Aporophobia predominates in the United States

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But surely the term xenophobia is more familiar to us, but when we talk about aporophobia, it gets a bit more uphill.

According to Donald Trump migrants arrive from “unknown places” with “truly foreign languages, no one speaks them”; a mantra he repeats at his rallies.

But it makes us wonder why this rejection of migrants, is it not fear of the poor?

In any case, they can be “a force” and can determine an election.

For some analysts, aporophobia predominates in the United States, since it is more common for a poor migrant to be rejected than one with a lot of money.

Aporophobia predominates in the United States

According to Spanish philosopher Adela Cortina, aporophobia is the fear of people of limited resources.

While the Royal Spanish Academy adopted it. The word xenophobia, from the Greek “xeno” (foreigner) and “fobia” (fear or aversion), fell short to describe a reality that shakes the societies of the five continents.

“And it is not repulsed by Orientals capable of buying soccer teams or bringing in what were once called ‘petrodollars’, nor by soccer players of any ethnicity or race, who earn millions of dollars but are decisive in winning competitions (…)”, says Cortina in his book “Aporophobia, the rejection of the poor”.

Cortina comments that, on the contrary, they open the doors to political refugees, to poor immigrants.

“The problem is not one of race, ethnicity or even foreigners, the problem is one of poverty. And the most sensitive thing in this case is that there are many racists and xenophobes, but aporophobes, almost all of them,” he adds.

In every Trump rally, the public present is an exposure to this sector of the population; revealing that aporophobia predominates in the United States.

Trump stirs migrant fear based on record numbers of arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border, where the U.S. Border Patrol has intercepted them more than 2.7 million times since January 2023.

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Fear of migration.

If he wins the elections Trump promises “the largest deportation in the history” of the United States.

Migrants “are killing our country, they are killing our people” and “they are poisoning the blood of the country”, says the former president, who coined a new term: “migrant crime”.

This anti-migrant rhetoric, which has earned him comparisons to Adolf Hitler, is not without danger.

“Our cognitive bias leads us to pay more attention to messages that generate intense negative emotions in us, such as anger or indignation.”

According to the IOM, irregular migration is a movement of people who move outside the rules of origin, transit or host countries.

Some 11 million migrants live in the United States illegally.

The vast majority of migrants go through what is known as migratory grief, which can lead to Ulysses Syndrome or Chronic and Multiple Stress Migrant Syndrome.

According to the World Bank, “in the next decade, migration will be increasingly necessary for all countries, regardless of their income level,” especially in states where the population has stopped growing.

Another aspect of the predominance of aporophobia in the United States is future projections. 

One in eight U.S. residents is a migrant, the American Immigration Council (AIC) stated last November.

In 2021 there were 45.3 million people, paying more than $500 billion in taxes.

In addition, 20% of all U.S. entrepreneurs were migrants.

More than 30 million Latinos are eligible to vote in the November presidential election, a higher number than African Americans, estimates the Pew Research Center.

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