According to a 2017 leak of Facebook’s content moderation guidelines, a statement such as “migrants are filthy” does not constitute hate speech — whereas the phrase “migrants are filth” does. The reasoning? Calling migrants filth is dehumanizing, but calling migrants filthy is merely a description of physical appearance.
If it feels like this rule was made in bad faith, that’s because it was.
The particular attention to the word “filth” results from its frequent appearance in the rhetoric of ethnic cleansing, including the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. Israeli researcher Elihu Richter argues in his article “Genocide: Can We Predict, Prevent, and Protect?” that the use of dehumanizing terms like “filth, cockroaches, cancer, parasites and microbes” represent a “specific warning of genocidal intent.” Stanford News similarly points to Stalin’s slurs against the kulaks, who were killed and deported by the thousands in the 1930s. He frequently employed phrases like “enemies of the people” and terms like “cockroaches, scum, vermin, filth, garbage, half animals, apes.”
In all of these cases, ethnic minorities were treated as a dehumanized public “health” crisis — an infection of the national population which needed to be purged in order to produce internal purity. Hitler himself referred to this as “racial hygiene,” and he created the National Hygiene Department in hopes of “strengthening the ‘national body’ by eliminating biologically threatening genes from the population.”
This historic context is exactly why it is so disturbing to see the Trump administration increasingly invoking the threat of disease as they make their case against immigrants and asylum seekers at our southern border. While the intent behind Trump’s rhetoric of immigrants as “murderers” and “rapists” is obvious, his statements about public “health” are less transparent in their aims.
And that’s exactly why they’re so dangerous.
Last month, Trump tweeted unabashedly that immigration “brings large scale crime and disease” into the United States. This tweet followed the horrific deaths of two migrant children in U.S. custody: Felipe Gomez Alonso, 8, who died of cold and high fever; and Jackelin Caal Maquin, 7, who died of dehydration and septic shock. In her attempt to stymie public outrage, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen similarly suggested that, “It is now clear that migrants, particularly children, are increasingly facing medical challenges and harboring illness caused by their long and dangerous journey.”
Yet both of the children died of easily treated maladies that were produced by the inhumane conditions of U.S. detainment — not by illnesses that they brought across the border.
It’s well documented that detainment facilities are woefully under-prepared for the massive influx of long-term detainees being held under new laws that criminalize low-level immigration violations. These concentration camps lack adequate food, medical care and shelter for the migrants being detained there over long periods of time. Some Customs and Border Protection holding cells are now commonly referred to as “las hieleras,” or “the ice boxes” because “women and children detained at the border will routinely spend several nights crowded into these tiny rooms … wrapped in foil blankets, shivering, and denied mattresses and medicine,” according to The Cut.
NPR also reports that many migrants are “held in Customs and Border Protection facilities that are unsanitary and overcrowded, receiving largely inedible food and being forced to drink foul-smelling drinking water.” One migrant mother describes guards preventing her from changing her young daughter’s underwear for several days after she soiled it; another mother says she had to plug her nose just to drink the dirty water distributed in her facility and a third mother recounts being denied water for her children even after begging.
Nonetheless, the Trump administration continues to blame immigrants for the illnesses they contract while being held under inhumane conditions in U.S. facilities. Secretary Nielsen announced on Dec. 26 that she has “personally engaged with the Centers for Disease Control to request that their experts investigate the uptick in sick children crossing our borders.” Against this backdrop, Fox News was running pieces on how the migrant caravan would bring everything from tuberculosis and AIDS, to the long-eradicated smallpox, across the U.S. border.
Treating an ethnic group as the source of disease is an effective tactic for normalizing the ideology of ethnic cleansing because it allows heinous state violence to disappear beneath the pretense of protecting public health. It’s much easier to claim that extreme measures are necessary if you can hide your political agenda behind the seemingly objective artifices of science and biology.
This is exactly why you can call migrants “filthy” on Facebook, but cannot call them “filth.” The intent behind these two phrases is exactly the same, but one appears to be an “objective” judgement. And anything objective is fair, right?
Similarly, the Trump administration is trying to sell us on the “objective” truth of a biological threat in order to make the ideology of racial cleansing more palatable — a tactic also used to sell eugenics. Pointing toward health allows Trump to rationalize underlying logics of white supremacy by shifting the apparent focus from migrants’ skin color to their biological components. To make matters even worse, Trump’s detainment centers can efficiently produce many of the illnesses he needs to back up his claims of looming disease and death.
Michel Foucault described biopolitics as the politicization of biology. As we begin to talk about populations instead of people (or a massive migrant caravan instead of individual asylum seekers), it becomes easier and easier for us to dissociate from violence committed against those individuals. For that reason, talking about abstract populations is always inherently dehumanizing: we see ourselves punishing “rapists,” “murderers” and “aliens” rather than encouraging the abuse of immigrant families. We justify violence by telling a story about the necessity of protecting ourselves.
On May 18, during a discussion on immigration policy, the President of the United States declared, “These aren’t people. These are animals.”
Have we truly reckoned with what it means for a statement like that to feel normal?
