Fake crisis, real harm

This week Donald Trump commandeered a few minutes of the television networks’ precious prime time for a speech in which he said nothing.

At least, he said nothing new, nothing that he hadn’t said many, many times before. Even the numerous lies and distortions were not fresh. It was like watching the twelfth rerun of a bad situation comedy in which the leading character is a jerk.

The president, as usual, did not address, in an honest and serious way, the country’s real crises—the deadly opioid crisis generated not by drugs pouring in across the border but by the greed of a few American pharmaceutical companies. Or the environmental crisis producing ever more powerful hurricanes and forest fires. Instead, the president dedicated his time to recounting a series of horror stories about crimes committed by undocumented immigrants and grossly distorting facts and figures about immigration, the drug problem and the role of the southern border in driving it.

The fallacy in the equation between immigrants and crime that Trump harps on constantly is this. Immigrants who live here do pretty much the same things as U.S. citizens. They work, marry, have children, go to school, join the military. And they commit crimes. But on average they commit fewer crimes than natives do. Those who come here are generally more abiding
than those born here. Trump’s rhetoric misleads by suggesting the opposite. This is the malice in the speech Nancy Pelosi alluded to in here response to Trump.

A second fallacy in talk about an immigration emergency or crisis is that undocumented immigration has been going down steeply for years. Trump sounded the alarm long after the peak of what he and his fans see as a sort of epidemic. What they are upset about is the changes wrought by immigrants already here, not an upward spike in immigration.

The main objective of Trump’s vacuous speech was to shift blame from the White House to the Democrats in Congress for a real and present crisis of the president’s own creation, the government shutdown. As a result of the President’s obsession with building a wall on the Mexican border, hundreds of thousands of federal workers are working without pay or being furloughed. Millions of Americans are being deprived of government services. Mexico is not paying for Trump’s wall obsession. Americans are paying even though Congress is not willing to spend a nickel on Trump’s delusion. Trump is threatening he will keep the government closed until the Democrats cave in and give him over $5 billion to satisfy his obsession with building a wall to keep out immigrants and refugees from the south.

By trying to hype a fake national security crisis, the president has in fact created two real crises: the government shutdown and the humanitarian crises on the border. That second crisis is entirely the fault of the administration’s refusal to deal with the consequences of yet another real crisis, the breakdown of order in several Central American countries, which is driving people to flee for their lives. People in fear for their lives have a right under international law to seek asylum in a safe haven. Even more than other U.S. administrations, the Trump regime ignores, violates and scorns international law. Its only concern is to keep out as many of those brown people from shithole countries and to kick out as many as possible of the ones already here.

I watched a great deal of the media commentary and Democratic reaction following Trump’s Tuesday speech. It exposed many of the lies, the demagoguery, and the fact that feeding red meat to his reactionary base by insisting on a wall matters more to Trump than the interests of millions of Americans. What was missing in the media analysis was a reckoning with this reality: Trump’s delusional, hateful wall is not a mere figment of Trump’s imagination. It has a solid basis of support among a significant part of the American people.

True, 61 percent of Americans oppose the wall. This is a good sign but nothing to celebrate. The whole idea of the wall is chimerical, like the Conquistadores search for El Dorado. That Mexico would ever pay for such a wall is delusional, reflecting a mixture of arrogance and a total ignorance of the nature of Mexican identity and historical memory. Most Americans have enough common sense to realize that the foundation of the whole wall thing, the idea of deciding to build a wall on this side and having the other side pay for it, is a nonstarter, anywhere, any time.

What the professional commenters reported but paid virtually no attention to is the fact that a huge majority of Republicans, 79 percent, support the wall (84 percent of Democrats oppose it). The basis of support is mainly racial, not fear of terrorism. A miniscule number of suspected terrorists are apprehended attempting to cross the border, but among that small number most were caught on the northern border. Why aren’t Trump and Republican supporters of the wall clamoring for a tall, beautiful wall on the Canadian border?

The political scientist Lars Schoultz studied two hundred years of U.S.-Latin American relations. The product was a book significantly titled “Beneath the United States.” The allusion is not to latitude but to attitude. Schoultz concluded that the U.S. consistently acted toward Latin America as if Latin Americans were members of an inferior race.  That attitude, a fundamentally racist attitude, is still alive and is deeply implicated in the anti-immigrants crusade of Donald Trump and the support for the wall among eight of ten Republicans.