During his year and a half in office, Donald Trump has successfully managed not to improve the lives of millions of Americans in any meaningful way. His substantial domestic achievements — and there have been achievements, just not good ones — have all tended in a single direction: towards the aggrandizement of the already-rich and powerful, at the expense of those who work for a living. From regulation rollbacks at the EPA that will cause death and disease due to more poisons in our air and water, to a tax bill that throws crumbs to ordinary Americans but hearty loaves to gazillionaires, to the rollback of financial regulations that will allow big banks to make still more money at the price of endangering our collective economy, he’s overseen a plutocratic agenda that views government as the servant of the 1%.
This is why, apart from his own personal enthusiasms, President Trump’s willingness to press forward with divisive, inhumane, and fundamentally racist immigration policies appears only to have strengthened despite weeks of mounting resistance and deeply critical and damning press coverage. Any fair-minded reading of the facts shows that there is no actual immigration crisis at the southern border. I’ve been following the story closely, and even I was shocked to see how much less current immigration is compared to the last few decades. Throw in the fact that many of these people are primarily here to seek asylum from violence and other reasons, and you begin to get a sense of how artificial this purported emergency really is.
What on its surface seems like this week's defeat — with the president copping to his own lie that he couldn’t do anything to remedy the child separation policy, yet then ending it with the stroke of a pen — may well be one further ratchet up the spiral of this crisis of his own making. There is no clear strategy to rectify the family separations that have already occurred, and plans are being laid for further mass warehousing of children through the summer. If getting tough on immigrants excites his base, and he has no other ideas, what on earth is to stop the president from continuing such practices in more and more extreme fashion?
But getting tough on immigrants is ultimately a proxy fight for promulgating a white supremacist vision that Trump, and much of the GOP, sees as both a central political identity and method of retaining political power. The appeal of this vision is fueled by demographic change in America, with our country well on its way to whites no longer being a majority. Whether white Americans fully admit it or not, being the majority group has provided all sorts of benefits, and there is fear of losing economic and social status. For too many, the solution is to put down non-whites and embrace the darkest strains of America’s divided past.
But white fears around demographic change are intentionally being amplified by politicians who see playing up racial division as essential to distracting voters from the basic truth I noted at the start — that Trump and the GOP really have nothing to offer the ordinary voter who earns less than six figures a year. And so distraction of the lowest and most hateful kind has become the order of the day. The basic underlying message to white voters is minimalist and tribal: we will do nothing for you, except ensure that you are at least kept above all other groups in our country. (In accepting this bargain, white Americans ironically embody the contradictory accusations of laziness and cunning leveled at groups like Mexicans and African-Americans — rather than fight such condescending and self-serving politicians and economic interests, they sit back and blame other people for their troubles, while claiming to be the only group in American society deserving of the full benefits of government power; rather than doing the hard and empathetic work of fighting for justice for all, they place their faith in and delegate their democratic responsibilities to a single authoritarian leader.)
The war on immigrants may have started as a symbolic fight in the larger struggle to keep America white and Americans distracted from their real, collective challenges, but in the past months it has become more akin to an actual war over America’s meaning and soul. When children are tortured — for what else are we to call the infliction of unbearable psychological pain and long-term damage on kids in the name of political advantage? — then we are well past the point where the debate is in any way abstract or without the deepest consequence. It is no surprise that Donald Trump swiftly followed his purported retreat on child separations with a doubling-down on the idea that immigrants are murderers and otherwise evil people, arguing that the separations of children from parents at the border are nothing compared to the “permanent separation” that occurs when an immigrant kills an American citizen. Such defamation is racism in its purest form; delivered by a president who has exhibited no qualms about abusing children for political purposes, there is no looking away from this evil.
The cruelty of the situation is compounded by the basic truth that Latin American immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, have contributed far more to this country than they’ve received. Look no further than the thousands upon thousands of American business owners, from grape growers to slaughterhouse operators, who have been more than happy to overwork and underpay undocumented workers in order to increase their profits. (As a fun exercise, ask yourself how vocal these employers have been in defending people they know to be hard and reliable workers against the aspersions of the Trump administration). It has not been a just system by any stretch of the imagination — no arrangement that requires people to live in the shadows without full political rights can ever be viewed as just — but the assertion that such immigrants have been a net harm to the United States is a position that the behavior of thousands of Republican-voting business owners easily refutes. You would not be wrong to say that one of the central tensions of Republicanism over the past few decades has been between whether it is better to fuck over immigrants by expelling them or to fuck them over by exploiting them.
The national backlash to Trump's child separation policy shows that a large majority of Americans retains a strong moral compass on issues of right and wrong. But the president's apparent decision to stoke anti-immigrant sentiment as the primary way to fight the 2018 midterms means that he is effectively choosing the terrain on which those elections will be held, terrain which he views as favorable to himself. In one sense, he’s correct, in that stoking hatred against Latin Americans has widespread approval among core Republican voters. One possibility is that, as I fear and suspect, he will double down on his child separation and detention policies, so that by the time of the midterms we witness tens of thousands of Latino immigrants being held in inhumane conditions as a sadistic bid to show he’s tough on immigration and fighting for his base.
The most critical danger in this scenario is the massive human rights abuses this would entail, resulting in mass human suffering. Politically, the danger is that it would up the stakes for the Democrats, as there would be no avoiding an escalated fight to end such un-American practices. As I noted last week, Trump is not entirely incorrect in believing that forcing the Democrats’ main issue to be advocacy for non-citizens is not ideal for the opposition. But even if the president chooses to water down his policies in a bid for more centrist voters, there is no doubt that he intends to maintain the boil of self-imposed crisis at the border.
If Trump is able to make immigration the central issue of the midterm elections, then anyone who opposes Trump must make it a priority to redefine the meaning of this issue. The president would define it as a fight over the economic and national security of country, as well as a question of cultural survival for the white majority. I see no path forward but to make explicit what the president would still prefer to keep slightly hidden about his message. We need to make the full definition of Trump’s immigration agenda plain in all its nativist, ignorant, sadistic squalor.
To do so, I see a pressing need to find a way forward between two big ideas that are currently in tension for many people. On the one hand, there is no avoiding a fight on the meaning of immigration to our country. It is clear to me that we are a nation of immigrants, that this is our country’s strength and origin, and that any attempts to deny this will result in both substantial damage to our nation and empowerment of the white supremacist thinking at the root of current opposition to immigration. On the other hand, stoking fears of immigration is Donald Trump’s main way to distract Americans from more pressing issues, including the epic bout of plunder and graft occurring in his administration. It’s essential that Democrats make the case that he wants us to talk about immigration so we don’t talk about all the ways he and the GOP are working to take away health care, not to mention the curious way he seems to have subordinated American foreign policy to Vladimir Putin’s wish list. More than anything, we need to make the case that stoking racist fears is how he distracts people from a host of substantive issues, many of which are economic, on which he has nothing to offer, and the solutions to which would involve raising up all Americans.
In other words, we can’t avoid pushing back against Trump's anti-immigrant, racist vision of America; but we also can’t let it suck all the oxygen from a fight from all the other issues on which progressives hold a winning hand, from health care to voting rights, and from environmental protection to securing our electronic borders against future election interference. There needs to be a strategy to make this into a single, unified fight.
