"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
Opinion | The racism behind anti-immigration rhetoric is palpable to every immigrant. Including me.
America is such a young country: It’s only a few hundred years old, and no one who has been here for only a few generations is without an immigrant connection. So, from the outside — from a place like Europe — the idea that Americans are not connected to immigration and our immigrant pasts seems like we are denying ourselves. We sound very self-hating about the very notion of immigration, but we’re actually just confusing racism with a desire to fix the immigration system.
I see that all the time: Things that are being said about immigration and the ideals of immigration are basically just being used as a thinly veiled form of racism. It’s so blatant. The president himself actually said he doesn’t mind people coming from countries like Norway — white people; it’s the people from “shithole countries” he doesn’t want. It seems almost pedantic and obsolete to actually have to talk about the fact that it’s racism.
The contributions of all immigrants has been so derided by our present administration, so I felt that I needed to celebrate immigration rather than have it openly derided. Also, I wanted to try to make people stand back and just see the anti-immigration propaganda that they were being fed, and understand instead how this country is what it is because of immigration. That was the genesis of my cabaret show (now an Audible book) “Legal Immigrant.”
The whole point of the show was to tell my experience from my perspective as immigrant, but also to show that I’m feeling these negative things about being an immigrant and I’m a white man of privilege; I can’t imagine what it must be like for people of color or Muslims. I don’t know the exact percentage, but I would say that, the day I became an American, at least 75 percent of the other people being sworn in with me were people of color.
So I wanted to try and make people stand back from this vehemence and have some fun while analyzing what was going on. I don’t want to be didactic, though: I understand that there are problems with the immigration system; I understand there’s a massive refugee problem in the world. But I will not condone racism or bigotry as part of that debate.
That doesn’t mean I’m not open to dialogue. I like when people engage, that’s why I do theater. I don’t want to just be behind a screen; I actually enjoy the fact that I can hear how people are reacting to me. And I’ve been heckled doing the show — from both sides. I want to hear what people have to say and I totally engage with some people. A couple of times it got quite rowdy, but that’s why I wanted to do these cabarets. They’re good ways to get people to engage and be provoked, and to maybe change their minds … or at least consider other options. And, at the end of the show, I make everyone in the audience sing “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow,” so I’m obviously someone who likes bringing people together, even though I also like provoking them.
There’s a thing in this country right now: Any dissent against the president or any disagreement with his views is seen as a red flag and people immediately respond in an aggressive way. People are just screaming at one another right now; it makes it very difficult to engage. And so, aside from trying to celebrate immigration, I’m trying to get people to also stand back and try to not let the tropes of this awful rhetoric blind us to what is actually going on.
This government is trying to brainwash its citizens into believing that the very thing that has made America what it is and has made America great — immigration — is a negative thing. That is complete doublespeak. The idea that if you’re pro-immigrant, you’re anti-America, and if you’re anti-immigration, you are pro-America is completely wrong. That’s not just my opinion; if you stand back from it and look at the history of this country, you can’t deny that is the truth.
I really do believe that people have lost the power of analysis in this country because of the duality of the political system: Politics in this country is a team sport. I also think that, with people like Betsy DeVos running the Education Department, it’s going to take a long time before we have a generation who can regain the powers of analysis. It’s all a multilayered effort to dumb us down, in order to be able to brainwash us and feed us propaganda. We need to stand up and take heed before it’s too late.
As told to THINK editor Megan Carpentier, edited and condensed for clarity.
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Yup!
It’s hard to have a “debate” or a “dialogue” when one side is wedded to myths and bogus narratives, rather than facts: when one side is driven by what it wants to believe, egged on by those who find it politically advantageous, rather than truth.
One of the worst of the many horrible things about the Trump Regime is that supposedly responsible public officials spread the anti-immigrant, anti-refugee White Nationalist myths and false narratives (see, e.g., “Gonzo Apocalypto,” Barr, “Big Mac With Lies,” Nielsen, “Cooch Cooch,” Mark “Fund My TGIF” Morgan, Matt Albence, EOIR, etc.).
IN THE TWO YEARS AND 308 DAYS THAT DONALD Trump has been president, he has constructed zero miles of wall along the southern border of the United States. He has, to be fair, replaced or reinforced 76 miles of existing fence and signed it with a sharpie. A private group has also built a barrier less than a mile long with some help from Steve Bannon and money raised on GoFundMe. But along the 2,000 miles from Texas to California, there is no blockade of unscalable steel slats in heat-retaining matte black, no electrified spikes, no moat and no crocodiles. The animating force of Trump’s entire presidency—the idea that radiated a warning of dangerous bigotry to his opponents and a promise of unapologetic nativism to his supporters—will never be built in the way he imagined.
And it doesn’t matter. In the two years and 308 days that Donald Trump has been president, his administration has constructed far more effective barriers to immigration. No new laws have actually been passed. This transformation has mostly come about through subtle administrative shifts—a phrase that vanishes from an internal manual, a form that gets longer, an unannounced revision to a website, a memo, a footnote in a memo. Among immigration lawyers, the cumulative effect of these procedural changes is known as the invisible wall.
In the two years after Trump took office, denials for H1Bs, the most common form of visa for skilled workers, more than doubled. In the same period, wait times for citizenship also doubled, while average processing times for all kinds of visas jumped by 46 percent, even as the quantity of applications went down. In 2018, the United States added just 200,000 immigrants to the population, a startling 70 percent less than the year before.
Before Trump was elected, there was virtually no support within either party for policies that make it harder for foreigners to come here legally. For decades, the Republican consensus has favored tough border security along with high levels of legal immigration. The party’s small restrictionist wing protested from the margins, but it was no match for a pro-immigration coalition encompassing business interests, unions and minority groups. In 2013, then-Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions introduced an amendment that would have lowered the number of people who qualified for green cards and work visas. It got a single vote in committee—his own. As a former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security observed, “If you told me these guys would be able to change the way the U.S. does immigration in two years, I would have laughed.”
. . . .
In November, Cuccinelli was promoted to DHS deputy acting secretary. Kathy Nuebel Kovarik became acting deputy at USCIS and Robert Law, the former FAIR lobbyist, ascended to the head of the policy office. The agency has promised a new flurry of major policy changes before the end of the year. And in what is perhaps the purest expression of the administration’s intentions so far, it started sending Central American asylum seekers to Guatemala with no access to an attorney, no review by an immigration court, far away from the border infrastructure of activists and reporters and lawyers or any form of help at all.
IT’S EASY ENOUGH TO BELIEVE THAT BECAUSE NONE of the Trump administration’s reforms are entrenched in law, they can be overturned as quickly as they were introduced. And yet even though, in theory, the policy memos can all be withdrawn, the “sheer number of both significant and less significant changes is overwhelming,” said Jaddou, the former USCIS chief counsel. “It will take an ambitious plan over a series of years to undo it all.” Formal regulations, like the third-country asylum rule and public charge rule, if it succeeds, will be especially hard to unravel.
The institutional implications run deeper. The backlog of delayed cases will likely take several years to get under control. The administration has promoted six judges with some of the highest asylum denial rates to the Justice Department’s immigration appeals court, including one who threatened to set a dog on a 2-year-old child for failing to be quiet in his courtroom. Those appointments are permanent.
The refugee program, too, will take years to rebuild. The plunge in admissions caused a plunge in funding to the nine resettlement agencies, which have closed more than 100 offices around the country since 2016. That’s a third of their capacity, according to a report by Refugees Council USA. “The whole infrastructure is deteriorating,” said Rodriguez, the former USCIS director. Because the application process is so lengthy, even if a new administration raises refugee admissions on day one, it would take as long as five years before increased numbers of people actually make it to the United States. Consider that in January 2017, the State Department briefly paused in-bound flights for refugees who had finally made it through the gauntlet of health, security and other checks. As of this summer, some of those refugees were still waiting to leave. While the flights were grounded, they missed the two-month window during which all of their documents were current. When one document expires, it can take months to replace, causing others to expire and trapping the refugee in what the report called “a domino effect of expiring validity periods.”
Even harder to repair is the culture shift within USCIS. New visa adjudicators will remain in their jobs long after the political appointees have gone—kings and queens of their own offices. Employees who were promoted for their skeptical inclinations will stay in those positions, setting priorities for subordinates. The multitude of changes at USCIS are the product of an administration that regards immigration as its political lifeblood. There’s no guarantee—or indication—that any of the potential Democratic nominees would apply the same obsessive zeal to overturning them.
Back in 1924, Johnson-Reed’s supporters never anticipated the Holocaust, and yet they expanded its horrors. We don’t know where our own future is headed, but we live in a time of metastasizing instability. Last year, the United Nations’ official tally of refugees passed 70 million, the highest since World War II. Mass migrations, whether because of violence or inequality or environmental calamity or some murky blend of factors that don’t conveniently fit existing laws, are the reality and challenge of our era. There aren’t any easy solutions. But already, what started as a series of small, obscure administrative changes is resulting in unthinkable cruelty. If left to continue, it will, in every sense, redefine what it means to be American.
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Read Rachel’s entire, much longer, article at the link.
Building Due Process and fundamental fairness is a painstaking incremental process that takes years, sometimes decades, to achieve. Destroying it can happen basically overnight.
This should never have happened if the Supremes had stood up to the Administration’s unconstitutional, factually bogus, racist, religiously targeted “Travel Ban” instead of green-lighting the return of “Jim Crow 2” under a clearly pretextual and fabricated “national security” facade. Judicial complicity and task avoidance enables cruelty and the destruction of democratic institutions (including, ultimately, the independent judiciary). That’s why the “New Due Process Army” is in it for the long run!
Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change!
Due Process Forever. White Nationalism Never! Complicit Courts Never!
Today’s biggest story set the scene for news that continues to develop about the Ukraine scandal.
The big story, in terms of its ability to frame the crazy events coming at us at top speed, happened last night, when Attorney General William Barr gave a speech to the Federalist Society, a group of conservative and libertarian lawyers who argue for an originalist interpretation of the Constitution. The conviction of members of the Federalist Society that courts should not do anything that is not listed in the original Constitution makes them great friends to business and to white men, since they focus on the protection of property and deny that laws can regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, or protect minority or women’s rights. The Federalist Society organized in 1982 to push back against what its members felt was an activist court system that tried to reorganize society from the bench. It has been extraordinarily successful in taking over the courts: currently five members of the nine-member Supreme Court are current or past Federalist Society members: Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh.
In his speech, Attorney General William Barr claimed he was going truly to be an originalist, and explained by taking American history back to its roots. In contrast to every single American historian in, well, American history, Barr argued that Americans had rebelled not against King George III in 1776, but rather against Parliament. What the Founders feared, he said, was not a strong executive, but rather a strong Parliament. (You can tell where this is going, right?) Barr was setting up the idea that Congress has grown far too strong lately (in fact, virtually every scholar will tell you that it is the Executive that has grown terribly strong since 1981) and that it is badly hampering the president’s ability to do his job. The president should be able to act on his own initiative, and not be checked by either congressional or judicial oversight, Barr insisted, in a theory known as that of the “unitary executive.”
