Thursday, January 25, 2018

What's at stake on the mass deportation issue

After the Democrats' humiliating collapse on DACA on Monday, Josh Marshall takes another look at the Trump Administration's current stand on immigration. He analyzes a White House statement yesterday by the shameless press hack Sarah Huckabee Sanders laying out "four pillars" of the Trumpist immigration policy. And he warns:

The core of Trump’s reform is a dramatic reduction of legal immigration and changes which change the ethnic and racial makeup of the immigration which continues.

What is just as important is what is not included. The so-called “comprehensive immigration reform” which was several times pushed and failed over the last decade had two basic pillars: new security and impediments to illegal immigration and some settlement for the more than 10 million undocumented immigrants who are already in the country and in many cases have been here for years or even decades. “DACA” was one portion of that larger whole – what we might call the most “deserving” subsection the 10 to 12 million: undocumented immigrants who came too young to have any choice in the matter and knew no other country than the US, despite not being citizens.

Trump’s pillars don’t explicitly say these 10 to 12 million people must all be deported. But that’s the upshot. And it seems unlikely that we’ll remain in the status quo of the last dozen years or so. Trump is on record for mass deportation and he’s shown for a year that he is as good as his word. We don’t need to guess. Mass deportation is already the policy and practice. [my emphasis in bold]
A disgraceful policy aimed as seriously hurting millions of people is underway.

If the Democrats are unwilling to use every means of leverage they have to stop this, the rot in the party is far worse than even most pessimists imagined.

No comments: