In the 2010s many conservatives leaned on the familiar ideal that people should be judged by character, not by skin color. That line became a common rebuttal to progressive arguments for race-conscious policies and programs — a way to defend individual evaluation against policies like DEI and against caricatures that treated people primarily as members of racial groups.
A few years later the posture flipped. After violent incidents or reports of wrongdoing by people from particular countries, prominent right-wing figures stopped treating migrants as individuals and began condemning whole national, ethnic, or religious communities. Stephen Miller argued migrants at scale recreate the conditions of their homelands; Donald Trump, after stories about welfare misuse, denounced Somali communities broadly. This is racial or ethnic collectivism: judging people by the perceived traits and histories of their group rather than on their individual behavior.
That logic is not new. It echoes the nativist arguments that shaped early 20th-century immigration restrictions, when elites warned that arrivals from southern and eastern Europe would degrade American life. Historian John Higham called that frame ‘racism’ — a belief that people should be judged by the collective record of their origins rather than as persons.
So why has the colorblind, individualist argument waned? A blunt explanation is power: appeals to individualism often operate defensively. People invoke them most powerfully when their side is under threat. Many who dressed their arguments in colorblind language during the 2010s were doing so to push back against progressive demands; when the political balance shifted and the right grew dominant, the discipline of individualism loosened and group-based rhetoric resurfaced.
At the core of modern MAGA politics is a demand for much tighter immigration controls. The underlying claim is straightforward: immigrants from poor or violent places will bring those problems here and ‘make America more like those countries.’ That conviction is explicit in the rhetoric of leading MAGA figures and it organizes a new strand of right-wing thought. But it runs into two practical obstacles: public opinion and reality. Most Americans still profess a commitment to judging individuals and hold mixed or generally favorable views of immigrants. Polls show support for immigrants rebounding after earlier declines, and many people across demographic groups back equal-opportunity norms over collective punishment.
More importantly, the empirical record weakens the argument that immigrants simply transplant their homelands’ conditions. U.S. immigration is heavily selective. Selection accounts for much of the variation in educational and economic outcomes across immigrant groups. Consider Indian immigrants: India’s per-capita income is lower than that of many Latin American countries, yet Indian Americans on average have higher household incomes and educational attainment than any other ancestry group in the U.S. Places with large Indian populations are often prosperous and safe, with strong schools and civic life.
Institutions and opportunity matter too. El Paso, overwhelmingly Mexican in heritage, looks very different from Ciudad Juárez across the border: far lower homicide rates, different public services, different economic prospects. Even less selective migration tends to converge toward American norms over time because of institutions, legal frameworks, and economic incentives. There are exceptions — cross-border criminal networks, gang migration, or targeted fraud do travel — but they are exceptions, not the rule.
For an anti-immigration movement that wants broad public support, the logical hurdle is clear: you cannot sustain sweeping restrictions if most people are inclined to judge newcomers as individuals or if evidence shows immigrants generally assimilate into American norms. The political solution is to manufacture or amplify fears about particular groups so the public will accept collective judgment. In recent cycles we have seen this play out: hoaxes and lurid false stories about Haitian migrants circulated widely before being debunked, while reports of fraud in Somali communities provided a stickier fodder for alarm.
Some groups are easier targets. Somalis in the U.S., for example, are disproportionately refugees (a less-selective immigration category), often poorer, visibly Muslim, and politically organized in a few localities. Those characteristics make them vulnerable to narratives that portray an entire community as a civic or cultural threat. If a critical mass of people begins to accept the question ‘Are these Somalis bad?’ as legitimate, that acceptance can be generalized: the same reasoning can be applied to Afghans, Haitians, Chinese, Jews, Indians, Italians — any group deemed undesirable.
That shift matters because it undercuts the liberal principle that rights and membership attach to persons rather than collectives. In the 20th century liberal appeals to individualism helped dismantle Jim Crow and race-based immigration rules. Martin Luther King Jr.’s insistence that people be judged by character rather than color was part of the rhetorical arsenal that made equal-rights arguments persuasive across a broad public.
I do not mean to blame progressives for the rise of right-wing racial collectivism. The right has long exploited racial and ethnic politics. But it is fair to say that when progressives emphasize group identity and race-conscious policy, they can reduce the rhetorical force of colorblind individualism. That erosion makes it easier for opponents to reframe political debates around group threat rather than individual rights.
If the public again accepts that whole groups can be judged and barred because of origin or faith, the consequence will be a departure from an individual-rights–based republic toward a politics where group membership determines access to rights and belonging. That is the prize at the end of this strategy — not only stricter borders but a reordering of civic life so that collective identity, not individual personhood, is the primary basis for inclusion.
