Racism and xenophobia: how do stereotypes degrade the human condition?

I write these lines as an Argentine and from this corner of the global south. I have always felt horror in the face of racism and xenophobia, no matter where or against whom they were directed. An injury to the dignity of a person for the mere fact of being one calls into question the very essence of the human condition.

I must admit, at this point, that these past days have been no exception. What began as a sporting competition turned into something far more disturbing when social networks were flooded with accusations against my country and its people. We were called savages, uncivilised, arrogant, starving, or racist. As if that were not enough, we were presented as embodiments of evil on Earth and were linked, in a manner as simplistic as it was fallacious, to particular international positions solely because of the government currently in power in my country.

The escalation of hatred moved beyond the digital world. The Association of Argentine Migrants Resident in Spain recorded between twenty-four and twenty-six complaints in the days after the final: beatings in the street, harassment at work, and even the stabbing of a young man. Its president described what had happened as a campaign of dehumanisation preceding the attacks, fuelled by videos manipulated with artificial intelligence and by posts that attributed to the nearly half a million Argentines living there the position of the Argentine government on Gaza. Added to this were reports from content creators who claimed to have been contacted by a PR agency willing to pay them to spread on social media the idea that the national team's progress was being favoured.

A note of precision, and two clarifications before continuing. The first is that none of this is attributed to Spaniards as such: the episodes were carried out by individuals, and much of the reaction of repudiation came from Spanish society itself. Falling into the reverse stereotype would be exactly the error this piece denounces. The second is that the authorities of the different countries did not report a common pattern linking all the episodes that circulated, so each case must be assessed individually. That said, the general climate is documented by FIFA itself. Its Social Media Protection Service in fact analysed more than six million posts during the group phase of the 2026 World Cup, identified eighty-nine thousand as offensive, blocked one hundred and eighty-one thousand comments, referred a thousand accounts for investigation, and detected a hundred cases legally actionable. What is striking in all of this is that racist insults climbed to eleven percent of all abusive content, three points more than at Qatar 2022.

Personally, although I live in my own country, I too received messages from people abroad whom I believed I knew. Some not only minimised the injuries suffered by my compatriots: they went so far as to justify them, arguing that they were "deserved". That attitude was especially painful to me, since it makes clear the extent to which prejudice can dehumanise the other, to the point of making it acceptable to discriminate against him on grounds of his nationality.

I do not intend by this piece to deny the existence of Argentines who may have acted in an offensive or discriminatory manner; such a stance would be intellectually dishonest and counterproductive to the aim of these lines. Indeed, I must admit that certain figures in our government regrettably contribute to reinforcing the prejudice that keeps being repeated about our country. It is here, then, that it becomes indispensable to recall that an entire people cannot be judged by the actions of some of its members, and that it is likewise not legitimate to respond to prejudice with stereotyped insults against that same nation.

Because racism proceeds, precisely, from the negation of the human condition. To claim that we Argentines are worth more or less than other people because we were born at a particular point in the hemisphere is nothing other than the reproduction of hate speech: a xenophobia expressed in national stereotypes that only perpetuates the very mechanism it claims to condemn.

When we reduce millions of people to a caricature, we cease to see individuals and begin to see imagined enemies. That logic fuelled some of the darkest episodes in the history of humanity and today accompanies the rise of the far right in various parts of the world. Every form of discrimination therefore starts from the same principle: denying the dignity of a person for belonging to a particular group.

Accordingly, my rejection of racism and xenophobia does not depend on the nationality of the victims or on the popularity of the cause. Hatred must be rejected at all times and in all circumstances, whoever its target may be. I reject it when it happens abroad, I reject it when it happens inside Argentina, and I reject it also, with the same conviction, when it is directed at Argentines.

Are we a racist country?

