Out of a morally rotten combination of personal animus and political calculation, Donald Trump has chosen to make immigration his premier issue. The man is clearly a racist, and has had no qualms about shepherding the GOP into its current identity as a de facto white supremacist party; a party that has chosen to channel widespread fears about demographic change, economic insecurity, and status anxiety into an ideology that blames all America’s challenges on the depredations of undeserving others. Whether it’s Latin Americans coming across the southern border, or Chinese ripping us off, there’s a dark-skinned person to blame for every ill. Apparently, only the Russians, fair-skinned and blameless, are to be trusted in this world.
Pinning society’s problems on minority groups is the strategy of authoritarians around the world, but it’s also been a major thread of Republican politics going back to at least Richard Nixon, so it’s not like this has come out of nowhere. But we can never lose sight of this critical question: why are Trump and the GOP going full-on white nationalist now? I’m not so sure myself, though I strongly suspect that it’s due to reaching a tipping point born of a complicated mix of America’s demographic change, a moral collapse among GOP politicians, and those afore-mentioned economic and status anxieties, and of course all rooted in a belief in white superiority that has coursed through our entire history.
Because we are at a point where questions of American identity and relative status have become key features of the political debate — both due to tectonic shifts in American society and the economy, and because Donald Trump in particular has chosen to highlight them — the Democratic Party has no choice but to engage on them. And indeed, the Democratic Party has done so, having become the party of multiculturalism and anti-racism. But immigration, as I’ve written before, contains particular dangers for the Democratic Party, of which Trump and his advisors are well aware and are eager to exploit. As the defenders of a racially harmonious and humane vision of the United States, Trump’s strategy is to define the Democrats as the party not of Americans, but of non-Americans; a party that cares more about immigrants than citizens. (Of course, a key part of this mindset is to also suggest that Democrats care more about minority citizens than white citizens, but this cannot be stated so explicitly, so immigration becomes a proxy for that key part of his white nationalist appeal).
And so Donald Trump has consistently kept immigration at the center of his agenda, most blatantly and obnoxiously through his come-hell-or-high-water insistence on a wall at the southern border that would in fact function as a multi-billion monument to white supremacy (and which, we all well understand, would likely end up being built in large part by immigrant labor, legal and otherwise. If I have not said it before, I will say it now: irony is lost on Republicans). Trump has also foregrounded immigration through various other actions, such as the ban on immigration from various Muslim-majority countries, refusal to reach a deal on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and attempts to implement changes in U.S. immigration policy that would preference white, English-speaking arrivals over those from third-world “shithole” countries, in the president’s infamous wording.
Because the president has put immigration front and center, he has effectively set the terms of the national dialogue, and given the Democrats no choice but to respond. This isn’t just because there is a general receptivity nationally to talking about these issues, but because the president can relatively easily set the terms of the national dialogue; this is just how American politics works. The danger for Democrats is that Trump and his ilk are on to something: immigration does put Democrats in a weak position, for the reasons Trump believes. Pushing back against Trump’s absolutist and racist views on immigration inevitably means the Democrats will be defending the rights of non-Americans, at least to some degree — which is exactly where Trump wants them. The clincher is that Democrats have no choice but to push back against Trump, since a defining characteristic of the values that are at the heart of the party’s identity is a defense of the vulnerable and of the United States as a multi-cultural society.
Because immigration issues touch so profoundly, if often indirectly, on the identity of the Democrats, they cannot shy from this fight. And to their credit, they largely have not, even as you can quite plausibly make the case that they have done so in ways that have both reinforced Trump and invigorated the Democratic base in what might turn out to be a zero-sum outcome electorally.
Maybe it is naivete, or stubbornness, or simple ignorance, but I can’t shake myself from thinking that the Democrats may yet find a way to turn the tables on Trump, and make immigration a strength for the party rather than an area of weakness, ideally in a way that would make Trump regret that fateful day in 2015 when he trundled down the Trump Tower escalator and declared Mexican immigrants to be murderers and rapists. If this is to be done, it’s going to involve calling out the racism and demagoguery at the heart of the Trump/GOP push for a whitened America.
