In his new book, The Latino Threat: How Alarmist Rhetoric Misrepresents Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation, Third Edition (Stanford University Press), UC Irvine anthropology Distinguished Professor emeritus Leo R. Chavez revisits his influential analysis of how fear-based narratives distort public understanding of Latino immigrants and citizens. Building on his award-winning first edition, Chavez explores how these narratives have intensified in today’s polarized political climate. Below, he shares why this new edition feels especially urgent, what the psychological, health and emotional fallout is for those caught in the crosshairs, and why it's time to put the Latino Threat Narrative to rest.

Q: Your book has been influential since its first edition, which won the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists’ Book Award. This third edition feels particularly urgent. What prompted you to revisit and expand The Latino Threat now, and how do you see its relevance in today’s political and social climate?

A: I would not have guessed in 2008, when the first edition of this book was published, that the story line I called the Latino Threat Narrative would become so quickly and commonly referenced in political discourse. In fact, Donald Trump used the same unsubstantiated anti-immigrant and anti-Latino tropes in his bid for the presidency in 2016 and continued to do so in his 2020 and 2024 presidential campaigns, claiming immigrants are poisoning the blood of the nation, that Latinos are genetically prone to criminality, Latinos can’t assimilate and won’t learn English, and the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants don’t deserve birthright citizenship. I also found that alarmist rhetoric about immigrants and Latinos that was once relegated to the political fringes has now become mainstream. For example, the increasing ease with which white replacement theory and Latina reproduction are evoked by politicians and the media. The alarmist assumptions in the Latino Threat Narrative are not “true” yet widely repeated. Empirical evidence undermining the assumptions of the Latino Threat Narrative has been updated in this new edition.

This Third Edition also focuses on how rhetoric influences attitudes, emotions, judgments, and behavior. Donald Trump is very effective in using rhetorical elements such as logos, pathos, and ethos to encourage his followers to see him as a messianic and charismatic leader, and to view the world in an “us/them” framework. His rhetoric is filled with metaphors of war: “crisis, “invasions,” “enemies,” “under siege, and “surveillance.” When metaphors are taken as reality, such as an “immigrant invasion,” they underscore the need for drastic policies such as the use of military at the U.S-Mexico border, apprehensions and deportations without warrant or due process, and the promotion of a state of fear in immigrant and Latino communities. 

Q: In this edition, you explore the psychological and emotional toll that the Latino Threat Narrative has on those it targets. Can you talk about why it was important for you to center these effects, and what you discovered in your research?

A: 2015 witnessed a surge in anti-immigrant and anti-Latino political rhetoric. I wondered how the Latino Threat Narrative affected those whom it targets. While the rhetoric may often rely on caricatures and stereotypes, the referents are real people, with families, dreams, and desires. Is it true that “words will never hurt you”? I undertook an experiment with colleagues here at UCI, particularly Chicano/Latino studies professor and chair Belinda Campos, to examine how youth of Mexican descent respond to the political rhetoric that places them in the crosshairs of debates over immigration and the future of the nation. Specifically, I wanted to know the emotional impact of political rhetoric’s targets’ sense of well-being, stress levels, and even perceptions of physical health. I found that negative political rhetoric elicited a range of negative emotional responses which were associated with the study’s participants’ higher perceived stress, lower subjective health, and lower subjective well-being. Conversely, positive emotional responses were associated with lower perceived stress, higher subjective health, and higher subjective well-being. Positive political rhetoric, by eliciting positive emotions, can have a salubrious effect. Based on these findings, I concluded that words do matter for the targets of political rhetoric. Words can wound; rhetoric can damage those in its crosshairs.

Q: You write about how the US-Mexico border has become a stage for political theater, especially during the Trump era. How has this “performance” evolved, and what consequences does it have for both policy and public perception?

A: From David Duke’s “Klan Border Watch” in 1977 to the murder of innocent Latinos in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas in 2019, the border has served as the backdrop for media spectacles, photo ops, and the politics of an immigration in “crisis.” Politicians, both Republicans and Democrats, regularly make pilgrimages to the border to have their photo taken and share their concerns over immigration. But the border itself is no longer just a backdrop for photo ops. It is a place where National Guard and U.S. Army troops are deployed to stop the “invasion” and where the governor of Texas strings huge buoys in the middle of the Rio Grande and barbed wire along its shores to prevent border crossers with fears of being maimed or drowned. The border is the site of a dangerous and on-going border theater, a place where the Latino Threat Narrative is pervasive.

Photo ops, walls made of shipping containers, giant buoys, barbed wire, and buses loaded with migrants, are public performances, spectacles of surveillance, that emphasize the power and privileges of citizenship. Long after any particular politician’s political life waxes and wanes, these images will remain an indelible part of our nation’s history. Migrants were the subjects in these spectacles. They were used to generate media attention in a political struggle over immigration policy, while at the same time masking the real humanitarian crisis at the border. Interestingly, lacking from these spectacles are discussions about solutions to fixing our immigration problem, to find ways for millions of undocumented immigrants to regularize their status, and to prepare for the demographic realities that create a demand for immigrant labor. Rather, the theatrics of a border in “crisis” maintains the status quo, which is very productive and useful for politicians and their “invasion” rhetoric.

Q: Given the current challenges to birthright citizenship and the broader conversations around national identity, how do you see the Latino Threat Narrative influencing these debates—and what might be at stake for American democracy?

