Eric Levitz writes in The Intellingencer and NY Maggie:
In certain respects, Donald Trump has been a far more “normal” Republican president than many pundits had predicted (or are willing to admit). Upon taking office, the mogul left his most heretical deviations from GOP dogma at the White House gates: The “populist” insurgent’s welfare chauvinism gave way to Paul Ryanism; his neo-isolationism, to something resembling conventional right-wing hawkery; his gestures of tolerance toward “the LGBT community,” to the pious persecution of transgender Americans.
On other fronts, the president’s apparent abnormality has had less to do with his ingenuity than with our collective amnesia: There is nothing abnormal about a Republican administration launching a crusade against voter fraud that is, in reality, a crusade against Democratic voter participation; or about one imposing tariffs on foreign steel; or running up the deficit; or sabotaging regulatory agencies; or even politicizing federal law enforcement.
And yet, it would be a mistake to suggest that Trump’s innovations have been purely stylistic, that he’s merely stamped his garish branding on the GOP’s classic product. Beyond the unprecedented illiberalism of the president’s rhetoric, his approach to governance has been substantively distinctive enough to warrant its own title. Trumpism is real.
True, the president hasn’t converted his party to the populist paleoconservatism he preached on the campaign trail. But he hasimplemented an immigration policy that serves white nationalist aims to a degree without modern precedent; elevated corruption into a philosophy of government; and prioritized spectacle over substance in his approach to foreign affairs to the point that America’s geopolitical strategy is now less neoconservative or isolationist or realist than it is nihilistic.
Taken together, these innovations amount to a novel variation on the conservatism Trump inherited — one that truly came into its own this past week. To see why this is the case, consider three developments from the past five days:
(1) The White House stripped legal status from 57,000 Honduran immigrants — who had been residing in the United States for decades — over the fervent objections of the State Department.
American immigration policy has long been cruel, and shaped by nativist fears. Donald Trump’s approach to policing undocumented immigration is less distinct from Barack Obama’s than many of the latter’s admirers would like to believe.
Nevertheless, the current administration’s overall immigration agenda is markedly different from those of its predecessors. Racist cruelty is not merely a feature of Trumpist immigration policy, but its first principle: The White House’s overriding goal is to inflict terror and suffering on America’s nonwhite noncitizens, as a means of combating “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty” — as former White House national security adviser Michael Anton once described America’s status quo immigration regime. (The president gave less eloquent expression to this same worldview, when he insisted that America did need not any more immigrants from “shithole countries.”)
This reality is best illustrated by Trump’s treatment of immigrants with temporary protected status (TPS). Established by Congress in 1990, TPS allows migrants whose home countries have been destabilized by natural disasters or civil strife to live and work in the U.S. legally, on a temporary basis. In practice, it has provided hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the developing world with de facto permanent residency in the U.S. Over the past two decades, various earthquakes and hurricanes led the United States to give large numbers of Salvadorans, Haitians, and Hondurans TPS; then, the resiliently adverse political and economic conditions in those countries led our government to allow those migrants to keep their protected status, indefinitely.
Many of these immigrants have now lived the majority of their adult lives in the United States. Some have started families here — TPS recipients are the fathers and mothers of an estimated 273,000 U.S.-born children, all of whom are entitled to American citizenship. In a different political era, Congress might have passed legislation providing this population with permanent legal status by now. But with comprehensive immigration reform paralyzed on Capitol Hill, previous administrations — Democratic and Republican — have simply allowed TPS recipients to renew their protected status every 18 months. After all, what good would be served by deporting hardworking, longtime U.S. residents, who are raising American citizens, back to countries plagued by poverty and violence?
The Trump White House refuses to answer that question.
Instead, it has moved to deport 300,000 Central American and Haitian TPS recipients without providing any justification beyond a transparently fraudulent appeal to legal necessity: Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has insisted that her hands are tied — the administration is legally obligated to withdraw these immigrants’ protections once the conditions that prompted them subside. Honduras has recovered from Hurricane Mitch; “temporary” means temporary. If Congress wishes to give these people permanent status, it can do so.