Barr did not stop there, though. He went on to blame “The Resistance” for sabotaging the Trump administration, and claimed that its members were “engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government.” More, he claimed “the Left” is “engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law.” Conservatives, he said, were at a disadvantage against progressive’s “holy war” because they “have more scruple over their political tactics” especially when facing “a hyper-partisan media.” (You might want to reread those last two sentences.)
Richard Painter, who was George W. Bush’s ethics lawyer, called this a “lunatic authoritarian speech.” Attorneys General are supposed to be non-partisan, and Barr lumped all opposition to Trump as the dangerous far left. The “Left,” in America, generally refers to those few people who advocate for communism—a system in which the government owns and controls all industries and businesses– or anarchy, a system in which there is no central authority at all. It’s actually a pretty small group. But Barr, and other recent Republicans, have included in “the Left” everyone who believes that the government has any role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and promoting infrastructure, all those things the Federalist Society opposes. In fact, most of us, regardless of whether we vote Republican or Democratic, want some basic regulations, social welfare programs, and infrastructure development.
But now the Attorney General, who is charged with overseeing our justice system, has declared that anyone standing in the way of Trump is not just a member of “the Left” but also is waging war against America. Painter is quite right: this is the language that enables a leader to imprison people he considers his enemies.
Barr is not saying all this in a vacuum. More news dropped today about the Ukraine scandal, filling in the lines we already suspected. Congress released transcripts today from Tim Morrison and Jennifer Williams, both of whom were deeply involved in the Ukraine mess and were on the July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky. A long-time career official in the State Department, Morrison replaced Fiona Hill as the Senior Director for Russia and Europe in July 2019. Williams is another long-standing career officer in the State Department. Since April 2019, she has been the Special Adviser for Europe and Russia for Vice President Mike Pence. Morrison said that Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland made it clear that aid was being withheld until there was an announcement about an investigation into Burisma, the company on whose board Hunter Biden sat.
This jibed with the opening statement of David Holmes, the political counselor at the Embassy in Kyiv, who testified for seven hours yesterday behind closed doors. Holmes was an eye-witness to the efforts of Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuiliani, and Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, to pressure the new Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing an investigation into Burisma, the company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. Holmes’s opening statement was explosive. It was not only first hand, but also it tied Trump directly into the efforts, and it made very clear that the administration was demanding the announcement of an investigation before it would release the money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s fight against Russian incursions. Holmes also said that he had reported what he had heard to John Eisenberg, Legal Advisor to the National Security Council, the same man to whom Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman had reported the July 25 call, and, once again, Eisenberg had done nothing. (Eisenberg is refusing to honor a subpoena to testify.)
Then, CNN dropped the story that at last year’s White House Hanukkah party Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman met privately with Trump and Giuiliani. After the meeting, Parnas told two people that the president had given him a secret mission to pressure the Ukraine government to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden. The Wall Street Journal reports that in February, Parnas and Fruman met with the Ukraine President at the time, Petro Poroshenko, and his Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, offering to invite Poroshenko to a White House State dinner if he publicly announced an investigation. As I wrote here two days ago, this would have boosted both Poroshenko’s and Trump’s reelection campaigns. In March, Lutsenko smeared U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch to an American reporter and Sean Hannity ran with the story on his show, but the scheme fell apart when voters elected Zelensky instead of reelecting the corrupt oligarch Poroshenko. Then they had to scramble to come up with a new plan, and the whole ham fisted Ukraine scandal took off.
The Ukraine scandal is fleshing out, and it is truly astonishing that there is not more evidence that can be read in Trump’s favor. This increasingly just looks like a shakedown that weakened national security to help Trump rig the 2020 election. Meanwhile, in northern Syria, where Turkish and Russian troops moved in when we moved out, the Russians boasted yesterday that they have now occupied a former U.S. air base.
Trump spent several hours today at Walter Reed hospital. The visit was unexpected and unannounced, but the White House said he had decided to have portions of his annual physical done three months early.
Attorney General Bill Barr Is Getting Roasted for His Outrageous Speech Blasting Progressives
As the impeachment hearings continued, Attorney General Bill Barr on Friday trash-talked Democrats for attempting to “drown the executive branch with oversight demands,” saying they were working for political gain without thinking of the consequences.
“In waging a scorched-earth, no-holds-barred war against this administration, it is the left that is engaged in shredding norms and undermining the rule of law,” Barr told a room of attorneys at the annual gathering of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group that has been influential in determining President Donald Trump’s nominees for federal judges.
The remarks about Democrats ignoring the rule of law were especially ironic because they came a mere hours after Roger Stone, one of Trump’s previous advisers, was convicted on all counts for lying to Congress during its probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The attorney general’s speech also came on the second day of presidential impeachment hearings examining allegations that Trump attempted to interfere in the 2020 elections by asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Barr criticized Democrats for launching a “holy war” and using “any means necessary to gain momentary advantage,” while he said conservatives “tend to have more scruple over their political tactics and rarely feel that the ends justify the means.”
. . . .
Barr reportedly received a standing ovation, but outside the halls of the Federalist Society, his remarks sparked outrage and intensified calls from the left to impeach not only the president, but the attorney general himself. Others were quick to roast Barr for his statements. “Bill Barr is the type of bare knuckles lawyer the Church would have hired thirty years ago to cover up sex abuse cases,” Richard Painter, a former White House ethics counsel, tweeted.
. . . .
“Yesterday AG Barr addressed a radical political group and gave one of the most vicious partisan screeds ever uttered by a US cabinet officer,” Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) tweeted Saturday morning. “Barr says trump should have king-like powers. Barr is a liar and a fanatic and should be impeached and stripped of his law licenses.”
. . . .
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Read Samantha’s complete article which includes the full the two of a number of tweets at the link.
Hours after a new witness testified in the House’s latest impeachment hearing on Friday, Attorney General William Barr railed against Democrats for declaring a “war of resistance against this administration.”
In a speech before the conservative Federalist Society, Barr rebuked lawmakers for probing President Donald Trump’s potential power abuses, suggesting their efforts are illegitimate.
“The sheer volume of what we see today ― the pursuit of scores of parallel investigations through an avalanche of subpoenas ― is plainly designed to incapacitate the executive branch, and indeed is touted as such,” Barr said. “The costs of this constant harassment are real.”
Barr’s portrayal of oversight as harassment echoes Trump’s repeated claims that he is the victim of a partisan “witch hunt” rather than the subject of a justified inquiry into his dealings with Ukraine, which remain at the heart of Democratic-led impeachment proceedings.
“The fact of the matter is that, in waging a scorched earth, no-holds-barred war of resistance against this administration, it is the left that is engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and undermining the rule of law,” Barr added. “This highlights a basic disadvantage that conservatives have had in contesting the political issues of the day.”
President Trump is convinced he has the “absolute right” to do anything from asking other countries to investigate his political opponents to pardoning himself. But he couldn’t possibly tell you why — aside from his innate conviction that “when you’re a star, they let you do it” — you can get away with anything. Enter Attorney General William P. Barr to put a pseudo-intellectual gloss on Trump’s authoritarian instincts. In a Friday night speech to the Federalist Society, Barr gave a chilling defense of virtually unlimited executive authority.
Barr’s wrongheaded assumption was that “over the past several decades, we have seen steady encroachment on presidential authority by the other branches of government.” His view faithfully reflects the conservative consensus of the 1970s when he was a CIA analyst and a law student. Few serious analysts share that view today at a time when the president claims the authority to kill suspected terrorists anywhere in the world without any judicial oversight. In fact, conservatives decried President Barack Obama’s tendency to rule by fiat — for example, in protecting “dreamers” from deportation or reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran that wasn’t submitted for Senate ratification.
Trump has now taken rule-by-executive-order to the next level by declaring a “state of emergency” to spend money on his border wall that Congress refused to appropriate. Trump has also misused his authority in myriad other ways, including obstructing justice (as outlined in a special counsel report that Barr deliberately mischaracterized) and soliciting a bribe from Ukraine to release congressionally appropriated military aid.
Yet, to hear Barr tell it, Trump is somehow denied power by the nefarious “Resistance.” Barr decried Trump critics who do not view “themselves as the ‘loyal opposition,’” but rather “see themselves as engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government.”
Earth to Barr: Trump does not treat his critics as “the loyal opposition.” He calls them “human scum,” “traitors” and “the enemy of the people,” using the language of dictators. And it is Trump and his toadies — not his opponents — who are “willing to use any means necessary to gain momentary advantage.”
Barr went on to blame the “Resistance” for Trump’s failure to get more nominees confirmed. The real problem is Trump’s incompetence and his preference for “acting” appointees to dodge the constitutional requirement to seek the Senate’s “advice and consent.” (Trump has not nominated anyone for nearly 20 percent of the top federal jobs.) If Barr wants to find a real abuse of the confirmation process, he should talk to Merrick Garland.
As devoid of self-awareness as his master, Barr whines about “the pursuit of scores of parallel ‘investigations’ through an avalanche of subpoenas.” He conveniently forgets that Republicans tried to impeach President Bill Clinton for lying about sex and spent years probing the Benghazi, Libya, attack in a failed attempt to blame Hillary Clinton. Trump is stonewalling congressional subpoenas at an unprecedented rate, forcing Congress to seek judicial assistance to enforce legitimate requests for documents and witnesses. But Barr denies that the courts have any right to “resolve … disputes” between the executive and legislative branches — effectively allowing the president to act like a king.
The attorney general went on to rail against judicial review of administration actions such as “the travel ban.” This was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court after the administration rewrote the initial versions, which constituted clear discrimination on religious grounds. Yet Barr is still aggrieved that the courts dared “to inquire into the subjective motivation behind governmental action” — i.e., to look at Trump’s own words about banning Muslims rather than accept the administration’s disingenuous explanations.
Barr blamed the courts and the president’s critics for the fact that so many administration actions have been challenged in court. The truth is Trump has nobody but himself to blame. Many of the lawsuits accuse the administration of violating the Administrative Procedure Act, which the executive branch can comply with simply by showing that its actions are not “arbitrary and capricious.” This is an incredibly low standard, which is why the normal “win rate” for the government in such cases is about 70 percent. According to the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, the Trump administration’s win rate is less than 7 percent.
Trump likes to blame such setbacks on “Obama judges,” but many of the judges ruling against him are Republican appointees. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., for example, wrote the 5-to-4 decision in June in which the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s attempt to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census.
“In this partisan age,” Barr sanctimoniously concluded, “we should take special care not to allow the passions of the moment to cause us to permanently disfigure the genius of our Constitutional structure.” He is right, but not in the way he intended. The real threat to “our Constitutional structure” emanates not from administration critics who struggle to uphold the rule of law but from a lawless president who is aided and abetted in his reckless actions by unscrupulous and unprincipled partisans — including the attorney general of the United States.