A:  On his first day in office on January 20, 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order ending birthright citizenship for children whose parents are not in the U.S. legally. However, since the early 1990s, right-wing politicians have continually introduced bills into Congress to end automatic birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. Despite birthright citizenship being enshrined in the  14^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, pundits on TV and radio talk shows promote this extreme approach, arguing these babies don’t deserve citizenship because their parents are not legally in the country, or because they are part of a plot to get their family legal status, or because providing them the services they are legally entitled to, such as health care and education, deprives other, more deserving, citizens.

Denying birthright citizenship would result in a whole new group of Americans: those who were born in the United States but are not citizens. Why is this a problem? First of all, proposed changes to the Fourteenth Amendment are short on details, especially as to the status of noncitizen U.S.-born children. Might they have some legal rights and protections, such as the right to go to school and protections for fair labor standards and practices? Perhaps more important, would U.S.-born noncitizens be deportable? If they were subject to deportation, where would U.S.-born noncitizens be deported to? To their parents’ country of origin? And if deported, what would happen if these U.S.-born noncitizens returned to the country of their birth, the United States, as unauthorized entrants? Would they be undocumented immigrants who are at the same time U.S.-born?

Also problematic is the lack of empirical support for the belief that denying these children citizenship will result in their leaving the United States. While some might, it is more plausible that they will continue to reside in the United States, the nation of their birth, despite their status. Thus, we would have thousands, potentially millions over time, of U.S.-born noncitizen residents.

Finally, what would happen to the children of U.S.-born noncitizens? Since their parents would not be citizens, the next generation would also be denied citizenship by birth. Thus, a lack of citizenship status could continue over generations. What we would then have in America is a caste, a category from which certain people cannot escape. Social stigma is often ascribed to castes as abject persons lacking full membership in society. Is this not exactly the situation for which the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship was needed in the first place?

What is gained by keeping the debate on birthright citizenship alive? It keeps the issue in the public’s imagination and enables politicians to fire up a political base angry over demographic change and White replacement. The rhetoric over birthright citizenship stokes this anger by blaming immigrants for having too many children, who, even if they are born in the United States, are underserving citizens, and for being part of an “invasion” and “reconquest” of America. Can birthright citizenship weather this round of nativism and furor over immigration and demographic change? The issue of birthright citizenship is currently at the Supreme Court where its conservative majority has been willing to overturn seemingly solid Constitutional precedents and guarantees. Birthright citizenship may face its toughest challenge in over a century.

Q: Looking ahead, what do you hope readers—whether scholars, students, or members of the general public—take away from this new edition of The Latino Threat? What conversations or actions do you hope it inspires?

A: I hope my book reminds people that we are a nation of immigrants and as such we have weathered periods of intense nativism and xenophobia. The anti-immigrant and anti-Latino rhetoric we hear so often today is not new. It has been around for decades. But it is more urgent than ever to work against such alarmist views. I have attempted to provide evidence that undercuts the Latino Threat Narrative. Over generations in the United States, Latinos increasingly use English in daily life. They increasingly have non-Latino friends and intermarry with non-Latinos. As Latino immigrants move along a path to citizenship, they are increasingly more integrated in terms of income, levels of education, and political engagement, despite the obstacles many face because politicians cannot find a way to help them regularize their immigration status. The information I have provided may not be able to destroy the Latino Threat Narrative, but they do undermine some of its basic premises.

The real danger posed by the Latino Threat Narrative, and the acrimonious debate over Latino immigration that it informs, is that it blinds us to the reality that Latinos are a vital part of U.S. society. Latino integration into society therefore goes unrecognized, either willfully or because of the taken-for-granted assumptions of the narrative. Just as lacking in recognition are Latino contributions to social and cultural life, to what we think of as being American. Perhaps this is because such changes are difficult to observe in process. They are slow and often imperceptible. Also, when so dominant a discourse pervades public culture as does the Latino Threat Narrative, it is difficult for other discourses to blossom, especially when radio and TV talk-show hosts use the supposed Latino threat to bolster their ratings, or politicians use it to garner votes.

What about the Latino Contribution Narrative? For over four hundred years Latinos have been contributing to the social, economic, and cultural life of what is now the United States. In a sense, those who worry about U.S. culture being changed by Latino immigrants and their descendants are correct. Latinos are changing U.S. culture and will continue to change it even as they themselves change. Immediate reactions to newcomers (immigrants) in a society often focus on difference. New people in the neighborhood who speak a different language, practice a different religion, and put-up signs on stores in foreign languages all raise ethnocentric responses and even fears. Over time, these differences may become less pronounced, because what was once new and strange can become part of the accepted way things are or even become central to a nation’s identity and symbols of that identity.

I hope readers will agree with me that it is time to put the Latino Threat Narrative to rest. It is counterproductive and divisive and creates self-fulfilling prophecies. It is an inaccurate depiction of the everyday lives of Latino immigrants and Latinos in general. The Latino Threat Narrative can cause real emotional pain and produce stress, feelings of being sick, and a low sense of well-being. Words can and do hurt, but so do feelings of being entrapped, cutoff from opportunities to work, travel, and socialize freely like other members of society. Citizenship in all its manifestations is hard enough to construct, and it deserves honest, productive, clear-eyed representations of all members of society, as well as public policies that reduce obstacles to integration and social and economic mobility. Perhaps it is naive to say it all begins with attitudes; an inclusive society is one in which a sense of belonging blooms freely and unhindered, fostered by widespread recognition that we are all in this thing called society together. Pitting one group against another to maintain privileges may have short-term benefits for some, but it creates long-term problems for all of us.

-photo courtesy of Steve Zylius, UC Irvine