www.tjprc.org editor@tjprc.org REHUMANIZING THE ALIEN “INVADERS”: HOW TESTIMONY CAN COUNTERACT XENOPHOBIA ROY SCHWARTZMAN Department of Communication Studies and Department of Peace and Conflict Studies, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, United States ABSTRACT Strategic use of first-hand testimony by immigrants can challenge prevalent xenophobic narratives of foreign immigrants as innate threats. Using United States President Donald Trump’s anti -immigrant rhetoric as a point of departure, these negative stereotypes can be critiqued and remediated on three levels: more nuanced individual immigrant testimonies (micronarrative); connections and diversity across stories told by immigrants (mesonarrative); and more explicit linkages between narratives and the contexts and agendas that generate them (metanarrative). The first-person testimonies of Holocaust survivors furnish the foundational exemplars of how testimony can rehumanize immigrants by enabling them to reclaim their narratives and thereby counteract collective demonization as villains or dismissal as victims. KEYWORDS: Immigrants, Testimony, Prejudice, Narrative, Xenophobia, Holocaust, Donald Trump Received: Dec 04, 2020; Accepted: Dec 24, 2020; Published: Jan 19, 2021; Paper Id.: IJCMSDEC20202 INTRODUCTION The ongoing challenges that many nations, particularly the United States and much of Europe, face in accommodating burgeoning numbers of immigrants has intensified xenophobic discourse, attitudes, and policies. United States President Donald Trump has served as a mouthpiece for such nativist sentiments, consistently stigmatizing immigrants as security threats and as unwanted burdens. These types of characterizations warrant critical analysis to prevent intensification of destructive prejudices. The following investigation proposes an invigoration of first-person testimony from immigrants themselves as a key means of challenging and reformulating narratives of immigrants as uniformly dangerous, destructive, and undesirable. A multi-level narrative analysis addresses the central research question: How can immigrant and refugee testimonies provide tools for preventing and counteracting prejudice? CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK AND METHOD First-hand testimonies wield unique power to counteract prejudice through the embodied presence of an eyewitness. In this study, Holocaust survivor testimony furnishes a key touchstone of constructively using testimony for several reasons. First, Holocaust survivor testimony constitutes the crucible of testimony’s evolution. The ranks of Holocaust survivors are waning rapidly, lending urgency to the need to creatively develop and deploy testimony. Second, the collection of Holocaust survivor testimonies via personal interviews has been especially robust, enabling close examination of how collection, dissemination, and interpretation of survivor testimony affects construction of narratives. Finally, the Holocaust provides a template for examining how survivor testimonies offer opportunities for resisting and reversing prejudice. Activating the voices of survivors can invigorate Original Article International Journal of Communication and Media Studies (IJCMS) ISSN (P): 2250–0014; ISSN (E): Applied Vol. 10, Issue 6, Dec 2020, 5-12 © TJPRC Pvt. Ltd.