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Mary Papenfuss Contributor HuffPost
Finally, let’s hear from Mary Papenfuss, also at HuffPost:
Attorney General William Barr’s latest extreme defense of Donald Trump has triggered a wave of calls for his impeachment — and disbarment.
Richard Painter, the former chief White House ethics attorney in the George W. Bush administration, tweeted that Barr’s remarks Friday before the conservative Federalist Society were “another lunatic authoritarian speech” amid an impeachment investigation into the president. He claimed that Barr — a member of the conservative Catholic society Opus Dei — is “the type of bare knuckles lawyer the Church would have hired thirty years ago to cover up sex abuse cases.”
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Read the rest of Mary’s article at the link.
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Somewhat “below the radar screen:” Barr’s repetition of Session’s blatantly unethical performance by acting as a “quasi-judicial decision maker” in Immigration Court cases where he clearly has both an actual and apparent bias in favor of a party, the DHS, and against another party, the individual migrant, particularly any asylum seeker.
Obviously, viewed through Barr’s perverted historical lens, we’ve made some seriously wrong moves.According to Barr’s interpretation, we should have allied ourselves with Hitler during World War II. Now, there’s a guy who understood the concept of the “Unitary Executive.” And, he sure knew how to deal with opposing legislators, “the resistance,” and others who were “enemies of the state” or of “inferior stock.” Why on earth would we have aligned ourselves with, and helped rebuild, the noxious parliamentary democracies of the West?
One of our allies, Stalin, did actually demonstrate the wonderful power of the “Unitary Executive” — talk about a guy who WAS the State and annihilated all opposition, real and imagined! He certainly would have known what to do with subversives who preached “impeachment” under the Constitution!
But, concededly, Stalin’s godless communism doesn’t fit in well with Barr’s Catholic Christian theocracy (minus, of course, the social justice teachings of Christ and the Catholic Church). Hitler’s pure Aryian Christian superiority was a much better fit with Barr’s historical outlook.
Of course, according to the Barr view, the seminal figure in Republicanism, Abe Lincoln, erred by not aligning himself with Jeff Davis and the Confederacy. Davis certainly knew how to operate without much legislative accountability. And the founders of the Confederacy also possessed Barr’s superior understanding of the relationship between the State and the Divine: “establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity — invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God.”
Sure, easy to believe that God was always a big fan of enslavement, rape, brutality, white privilege, and theft of services from enslaved African Americans, who also happened to be believers in God. Fits right in with Barr’s dehumanization of Hispanic workers, trashing of LGBTQ Americans, denial of rights to asylum seekers, threats to political opponents, and war on Hispanic Americans who have the audacity of wanting to vote and live peacefully in their communities without being terrorized by DHS enforcement.
George Washington, who wrongly refused to install himself as either King or “President for Life” was, according to Barr’s historical perspective, a dangerous wimp who diminished the potential powers of the “Unitary Executive.”
Undoubtedly, our Founders had their flaws. After all, the Constitution not only enshrined the dehumanization of African Americans, who had actually made the success and prosperity of the American Republic possible, but also excluded the majority of inhabitants from political participation.
But, unlike Barr and his fellow “originalists,” our Founders were largely persons of vision and good will who had enough self awareness and humility to see a better and more dynamic future. They would certainly be shocked and dismayed to find out that rather than viewing our Constitution rationally, as a blueprint to be built upon for a better, more inclusive, more tolerant future, two plus centuries later, individuals like Barr holding supposedly responsible positions under our Republic, would be mindlessly and immorally urging us never to escape the limitations and mistakes of our distant past.
Disturbingly unqualified as he is to serve as our Attorney General, Barr does illustrate the moral and legal bankruptcy of the “fake doctrine” of “originalism.” It’s actually an intellectually indefensible excuse for an empowered, largely White, predominantly male, minority to exclude the majority of America’s inhabitants and their hopes and dreams from full participation in our democracy. It’s as ugly and dishonest as Barr’s own tenure as Attorney General.
Senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller shaped the 2016 election coverage of the hard right-wing website Breitbart with material drawn from prominent white nationalists, Islamophobes, and far-right websites, according to a new investigative report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
Miller also railed against those wishing to remove Confederate monuments and flags from public display in the wake of Dylann Roof’s murderous 2015 attack on a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and praised America’s early 20th-century race-based, restrictionist immigration policies.
Emails from Miller to a former Breitbart writer, sent before and after he joined the Trump campaign, show Miller obsessively focused on injecting white nationalist-style talking points on race and crime, Confederate monuments, and Islam into the far-right website’s campaign coverage, the SPLC report says.
Miller, one of the few surviving initial appointees in the administration, has been credited with orchestrating Trump’s restrictionist immigration policies.
The SPLC story is based largely on emails provided by a former Breitbart writer, Katie McHugh. McHugh was fired by Breitbart over a series of anti-Muslim tweets and has since renounced the far right, telling the SPLC that the movement is “evil”.
However, throughout 2015 and 2016, as the Trump campaign progressed and she became an increasingly influential voice at Breitbart, McHugh told the SPLC that Miller urged her in a steady drumbeat of emails and phone calls to promote arguments from sources popular with far-right and white nationalist movements.
Miller’s emails had a “strikingly narrow” focus on race and immigration, according to the SPLC report.
At various times, the SPLC reports, Miller recommendations for McHugh included the white nationalist website, VDare; Camp of the Saints, a racist novel focused on a “replacement” of European whites by mass third-world immigration; conspiracy site Infowars; and Refugee Resettlement Watch, a fringe anti-immigrant site whose tagline is “They are changing America by changing the people”.
McHugh also says that in a phone call, Miller suggested that she promote an analysis of race and crime featured on the website of a white nationalist organization, American Renaissance. The American Renaissance article he mentioned was the subject of significant interest on the far right in 2015.
In the two weeks following the murder of nine people at a church in Charleston by the white supremacist Dylann Roof as Americans demanded the removal of Confederate statues and flags, Miller encouraged McHugh to turn the narrative back on leftists and Latinos.
“Should the cross be removed from immigrant communities, in light of the history of Spanish conquest?” he asked in one email on 24 June.
“When will the left be made to apologize for the blood on their hands supporting every commie regime since Stalin?” he asked in another the following day.
When another mass shooting happened in Oregon in October 2015, Miller wrote that the killer, Chris Harper-Mercer “is described as ‘mixed race’ and born in England. Any chance of piecing that profile together more, or will it all be covered up?”
Miller repeatedly brings up President Calvin Coolidge, who is revered among white nationalists for signing the 1924 Immigration Act which included racial quotas for immigration.
In one email, Miller remarks on a report about the beginning of Immigrant Heritage Month by writing: “This would seem a good opportunity to remind people about the heritage established by Calvin Coolidge, which covers four decades of the 20th century.” The four decades in question is the period between the passage of the Immigration Act and the abolition of racial quotas.
Miller also hints at conspiratorial explanations for the maintenance of current immigration policies. Mainstream coverage of the 50th anniversary of the removal of racial quotas in immigration policy had lacked detail, Miller believed, because “Elites can’t allow the people to see that their condition is not the product of events beyond their control, but the product of policy they foisted onto them.”.
Miller used a US government email address during the early part of the correspondence, when he was an aide to senator Jeff Sessions, and then announced his new job on the Trump campaign, and a new email address, to recipients including McHugh.
As well as McHugh, recipients of his emails included others then at Breitbart who subsequently worked in the Trump administration, including Steve Bannon and current Trump aide, Julia Hahn.
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“The Worst Generation?”
Also, remember that Miller is an acolyte of shameless White Nationalist racist Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions. The latter was last seen groveling and pleading before Donald Trump in what hopefully for America will be a vain attempt to regain his Senate seat in Alabama. The country certainly has been enriched by not having this vile purveyor of racist lies, false narratives, and gratuitous cruelty on the national scene since Trump fired him. Nevertheless, his cruelty, illegal, and immoral actions during his tenure as Attorney General continue to destroy lives and haunt our nation.
Tyler Anbinder Professor of History George Washington University
Professor Tyler Anbinder writes in WashPost:
November 7, 2019 at 10:03 a.m. EST
President Trump insists that he harbors no prejudice against immigrants. “I love immigrants,” he told Telemundo in June. Indeed, Trump has married two immigrants — Ivana Zelníčková (from what is now the Czech Republic) and Melanija Knavs (born in what is now Slovenia). He does occasionally say something positive about an immigrant group, such as when he wondered why the United States couldn’t get more immigrants from Norway. But for the most part, Trump portrays immigrants as a threat or a menace, and he calls the largest segment of America’s newcomers — Latinos — “animals” and invaders.
As a historian who specializes in the study of anti-immigrant sentiment, I know that Trump is not the first president to denigrate newcomers to the country. But Trump has attacked and scapegoated immigrants in ways that previous presidents never have — and in the process, he has spread more fear, resentment and hatred of immigrants than any American in history.
Trump’s nativism is especially striking for its comprehensiveness. Over the centuries, nativists have leveled 10 main charges against immigrants: They bring crime; they import poverty; they spread disease; they don’t assimilate; they corrupt our politics; they steal our jobs; they cause our taxes to increase; they’re a security risk; their religion is incompatible with American values; they can never be “true Americans.”
Trump has made every one of these charges. No American president before him has publicly embraced the entire nativist worldview. A commander in chief who is also the nativist in chief has the potential to alter immigrants’ role in American society now and for generations to come.
There have, of course, been upsurges of nativism in previous eras, but presidents have rarely been the ones stoking the flames. President John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, which among other things nearly tripled the time immigrants had to wait before they could become citizens and vote, but his voluminous writings contain nary a word critical of immigrants.
Millard Fillmore, president at the height of the massive influx of Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Famine, remained silent during his administration on the social tensions these newcomers caused. Even in 1856, when the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant American Party (popularly called the Know Nothing Party) nominated Fillmore to return to the White House, he and his surrogates eschewed attacks on immigrants and rebranded the party as a moderating force between proslavery Democrats and anti-slavery Republicans.
Congress has typically been the source of the greatest nativist zeal in national politics — and presidents have generally tried to tamp down that zeal. Rutherford B. Hayes and Chester Arthur vetoed legislation barring the immigration of Chinese laborers in the 1870s and 1880s, though Arthur later agreed to sign a 10-year ban. In subsequent decades, Grover Cleveland, William H. Taft and Woodrow Wilson vetoed bills making the ability to read a prerequisite for adult men to immigrate. Congress eventually overrode Wilson’s veto to enact such a law in 1917.
By the 1920s, most Americans were convinced that further limits on immigration were necessary. “America must be kept American,” President Calvin Coolidge declared in December 1923, following the political winds, and by “American,” he meant white in race, Anglo-Saxon in ethnicity and Protestant in religion. Coolidge endorsed the severe limits Congress placed on the immigration of Slavs, Poles, Italians, Greeks and Eastern European Jews and accepted a ban on immigration from Asia and Africa, as well.