The president’s termination of a program allowing Liberian and other refugees to live in the United States — announced last March and taking affect this month — has added fuel to my righteous fire. This decision is revolting on various levels: it’s in line with the president’s clear racial animus, affects a vulnerable population, and presents no clear benefit to the United States once you peel away the lies about mooching and undeserving refugees.
Here’s the background: back in 1991, President George H.W. Bush granted temporary protected status to thousands of Liberians fleeing civil war in that country. When that program expired in 1999, President Clinton extended their protection through something called deferred enforcement departure, as did presidents George W. Bush and Obama. DED covers thousands of others besides the Liberian refugees, but the overall numbers are minuscule compared to overall immigration into the United States over the last several decades.
The situation of these Liberian refugees encapsulates much of what is so wrong, and so deserving of opposition, in Trump’s immigration policy. There appear to be only around 800 Liberians affected by this decision, but the smallness of the population makes Trump’s revocation of their status all the more telling. There are real questions of whether Liberia is now safe — its first peaceful transfer of power since 1944 was only last year. Beyond this, the idea that our vast country is somehow being drained by this small group of people is preposterous — but of course, as so often, it’s not the reality, but the symbolism, and the enactment of cruelty based on false premises, that’s the real point. Indeed, the reality should give all but the hardest-hearted American pause. All these Liberians have made lives in the U.S. for more than two decades, and are contributing members of society. The Washington Post has two excellent recent articles about a pair of Liberian women affected by this decision. One is a health care worker, the other an oncology nurse; no credible economic or social calculus could conclude that they are not adding to the overall national wealth of our nation.
The history of the relationship between Liberia and the United States elevates Trump’s decision on the DED program from one more example of his backwards ideology to perhaps its grotesque epitome. Liberia, after all, was founded as part of an effort in the early 1800’s to return black Americans to Africa, born out of a racist belief that whites and black could not live together in the United States. Just as Trump’s wall would be a monument to white supremacism, so the existence of Liberia itself already exists as such a living reminder of this mindset. In a telling example of how Trump has tapped into long-standing currents of America’s darkest history, one of the immigrants profiled by The Washington Post, Afomu Kelley, is the descendant of a black American who moved to Liberia in the 19th century. In other words, the same white supremacist impulses that led to the creation of Liberia in the 1800s are now leading the current American president to send Liberians back to that country.
To not call out and question this action is to be complicit in it, and it is some relief that Democratic politicians have been fighting the move (including Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar, who brought a Liberian threatened by deportation as a guest to the State of the Union address last month). It seems incredible to me that identifying the historical continuities in this situation, on top of the other sound arguments against such a cruel uprooting of contributing members to American society, cannot be forged into a weapon against Trump and his anti-minority allies. If Trump can sensationalize murders committed by illegal immigrants, and put forward families of their victims as martyrs to a white nationalist vision, then Democrats should feel free to highlight the fact that actual American citizens — the U.S.-born sons and daughters of these Liberians immigrants — will be victims of the revocation of DED protection. Parents will have to choose between taking their children to a country with which their offspring have no familiarity, or leaving their children behind: choices that no parent should ever have to make, and with which only the morally compromised cannot empathize.
Trump’s strategy is to make us believe he’s against illegal immigration, but revocation of DED protection for Liberians and others shows this to be a lie. He seeks to deport people who have been here for many years, have worked hard and contributed to the American economy, and in many cases have either American-born children or children brought here at such a young age that they have deep connections to the U.S. and might be considered American citizens for all reasonable purposes. In purporting to enforce immigration fairness, he in fact makes war on our social fabric and the notion that every individual has something to contribute. More than this, he seeks to make us believe our country is weak, and indeed seeks to weaken it, by trying to make us afraid of the immigrant next door — by making us afraid of each other. In this, he is a fine advocate against himself. The Democrats must move out of defense, and learn to use his flawed policies against him.