Shitholes, Sanctuaries, and Springfield

The story I tell my kids is that it was the 1710s. Maybe the 1720s.

The thing about early 18th century migrations from Ireland and England is that it is very hard to know precisely who it was that actually made the trip as a European and who was born here as an American. Early censuses are notoriously incomplete, many destroyed by fires and others by war. Those that survived contain precious little information or context. That’s why any time someone tells you they “traced their ancestry back to William the Conqueror,” what they’re really telling you is that they copied the family trees of a dozen bored retirees who themselves had lazily copied the work of an even lazier guy who one day guessed that one of a dozen John Smiths listed in a vaguely time-appropriate baptismal record in Falmouth simply had to be their John Smith from Maryland, then put it on the internet.

By the mid-to-late 18th century, records get better. That’s how I know that 31 of my 32 great-great-great-great grandfathers – thanks a lot, John McCreary – were born on these shores. My ancestors fought in the Revolution. They were circuit riders in the frontier Methodist Church. They fought for Jackson in the War of 1812. They served alongside Davy Crockett and Sam Houston and named three generations of my ancestors for them. That includes my son, Harold Houston, named after the Irishman on his mother’s side who took a ship from Ulster bound for Boston and for a Virginian who relieved my namesake fourth great grandfather’s company after battles against the Red Sticks at Emuckfaw and Enotichopco Creek before he became the first President of the Republic of Texas. 

I am what some today are increasingly referring to as a “Heritage American.”

The whole idea is a red-white-and-blue-washing of a painfully ordinary strain of ethnonationalism. It latches onto a shred of truth about American exceptionalism to conveniently forget full half the things that actually do make America exceptional. It is a load of rubbish.

But to us here at Perscient, it is also a fascinating tale of just how a nationwide narrative can emerge and explode and shape our collective processing of world events in a distinctly measurable way. It is also a tale of three pivotal moments that shaped the stories being told today about immigration: the shithole moment, the sanctuary moment, and the Springfield moment.

The Shithole Moment

The rise of the Heritage American story is a small but interesting part of a network of very new and very old stories that we tell about immigration in the United States. We will return to it shortly. Before we do, however, we first have to grapple with the fundamental problem in any kind of media commentary: disentangling the stories we tell from the realities they place into narrative frames is difficult.

There’s an old adage in finance – usually apocryphally and wrongly attributed to 20th century British economist John Maynard Keynes – that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. I’ve never liked it very much. Oh, it is true enough and useful enough as a saying – so long as you are not too pedantic about the whole thing. Thankfully, I am pedantic to a fault. I am more than happy to point out that it is very dumb to believe that the market is being irrational any time it disagrees with what we think is real. Most of the time when we call something irrational it is just us being wrong with extra steps.

Irrationality is too fine a scope for the human behavior the adage references, anyway.

It is far more useful to understand that people can be story-driven longer than you or I can stay reality-driven.

In either case, the utility lies in understanding that there are far fewer transmission mechanisms between story and reality than we imagine. In markets, credit events are reality transmission mechanisms. In politics, things like elections and wars can be reality transmission mechanisms. You can’t story away bankruptcy and you can’t story away the occupation of your capital. Not until enough time has passed to lie about it in a book, anyway. Within those hard boundaries, stories usually survive until a better one comes along. And by better I don’t really mean better. I mean better adapted. More easily spread, more conducive to incentives and priors and identity and everything else that we need to be true. More easily transformed into new Common Knowledge, something we all know that we all know.

But a story that rhymes with the evidence of our eyes and ears – or at least one that contains parts of it – helps the formation of common knowledge. Most of us still consider ourselves creatures of reason, and a story told in a way that allows us to consider it (and more importantly, ourselves) to be reasonable will be easier for us to believe. Verisimilitude, to use a five-dollar word for it, matters. It’s why conspiracy theories work. A single grain of truth can be weaponized into a system of conjecture that treats the grain of truth as adequate proof. And as we will see at the end of this story, a sufficient breakdown in verisimilitude, especially if it is accompanied by a story that is becoming increasingly divorced from what we need to be true, can destroy even the most powerful and ascendant narrative.