The only Americans who came even remotely close to rivaling Trump’s nativist influence were more narrowly focused than the president is. Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford were widely admired anti-Semites whose views reached millions, but their animus was focused on powerful Jews at home and abroad, not Jewish immigrants in general. Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest, had millions of loyal radio listeners in the 1930s, but he, too, was more an anti-Semite than a broad nativist. None of them commanded the devotion of nearly as large a share of the population as Trump does.
John Tanton, who died this year, was a driving force behind the modern anti-immigration movement, organizing and raising money for a variety of groups that have advocated a reduction in immigration. But those groups didn’t have influence until Trump began spreading their ideas and appointing their leaders and allies to positions in his administration.
Trump’s anti-immigrant efforts have featured several classic nativist tropes. He falsely associates immigrants with crime, as when he said during his campaign that Mexicans are “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” In truth, immigrants commit significantly less crime than the native-born do. He scapegoats entire immigrant religious groups for the actions of one or two criminals, calling for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” after Syed Rizwan Farook (who was not even an immigrant) and his wife (who was foreign-born) killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif. He perpetuates the notion that immigrants pose a public health threat, as when he wondered in 2018 why we let “all these people from shithole countries come here.” One of his objections, reportedly, was that Haitians “all have AIDS,” though the White House denies he said that. He’s making it harder for low-income immigrants to come here in ways that would almost certainly reduce immigration from Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean, justifying his proposal on the grounds that he needs to “protect benefits for American citizens.” And he argues that even the U.S.-born children of recent immigrants — if they are part of ethnic, religious or racial minorities — are not real Americans, as he suggested when he tweeted that four congresswomen of color should “go back” to “the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
What makes Trump more influential than any previous American nativist is the size of his audience and the devotion of his supporters. Trump has more than 66 million Twitter followers and a powerful echo chamber in conservative media, allowing him to instantaneously convey his ideas to a quarter of the adult population. Other presidents had passionate followers (Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan come to mind), but none of them expressed much, if any, animus toward immigrants. Trump’s rhetoric has changed the way many Americans view immigrants: Nearly a quarter now call immigration a “problem,” more than double the percentage who characterized it that way in 2015, and the highest share since Gallup began asking that question a quarter-century ago.
Trump has made public expressions of nativism socially acceptable for the first time in generations. As he lambasted Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a Somali immigrant, at a July rally in Greenville, N.C., the crowd erupted with chants of “Send her back,” echoing Trump’s notorious tweet. “There was a filter,” a Latino resident of Greenville noted after the rally, that previously prevented Americans from expressing such hatred of immigrants, but “now the filter has been broken. My Hispanic friends are afraid to go to the store. They’re afraid to do anything. It’s scary.”
Trump’s spread of nativism has led to an upsurge in animosity directed at immigrants. Those who read or hear the president’s nativist views are more likely to write offensive things on social media about the groups he targets, one political science study found. One study using data compiled by the Anti-Defamation League found that counties that hosted Trump rallies in 2016 saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes in the following months, primarily assaults or acts of vandalism, compared to counties that didn’t host rallies. ABC News identified at least 29 cases in which violence or threats of violence were carried out, and the perpetrators targeted immigrants or those perceived to be immigrants more than any other group.
The president’s rhetoric inspires not merely petty violence but occasionally full-fledged acts of terrorism as well. Throughout the fall of 2018, Trump relentlessly sowed fears that an “invasion” of Central American refugees was imminent via an immigrant “caravan” heading through Mexico toward the United States. Before a gunman killed 11 worshipers in a Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018, he apparently justified his actions on the grounds that the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which these days assists refugees from all over the world, “likes to bring in invaders that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered.”
Five months later, the man accused of killing more than 50 Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand hailed Trump as a symbol “of renewed white identity” in an online manifesto. In August, a man traveled to El Paso with the goal of killing as many Latinos as possible, authorities said, slaying 22 people at a Walmart. A manifesto linked to him echoed many of the president’s favorite talking points: It condemned “the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” charged that immigrants are taking jobs from natives and lauded Republicans for reducing “mass immigration and citizenship.” These accused shooters all seemingly found Trump’s nativist rhetoric inspirational.
While this upsurge in nativist violence is terrifying, history suggests that, over the long term, those who embrace immigrants will win out over those who fear them. The percentage of Americans who want to cut immigration has risen since Trump took office, but that figure is still down by almost half since the mid-1990s. Ironically, Trump’s nativist pronouncements and actions may have galvanized Americans who oppose him to look even more favorably at immigrants than they did before. Seventy-six percent of Americans now say that immigration is good for the country — an all-time high in Gallup’s poll — while the percentage who call it harmful, 19 percent, is at an all-time low.
Anti-immigrant attitudes have always been part of American culture. They have spiked periodically — in the 1850s, in the 1920s — but those nativist upswings have proved ephemeral. The one we are witnessing today can be traced primarily to the uniquely powerful influence of Trump, the most successful purveyor of anti-immigrant sentiment in American history. But the admiration that the vast majority of Americans hold for immigrants cannot be extinguished by any man or woman, no matter how influential.
After all, most Americans understand that immigrants make America great.
Twitter: @TylerAnbinder
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Beyond the vileness and lies of Trump’s White Nationalist, racist, xenophobia, Professor Anbinder’s article ends on an upbeat note:
Anti-immigrant attitudes have always been part of American culture. They have spiked periodically — in the 1850s, in the 1920s — but those nativist upswings have proved ephemeral. The one we are witnessing today can be traced primarily to the uniquely powerful influence of Trump, the most successful purveyor of anti-immigrant sentiment in American history. But the admiration that the vast majority of Americans hold for immigrants cannot be extinguished by any man or woman, no matter how influential.
After all, most Americans understand that immigrants make America great.
Unfortunately, the “upward arc of history” will be too late to save the many individual lives and futures daily destroyed by Trump’s White Nationalist hate campaign.
That’s why the “New Due Process Army” is fighting to save lives and protect the Constitutional, legal, and human rights of everyone.
The United States’ refugee program once served as a global model of how a powerful country should support the world’s most vulnerable people. But under President Donald Trump, America is now accepting fewer refugees than ever, signaling that not even they are immune to the president’s restrictionist immigration policies.
On Thursday, the administration announced that the US will accept 18,000 refugees at most over the next year, the fewest in history and down from a cap of 110,000 just two years ago. A new executive order from Trump will allow state and local authorities to block refugees from settling in their areas.
The Trump administration claims that lowering refugee admissions would allow the US to take in more asylum seekers: people fleeing violence and persecution who apply for protection when they are already in the US, unlike refugees, who are processed by international organizations.
But the administration is also doing everything it can to keep asylum seekers out of the US. Migrants can be returned to Mexico to await decisions on their asylum applications, barred from obtaining asylum if they passed through another country before arriving in the US, or sent back to the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras to seek protections there.
During his campaign, Trump painted refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war as national security threats. In office, his administration hasn’t distinguished among asylum-seekers, refugees, and other migrants. It’s painted them all as a threat to or drain on American society and has crafted policies that try to keep as many people out of the US as possible.
The Trump administration is setting up the admission of refugees and asylum seekers as a “zero-sum game.” But in reality, it’s just trying to block immigration across the board, said Elizabeth Foydel, deputy police director at the International Refugee Assistance Project.
The US has the capacity to take in both more refugees and more asylum seekers. But the Trump administration is sending a message: The US is no longer the same safe haven it once was. The policies are in line with acting US Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Ken Cuccinelli’s amendment to Emma Lazarus’s famous poem on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet.”
During the campaign, Trump helped stoke anti-refugee sentiment
The refugee program has historically flourished under Republican presidents. Even in previous Republican administrations seeking to curtail immigration, no one has ever set the cap on refugee admissions as low as Trump has. Former President George W. Bush briefly cut the number of refugees admitted after the 9/11 attacks, but even then the limit was set at 70,000.
But the bipartisan consensus on maintaining a robust refugee resettlement program began to unravel after the Paris terror attacks in late 2015, said Yael Schacher, senior US advocate for Refugees International, when suicide bombers — reportedly sanctioned by the Islamic State — killed 130 civilians in explosions and mass shootings throughout the city.
There was speculation that one of the attackers was a refugee, one of 5.6 million Syrians who have been displaced since 2011 by the still-ongoing civil war. It was later confirmed that all of the perpetrators were citizens of the European Union. But the rumors were enough to spark a panic about Syrian refugees and start a movement among governors, mostly Republicans, to cut back US admissions of Syrian refugees and resettlement efforts more broadly.
Governors from 31 states, all Republican but for New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan, said they no longer wanted their state to take in Syrian refugees. In 2016, Mike Pence, then governor of Indiana, also tried to prevent refugee resettlement agencies in his state from getting reimbursed for the cost of providing social services to Syrian refugees.
But states didn’t have the legal authority to simply refuse refugees; that’s the prerogative of the federal government. Pence ultimately had to back down after a federal court ruled against his decision to withhold the reimbursements.
Trump, then campaigning for president, stirred up more fear, suggesting that Syrian refugees were raising an army to launch an attack on the US and promising that all of them would be “going back” if he won the election. He said that he would tell Syrian children to their faces that they could not come to the US, speculating that they could be a “Trojan horse.”
“Military tactics are very interesting,” Trump said. “This could be one of the great tactical ploys of all time. A 200,000-man army, maybe. Or if they sent 50,000 or 80,000 or 100,000 … That could be possible. I don’t know that it is, but it could be possible.”
When Trump eventually took office, he delivered on his promise to slash refugee admissions from Syria, suspending refugee admissions altogether from January to October 2017. From October 2017 to October 2018, the US admitted only 62.
State leaders lined up behind him: The Tennessee legislature, for instance, filed a lawsuit in March 2017 claiming that the federal government was infringing on states’ rights by forcing them to take in refugees (a court challenge that also failed).
Trump’s executive order Thursday may vindicate the states that wanted to turn refugees away. (The International Refugee Assistance Project said it is contemplating challenging the order in court.) Under the executive order, local governments that do not have the resources to support refugees in becoming “self-sufficient and free from long-term dependence on public assistance” will be able to turn them away.
It’s not clear how it will play out in practice. States won’t just be able to refuse refugees from certain nations, such as Syria, Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor at Cornell Law, said. Immigration law provides that state and local governments must provide aid “without regard to race, religion, nationality, sex or political opinion.”
But it could prove complicated when states and municipalities disagree over whether to accept refugees. It’s possible that states will be able to override local governments. Take, for example, cities like Dallas, which has historically taken in many refugees but is located in Texas, which has previously sought to prohibit them.
The executive order would also create inconsistent refugee policies across the country, making it next to impossible for the federal government to properly plan for refugee settlement, Schacher said.
“We are one nation,” she said. “The idea that governors can direct where refugees can first resettle not only undermines federalism but divides us on a policy which is fundamentally a national one.”
Trump’s refugee policy reflects his broader attitude toward immigrants
The Center of Immigration Studies (CIS), which advocates for lowering immigration levels overall, has influenced many of the Trump administration’s restrictive immigration policies. The refugee cap is no exception.
