Trump on Immigration

 Trump has been attacking immigration recently at his rallies and implying that immigrants are "poisoning" American society.

This is of course causing howls of fascism and claims that he is using the precise language of Hitler in Mein Kampf.

That is essentially using Level 1 of Graham's Hierarchy of Argument. People are calling him a fascist and comparing him to Hitler. That's just "Name-Calling." That's appropriate for toddlers in the playground but not for political commentary. I think we need to move up the hierarchy and address the claim itself. In 2023, in the US, are immigrants having a positive or a negative effect? Are some immigrants having a positive effect and others a negative one? I honestly don't know although every immigrant that I've encountered recently seems to be having a positive effect. 

This is not the first time in American history that there have been people that were anti-immigrant. Refer to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. So, rather than attacking the guy who said it how about we address the claims being made? I know very little about immigration policy so I don't feel qualified to evaluate the question. I could be wrong but I suspect the quote from Mein Kampf people are mostly referring to is as follows: 

"What history taught us about the policy followed by the House of Habsburg was corroborated by our own everyday experiences. In the north and in the south the poison of foreign races was eating into the body of our people, and even Vienna was steadily becoming more and more a non-German city." 

 Hitler uses "poison" or its derivatives fully 56 times in Mein Kampf. He accuses anyone he doesn't like, including Jews, political opponents (Socialist and Marxist), writers, actors and intellectuals in general of poisoning either the German people, German society, the German government or the German military. 

 Hitler was an equal opportunity hater. But that doesn't automatically mean everything he said was wrong. 

Historically he was right about the House of Habsburg in Austria-Hungary although he was talking about an empire with essentially conquered peoples rather than immigrants so I don't really think it applies. The polyglot empire was doomed to fail because it couldn't balance all of the competing political and cultural agendas. 

After WW I it was dismembered into multiple countries along ethnic lines.