by other races of color that multiply with a rhythm unknown to our own.” He imposed an additional tax on bachelors over 25 years of age, honored prolific childbearers and banned abortion and contraception. Vance wants to provide an electoral advantage to prolific child-bearing families.

Berlusconi called migrants an “army of evil” and a “national emergency” and claimed that “white replacement due to fertile migrants and low Italian birth rates” was taking place, Ben-Ghiat writes. He persuaded more than 40 percent of Italians to believe immigrants were the main perpetrators of crime, as Trump does.

Hitler sought to “purify” Germany, taking his cue, Ben-Ghiat writes, from eugenics practices in Europe — and the United States. He claimed the right to kill “as the welfare of the people and the state demand,” and his victims included six million Jews. He wrote in his book “Mein Kampf” that the French had achieved “such great progress in Negrification that we can actually speak of an African state arising on European soil.”

It is impossible, therefore, to separate Trump’s attack on undocumented migrants from the basic ideology that drives it: fear of loss of “white” superiority. There was a time, though, when Americans would not have accepted scapegoating of vulnerable people – immigration control is one thing, demonizing migrants is another. Trump is obviously hoping that voters will see no difference between the two.