That said, there is something particularly unjust about the label of "racist" applied to one of the most welcoming societies in the hemisphere. Let it be clear: Argentina is a country with a great many problems, and anyone who knows this land knows how much we complain about them. In politics we are as passionate as in football, but in a way that, instead of uniting us, sets us against one another in a divide with deep historical roots. Perhaps sport is the common denominator of a long-suffering people, capable of expressing itself in ways both irrational and wonderful, and which every so often resolves its disagreements in an embrace with the stranger or with the political adversary.

But let us return to the question that concerns us: are we a racist country?

The question is, to say the least, painful for any Argentine whose family includes an immigrant grandparent who came to build a new life in a country as diverse as it is welcoming. A story that has not changed and does not seek to change, built on the foundations of a Constitution that embraces the foreigner when it undertakes to secure the general welfare "for all the peoples of the world who wish to dwell on Argentine soil".

From the freedom of the womb enacted by the Assembly of Year XIII in 1813, to the full abolition enshrined in the Constitution of 1853, which declared every slave free by the mere fact of setting foot on the territory; to the history of the Immigrants' Hotel or that of the founding heroes who defended our freedom and independence, such as María Remedios del Valle; and even to having been the only country on the American continent with a president of Arab origin and born into Islam, or to hosting one of the largest mosques in Latin America a few metres from the synagogues and churches of one and the same city, thus configuring a vast territory of peoples as diverse in the cultural, the religious, and the ethnic as they are unified in a shared feeling: all of that composes the identity of an integrative patriotism.

Immigrants' Hotel, Buenos Aires. General Archive of the Nation.

And there is one datum that no interpretation can rewrite. In the 1914 census, nearly thirty percent of the country's population was foreign-born, and in Buenos Aires the figure approached half. The United States never exceeded fifteen percent even at its own migratory peak. No receiving society of the modern era absorbed a comparable proportion of newcomers, and none did so, as Argentina did, without racial admission quotas or a legal regime of segregation.

Immigrants freshly arrived at the port of Buenos Aires, early twentieth century.

Comparative data do not support the accusation either. Argendata, of the Fundar foundation, took the Integrated Values Survey for the 2017-2022 period and measured what percentage of the population declares that it would be bothered to have someone of another ethnicity as a neighbour. In Argentina, 2.7% answered yes, a lower figure than the United States (3.2%), France (3.7%) and Spain (12.7%). Uruguay recorded the lowest value in the sample, 0.6%, and at the opposite end were Vietnam, above 60%, and Myanmar, at 70.4%. I make explicit what the person who circulated the figure also stressed: this does not prove that there is no racism in Argentina, nor does it turn any of the countries on the list into a hopeless case — it simply refutes the notion of an Argentine racist exceptionalism.

But to return to this idea of an open-doors vocation: it is not something that appears only in the founding narrative — it is also present in positive law. In fact, Article 20 of the Constitution establishes that foreigners enjoy on the territory all the civil rights of the citizen, without being required to naturalise, a clause exceptional in comparative law and in force since 1853. The 1994 reform, for its part, gave constitutional rank to human-rights treaties (among them the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination) and recognised the ethnic and cultural pre-existence of Argentina's Indigenous peoples.

As if that were not enough, that scaffolding is completed in legislation. Law 23,592 sanctions discriminatory acts and aggravates penalties when motives of race, religion or nationality are involved; Law 25,871 enshrined the right to migrate as an essential and inalienable human right. And in the City of Buenos Aires, as in several provinces, foreign residents vote. It would not be unreasonable to ask those who accuse us of xenophobia to explain why this framework exists here and not in several of the countries from which the accusation is being made.

In line with the above, the oft-repeated saying that "the Argentine is born wherever he pleases" does not sound strange within this paradigm. That of a nation without walls, which offers health, education, and a series of rights that make a good part of our people proud, because they recognise themselves in them. As Pope Francis rightly reminded us, the immigrant is not only to be received: he must be welcomed, protected, promoted and integrated.

