My apologies, fellow political junkies: in truth, State of the Unions aren’t all that important. They’re certainly interesting—Washington loves to pull out pageantry, from its deluge of issue-based pins to the carefully composed distress of the opposition. It’s a game of stand, clap, sit and repeat—good exercise, but not much policymaking. We don’t watch the State of the Union to see the implementation of policy, hear the announcement of new treaties or observe a government in action: we watch the State of the Union because the president’s words matter.
This annual speech is the executive’s largest formal platform; for one night, he has the attention of the nation. The State of the Union is about one thing— the words that the most powerful person in the country chooses to use. And the ones he doesn’t.
On Wednesday evening, President Trump gave his first State of the Union address. Fox News called it “visionary.” The New York Times called it “effective.” CNN wrote “it felt like the tumult...of the last few years never happened.” His address had the elements of an average State of the Union: it was long, patriotic, and—if we’re being honest— boring. It wasn’t a Donald Trump campaign speech, rife with racist feather-ruffling and off-script tangents. It wasn’t met with widespread denunciation. But that doesn’t mean his speech was unremarkable.
On Wednesday evening, President Trump gave his first State of the Union. But it wasn’t the president’s first time using words, stories and emotions to proffer a divisive and bigoted message.
Absent new policy to unveil, President Trump filled his address with stories. There was the family who adopted a baby from an opioid-addicted mother, two Ohio businesspeople who are “handing out raises” after tax reform and a 12-year-old boy planting flags on veterans’ graves. These stories are heartwarming, but President Trump’s speechwriters aren’t using them for teary eyes: they’re using them because stories are powerful. Stories that pull at our emotions are the most effective ways to persuade—they trigger our anger, our love, our empathy. In the case of the three stories above, stories aren’t a dangerous tool. But they certainly can be.
“For decades, open borders have allowed drugs and gangs to pour into our most vulnerable communities,” Trump said, as he began to address immigration. He then launched into the story of Kayla and Nisa, two young girls who were “brutally murdered” by “the savage MS-13 gang.”
“Many of these gang members took advantage of glaring loopholes in our laws to enter the country as illegal, unaccompanied, alien minors,” he continued. “And wound up in Kayla and Nisa's high school.”
Here, Trump is peddling a single story: immigrants are gang members, immigrants are murderers and immigrants infiltrate your children’s schools with malignant intent. This is the story that tugs on emotions, the story that makes the president’s calls to stem the distribution of visas, end family reunification policies and create a “merit based immigration system” seem more palatable. But stories are as powerful as they are dangerous: the story of Kayla and Nisa is the truth, yet the story Trump paints of American immigrants couldn’t be farther from it.
We heard President Trump on the campaign trail, and throughout his presidency, when he declared that immigrants bring “drugs” and “crime.” They’re “rapists.” Perhaps some of them, he assumes, are good people. But this story of immigrants he has created—the story of gangs and drugs and crime—is not reality.
Dozens of studies, from both before and after the Trump presidency, have found that immigrants do not commit more crime than native-born Americans; in fact, they commit less. Census data from 1980 through 2010 reveals that adult male immigrants are one-fifth as likely to be incarcerated as their native-born American counterparts. In 2016, President Trump directed the Department of Homeland Security to publish a weekly list of crimes committed by immigrants. This was his desperate appeal to American empathy: look at these terrible stories, he tells us. Forget the facts. President Trump is using the power of stories to manipulate the head and the heart, proffering a fictitious and dangerous narrative of immigration.
I have a different story to tell the president. When I was sixteen years old, I met a girl in my math class who I will refer to as Maria. We sat at a desk across from each other, and though I’d never met her before, she reached out to me on the eve of our first exam. “Hey,” she pulled me aside one day, “Want to study after school?” I agreed, and as the bell rung, we both made our way to the library. Studying with her was like hiring a personal drill instructor: Maria worked harder, more diligently and more effectively than anyone I’d ever seen. We aced the test, and soon, Maria and I became friends. I learned that her mother and father had met in El Salvador, they had come to the United States after the death of their parents, and they had raised her on the income of a custodian and a part-time nurse. Now, her father was a policeman, and her mother was pursuing her graduate degree.
These stories are the reality of immigration in the United States. Immigrants are not a criminal and threatening mass, but a coalition of smart and dedicated individuals—each with a powerful and important story.
While speaking about immigration, President Trump thundered that his job is to “defend Americans”—to protect safety, families and communities. He finished with an allusion to the Dreamers, immigrants brought to America by their parents as youth—people that President Trump plans to deport, barring a deal on immigration. He asked Congress to “close the deadly loopholes” in our immigration system; after all, he ended, “Americans are dreamers, too.”
When the president said that, he tried to tell us two things: that immigrants are not Americans, and that immigrants put America in danger. It’s time we tell him two things back: that immigrants make America great, and that stories matter. The president should choose his more wisely.
Cameron Beach is a Trinity sophomore. Her column runs on alternate Fridays.
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Cameron Beach is a Trinity sophomore. Her column runs on alternate Mondays.