But this narrative is patently false: U.S. law requires the Executive branch to consider whether the TPS recipients’ home countries are stable enough to accept a large number of deportees before it terminates their protected status. And as the Washington Postrevealed this week, career officials in the departments of State and Homeland Security concluded that those countries weren’t. In fact, U.S. diplomats warned the White House that deporting TPS recipients en masse was likely to produce a “bonanza for smuggling networks and gangs,” as many of those longtime U.S. residents would seek extralegal means of returning to this country.
The administration ignored this advice. When Acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke extended protections for Hondurans last fall, John Kelly called her from Asia “to convey his frustration,” while Stephen Miller hectored other DHS staff. Duke resigned in February; last Friday, the administration moved to expel the 57,000 Honduran recipients of TPS, despite the fact that their home country is suffering from an epidemic of gang violence so severe, many of its citizens joined the caravan that marched from Central America to the U.S. border just last month.
Between the 300,000 immigrants stripped of TPS and the 700,000 Dreamers denied DACA, the Trump administration has attempted to revoke the legal status of roughly 1 million longtime U.S. residents; all while offering no explanation for its actions beyond the bogus claim that they were legally required.
The reason that the White House has neglected to disclose the actual rationale behind these policies is simple: Its true motivation is too incendiary to formally acknowledge.
You cannot expel immigrants who have been thriving in the U.S. for two decades, out of concern that they might prove unable to assimilate. You can’t deport a population that has a higher labor-force participation rate than native-born Americans on the grounds that it will be a burden on the U.S. economy. You cannot claim that your immigration policy is motivated by concern for public safety, when you move to deport law-abiding longtime residents — even though your diplomats warn that doing so will benefit criminal gangs and smugglers. And you certainly can’t claim that your hard-line immigration agenda puts the interests of all American citizens first, when you’re trying to separate hundreds of thousands of American citizens from their mothers and fathers. None of the polite restrictionist arguments apply.
But an impolite argument does: If the Trump administration’s goal is to combat the demographic threat posed by America’s rising population of “Third World foreigners,” then its TPS policy makes perfect sense. Trump can’t stem the tide of new, nonwhite immigrants without Congress’s help. But he can expel those with only a temporary claim to legal residence. And so that is what he has done. Which is to say: A mild form of ethnic cleansing is now a cornerstone of American immigration policy.
Protecting the racial character of the United States was an explicit goal of American immigration law until 1965 — and has been an implicit one since January 2017.
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Read the rest of Eric’s very perceptive analysis at the above link.
Yup. It’s all about racism! That’s what Trump, Sessions, Miller, Cotton, Perdue, Goodlatte, & Co. have always been about. Essentially turning America back to the pre-1965 days of “national origins” immigration.
And, I’m pleased that someone OTM (“other than me”) finally has pinpointed the willfully false narrative behind the bogus claim that termination of TPS was “legally required.” Complete BS:
But this narrative is patently false: U.S. law requires the Executive branch to consider whether the TPS recipients’ home countries are stable enough to accept a large number of deportees before it terminates their protected status. And as the Washington Post revealed this week, career officials in the departments of State and Homeland Security concluded that those countries weren’t. In fact, U.S. diplomats warned the White House that deporting TPS recipients en masse was likely to produce a “bonanza for smuggling networks and gangs,” as many of those longtime U.S. residents would seek extralegal means of returning to this country.
Trump/Sessions racist immigration policies hurt the “good guys,” help the “bad guys,” and insure that American immigration “policies” will be a mess for decades to come. As Eric states, “A mild form of ethnic cleansing is now a cornerstone of American immigration policy.”
The only thing I’d dispute is the term “mild.” This is just the beginning. Trump, Sessions, & Co. have non-White populations of Americans, primarily Hispanics but also including African-Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans, etc., squarely within their sights.
Yes, there’s strength in diversity and in immigration! I’ve seen it in my courtroom and in my life. Don’t let Trump, Sessions, and their racist cronies destroy the greatness of America!
“Normalizing” Donald Trump is morally wrong and politically suicidal. Look what happened in the 1930s when the Western Powers tried to “normalize” Hitler and the Nazis. There’s nothing “normal” about White Nationalism and White Supremacy!
Join the New Due Process Army. Fight to Keep America Great!
PWS
05-11-18
Photo: Robin Urevich
