As the government shutdown hits its third week, with the ability for Democrats and Republicans to reach an agreement depending on Donald Trump’s absolute demand for border wall funding, it’s startling to take a step back to remark how he has worked to turn a humanitarian crisis into the preeminent national security and economic threat to the United States. For a president, with all manner of data and advice at his disposal, to look upon the United States, with its challenges of economic inequality, a shrinking middle class, and mass impoverishment at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, and upon the state of the world, with the threats of global warming and rising authoritarianism, and decide that it is appropriate to shut down the government on the basis of immigration issues in order to get his way, is objectively insane. At the same time, it’s the ultimate testament to the moral emptiness, demagoguery, and racism at the heart of the right-wing political wave he has both ridden and conjured. Not only does this politics misidentify impoverished migrants as a threat to the country’s economy and safety, it’s also powered by a twisted combination of racial hatred and white supremacist attitudes that Trump can’t help but give voice to.
This country never should have allowed a situation to develop in which millions of people live under the radar, deprived of the protection of the law and fair wages through their undocumented status. At a minimum, this was a ticking time bomb that a demagogue like Trump would eventually use against the Democratic Party and against our democracy more generally, even if both parties have been complicit in this situation. Purely on grounds of justice, no democracy should be comfortable with a vast population of undocumented immigrants vulnerable to exploitation and unable to participate in the political system. Yet the benefits they brought to the American economy long received a bipartisan embrace: many are the employers who built their wealth on the backs of underpaid, undocumented laborers.
And now, President Trump’s elevation of stopping immigration across the southern border, with broad support from the Republican base, signals what a diminished and petty vision of American is now held by millions of Americans. Not only does it seek to erase the contributions these migrants have made and continue to make, it seeks to demonize them as some sort of invading army. Even at this late date, the hypocrisy still astounds. If the Republican Party really wanted to stop illegal immigration and the supposed threat of these workers taking low-end American jobs, then they could be done with it by passing laws that harshly penalized those who hired undocumented workers. Instead, amazingly, all blame is placed on people who are doing what so many of our ancestors did — coming to America in search of a better life.
And the racist vision further precludes actual solutions to the flow of immigrants northward, by conceiving of all the vast lands south of the Rio Grande as a demented lawless hellscape of gangs and faceless hordes. Completely blanked out is the idea that there are actual countries and societies where large-scale, non-exploitative assistance might promote democracy and healthy economic development, and alter the dynamics that send so many people fleeing northward from poverty and violence.
It remains shocking to me that the Democrats have allowed Trump to so thoroughly shape this debate. His economic premise that immigrants are simply draining our economy is flawed; his assertion that they present a national security threat is laughable; and his racism is contemptible. It is unnerving that our entire national dialogue has been centered so often on a purported threat that is, in fact, almost entirely illusory. The con man president has once again conned America.