A decade ago many conservatives embraced the phrase that people should be judged by “character, not group identity,” partly as a response to progressive critiques of colorblindness. Those critiques argued that addressing structural racial disparities required policies that recognized race and group position. The policy result was a wave of DEI efforts and a backlash in media and politics that often read as, and at times became, harsh criticisms of white people—sometimes expressed in extreme terms that went largely unpunished.
That moment helps explain why the right rallied around individualist language: it protected people from being evaluated by the groups they belonged to. But the rhetoric has since inverted. After an Afghan man shot two National Guardsmen, opinion pieces cautioned against blaming Afghan refugees as a whole. Stephen Miller replied that mass migration brings not lone individuals but whole societies. Around the same time, reports of concentrated welfare fraud among some Somali migrants in Minnesota produced Trump’s sweeping denunciations of Somalis—an assertion that people from “failed” countries are undesirable in America.
This turn isn’t unusual. A century ago immigration restrictionists openly argued that people from “underdeveloped” regions were inherently inferior—what historians call a strain of racism. Today’s language is a modern racial collectivism: assessing people by the conditions of their homeland or by perceived group traits rather than by individual behavior.
What happened to the earlier defense of judging people individually? In short: when a political movement regains power, defensive appeals to principles like individualism can fall away. Principles such as individual evaluation or free speech often get invoked most loudly when one’s side feels besieged and can be deployed more selectively when in the ascendancy. Some conservatives genuinely hold to individualism; many others used that language instrumentally when it suited them. Much of the current MAGA terrain fits that instrumental pattern.
At its core, MAGA’s immigration agenda rests on a predictive claim: that migrants from poor, violent, or ill-governed places will reproduce those conditions in the U.S. Leaders who push this idea genuinely believe national origin and homeland context are reliable predictors of community behavior. That belief is a form of racial or national collectivism.
But politics runs up against public opinion and the evidence. Long-term polling shows Americans’ attitudes toward immigration have fluctuated but broadly rebounded from recent lows; many people still favor judging individuals on their merits and support equal opportunity more than categorical exclusions. Views about particular immigrant groups vary, but not always in ways that map neatly to how “developed” their home countries are. For instance, immigrants from Africa often enjoy more favorable ratings than immigrants from some economically more advanced places.
Empirical research on immigrant outcomes points away from the homeland-determinism story. The U.S. immigration system is highly selective; migrants who arrive tend to be more motivated or skilled than average in their source countries. Work by economists like Edward Lazear shows selectivity accounts for much of the educational and economic success of immigrant groups. Consider Indian Americans: despite India’s low per-capita GDP relative to wealthy countries, Indian-origin residents in the U.S. rank among the highest in education and income. Fremont, California—home to many Indian families—is affluent, safe, and prosperous; it didn’t become a U.S. version of India.
The same logic applies to places like El Paso versus Juárez. Although geographically contiguous, the American side doesn’t mirror conditions across the border because U.S. institutions, law, incentives, and economic structures reshape immigrant behavior and opportunities. Yes, links to source-country problems exist in some cases, but the differences between immigrant communities in America and the societies they left are often profound.
If Miller and Trump’s claim that immigrant communities inevitably transplant their homelands’ dysfunctions is empirically weak, why repeat it? Because political success for MAGA depends on changing how Americans evaluate people: it’s useful for them if citizens begin judging individuals primarily by group identity. To manufacture that shift, leaders search for target groups they can persuade voters to fear, resent, or dismiss. Political messaging and campaign smears are the tools: false stories and rumors have done this work before—such as the fabricated claims circulated in 2024 about Haitian migrants in Ohio—that may be baseless but damage a group’s reputation.
Somalis in Minnesota are a current example. Their visible poverty, refugee status, Muslim faith, and growing political organizing in Minneapolis make them an accessible target. They are less “selected” in the economic sense, which leaves them more vulnerable to stereotyping, and their activism provokes narratives of “takeover.” Yet immigrant political organizing has a long American history and has often been a path to inclusion, not a sign of menace.
The larger danger is systemic. Getting the public to reject a group categorically does more than win a policy fight over welfare or border control: it shifts the frame of civic life toward judging groups rather than individuals. Even if targeted communities successfully defend themselves in court or at the ballot box, they do so by defending their membership rather than defending specific actions. Over time that erosion of individualist principles threatens equal citizenship and the liberal idea that rights and responsibilities attach to people, not collective identities. It nudges society toward an estate-like arrangement in which groups — not individuals — are the primary political units.
Mid-20th-century liberal successes against racial collectivism—ending Jim Crow and remaking discriminatory immigration law—relied heavily on appeals to individual rights and character. But the progressive turn in the 2010s toward identity-based politics and critiques of colorblindness weakened that rhetorical foundation. That is not to blame progressives for the rise of right-wing collectivism, which has independent roots and responsibility. Still, it helps explain why the classic defense of judging people individually sounds less resonant now than it once did.
What’s at stake is whether the political center will reassert the principled case for evaluating people by their deeds, not their group labels. If it doesn’t, the country risks allowing racial and national collectivism to redefine civic membership and public life. That is why movements that seek to make you hate one group or another are dangerous—not only to the groups they single out, but to the idea that individual rights and equal treatment should govern a plural democratic society.