Then they came for the citizens
On Christmas Eve, the New York Times Sunday Magazine reported on the latest escalation in the administration’s anti-immigrant frenzy: a spike in denaturalization. That’s when the U.S. government takes away the citizenship of people who have acquired it through the naturalization process, many of whom have lived here for decades, and deports them.
Denaturalization is not new nor is it the most inhumane manifestation of the ongoing crusade against immigrants. That would be the caging of children. But the increasing numbers of denaturalizations are significant mainly as an indicator of an ever broader and increasingly radical right-wing ethnic cleansing project.
The avatars of this radicalization come in many forms. Physical: The Wall. Rhetorical: Bad hombres; Shit-hole country immigrants. Draconian policies: Caging children; separating families; enlisting the police and the armed forces in enforcing immigration laws; Policy frameworks: zero tolerance. Extreme proposals justified through outlandish arguments: denial of birth right citizenship, a blatant unconstitutional violation of the 14th amendment. Violence and the threat of violence: authorizing troops to fire live rounds against demonstrators at the border who hurl rocks. Now, the threat of mass denaturalization.
Looking at the whole package, the administration’s claims that it is about border control and national security is farcical. If terrorism is the issue you don’t pull out 2,000 troops from Syria where the terrorists are and deploy 8,000 to the Mexican border, where they aren’t. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis finally got sick of the commander-in-chief playing with the military like toy soldiers and quit. Trump was not upset. The last thing he wants is someone with the stars, the sober judgment and the guts to confront his delusions with reality. So now is the best chance for the fanatics, the amateurs, the brownnosers, and the know-nothings to drive the ship of state completely aground. Stay tuned because anything could happen.
Meanwhile, Trump and the Trumpistas are defending a frontier all right, but it is not that between the terrorists and the citizens of this country. It’s the border between people from “shithole” countries, black and brown people from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean and the white people who “made America great” and Trump president.
Trump and the people who support him are the latest—and hopefully—the last iteration of a recurring theme in American history, the struggle for white northern European predominance—demographic, cultural, linguistic, economic, and political. It’s a version of many global, national and regional stories: colonialism, Jim Crow, apartheid, slavery. Today it assumes such forms as the suppression of the minority vote, gerrymandering, mass incarceration (of minorities) and disenfranchisement of convicts and felons who have served their sentences.
While African Americans continue to bear the brunt of police brutality, discrimination in housing, employment, and in myriad other social arenas, the new field of battle for white supremacists is Third World immigration. It is not as if xenophobia has replaced and extinguished the old racisms against blacks and Jews, which are still going strong. Xenophobia, or to use another word, nativism, went into remission for half a century not because of any rise in acceptance of multiculturalism. It faded because the anti-immigration movement that culminated in 1924 was so successful that for decades the flow of immigrants became a mere trickle. In 1965, immigration reform abolished the racist immigration system that had existed since the 1920s, and immigration began to increase, gradually at first, then surging during the end of the twentieth century. The xenophobic backlash was not far behind and followed the same trajectory as immigration, building slowly at first and later reaching a crescendo with Donald Trump’s rise since 2016 to today.
Immigration restriction and cultural chauvinism, such as the English Only movement, have been taking place since the 1980s. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all took significant steps to close the doors to the United States. Deportations reached record levels under Obama, for instance. This signals that the anti-immigration movement is not just about one man or one party but represents a broader societal rejection of demographic change and the ongoing cultural transformation of the United States.
But it is easy to miss the forest for the trees amid the apparent continuity. What is true is that one man and one party have pursued the war on immigrants and immigration with a singular ferocity not seen in generations. The result has been a quantum leap in human suffering. In the latest tragedy, two small Guatemalan children have died under government custody during the last week. While Obama took tough immigration measures, they were targeted on criminals, not families, and tempered with compassion, such as protection for the Dreamers.
That for his ludicrous wall Donald Trump is willing to close the government and stop paying workers during Christmas is only one sign that we are in the presence of something more like a holy war than a policy. The premise of this jihad is that people of the white race and northern European culture are superior, they are the ones that made America great, and to “make it great again” we have to get rid of as many of the inferior races as possible and prevent any more them from coming in.