The organization has gained influence in the Trump era, with some of its former researchers assuming senior positions in the administration. CIS threw support behind the movement to block Syrian refugees in 2016, casting doubt on whether the United Nations’ refugee office could actually vet them for security threats before they arrive in the US.
The organization has also claimed that the current system allows the federal government to impose too much financial burden on states to carry out refugee resettlement. And it has called into question why the US should dedicate resources to resettling refugees rather than focusing on the southern border.
Trump’s most recent refugee policy moves are “long overdue,” in particular his executive order allowing states the opportunity to refuse refugees, CIS senior researcher Nayla Rush writes.
“Refugees are not just parachuted into a void,” she said. “Positive reception and orientation are, therefore, necessary for a successful integration.”
It all fits in with one of the broader ideas guiding Trump’s immigration policy: that immigrants “exploit public assistance” without offering the US anything in return, Foydel said.
In the same vein, the Trump administration has published a rule, set to go into effect October 15, that would allow the Department of Homeland Security to weigh certain immigrants’ use of Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Section 8 housing assistance, and federally subsidized housing against them in their applications for green cards or visas. The rule will primarily affect a small proportion of family-based green card applicants, but immigrants are already disenrolling from public benefits out of fear that they will be penalized.
Trump has justified it as a means of ensuring that immigrants are “financially self-sufficient” and to “protect benefits for American citizens.”
“I am tired of seeing our taxpayer paying for people to come into the country and immediately go onto welfare and various other things,” Trump said when announcing the rule. “So I think we’re doing it right.”
Foydel said that Trump is trying to abdicate federal responsibility for the most vulnerable immigrants, forcing states that already serve as immigrant “sanctuaries” to step up. He threatened to release detained immigrants into sanctuary cities in April, and Thursday’s executive order also requires states that agree to receive refugees to publish their “consent letters” publicly, which some have questioned as a means of politically targeting immigrant-friendly areas.
“The positions of different states might be politicized and used to foment anti-refugee sentiment,” Schacher said.
It’s a mischaracterization to say that immigrants take advantage of welfare programs, Foydel said.
In her experience, refugees have no desire to be on public assistance for any longer than necessary and start working as soon as they can. She also pointed to research that refugees end up contributing more in taxes than what it costs to resettle them: on average, $21,000 among refugees who entered the US as adults between 2010 and 2014, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.
“I think that there are a number of policies we’ve seen that have this language of economic self-sufficiency,” Foydel said. “It’s part of a false narrative about refugees and also immigrants more broadly exploiting public assistance when the data says it’s not true.”
Trump‘s cowardly attacks upon the world’s most vulnerable, aided and abetted by morally corrupt GOP policitos, and “masterminded” by neo-Nazi advisor Stephen Miller (taxpayers are actually supporting this evil clown — talk about abuse of public assistance!), ends what had been one of our most important and long-lasting bipartisan policy successes.
And, since much of the expertise and hard work that made the program so successful were contributed by NGOs and (real, not Trumpian) religious organizations, those programs are now being dismantled and the expertise and resources directed elsewhere. Literally decades of irreplaceable knowledge, expertise, and organizational talent has been lost almost overnight.
Even when a wiser, more humane, decent Administration finally wants to “restart” these critically important programs, it will be no easy task. It basically took nearly half a century to build up the current expertise. Once dissipated, it won’t be easily re-created – certainly not overnight. Obviously, there are serious, long-term consequences to allowing a kakistocracy to take over the government of our nation.
Letters to the Editor [LA Times]: Trump’s U.N. speech extolling nationalism was frightening
President Trump’s speech at the U.N. dismissing globalism and praising nationalism endorsed the very ideologies the U.N. was formed to combat.
To the editor: In his speech to the General Assembly on Tuesday, President Trump called for rejecting everything the United Nations stands for and a return to nationalism. Great.
This is what comes from someone who is ignorant of history — and fairly recent history at that. It was nationalism that brought us the two most catastrophic wars in human history. It is nationalism that has been at the root of many conflicts since then.
The U.N. was created to combat this most destructive of ideologies. For the most part, it has been succeeding, but in small, incremental, not often seen ways.
Now, the man in the White House wants to throw it all away. And for what? Self-aggrandizement? Profit for defense companies? Or just to give fodder to his followers?
Stephen McCarthy, Monrovia
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Stephen McCarthy “gets” it. Unfortunately, Trump, the GOP, and their enablers don’t!
Will the electorate “wake up” in time. Or, will we repeat the worst mistakes in history with America as the main culprit?
A woman and her young daughter, no older than 6 or 7, are shopping for groceries in a corner store of a bombed-out city. It’s sometime around 1947. The war is over, the Germans are gone, the Gestapo is no longer hunting Jews. Some of their local henchmen have been imprisoned or shot. Many just took off their uniforms and returned to their former lives.
The mother speaks with the trace of a foreign accent. As she reaches for her wallet to pay, the grocer says: “Why don’t you people go back to where you came from?”
Where, precisely, would that even be? The woman had fled Moscow for Berlin as a girl, after the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917 and arrested her father, who was never to be heard from again. Later, when still in her twenties, she had fled Berlin for Milan, sometime between Hitler’s coming to power in 1933 and Mussolini’s enactment of the racial laws in 1938.
She and her daughter were citizens of no country, living under a made-up name. They had nowhere to return, no place to go, no way to stay, and nothing they could do about any of it. To go back to the Soviet Union would have been suicidal. Israel did not yet exist. Germany was out of the question. America’s doors were mostly shut.
This was the life of a refugee in postwar, pre-reconstructed Europe. It changed dramatically the following year, when Harry Truman signed the Displaced Persons Act, marking the first time that U.S. immigration policy became actively sympathetic to the utterly dispossessed.
Thanks to the law, mother and daughter arrived in New York on Nov. 13, 1950, with only $7 between them, but without the weight of fear on their backs.
What Truman did became precedent for decisions by subsequent administrations to admit other refugees: Some 40,000 Hungarians fleeing Soviet tanks after 1956 (including a young Andy Grove, later the C.E.O. of Intel); hundreds of thousands of Cubans fleeing Castro’s repression after 1959 (including a young Gloria Estefan); as many as 750,000 Soviet Jews fleeing persecution by a succession of Kremlin despots (including a young Sergey Brin).
There were so many others. More than a million Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians after the fall of Saigon. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians after Khomeini’s revolution. Over 100,000 Iraqis since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Similar numbers of Burmese. Altogether, some three million refugees have been welcomed by the U.S. since the Refugee Act of 1980, more than by any other country.
By almost any metric, America’s refugees tend to succeed, or at least their children do. Whatever they do to enrich themselves, they enrich the country a great deal more. Empirical data on immigrant success overwhelmingly confirm what common sense makes plain. People who have known tyranny tend to make the most of liberty. People who have experienced desperation usually make the most of opportunity. It’s mainly those born to freedom who have the knack for squandering it.
But beyond the material question of enrichment is the spiritual one of ennoblement. Of what can Americans be more proud than that we so often opened our doors to those for whom every other door was shut?
All of which makes this a moment of unique shame for the United States.
The Trump administration has made no secret of its xenophobia from its first days in office. The number of refugees arriving in the country plummeted from around 97,000 in 2016 to 23,000 in 2018. Last week, The Times reported that the White House was considering options to cut the numbers again by half, and perhaps even bring it down to zero.
As if to underscore the spirit of cruelty, the administration also declined to grant temporary protected status to Bahamians devastated by Hurricane Dorian. And the Supreme Court issued an order allowing for a new rule that effectively denies asylum protections for refugees arriving through a third country — a victory for executive authority when that authority is in the worst possible hands.
Critics of this column will almost certainly complain that the United States can’t possibly take everyone in — a dishonest argument since hardly anyone argues for taking in “everyone,” and a foolish argument since America will almost inevitably decline without a healthy intake of immigrants to make up for a falling birthrate.
Critics will also claim that “very bad people,” as Donald Trump likes to say, might take advantage of a generous asylum and refugee policy. Here again I’m aware of nobody advocating a “let-the-terrorists-come-too” immigration policy. Only a person incapable of kindness — a person like the president — can think that kindness and vigilance are incompatible, or that generosity is for suckers.
The mother and daughter whose story I told at the beginning of this column are, as you might have guessed, my own grandmother and mother. I thank God it was Harry Truman, not Donald Trump, who led America when they had nowhere else to turn.
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There will be no America if Trumpism prevails, Bret.
BJORKLUNDEN REPORT, PART I: “American Immigration: A Legal, Cultural, & Historical Approach to Understanding the Complex and Controversial Issues Dominating Our National Dialogue”
I had the pleasure of co-teaching this course with my good friend Professor Jennifer Esperanza of the Beloit College Anthropology Department. The venue was Lawrence University’s amazing Northern Campus, known as Bjorklunden, on the wildly beautiful shores of Lake Michigan in Door County, Wisconsin, from August 4-9, 2019. This was a “derivative” of an immigration component of a summer session of Jenn’s class for undergraduates at Beloit. This time we had a group of 15 enthusiastic, well-informed post graduate students from a variety of professional backgrounds.
Here’s what we set out to achieve:
Class Description:
All Americans are products of immigration. Even Native Americans were massively affected by the waves of European, involuntary African-American, Asian, and Hispanic migration. Are we a nation of immigrants or a nation that fears immigration? Should we welcome refugees or shun them as potential terrorists? Do we favor family members or workers? Rocket scientists or maids and landscapers? Build a wall or a welcome center? Get behind some of the divisive rhetoric and enter the dialogue in this participatory class that will give you a chance to “learn and do” in a group setting. Be part of a team designing and explaining your own immigration system.
Class Objectives:
_Understand how we got here;
_Understand current U.S. immigration system and how it is supposed to work;
_Learn more about the various lived experiences of immigrants and refugees through their personal stories and ethnographic accounts
_Develop tools to become a participant in the ongoing debate about the future of American immigration;
_Get to know a great group of people, enjoy Door County, and have some fun in and out of class
Here are our “five major themes:”
Day 1: An Introduction to Immigration (From the Top Down and the Bottom Up)
Highlight: Getting the “immigration histories” of the participants
Day 2: Labor Migration: Push/Pull Factors
Highlight: Stories and examples of the “hard-work culture” created by various groups of hard-working immigrants to the U.S. both documented and undocumented with a particular emphasis on the culture created by Hispanic restaurant workers
Day 3: “Making Home”
Highlight: Watching and discussing NPR broadcast on German immigrants in rural Wisconsin which related directly to the family histories of many of us in the class (including me)
My coverage of the entirety of refugee history and modern U.S. refugee and asylum laws in 70 minutes (favorite student comment/compliment: “I expected this to be deadly, but it wasn’t.”)
Day 5: Contemporary Issues: The Future of Immigration, Refuges, & Asylum
Highlight: The class presentations of the famous (or infamous) “Mother Hen v. Dick’s Last Resort” “Build Your Own Refugee System” Exercise
Here’s the complete Course Outline (although admittedly we varied from this when necessary):
Jenn and I thank you for joining us. We’ve had our “Last Supper” and our “Final Breakfast” here at beautiful Bjorklunden. That means that our time together is ending.