It will be said that this is a troubled land, and it is: we have thousands of unresolved conflicts. But being a closed people is not something that characterises us. We are Argentines and, even in crisis, there will always be room for one more. In fact, in these last years of international upheaval we continue to take in thousands of refugees fleeing dictatorships and wars. It is what we were, and what we shall continue to be.

The Afro-Argentine people and a recurring accusation

Now, given the weight of some of the accusations that wound our identity, it is worth dwelling on one in particular: the one concerning the Afro-Argentine population. When we are ascribed the character of a racist country, or even of having perpetrated an extermination, it is precisely there that it must be firmly refuted, and the process described for what it truly was: a phenomenon rooted predominantly in class. The wars in which Argentina took part drew from its poorest strata; the epidemics of yellow fever and cholera devastated precisely the neighbourhoods where that population lived; and to this was added racial mixing. It is worth recalling, moreover, that in Argentina there never existed a regime of legal segregation, nor racial quotas for migratory admission, nor a prohibition of interracial marriages. That there is racism, as there is in every society of this continent, does not authorise us to attribute to it institutions it never had: to conflate the two is exactly the error of those who look at us with borrowed categories.

Beyond that, I must state that we often suffer the unjust association with the government whose conduct engenders shame in our people. This clearly does not define us — our Constitution in force and the identity that speaks to us do not conform to the government of the moment; if it did, we would be a bipolar nation that changes radically every four years. That said, no flag, no government, no party and no sporting event justifies treating a person as inferior on account of the place where they were born, nor insulting them for international positions they never adopted and which are attributable solely to Javier Milei's own positions.

A comparative-politics observation is also in order. For all that can be reproached to our far right — and there is a great deal — Argentina has not produced a mass political force whose organising axis is the rejection of the immigrant. We have no local equivalent of France's Front National, Alternative for Germany, or Vox: here public debate is structured around the economy, the state, and the domestic divide, not around borders.

And that is where the crux of the matter lies. What is being projected onto us is not a moral judgement but an alien analytical framework: racial categories built to describe a society organised around the colour line, applied to another that was historically structured around class. Bourdieu and Wacquant warned of this in relation to the Brazilian case more than two decades ago, speaking of the cunning ruses of imperialist reason: the export of a U.S. particularism in the guise of a universal grammar.

A civic and integrative nationalism

In conclusion, many were the public figures who dressed up their footballing rivalry in the language of hatred and who, in doing so, merely reproduced absurd prejudices against an entire nation. That is why today, more than ever, it is right to reaffirm who we are and who we shall be for posterity. A kind of civic and integrative nationalism, faithful to the idiosyncrasy of a diverse country, with some of the largest Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities in the region, with el tano, el gallego, el turco and el ruso turned into neighbourhood nicknames (Buenos Aires shorthand for the Italian, the Spaniard, the Middle Easterner and the Slav), and with so many migrant communities never segregated, always integrated, and moreover celebrated each year in the fiestas de colectividades — the immigrant communities' festivals that are held across the country.

Festival of the Immigrant Communities. Every year, dozens of communities share their culture in different cities across the country.

So to Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, and to the other public figures who have called our past and our present into question, it must be said that we are not what they project. We are the global south, with all its present challenges and difficulties; but racial segregation, white supremacy, and anti-immigration discourse are not defining features of our identity. It is worth recalling, then, that ignorance does not justify xenophobia, and that we are responsible for what we do and say. And one might also ask whether all of this does not point to a pending debate: that of anonymity on social networks, and the corresponding responsibility that falls upon influencers and public figures when they communicate.

The danger, then, does not lie in the insult itself, but in the fact that an accusation may spill over into hate attacks and end up being instrumentalised to reproduce an algorithm inimical to coexistence in those very diverse societies. Of course, we are a country with great crises and problematic situations — but if anything is evident, it is that in the face of the hegemon, rebellion is warranted; and in the face of intolerance, openness and welcome.