But all of this is why disentangling reality from story in the wake of actual events is hard. Really hard. When things happen, we tell stories about them. Sometimes those stories grow and change as we try in good faith to work out what the things that happen mean. Sometimes those stories resonate with something we already felt. Sometimes the people who benefit from how we respond to stories see a golden opportunity to use them to shape new common knowledge that will serve their own interests.

So how do we disentangle the realities of an extraordinary impulse of unchecked undocumented immigration over multiple years from the stories that appear in its wake? How do you discern among the stories attempting in good faith to grapple with and frame what that migration means, the stories which attach those events to other Bad Things for which they offer a convenient one-size-fits-all explanation, and the stories which seek to make us not just comfortable but delighted by, say, Alligator Alcatraz merch?

You measure them.

The first immigration story I think it is useful to measure is the trope that Americans in general are fine with or very supportive of immigrants but don’t want law-breaking illegal immigrants to be rewarded. I think it was once a story that a huge majority of Americans both believed and told. I think it is still a story that a plurality of Americans tell. What I’m not so sure about – what we can’t quite be sure about, other than trusting the evidence of our eyes and ears about some of the ways some Americans have been discussing migrants over the past few years – is whether we still believe it. Two things are clear: it is a story which varies in strength over time, and it is a story which has been on a steady decline into oblivion over the past 7 1/2 years. The below chart displays the density of language matching the Semantic Signature of this idea across a massive dataset of US-based media discussing immigration and migration to the United States through the November 2024 election.

Rolling 1-Year Density of Love Immigrants / Hate Illegal Immigration Semantic Signature

When we first started exploring the Semantic Signatures of stories like this, one of the first observations we made was that even oppositional “stories” and “framings” often move together. The reason is pretty intuitive. When a new narrative is being promoted or spreading, it almost always prompts a counternarrative from those for whom that story does not serve pre-existing ends, incentives, and symbolic attachments. Likewise, when a narrative is in retreat, the need for the counter-narrative also relaxes. It is in the inflection points and divergences that we can often find the most interesting data.

Consider the case of a story we might expect to have a relationship with loving immigrants but opposing illegal immigration: the aforementioned idea that American public policy ought to favor the kinds of Americans whose families have been here for generations, those so-called Heritage Americans, so named because its proponents seek to avoid the negative connotations of saying explicitly in the marketing materials that they want to favor white-skinned Americans of European extraction.

Heritage Americans is one among many rapidly ascending “anti-post-war consensus” narratives. They basically all boil down to the assertion that the post-World War II period instituted a system of oppressive thought policing about all sorts of opinions everyone supposedly used to hold, like the ethnic supremacy of people of European origin, the fundamental incompatibility of cultures, the acceptability of racial or ethnic prejudice, and the observation that a cabal of globalist Jews are plotting literally right now to make everything in the world terrible, presumably with their weather control space lasers. Most of it falls into sophomoric and conspiratorial extrapolation of the correct observation that yes, Virginia, humanity collectively embraced somewhat stronger taboos against the beliefs and behaviors that led to the deaths of tens of millions of humans. Go figure! The rest is just garden variety pseudo-scholarly historical revisionism. This is easy to spot. Just look for the guy with a Greek or Roman bust as an avatar and listen for them to say that they, “just think what all of the founding fathers and all your favorite heroes thought up until 1939!”

Once again, it’s all a load of rubbish.

And once again, it is still interesting to observe. As it happens, in this case there are periods over the last decade in which these two stories have moved in concert, in which they seem to have triggered movement in one another, and in which they have moved in opposition.

Rolling 1-Year Density of Selected US Immigration Semantic Signatures

What do we see here? What would we expect to see here? And what does it mean?