In five days, we have completed a journey that began on Monday with hunter-gatherers in Africa thousands of years ago, and ends inside today’s headlines about ripping apart families in Mississippi and trying to develop better approaches to refugees: individuals who are an integral part of the human migration story as old as man, and who will not be stopped by walls, prison cells, removals, or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or rhetoric from our so-called “leaders.” On the way, we wound through our own rich immigration heritages and personal stories about how migration issues continue to shape our lives, including, of course, bringing this wonderful group together in the first place.
Jenn shared with you some very personal stories about her own family’s recent immigration experiences and how it shaped, and continues to mold her own life and future. I introduced you, at least briefly, to a key part of my own life, the U.S. Immigration Court, the retail level of our immigration system, where “the rubber meets the road” and where the maliciously incompetent actions of unqualified politicos have created “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” and made a bad joke out of the precious Constitutional right to Due Process under law for all in the U.S. regardless of status or means of arrival.
Our lively class discussions have not been “merely academic,” but real and practical. We have discussed real life scenarios literally “ripped from today’s headlines,” involving real people and real human dilemmas, including the challenges facing those whose job it is to ensure that justice is served. Although this class is done, the learning, the intense human drama, and the “living theater” of American immigration will continue.
Jenn and I have enjoyed working with all of you over this week. The past five days have certainly been a high point for us this summer.
We have communicated our shared values of fairness, scholarship, timeliness, respect, and teamwork! And, we hope that our ability to bond and bridge generational, age, academic, gender, professional, cultural, and geographic gaps to bring you this learning experience has served as a “living example” of how those shared values play out in “real life.”
For me and others like me, our “time on the stage” is winding down. Others, like Jenn and Chuck, are still very much engaged in the production. Still others, like Mary’s inspiring grandchildren, Jenn’s boys, and my eight grandchildren, are “waiting in the wings” to take the stage and assume their full roles in the ongoing drama of human history.
Our hope and challenge for each of you is that no matter where you are in the process of lifelong learning and doing, you will reach your full potential as informed, caring, and compassionate human beings, and that you will continue to strive to make our world a better place! We also hope that something that you have learned in this class will make a positive difference in your life or the life of someone you care about.
Thanks again for inviting us into your lives, engaging, participating, and sharing. Journey forth safely, good luck, and may you do great things in all phases of life!
Here’s our “Class Photo” taken on the deck outside the Lakeside Seminar Room where we met:
Left to right: Steve Handrich, Judge Charlie Schudson, Nancy Behrens, Mary Poulson, Jeff Riester (fellow LU ’70), Chuck Meissner, Genie Meissner, Chuck Demler (LU ’11, Associate Director of Major and Planned Giving), Greta Rogers, Me, Professor Jennifer Esperanza (Beloit College), Renee Boldt, Susan Youngblood, Chris Coles, Cynthia Liddle, Fred Wileman (my cousin), Mary Miech
Here are some shots of Bjorklunden:
Bjorklunden — A Different WorldBjorklunden LodgeLooking South Along Lake Michigan ShoreExploring the Ice Age With “Naturalist Jane”AM on Lake Michigan Looking North Toward Bailey’s HarborMoon Over Lake MichiganLooking East
And, this is Jenn and me conducting our “exit session” @ the Door County Brewing Co. in Bailey’s Harbor:
“Oh, the beauty of exam-free teaching!”
Thanks again to Mark Breseman (LU ’78), Executive Director; Kim Eckstein, Operations Manager; Alex Baldschun, Assistant Director; Jeff Campbell, Head Chef; Mark Franks, General Maintenance Mechanic; Lynda Pietruszka, Staff Assistant/Weekend Program Manager, and, of course, the amazing, brilliant, personable, and talented LU student staff at Bjorklunden for taking care of our every need and making everything work.
The student staff basically runs the place from an operational standpoint. While many universities brag about their hotel and hospitality management programs, as far as I could see the student staff at Lawrence was getting great “hands on” experience and training in hospitality management from the ground up. How do I know? Well, in the “corporate phase” of my career, I represented some of the largest international hotels and hospitality corporations in the world. The “hands on” training that these students were getting appeared to be very comparable to those of well-known hotel management programs and just the type of skills that major hotel chains are always looking for in their executives and managers.
Special thanks to Alex and Kim, for emergency copying and technical services; to Kim for showing me the only “Level 2” Electric Vehicle Charger in Bailey’s Harbor (I’ve recommended that as a proudly eco-friendly institution Lawrence install Level 2 EV Chargers and dedicated plugs for Level 1 EV Chargers in convenient locations on both the Appleton and Northern Campuses); to Jeff for giving me tasty vegan options for every meal; and to Lynda and Mark Franks for their general cheerfulness and “can do” attitude. I also appreciate the student staff who resided on my corridor for putting up with my constant whistling.
I thank Chuck Demler for getting me involved in the Bjorklunden teaching program. I am indebted to Jeff Riester for not sharing his recollections (if any) of our time together as undergraduates at Lawrence with particular reference to our two terms at the Lawrence Overseas Campus then located in Boennigheim, Germany.
Finally, thanks to my good friend and professional teaching colleague Professor Jenn Esperanza of Beloit College (who also happens to be “best buds” with my daughter Anna and her husband Daniel, a fellow Professor at Beloit College) for undertaking this adventure together and being willing to share so much of her very moving and relatively recent personal experiences with immigration and being part of the “American success story.” Jenn and I appreciated the enthusiastic participation of all the members of our group and their signing up for our class.
It’s a significant omission and a stark difference from the written document that has been linked to the 21-year-old gunman who allegedly opened fire on weekend shoppers Saturday at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. The shooter’s alleged document mentions a Hispanic invasion, the increasing Hispanic population and a decision by its writer to target Hispanics after reading a right-wing conspiracy theory asserting Europe’s white population is being replaced with non-Europeans.
“We’ve got dead bodies. The majority are Hispanic. Some are foreign nationals from Mexico and we got a manifesto describing what he intends to do and why,” said state Rep. Cesar Blanco, a Democrat who represents El Paso.
“I think it’s telling; he failed to mention Latinos,” Blanco said of the president. “He failed to mention that our community is majority Latino, but it doesn’t surprise me.”
The Mexican government confirmed that eight of the victims identified so far were Mexican citizens, not unexpected considering the city of El Paso and surrounding communities of El Paso County, Texas are about 83 percent Latino.
Add to that the number of shoppers and workers from Mexico who legally cross the international border each day to shop, dine, work and visit family. The Walmart is part of a complex of retail outlets, with a Sam’s Club and the Cielo Vista mall next door. There is also a theater close by along with many restaurants and hotels.
Trump did say in the speech that he had sent his condolences to Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, because eight citizens from Mexico were among the dead. But he didn’t make specific mention of El Paso’s residents of Latino descent, who comprise the majority of the community.
Jeramey Maynard, 26, a local artist and restaurant manager, said Trump’s response has been largely political, exemplified by the president’s call to combine gun regulation reforms with immigration reform.
“He’s choosing his words without saying Hispanic or immigrant and making it about other things,” Maynard said. “He’s been having these racist comments. When it comes time to defend the community, of course we are not going to hear him say anything about the Hispanic community.”
Maynard added that he thought Trump “would paint it with the broadest brush he can. Why would he say something he thinks supports the Democratic Party?”
‘Target on our back’
Trump launched his 2016 election campaign with disparaging words, seen by many as racist, about people in the United States who have come from Mexico.
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best. They’re not sending you, they’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems,” Trump said to a largely white crowd at Trump Tower in New York. “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists and some, I assume, are good people …”
Some defended the president saying he was referring only to immigrants who commit crimes and not speaking of Latinos in the United States as a whole.
But then Trump went on to question the ability of a U.S. district court judge to be impartial because he is of Mexican descent.
Trump’s political rallies have often been filled with chants of “Build the Wall” in reference to his pledge to build a wall across the entire border and make Mexico pay for it.
He responded to the influx of Central Americans seeking asylum by separating children from their parents and allowing border officials to hold them in chain-link pens.
In the past several days, many Latinos have been vocal about what they see as a through line between the president’s rhetoric and the shooting in El Paso.
Rep. Veronica Escobar, a Democrat whose district includes El Paso, said she had hoped Trump would have apologized for his rhetoric, which she said put a target on the city’s back.
“I would encourage him to do that,” she said.
The city has seen stark evidence of fear that exists among families because of the Trump hardline on immigration, according to several residents.
Marisa Limón Garza, deputy director of the Hope Border Institute, said the organization fielded calls from families who were directly affected by the shootings and families who were looking for loved ones.
They were afraid to go to the hospital or to interact with police and border enforcement, who responded to the shooting.
“If you are undocumented or of a mixed status household, the last place you want to go is where there is a tremendous amount of police presence,” Limón Garza said. Immigrants often are part of families that may include a mix of citizens, legal residents and people without legal status.
Her organization has been working with families to help them get the help they need, but she said it is a daily occurrence for people without legal permission to be in the country to be afraid to go to the hospital.
“This is just another layer of psychological trauma that this community has to face when we have already been ground zero for so many other challenges,” she said.
‘The illness is racism and xenophobia’
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus pushed Trump to commit to no longer using “invasion“ to describe Hispanic communities, immigrants or refugees to the country.
The caucus also asked the Trump administration to “acknowledge the threat of white supremacy and domestic terrorism” and to “combat this state of emergency head-on” with federal resources.
Rep. Joaquín Castro, D-Texas, twin brother of presidential candidate Julián Castro, said in a statement that the caucus is grateful Trump addressed the El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, tragedies.
But he said, “this does not make up for the years of attacks by President Trump on Hispanic Americans and our immigrant communities.”
“During the president’s address, he blamed the Internet, news media , mental health and video games, among others … Unfortunately, he did not take responsibility for the xenophobic rhetoric that he has frequently used to demonize and dehumanize Hispanic Americans and immigrants over the past four years.”
But Limón Garza said the tragedy has not been confined to immigrants.
“Here in El Paso we are a community that is over 80 percent Latino and that means people that are immigrant themselves and then people who have been here for generations,” she said. “It’s clear it was not just a random attack. It’s clear that this cannot be called someone with a mental illness. This illness is racism and xenophobia.”
Trump delivered a dishonest, divisive, and totally insincere condemnation of White Supremacy designed and delivered primarily to reassure his White Supremacist supporters that he’s really still on their side.
His ridiculously inappropriate upcoming visit to El Paso is a totally dishonest and divisive self-promotion stunt which all residents should either ignore or peacefully protest.
There is no human good, empathy, or redeeming quality in Donald Trump. Decent folks have to stop looking for that which doesn’t (and never did) exist and band together and use what remains of our Constitutional system to remove him from office before he destroys our country and everyone in it. It won’t be easy, but the lives of generations to come and the world’s future are at stake.
