“Stop This Invader!”—The War on Spotted Lanternflies 

A bright red flash whips through the air and lands on my wrist. Perched there, the red hindwings are tucked underneath the insect’s body, showing through the semi-translucent spotted forewings. I feel the imprints of its small velvet legs on my skin before it flies away.

Moments later, another red flash lands on the treated wood surface of a picnic table. A woman with wavy blonde hair next to me flicks out her finger, and the flash disappears.

“I should have killed it. Looks like one of those Chinese ones,” the stranger says genially. I smile politely but don’t say anything in response. I’m at a beer garden near my hometown in central Pennsylvania and just trying to relax.

Native to parts of China, India, and Vietnam, the first known spotted lanternflies arrived in the U.S. in 2014 in Berks County, Pennsylvania. The large insect stood out for its distinctive red, black, and yellow coloring. Despite its beautiful appearance, the insect was quickly deemed an invasive species by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The spotted lanternfly, with a voracious appetite for grapevines and fruit and lumber trees, posed a threat—not so much to the environment but to the economy. A 2019 study by Penn State University estimated the insect, if uncontrolled, could cost the state US$324 million annually and more than 2,800 jobs.

By 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, several mid-Atlantic states issued kill-on-sight orders to prevent the spotted lanternfly’s spread. People started gleefully hunting the insects and stomping them to death. Their demise became something of an obsession; one Pennsylvania man developed Squishr, an app for residents to track and post photos of their kills. At rest stops along interstate highways, USDA and Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture signs instructed travelers to “Look Before You Leave” and to check vehicles to avoid transporting the insect across state lines. Other messaging was more explicit: Signs reading “Stop This Invader!” were posted at local dog parks, at trailheads in state parks, and outside grocery stores.

Looking back, the anxiety seems misplaced—and disturbing. Why did people become so obsessed with eradicating the spotted lanternfly?

The answer reveals less about the insect itself, or the destruction it causes, and more about the racial and class anxieties flying around during the height of the pandemic. As the insects’ numbers climbed during a time when everything from immigration to trade wars and pandemics amplified the threat of foreign “invaders”—and Asian ones in particular—the war against the spotted lanternfly became an arena for racism and nativism to run rampant.

With President Donald Trump’s return to office in the U.S. this year, these anxieties are resurging. Trump has already started to fulfill his campaign promise of mass deportations of undocumented migrants from China and other parts of Asia.

HOW TO KILL

I didn’t start out my research in central Pennsylvania with an interest in the spotted lanternfly.

I am an anthropologist who studies the legacy of nuclear power in the state. I grew up in a White family in the predominantly White, religiously and politically conservative area that hosts the now infamous Three Mile Island plant, where America’s worst civilian nuclear accident occurred in 1979. During the pandemic, I lived with my parents and conducted fieldwork with community members to find out more about the lasting impacts of the accident. But time and again, concerns about threats associated with Asia—from viruses to insects—eclipsed talk of what I saw as the more pressing concern for the region: safely decommissioning the nuclear power plant.

In early 2020, U.S. concerns turned toward a foreign invader less visible and far more deadly than the spotted lanternfly. Then-President Trump and politicians across party lines declared war against COVID-19. But it wasn’t just a virus the U.S. was fighting. Trump repeatedly referred to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus” or the “Wuhan virus.” At a rally in Tulsa, he dubbed it the “kung flu.”

The racialized language found its mark: Anti-Asian hate crimes ballooned 77 percent from 2019 to 2020 and were also heightened in 2021 as Asians and Asian Americans were blamed for the pandemic. In my home state, Asian Americans faced racial slurs on the SEPTA, the state’s railway system, and assaults on Philadelphia streets.

As theories circulated that COVID-19 was cooked up in a Chinese lab, Pennsylvania newspapers packaged spotted lanternflies as “a plague you can do something about.” In an interview for The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture’s press secretary suggested that parents make a game of killing the insects: “Honestly, it’s something fun you can be doing outside right now. If you’ve got kids, keep them occupied by just sending them out and telling them to look for these treasures they need to destroy.”

But more than a recipe for a morbid family pastime, this response to the spotted lanternfly revealed the permeability of national boundaries at a time when U.S.-China relations were especially fraught. Then-President Trump had imposed trade tariffs on China in 2018, and President Biden intensified them in 2024 due to allegations of unfair Chinese economic policies and security concerns. (Most recently, President Trump has proposed a 10 percent additional tariff on Chinese goods.) Against the backdrop of what economists called a new cold war, conservation efforts to stop the spotted lanternfly took on a nationalist pitch.

Allegedly, the first spotted lanternfly eggs came over on a cargo ship laden with stone shipped from China to the U.S in 2012. For those concerned with China’s rising economic power, the ride-hitching insects were a 21st-century embodiment of West’s warning in 1873: Should trade restrictions with China ease, the U.S. could unwittingly be overtaken by a foreign invader.

UNEXPECTED CASUALTIES

In 2020, my parents’ Korean American neighbor excitedly called us over to see the “Chinese spotted lanternflies” he had killed. I peered into his small bowl of sugar water, where houseflies and box elder bugs had crawled in and drowned. But there was no sign of spotted lanternflies among the casualties.

Several years in, some conservationists have suggested that the public’s all-out war on the spotted lanternfly is overkill. Their numbers are diminishing in areas where they once thrived, and evidence suggests that trees hosting their swarms are more likely to die of people’s irresponsible extermination tactics than insect activity. Other biologists and conservationists are rethinking names for Asian-born species in the wake of anti-Asian hate.

The spotted lanternfly rhetoric was less explicitly racist than Trump’s COVID-19 “kung-flu,” but the discourse buzzing around the insect relied on similar metaphors: declarations of war against foreign invaders. These are metaphors preoccupied with boundaries—who and what a community or nation lets in and who and what they keep out—that draw from histories laced with racism, xenophobia, and nativism.

This rhetoric not only harms; it also occludes. The obsession with the spotted lanternfly, in my field site for instance, distracted residents’ attention away from other pressing environmental problems, such as the ongoing decommissioning of the nuclear power plant housing radioactive waste and operated by a skeleton crew. Last September, Microsoft announced a deal to reopen the Three Mile Island plant to power data centers predominantly devoted to artificial intelligence and cloud computing—raising new questions about the site’s impacts on local communities.

The spotted lanternfly flew into a war far less virtuous than conservation. The zeal behind the killing does not reflect a desire to protect nature—but a hatred for something foreign.