The most important thing we see is that the real start to the long, uninterrupted drop in Loving immigrants despite reservations about illegal immigration took place in the second week of January 2018. That is precisely when a spike in “America is for Heritage Americans” rhetoric kicked off. What event triggered both? Well, it wasn’t so much an event as it was a speech. The operative date here is January 11, 2018. And it wasn’t a real-world event. At least it wasn’t a real-world border or immigration event.

January 11th is when Donald Trump met with the Prime Minister of Norway and told the world that we wanted more immigration from countries like that instead of “shitholes” like Haiti, El Salvador, and Africa.

This was the Shithole Moment. It kicked off a multi-year process that ended with a permission structure for openly expressed ethnonationalism, racial prejudice, and good old-fashioned racism.

I can’t tell you precisely how much of the next seven years of steady decline in the American story of love for immigrants in spite of opposition to illegal immigration can be attributed to this permission structure or to good faith responses to the events of the next few years. And to be fair, there were a lot of them. The DACA shutdown was only a couple weeks after the Shithole Moment. The caravan crisis kicked into gear that summer. I think these events would have shifted some opinions even if no narrative-crafting was taking place. Neither can I tell you how many of those who transitioned from an anti-illegal to anti-migrant stance were just embracing the permission to lower a mask that obscured a view they already had, and how many were shaped by the changing waters of common knowledge about immigrants. But I think the precision with which the story changed on a dime after the Shithole Moment tells us a lot. I think the stories we embraced shaped these years more than the reality we witnessed.

And the pro-immigration/anti-illegal story wasn’t the only powerful story left in the dust. Even after the Heritage American talk died down for a while, its mirror Semantic Signature – the belief that new Americans are every bit as American as someone whose family has been here for generations – continued a long, slow decline that began with the Shithole Moment. Whatever the cause, something fundamental changed in our national conversation.

Rolling 1-Year Density of ‘New Americans are True Americans’ Semantic Signature

But it would not be the last common knowledge moment.

The Sanctuary Moment

There were a lot of immigration- and border-related events that took place between 2018 and 2022, not least two election cycles that were filled with immigration and border-related rhetoric. The steady decline in the density of traditional American immigration stories abated somewhat during the first two years of the Biden administration. But once again, it wasn’t an immigration event that caused the next important narrative shoe to drop. It was another common knowledge event.

On July 22, 2022, the mayor of Washington D.C., Muriel Bowser, wrote urgently to request the deployment of the National Guard to respond to a “humanitarian crisis” that had reached a “tipping point.” She was referring to the busing of migrants from Arizona and Texas. It was the first time that a vocal leader of a so-called sanctuary city had been willing to say out loud that there were too many foreign migrants in her city. Common knowledge once again shifted on a dime. Stories about America for Heritage Americans re-emerged from stagnation; after all, if even a Democratic mayor of a sanctuary city thinks that there are too many migrants, why shouldn’t everyone else say so? To add insult to injury, the quoted number was 4,000. When it became clear that such a small number was a “tipping point” and a “crisis”, the permission structure for others to conform the argument to the much larger numbers of migrants impacting communities elsewhere was very powerful indeed.

But it also created a permission structure enabling the telling of another immigration story. A potentially darker and more dangerous one.

Muriel Bowser’s Sanctuary Moment in July 2022 was the tipping point for the narrative that immigration and migrants made life worse for Americans.

Rolling 1-Year Density of Migrants Harm U.S. Quality of Life Semantic Signature

Again, the change was immediate. The language which comfortably ascribed the many ills of American life to migrants emerged from nowhere immediately after the Sanctuary Moment. I don’t think you can ascribe the moments of dehumanization and cruelty we have witnessed in recent months entirely to it and the stories it spawned. Stephen Miller was always going to be Stephen Miller. Once Donald Trump realized, as he confessed surprise to learn in a June 2023 speech in North Carolina, that these socially charged issues were far more important to his base than economic policy, it was probably always going to play out this way. And with the wanton abdication of the Biden administration to enforcement of a border, there would always be enough events in reality world to shift the minds of those not already influenced by story. But Great Replacement rhetoric – the old theory that globalists and elites are trying to systematically replace ethnic white populations with unmanageable numbers of non-white minorities – ramped up to a fever pitch once the “if Democratic sanctuary city mayors are saying it” rationalization became common knowledge.