Donald M. Kerwin Executive Director Center for Migration Studies
Statement of Donald Kerwin, Executive Director of the Center for Migration Studies, on the Shooting in El Paso
The violent attack yesterday in El Paso in which 22 people lost their lives and more than 24 others were injured evokes two starkly divergent views of El Paso, the first held by most of its residents and those who know it well, and the second championed by extremist politicians, media sources, and hate groups. The latter describe El Paso and other border communities as dangerous and crime-ridden places, victimized by “invaders” from undesirable countries.
Just five days ago, Beto O’Rourke outlined a different vision of this community, writing in The Hill that that El Paso might (instead) be considered the nation’s future Ellis Island; that is, a symbol of hope for the world. The Ellis Island language may have come from a 2012 gathering in El Paso of border residents (most from El Paso) from different sectors – public officials, law enforcement, faith communities, business people, the press, and others – who were offended by how their communities had been characterized in the national immigration debate and wanted to articulate a richer, more truthful narrative of their communities. “If nothing else,” they later wrote presciently, “we could all agree on this point. There is a prevailing narrative about the US border and it is false and it is dangerous to border communities.”
These border residents recognized the problems in their communities, some of which they attributed to ill-considered federal immigration enforcement policies and the vilification of immigrants. El Pasoans have generously welcomed newcomers throughout their history, particularly in recent months. In a report published by the Border Network for Human Rights titled “The New Ellis Island: Visions from the Border for the Future of America,” they described El Paso as a safe, family-oriented, creative and culturally rich community that benefitted from its diversity and bi-national identity, and that could serve as a model for other American communities in an increasingly inter-connected world.
As Professor Josiah Heyman of the University of Texas in El Paso later wrote in the Journal on Migration and Human Security:
These border residents viewed their region as a set of human communities with rights, capacities, and valuable insights and knowledge … They saw the border region as the key transportation and brokerage zone of the emerging, integrated North American economy. In their view, the bilingual, bicultural, and binational skills that characterize border residents form part of a wider border culture that embraces diversity and engenders creativity. Under this vision the border region is not an empty enforcement zone, but is part of the national community and its residents should enjoy the same constitutional and human rights as other US residents.
They also enunciated a prophetic view of their communities:
We imagine a border that is no longer characterized by walls, migrant deaths, illegality, human and drug trafficking, and violence in all of its forms. We see a place of opportunity and encounter. We see a place of pilgrimage where – like Ellis Island – residents and visitors can remember their family histories of crossing over, living as “strangers,” and struggling for a foothold in their new country. We imagine a region which, 50 years from today, serves as a symbol of hope for border communities throughout the world. We picture a border that crosses, but does not divide families and communities. We see a border of faith communities converted by their own core values and beliefs. We envision a gathering place for God’s scattered children, where residents and visitors in all their diversity can work together to build the human family. We hope, pray, and vow to work for such a border.
Yesterday’s hate crime attacked this community, its perpetrator reportedly angered by the “Hispanic invasion of Texas” and seeking to prevent “cultural and ethnic replacement” in a region settled by Spanish speaking persons in the mid-17th century and by native peoples in 40 AD.In a statement on the shootings, Bishop Mark J. Seitz of the Diocese of El Paso wrote:
Once again in our nation we see the face of evil. We see the effects of a mind possessed by hatred. We see the effects of the sinful and insipid conviction that some of us are better than others of us because of race, religion, language or nationality.
Bishop Seitz also lauded the borderlands for demonstrating to “the world that generosity, compassion and human dignity are more powerful than the forces of division.”
In announcing a faith vigil last night in response to the shooting, an inter-faith alliancewrote:
Today we stand in horror and shock at the devastating loss of life and heartless attack on our border community. Tomorrow we will mourn, dry tears, offer our sacrifice of prayer and brace ourselves for the work ahead. Because even now the borderlands will stick together and the borderlands will stand together.
As many have remarked, El Paso is a resilient and special American community, but has too long been the victim of hateful and dangerous rhetoric. Its residents deserve the nation’s solidarity and respect, particularly at this sad time.
The Center for Migration Studies (CMS) is a New York-based educational institute devoted to the study of international migration, to the promotion of understanding between immigrants and receiving communities, and to public policies that safeguard the dignity and rights of migrants, refugees, and newcomers. For more information, please visit www.cmsny.org or contact Emma Winters, CMS’s Communications Coordinator, at ewinters@cmsny.org.
Thanks, Don, for your powerful and timely statement!
Interesting to compare the statements of a real leader like Don Kerwin, who exercises moral authority, with the vapid and disingenuous statements of immoral White Nationalist hate purveyors like Trump and most of his GOP stooges (including, of course, “Super Stooge” Mike Pence).
Trump might have yielded to his campaign advisers’ suggestions that he “cool it” until the bodies are buried. Since “ego is everything, and winning is ego” in Trump-land, he apparently deemed it worth the supreme sacrifice of knocking off the hate tweets and lie streams for a few hours.
But, I guarantee that it won’t be long before Trump is once again throwing around knowingly false racist narratives and “hate bombs” directed at migrants, Hispanic Americans, African Americans, other minorities, and Democrats, with the GOP looking the other way, nodding approval, or, in too many cases, actually joining in or attempting to defend the indefensible. This is a party whose sorry and cowardly actions and policies are inconsistent with the continuation of America as a democratic republic. It deserves to be voted out of existence and consigned to the “dustbin of history.” Whether or not that actually happens, and when, is ultimately up to the American voters.
E.J. Dionne, Jr. Opinion Writer Washington PostDavid Miliband Chief Executive International Rescue Committee
E.J. Dionne, Jr. writes in the Washington Post commenting on a recent speech by David Miliband, Chief Executive of the International Rescue Committee:
. . . .
“A new and chilling normal is coming into view,” Miliband concluded. “Civilians seen as fair game for armed combatants, humanitarians seen as an impediment to military tactics and therefore unfortunate but expendable collateral, and investigations of and accountability for war crimes an optional extra for state as well as nonstate actors.”
But these evils cannot be isolated from the larger political corrosion in the rest of the world — and this includes the long-standing democracies themselves. “The checks and balances that protect the lives of the most vulnerable people abroad,” he said, “will only be sustained if we renew the checks and balances that sustain liberty at home.”
This isn’t simply about aligning principle and practice. More fundamentally, when governments abandon a commitment to accountability domestically, they no longer feel any obligation to insist upon it internationally. It’s no accident, as Miliband noted, that under President Trump, the United States “has dropped the promotion of human rights around the world from its policy priorities.”
He pulled no punches: “The new order is epitomized in the photo of Russian President [Vladimir] Putin and Saudi Crown Prince [Mohammed bin] Salman high-fiving each other at the G-20 meeting in Argentina in November last year. With Syria in ruins, Yemen in crisis, and political opponents like Boris Nemtsov and Jamal Khashoggi dead, theirs was the embrace of two leaders unencumbered by national institutions or by the fear of international law.”
Miliband acknowledged the mistakes of an earlier era (including the Iraq War) but argued that “accountability, not impunity” was on the rise in the 1990s, when there was “an unusual consensus across the left-right divide” about “the need for global rules.” We have said goodbye to all that.
In 2002, Samantha Power, later the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, published “ ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide,” a book that stirred consciences about the world’s obligations to helpless people unprotected — and often targeted — by sovereign governments.
Nearly two decades on, we are numb, distracted and inward-looking.
Miliband understands that democratic citizens, grappling with their own discontents, will be inclined to look away from the travails of others “until there is a new economic and social bargain that delivers fair shares at home.”
But an Age of Impunity not only poses immediate dangers to millions confronting violence far away. It also corrodes the sense of obligation of the privileged in wealthy nations toward those left behind. When anything goes, no one is safe.
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Read the complete article at the above link.
The key point here for Americans who have been “tone deaf” to Trump’s (and his toadies at DHS, DOJ, DOS, and elsewhere) gross abuses of the rule of law, human rights, and human dignity is the following: “When anything goes, no one is safe.”
Professor Kate Cronin-Furman University College, London
Professor Kate Cronin-Furman writes in the NY Times:
The debate over whether “concentration camps” is the right term for migrant detention centers on the southern border has drawn long-overdue attention to the American government’s dehumanizing treatment of defenseless children. A pediatrician who visited in June said the centers could be compared to “torture facilities.” Having studied mass atrocities for over a decade, I agree.
At least seven migrant children have died in United States custody since last year. The details reported by lawyers who visited a Customs and Border Protection facility in Clint, Tex., in June were shocking: children who had not bathed in weeks, toddlers without diapers, sick babies being cared for by other children. As a human rights lawyer and then as a political scientist, I have spoken to the victims of some of the worst things that human beings have ever done to each other, in places ranging from Cambodia to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Sri Lanka. What’s happening at the border doesn’t match the scale of these horrors, but if, as appears to be the case, these harsh conditions have been intentionally inflicted on children as part a broader plan to deter others from migrating, then it meets the definition of a mass atrocity: a deliberate, systematic attack on civilians. And like past atrocities, it is being committed by a complex organizational structure made up of people at all different levels of involvement.
Thinking of what’s happening in this way gives us a repertoire of tools with which to fight the abuses, beyond the usual exhortations to call our representatives and donate to border charities.
Those of us who want to stop what’s happening need to think about all the different individuals playing a role in the systematic mistreatment of migrant children and how we can get them to stop participating. We should focus most on those who have less of a personal commitment to the abusive policies that are being carried out.
Testimony from trials and truth commissions has revealed that many atrocity perpetrators think of what they’re doing as they would think of any other day job. While the leaders who order atrocities may be acting out of strongly held ideological beliefs or political survival concerns, the so-called “foot soldiers” and the middle men and women are often just there for the paycheck.
This lack of personal investment means that these participants in atrocities can be much more susceptible to pressure than national leaders. Specifically, they are sensitive to social pressure, which has been shown to have played a huge role in atrocity commission and desistance in the Holocaust, Rwanda and elsewhere. The campaign to stop the abuses at the border should exploit this sensitivity and put social pressure on those involved in enforcing the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
Here is what that might look like:
The identities of the individual Customs and Border Protection agents who are physically separating children from their families and staffing the detention centers are not undiscoverable. Immigration lawyers have agent names; journalists reporting at the border have names, photos and even videos. These agents’ actions should be publicized, particularly in their home communities.
This is not an argument for doxxing — it’s about exposure of their participation in atrocities to audiences whose opinion they care about. The knowledge, for instance, that when you go to church on Sunday, your entire congregation will have seen you on TV ripping a child out of her father’s arms is a serious social cost to bear. The desire to avoid this kind of social shame may be enough to persuade some agents to quit and may hinder the recruitment of replacements. For those who won’t (or can’t) quit, it may induce them to treat the vulnerable individuals under their control more humanely. In Denmark during World War II, for instance, strong social pressure, including from the churches, contributed to the refusal of the country to comply with Nazi orders to deport its Jewish citizens.
