Actor Ben Affleck says support for deporting illegal aliens — a position held across party lines for decades — is rooted in “xenophobia,” and he claims it is “totally false” that Democrats have refused to prosecute illegal migrants accused of murder and rape.
Affleck made the comments this week on The Moment Podcast while promoting his new Netflix film “Animals,” which focuses on illegal migrants in Los Angeles.
“Look, you can’t look at this movie without confronting the fact that — and this is not a new phenomenon — but like in times of economic difficulty or with politicians who are seeking to curry favor with voters, it’s a lot easier to say, to scapegoat and point fingers,” Affleck said. “And you know, xenophobia and anti-immigration policies have been a part of the history of the United States for a very long time.”
He pointed to his hometown of Boston as an example, saying, “I remember, you know, these calls, the sort of slam the door on immigrants, like the Irish come in we don’t want the Italians, the Italians come in we don’t want the Portuguese. You know it’s and it’s why it is a complicated issue.”
Affleck also addressed Latino voters who have backed stricter immigration enforcement, saying their support can be understood as resentment over people “cutting the line” after following legal immigration rules — resentment he said politicians exploit by offering “an easy answer” that blames immigrants instead of “the system.”
He argued most Americans don’t believe “every immigrant is a criminal, a rapist, a bad person,” and said people “recoil in horror” at how deportation enforcement has been carried out.
“Nobody wants, you know, criminals or rapists, but the idea that like somehow those people were being ignored previously is totally false,” Affleck said.
That claim runs up against the record in a number of Democrat-run states, where local governments have limited cooperation with federal immigration authorities and, in many cases, declined to turn over illegal migrants accused of violent crimes for deportation proceedings.
Affleck went further, describing the public debate over deportation as cover for something uglier. “It’s simply a veneer to paper over, uh, and give a more polite presented voice to one of our more base ugly tendencies, which is to get to hoard, to protect, to seek our own protection at the expense of somebody else,” he said.
He closed by calling the underlying issue “much more complicated than anybody wants to give it credit for,” adding that “the fundamental basic falsehood that seeks to identify any group of people as below or beneath or bad” is “repellent and a lie and needs to be… objected to loudly.”
Trump administration immigration policy has focused on removing illegal migrants with criminal records, a position that has long drawn bipartisan backing. Affleck’s remarks did not distinguish between that enforcement priority and broader immigration policy.
