Former President Donald J. Trump’s third run for the White House has neared its end the same way his first one started: with relentless dehumanizing portrayals of immigrants.

He has cast people crossing the nation’s southern border as criminals, rapists and terrorists. He has warned the United States is under “invasion” and an “occupied country.” He has falsely accused Haitian immigrants in Ohio of eating pets.

Mr. Trump’s nativist message is only the latest example of a longstanding strain of xenophobia in American politics, historians say, one that is sometimes downplayed in favor of reverent evocations of Ellis Island and the promise of the American dream. (Even before the nation’s founding, Benjamin Franklin denigrated German immigrants in a 1753 letter.) Erika Lee, an author and history professor at Harvard University, describes Mr. Trump’s vitriol as central, not exceptional, “to the ways in which Americans have viewed immigration and its impact through the centuries.”

But Mr. Trump, more so than any other former U.S. commander in chief, uses terms redolent of Hitler’s calls for ethnic cleansing, historians said. And the former president has been able to shape his party’s position on immigration in a way no other nativist leader has.

Here is a look at four of Mr. Trump’s recent statements and their echoes through time.

CRIMINALITY

“Kamala has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from prisons and jails and insane asylums and the worst mental institutions anywhere in the world.”
— Oct. 16, 2024, Trump rally in Atlanta