Recently, in defending U.S. immigration policy under the Trump administration, Jeff Sessions made an assertion which I strongly suspect he views as a silver bullet to refute any and all criticisms of the restrictive and punitive policies he has taken against immigrants. He essentially stated that the United States is a political entity that is fully within its rights to patrol its own borders and act in defense of its own sovereignty. But beneath the anodyne obviousness of his point, with which few would argue, is a welter of subtexts and assumptions that sprout from a benighted and racist view of what type of country the United States is and should be. Sessions’ long record and current advocacy show that he believes the United States is under threat because the relative number of white people is declining: a racist view which has led inexorably to cruel and inhuman practices against immigrants who, per the logic of racism, are less than human and threaten the racial purity of our country, and so are deserving of whatever draconian practices are enacted against them.
Sessions’ statement also embodies the “Basta!” cry of so many Trump voters who perceive the United States to be under the assault of a combined cultural and economic wave of foreigners stealing American jobs and altering American culture in ways with which they are deeply uncomfortable; who believe that too much more of this means that America will cease to be America. Sessions' words may be out of a political science textbook, but his more moralistic suggestion that we need to restrict immigration to protect our general way of life runs through his words.
Yet a basic contradiction at the heart of Sessions’ argument points up the smallness of the man and the vision of which he has become the chief legal enforcer. His argument, at its base, is that the United States should be viewed as indistinguishable from any other country that needs to patrol its borders; we are one nation among many, and just want to assert the rights that all other countries rightly claim. At the same time, though, he clearly believes that what the United States embodies is precious and well worth defending. What he seeks to obscure is in fact the reality that the United States is a great country precisely because we are the sum of so many nations and so many immigrants who have come here. Save for Native Americans, all our ancestors are relatively recent arrivals to these shores (though, obviously, not all arrived here of their own free will). Sessions says that the United States is nothing if it cannot enforce its borders; but the deeper truth is that if the United States were not a nation of immigrants, then it truly would be nothing.
There’s an even deeper contradiction buried in his words, though. Sessions would have us believe that the United States is an ordinary country asserting ordinary rights, when in fact the United States is the most powerful country ever to exist on Earth. Yes Sessions needs us to believe in our ordinariness, even in a sense of our weakness, in order for his argument that we are beset by foreigners to make any sense. The reality, of course, is that the immigrants at our southern border are vulnerable people from mostly poor countries. Most are coming here for work, though many for asylum from violence; and if the United States were truly worried that they are stealing American jobs, then we would punish employers that hired undocumented immigrants as a key element of ending this migration. Needless to say, such is not the policy of this administration.
Instead, the primary concern is not to save jobs worked by undocumented immigrants — most of which are labor-intensive, low-pay positions that citizens themselves don’t want to work — but to scapegoat a vulnerable population as the cause of our country's ills. So we have the spectacle of a gargantuan border patrol bureaucracy inflicting immoral cruelty on these immigrants, including those who seek asylum by the proper procedures, by removing their children from them. Again, if the United States were serious about deterrence, we would enforce laws that every employer verify the Social Security numbers of every employee, and so be done with it. But this is clearly not the point of the anti-immigrant frenzy. Rather, the point is for an extremely powerful country to flex its muscles against the most vulnerable people imaginable, in an effort to embody the fundamental racism and xenophobia of this administration, and of many of the president’s supporters.
The United States is powerful enough, and has sufficient resources, to treat all immigrants crossing our border with dignity and respect. To continuously fall back on the assertion that they have committed illegal acts and ergo they are criminals is to intentionally ignore all context for their actions, or even what their actions are. It is the same mindset that says a starving man who steals a loaf of bread is as much a criminal as a man who heads up a concentration camp; technically true, but morally, an abominable equivalence that should cast suspicion on the motives of the person making such a comparison.
The point of all the ICE raids on long-time but undocumented families living in America, all the way up to the separation of children from their parents at the border, is not to protect American jobs or enforce our sovereignty, but to exert power against the vulnerable in a way that maximizes the political payoff to the president: by acting cruelly, even sadistically, in a play to feed and placate the rage and resentments of the Trump base.
Trump and his advisors see another win in this ugly situation: it forces the Democrats to stand up for non-citizens, and so allows the Republicans to make the argument that Democrats care more about foreigners than Americans. Think back to the Trump supporter who, criticizing attempts to protect Americans brought here as children by their parents, asserted that many Americans are dreamers, too. This zero-sum, America-first mindset is clearly viewed as a decisive wedge issue to slander anyone who stands up for human rights or disagrees with the Trumpian assertion that the only true America is a white America.
A couple weeks ago, I argued that Democrats need to be careful not to respond to Trump’s moves on immigration by playing his game, such as by impotently calling on him to change U.S. policy in ways he never would, and by all means to avoid reinforcing the slander that they've abandoned Americans in favor of non-citizens. Instead, the most important thing is to make sure Americans are made aware of what is being done in our name, and how there is no reasonable connection between such cruelty and keeping American safe and economically healthy.
Yet the last few weeks have illustrated the bind in which Trump’s willingness to act in inhumane ways puts both Democrats and all other decent Americans. When U.S. policy is to inflict what amounts to torture against young children, then there is no choice but to respond. I could not be prouder of our Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley visiting a child detention facility and being at the forefront of the fight against these immoral policies, and the ways that he and other Democrats are essentially taking this fight to the streets; these moves seem like a healthy refusal to play by Trump’s rules. Visiting the facilities behind whose walls this state-sponsored sadism is perpetrated serves to ground our opposition in the tangible reality of what is being done in our collective name. Donald Trump’s repeated lie that he is simply enacting a Democratic policy turns more cowardly and obscene by the day. This is a man who lacks the courage of his own cruel convictions, and who embodies the moral obscenity in the hearts of too many of his backers. We are seeing how pushing back on his overreach puts him on the defensive, and exposes his deceit and bad faith for all to see (even if not all are yet ready to believe it).
There is an opening here large enough to drive a progressive Democratic party through. The Trumpian nationalist vision, taken to its extreme logic — as it has been with the child separation policy — reveals an idea of the United States not as great or exemplary, but as small and craven, a betrayal of the common humanity and values that makes this country unique and a beacon to the world. Trump-Republican nationalism says that we are weak, and can only improve ourselves through cruelty and conflict. We see this not only with immigration, but in the trade wars the president is needlessly starting on flimsy pretexts; in his claims that loyal allies only drag us down; in an economic policy that says that the richest among us are the ones truly deserving of government largesse in the form of massive tax cuts.
Democrats would do well to connect their defense of immigrants to a larger vision of American power and possibility, to a defense of values that benefit all of us, and to refute Trump’s vision of America that turns reality upside-down and paints immigration as a drain, and our economic problems as the fault of malicious foreigners. In the absence of a decisively progressive vision, the field is left open for Trump’s phony MAGA appeals that in reality abandon America’s greatness for the petty aspirations of our grifter in chief. And in a broader sense, when we defend our common humanity, we defend people of all nations who are potential allies in a shared democratic project that will protect the world against future Trumps, both in the U.S. and abroad.
