Tag: Asian Americans

Caitlin Dickerson and Michael D. Shear report for The NY Times:

From the early days of the Trump administration, Stephen Miller, the president’s chief adviser on immigration, has repeatedly tried to use an obscure law designed to protect the nation from diseases overseas as a way to tighten the borders.
The question was, which disease?
Mr. Miller pushed for invoking the president’s broad public health powers in 2019, when an outbreak of mumps spread through immigration detention facilities in six states. He tried again that year when Border Patrol stations were hit with the flu.
When vast caravans of migrants surged toward the border in 2018, Mr. Miller looked for evidence that they carried illnesses. He asked for updates on American communities that received migrants to see if new disease was spreading there.
In 2018, dozens of migrants became seriously ill in federal custody, and two under the age of 10 died within three weeks of each other. While many viewed the incidents as resulting from negligence on the part of the border authorities, Mr. Miller instead argued that they supported his argument that President Trump should use his public health powers to justify sealing the borders.
On some occasions, Mr. Miller and the president, who also embraced these ideas, were talked down by cabinet secretaries and lawyers who argued that the public health situation at the time did not provide sufficient legal basis for such a proclamation.
That changed with the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic.
Within days of the confirmation of the first case in the United States, the White House shut American land borders to nonessential travel, closing the door to almost all migrants, including children and teenagers who arrived at the border with no parent or other adult guardian. Other international travel restrictions were introduced, as well as a pause on green card processing at American consular offices, which Mr. Miller told conservative allies in a recent private phone call was only the first step in a broader plan to restrict legal immigration.
But what has been billed by the White House as an urgent response to the coronavirus pandemic was in large part repurposed from old draft executive orders and policy discussions that have taken place repeatedly since Mr. Trump took office and have now gained new legitimacy, three former officials who were involved in the earlier deliberations said.
One official said the ideas about invoking public health and other emergency powers had been on a “wish list” of about 50 ideas to curtail immigration that Mr. Miller crafted within the first six months of the administration.
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He had come up with the proposals, the official said, by poring through not just existing immigration laws, but the entire federal code to look for provisions that would allow the president to halt the flow of migrants into the United States.
Administration officials have repeatedly said the latest measures are needed to prevent new cases of infection from entering the country.
“This is a public health order that we’re operating under right now,” Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, told reporters earlier this month. “This is not about immigration. What’s transpiring right now is purely about infectious disease and public health.”
The White House declined to comment on the matter, but a senior administration official confirmed details of the past discussions.
The architect of the president’s assault on immigration and one of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers inside the White House, Mr. Miller has relentlessly pushed for tough restrictions on legal and illegal immigration, including policies that sought to separate families crossing the southwest border, force migrants seeking asylum to wait in squalid camps in Mexico and deny green cards to poor immigrants.
Mr. Miller argues that reducing immigration will protect jobs for American workers and keep communities safe from criminals. But critics accuse him of targeting nonwhite immigrants, pointing in part to leaked emails from his time before entering the White House in which he cited white nationalist websites and magazines and promoted theories popular with white nationalist groups.

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Read the full article at the link.

As America suffers, immigrants, both legal and “undocumented,” are on the front lines of those “essential workers” risking their lives to keep us healthy, safe, fed, and clothed.

Meanwhile, neo-Nazi Miller remains “on the dole” — publicly funded for putting out a steady stream of discredited and xenophobic actions designed to exploit, dehumanize, and demean many of the most courageous and necessary among us.

Can it get any more vile and disgusting?

Nearly 55 years after the end of WWII, Trump & Miller are reviving many aspects of the racist ideology and actions that we supposedly fought to end forever. Raises the question of who really won the war.

Always the opportunists, Trump and Miller now see the crisis that their “malicious incompetence” helped to aggravate as a chance to target both “Optional Practical Training” (“OPT”) for foreign students and Chinese students, one of the largest groups of those studying in the U.S. You can read about it in this article by Stuart Anderson in Forbes.https://apple.news/ADkCNTe_gTje__BlQ8c-8pg

OPT unquestionably benefits our country as well as the students, many of whom remain and become important parts of our society. The targeting of Chinese students certainly fits with the far right’s Anti-Asian movement that has helped spike a notable increase in hate crimes directed against Asian Americans during the pandemic. Could the revival of the Chinese Exclusion Act be far beyond on the Trump/Miller Jim Crow agenda?

This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does!

PWS

05-04-20