The end result of these stories and the permission structures opened up by those two common knowledge moments?

Well, the density of Semantic Signatures is not a measure of what people think. Directly, it measures how much people are saying certain things. Indirectly, it measures what most of us are likely to assume everyone else thinks. In a sense, that makes it a measure of how media is being used by influential people and institutions to guide public opinion. In this case, however, I think it’s true that a meaningful portion of Americans who used to love immigrants no longer did. I think a meaningful portion of Americans who used to believe every one of us is equally American no longer did. I think a meaningful portion of Americans who used to see language blaming migrants for every public ill as racist and harmful now saw it as a hard truth we must say out loud. I don’t know if it was 5, 10%, or 20% of the population that moved from anti-illegal to anti-immigrant in practice over this period, but I think that’s the scale we are talking about. I think real world events had something to do with these shifts. I think the stories we told about them had a lot more to do with these shifts. I think those stories were bound up and perverted by our baser instincts and by opportunistic storytellers keen to direct those instincts to their own social and political ends.

But that isn’t the end to our story.

The Springfield Moment

You may have noticed that the charts presented thus far have largely run only to the 2024 election. You might think that the story would only get uglier if we included the next 8 months.

You’d be wrong.

There was one more common knowledge moment still to come.

In a September 5th Facebook post, an Ohio woman posted a story that, as the Independent put it, she heard from a neighbor, who heard it from a friend, who heard it from her daughter. The post described Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio carving up a cat hanging from a tree like a deer. It went on to speculate that these migrants were collecting other pets to eat, too.

It was precisely the kind of post suited to spread like wildfire in a zeitgeist so rich with language of all the ways that migrants were making life in America worse, and all the ways that new Americans could not be trusted to care for our land in the way that multi-generational American families might. Jack Posobiec of Pizzagate fame found and tweeted the original post through his anonymous alt account EndWokeness, after which it quickly went viral. Zero Hedge picked it up, and other outlets followed. For a week, the entire world of MAGAsphere influencers was laser-focused on the incompatibility of Haitian immigrants with American life, the destruction of Springfield, and all manner of speculation about the many other harms brought to the American way of life by immigrants, wholly independent of whether they were here illegally or not.

But the virality of the “Haitians are eating our pets” post wasn’t our Springfield Moment. Neither was September 9th, when vice presidential candidate JD Vance tweeted out the claims – nor the next day, when Donald Trump repeated them during a presidential debate. The Springfield Moment was the next three weeks, when the story was promptly revealed by outlet after outlet and local official after local official (of both parties) to be an utter fabrication.

That was the precise inflection point of the Loving Immigrants story.

That was the Springfield Moment.

Rolling 1-Year Density of Selected US Immigration Semantic Signatures

Not everything changed immediately in this case – we were in the middle of an election, after all.

What did change immediately were the stories the national populists wouldn’t tell. The stories of love for immigrants in spite of misgivings about illegal immigration were being told again. The stories which told us that new Americans were true Americans, too. Oh, for a while, anyway, the MAGAsphere and candidates continued to tell stories of the harms caused by migrants, keeping the density of the migrant-negative signatures at elevated levels for some time thereafter. In some cases, they stuck by the pet-eating claims about Haitians; more often, they explained that the Haitians (and people from other Shitholes) were guilty of far worse, so the widespread lying didn’t matter. Except in the real world, it did. As soon as the election and inauguration were behind us, with all of their attendant rhetoric and storytelling about the manifold harms caused by migrants and the need to put Real Americans first, the density of every signature we have charted moved sharply back toward a more constructive view of immigration and migrants.

The Springfield Moment was the first in a series of events which created a gulf between story and reality. The verisimilitude of the story was broken and Americans rejected it.

The Springfield Moment was also the first in a series of events which created a gulf between the symbols and memes chosen by the Trump administration and the identities Americans attached to themselves.