The midlevel functionaries who make the system run are not as visibly involved in the “dirty work,” but there are still clear potential reputational consequences that could change their incentives. The lawyer who stood up in court to try to parse the meaning of “safe and sanitary” conditions — suggesting that this requirement might not include toothbrushes and soap for the children in border patrol custody if they were there for a “shorter term” stay — passed an ethics exam to be admitted to the bar. Similar to the way the American Medical Association has made it clear that its members must not participate in torture, the American Bar Association should signal that anyone who defends the border patrol’s mistreatment of children will not be considered a member in good standing of the legal profession. This will deter the participation of some, if only out of concern over their future career prospects.
The individuals running detention centers are arguably directly responsible for torture, which could trigger a number of consequences at the international level. Activists should partner with human rights organizations to bring these abuses before international bodies like the United Nations Human Rights Council. They should lobby for human rights investigations, for other governments to deny entry visas to those involved in the abuses, or even for the initiation of torture prosecutions in foreign courts. For someone who is “just following orders,” the prospect of being internationally shamed as a rights abuser and being unable to travel freely may be significant enough to persuade them to stop participating.
When those directly involved in atrocities can’t be swayed, their enablers are often more responsive. For-profit companies are supplying food and other material goods to the detention centers. Boycotts against them and their parent entities may persuade them to stop doing so. Employees of these companies can follow the example of Wayfair workers, who organized a walkout on Wednesday in protest of their company’s sale of furniture to the contractor outfitting the detention centers. Finally, anyone can support existing divestment campaigns to pressure financial institutions to end their support of immigration abuses.
Many Americans have been asking each other “But what can we DO?” The answer is that we call these abuses mass atrocities and use the tool kit this label offers us to fight them. So far, mobilization against what’s happening on the border has mostly followed standard political activism scripts: raising public awareness, organizing protests, phoning our congressional representatives. These efforts are critical, but they aren’t enough. Children are suffering and dying. The fastest way to stop it is to make sure everyone who is responsible faces consequences.
Dr. Cronin-Furman is an assistant professor of human rights.
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“The fastest way to stop it is to make sure everyone who is responsible faces consequences.”
That includes attorneys who defend indefensible policies in Federal Court as well as Federal Judges all the way up to the Supremes who fail to stand up for Due Process for individuals, and who insist on treating Trump’s overt attacks on our Constitution, democracy, and human dignity as within the scope of “normal” Executive actions rather than intentional and dishonest abuses requiring censure and strong, courageous, unconditional disapproval.
Donald Trump Cracked a ‘Joke’ After His Supporter Yelled About Shooting Immigrants at the Border. This Isn’t a Joke.
Not when armed militias are roaming the border and one member mused about doing the same thing. Not when the president has relentlessly dehumanized migrants and advocated for political violence from the podium.
Why are they laughing and clapping? Because they know it’s not a joke.
Sadly, that last part wasn’t the most frightening “joke” of the evening at the Trump rally in Panama City Beach, Florida, last night.
When Trump talked about stopping asylum-seekers and other undocumented immigrants, a person in the crowd yelled, “Shoot them!” and everybody laughed and cheered and clapped. In response, the president laughed that this was all some charming regional quirk of the Florida Panhandle, where you can “get away with” this kind of joke.
This is not a joke. Over and over again, Trump has made comments his aides later dismissed as “jokes,” or gone out of his way to say he would never do something, all with the intent of putting these ideas out there. Perhaps they might take on a life of their own. He once said he “hates these people”-referring to reporters-but “would never kill them.” Why does that need to be said, unless you want to get people thinking about it? At a rally in February, a supporter worked into a frenzy physically attacked a BBC reporter while Trump spoke.
The intent last night was clear: float the idea by suggesting we could never allow border agents to use weapons against migrants, even though other countries do. And then, when a guy in the crowd jumps to the next step, let it slide into the public imagination under the guise of a “joke.” It’s a trial balloon. Will there be pushback? Where will the message land, and how?
After all, there are already people roaming the border who are musing about murdering immigrants. Various “militias” have taken it upon themselves to patrol the border as a vigilante-or paramilitary-force. As reporter Ken Klippenstein foundjust this week thanks to a police report obtained through FOIA, some of them are quite interested in what the president’s joking about.
They’re already “detaining” large groups of migrants at gunpoint based on no legal authority. That’s also known as “kidnapping.” (The leader of the group, United Constitutional Patriots, was arrested. Now the group want to change its name to escape accountability.) At least one member, it appears, is already musing about lining people they capture up against a wall and shooting them. Perhaps they are looking for some kind of…permission. Or signal. From someone in a position of authority. Who communicates it’s not a big deal-normal, even. We’re all laughing, after all.
Elsewhere in the speech, Trump once again echoed conspiracy theories about an “invasion” of immigrants at the southern border.
This is the theory that drove the Tree of Life synagogue shooter-who believed Jews were helping to organize the “invasion” of nonwhite people through The Caravan-to kill 11 Jewish worshippers. (After the shooting, Trump said he “wouldn’t be surprised” if someone was funding The Caravan when asked by a reporter, echoing anti-Semitic tropes. In response to a reporter’s further question, he even alluded to George Soros, a Jewish billionaire and frequent target for right-wing conspiracies. He also doubled down on his “invasion” language.) In reality, most people coming to the southern border are seeking asylum based on claims they are fleeing domestic or gang violence in the chaotic Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. In another time, we might call them refugees. They travel in “caravans” up through Mexico because the journey is dangerous and there’s safety in numbers.
No matter: they are convenient villains in the president’s dark and venal vision of the American Experiment, where this is a country for and by white people and everybody else ought to be thankful for whatever they get. The demonization of The Other is a tale as old as America, but Donald Trump has returned the nation to dangerous places in 2019, questioning not just the Americanness, but the very humanity, of Hispanic immigrants and Muslims. He does so by attacking these groups’ violent outliers-the drug dealers and coyotes and ISIS-but these are the only examples of these groups he has ever discussed. There has never been one word about the Guatemalan mother who flees here with her child and works for decades cleaning somebody’s house. It’s only ever the murderers and rapists, and if they’re “invading” your country, any response is justified.
His followers get the message. Note that the woman in the clip above-who confirmed someone else in the crowd yelled “shoot ’em”-did not say the supporter and the president were talking about “illegal immigrants.” She said “immigrants.” Because that’s who Trump is always talking about. It’s not about the law. Donald Trump has no regard for the law. It’s about Us and Them. There is no reason to believe this will get anything other than worse while this grotesque and incurable man continues to wield more power than any other human being on Earth. He is a danger to the most marginalized in our society now, but that’s how it always begins. If he can get away with this, who will be next?
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Read the complete article with some of the “twitter feeds embedded” at the above link.
What kind of country are we becoming?
What kind of folks cheer and encourage “jokes” about shooting the most vulnerable among us? Trump has certainly brought out all the worst in America.
There are no “jokes” in Trump’s world — he’s a sick and cruel coward without values, human empathy, or any sense of humor. As American historian Professor Heather Cox Richardson pointed out recently on Facebook “Trump has a pattern of floating ideas as ‘jokes’ to normalize them.”
At one point in our recent past, a politician who “joked” about shooting unarmed people would have been censured by both parties and forced to resign. Trump has “normalized” the vile and unspeakable and brought out the absolute worst in his supporters and the hollow toadies with whom he surrounds himself. It’s destroying America. The rest of us who still believe in humanity and the values to which our country historically has aspired, without fully achieving, need to stand up to this redux of Germany in 1939 and Birmingham in 1963.
Join the New Due Process Army. Fight to uphold our Constitution against the dangerous onslaught of Trump and his enablers!
In early 1921, an article in Good Housekeeping signaled the coming of a law that makes President Trump’s campaign for immigration restriction seem mild by comparison. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” it read. “The dead weight of alien accretion stifles national progress.” The author was Calvin Coolidge, about to be sworn in as vice president of the United States. Three years later, the most severe immigration law in American history entered the statute books, shepherded by believers in those “biological laws.”
The anti-immigrant fervor at the heart of current White House policymaking is not a new phenomenon, nor is the xenophobia that has infected the political mainstream. In fact, race-based nativism comes with an exalted pedigree — and that pedigree is something we all should remember as the Trump administration continues its assault on immigrants of specific nationalities. The scientific arguments Coolidge invoked were advanced by men bearing imposing credentials. Some were highly regarded scholars from Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford. One ran the nation’s foremost genetics laboratory. Another was America’s leading environmentalist at the time. Yet another was the director of the country’s most respected natural history museum.
Together, they popularized “racial eugenics,” a junk science that made ethnically based racism respectable. “The day of the sociologist is passing,” said the Harvard professor Robert DeCourcy Ward, “and the day of the biologist has come.” The biologists and their publicists achieved what their political allies had failed to accomplish for 30 years: enactment of a law stemming the influx of Jews, Italians, Greeks and other eastern and southern Europeans. “The need of restriction is manifest,” The New York Times declared in an editorial, for “American institutions are menaced” by “swarms of aliens.”
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Protesters rallied last June against family separations in front of the United States Port of Entry in downtown El Paso, Texas. CreditVictor J. Blue for The New York Times
Keeping people out of the country because of their nationality was hardly a novel idea. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was avowedly racist. In 1923 a unanimous Supreme Court declared that immigrants from India could be barred from citizenship strictly on racial grounds.
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The race-based ”Aryan Nationalism” of 1920’s America helped pave the way for the Nazi atrocities of World War II.
Out of the failure of the West to save lives when it was possible before the start of World War II and the horrible human exterminations that followed came the 1951 U.N. Convention on Refugees. It is that Convention which Trump and other nationalist leaders throughout the Western World are committed to destroying.
At the recent Louisiana State Bar Immigration Conference, held on April 26, 2019, Attorney R. Andrew Free of Nashville, TN, who had been to the border and observed firsthand the lawless, counterproductive, and inhumane behavior of both the Mexican and U.S. authorities toward asylum seekers, particularly women and children, made an excellent “historical perspective” presentation.
Free traced the origins of today’s xenophobic and racist-inspired restrictionist immigration policies policies to two historic events: 1) the Eisenhower Administration’s 1954 “Operation Wetback” directed against Mexicans which resulted in some Mexican-American citizens and lawful residents being swept up in the indiscriminate “dragnet,” without any hint of due process, directed against Hispanic appearing and Spanish speaking individuals along the Southern Border; and 2) the highly racist Immigration Act of 1924, praised by such “modern day Jim Crows” as Jeff Sessions and his acolyte White House Advisor Stephen Miller.
Do we as a people REALLY want to be remembered the way Coolidge, Albert Johnson, and the host of racist “pseudo-scientists” are described in this article? Or, are we willing to take a stand against the White Nationalist restrictionist agenda being pushed by Trump and his many enablers?
How can we forget our own immigrant heritages and the nasty racist stereotypes thrown at almost every group of new immigrants, including of course enslaved African Americans and other “involuntary forced migrants,” who built America into a great nation!
