Donald Trump’s repeated tweets that the United States is about to be invaded by a “caravan” of Latin American immigrants is so transparently an incitement to fear and hatred, so obvious an example of the way he creates crises out of nothing, that it raises anew the issue of how this sad and sordid fool is able to drive the national dialogue with such relative ease. This episode is the reductio ad absurdum of his methodology: we are to believe that people dislodged by poverty and political repression are actually determined enemies of America, so threatening and powerful that no less than deployment of the U.S. military will suffice to stop them from visiting terror on the Homeland (a word that, in the age of Trump, feels increasingly impossible to separate from its authoritarian associations).
Despite the president’s attempts to redefine the character of our nation, the United States traditionally takes in refugees forced to flee their countries due to violence, natural disaster, and other dire circumstances not because we’re weak and can’t protect ourselves from crossing the border, but because we’re a powerful country that subscribes to international conventions on how to treat the powerless. Donald Trump would have us act like cowards, when we have the power and resources, not to mention moral obligation, to act humanely.
The presence of Honduran refugees among the caravan that Donald Trump claims is about to invade the U.S. highlights the moral bankruptcy of his vision for America. The United States has long backed abusive and anti-democratic forces in Honduras; most recently, the U.S. helped legitimize the dubious re-election late last year of President Juan Orlando Hernández, who cemented his hold on power by violence against peaceful protestors. For the president to double-down on this initial betrayal of democracy by treating its victims — those very people the United States should have stuck up for in the first place — as enemies of America shows such contempt for our ideals that every American should feel ill at heart.
Donald Trump claims to be putting America first, but when his government pursues policies that actually generate refugees and ask us to ignore our own obligation to defend democracy, he’s in fact asking us all to put America last.
If the president and the Republican Party wanted to stop illegal immigration, wanted to stop illegal immigrants from taking American jobs as they claim, they could simply pass a law that required all employers to verify the citizenship or legal immigration status of job applicants. But they will not do this because too many employers want to continue hiring illegal immigrants because they’re cheap labor; and many of these are GOP voters and financial contributors. So instead, we have this continuing vile and racist onslaught against Latin American immigrants, which the president has escalated to be equivalent to an actual assault against our country.
Trump no doubt feels this a great fight to pick because it energizes his base and puts Democrats in the position of balancing a defense of human rights against the perception advocated by the president that to treat immigrants humanely means to hurt the security of Americans. But in branding a small group of refugees as an existential threat to America, Donald Trump has staked out a position so absurd that it presents an opportunity to define his policies as the unhelpful, un-American bullshit that they are. Democrats and other opponents of Trump should highlight the moral cowardice of his position, the way it compromises us all while gaining us nothing in return. As the ultimate example of his tendency to create crises out of thin air for political advantage, it’s also yet another example of his fundamental unfitness for office. We need to make it clear, however we can, that Donald Trump hasn’t just picked a fight with refugees; he’s picked a fight with America.