It has been a fascinating moment in media, not least because of how rare it has become in the post-fact world for a story to fail mostly because it was very obviously false. Our measures of semantic signatures have been screaming that the stories of ‘America for Heritage Americans‘ and ‘Migrants are destroying the quality of life in America‘ have been cratering since the inauguration. Meanwhile, the White House has been leaning into deeply memetic messaging of precisely those stories. For months, videos of prisoners in chains marketed explicitly as producing sexual pleasure, AI-produced Studio Ghibli images mocking crying deportees, and cruel memes making jokes of life-changing ICE raids were produced to raucous applause from an audience whose tastes had been conditioned to consider not whether our policies were effectively correcting a disastrous Biden-era border policy, but the extent to which the libs had been owned.

Who has the right of it?

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but we do. Recent polling data on the subject is astonishing. It leaves little room for doubt; indeed, it seems to bear out the entire idea that public opinion may in many cases be predicted by measuring the prevalence and density of the stories being told in media to change that opinion. On Friday, Gallup released a poll showing that more Americans believe that immigration is a good thing than any point in the last quarter century. Republicans asked whether immigration had mostly good effects answered yes 64% of the time, up an astounding 25% from the same time last year. It was the biggest one-year shift in sentiment for any demographic category in the history of the poll. Right now, 62% of Americans disapprove of the current administration’s immigration policy against 35% who approve.

Is some of this the result of events in the real world, too? Are people just less concerned because the pace of illegal immigration has slowed significantly under President Trump after four years of what-me-worry from President Biden? Probably. Again, this disentanglement is hard. But the dissatisfaction with his policies, anger with messaging broadly seen as needlessly cruel and childish, and the nature of the poll questions asked here don’t really lend themselves readily to that conclusion. Quite simply, there was a backlash in narrative space that has manifested in a backlash in privately held opinion.

This won’t be the end of it. America’s border is large and porous, and the differing priorities among our two major parties concerning it will mean we will have to deal with these questions forever. For those of us who continue to believe in the small-c conservative AND the small-l liberal values of being pro-border, pro-assimilation, and pro-immigrant, I think that means we have to keep telling these stories to the very Americans who will carry our heritage with them: our children. The alternative is that the only stories they will hear are the words of media personalities and politicians who mean only to steer them toward a self-serving conclusion, whether that’s the narrative that any limits on borders or plans to enforce immigration laws are inherently racist, or the narrative that migrants are ruining the American way of life. Over the course of their lives, we should expect the stories being told to our children to careen back and forth between those two extremes.

As for me, I’ll tell my children the story that there’s not a damn thing wrong with being proud to be an American, nor of believing your culture is exceptional, nor of believing in borders, nor in being proud of the things your fathers built, nor in being proud of and wanting to conserve what America was and is. I’ll tell them the story that it IS wrong to carry all of that pride while ignoring that the truly exceptional heritage of being an American can’t be found in an ancestor who fought against the redcoats, or with Andrew Jackson, or Sam Houston, or Davy Crockett. It will be found in the very fact that we, the descendants of those men, have no more claim to the title of American than the man who gave his oath not five minutes ago.

I’ll tell my children the story of the true heritage of every American: that every American is a heritage American. 

What the national populists in power right now get right is that our ancestors built something unprecedented. They discovered, explored, tamed, and conquered a continent. They built the wealthiest, most powerful civilization in the history of the world from scratch. Our American ancestors were and achieved something exceptional. But there’s something they miss: Americans never stopped being and achieving the exceptional. The enterprising spirit that causes someone to risk it all to come here is an indispensable factor in that equation.

I am convinced that so long as what we offer immigrants is a full adoption into our weird, sometimes dysfunctional family – an invitation to work hard, to be honorable citizens, to add what they find worthy and beautiful to what we find worthy and beautiful – Americans will never stop being and achieving the exceptional.

THAT’S the story I will tell my children – no matter which way the pendulum of common knowledge is swinging.