Immigration and political radicalization

Wofgang Münchau's Eurointellgence Report (09/19/2018) makes this observation, which I would say applies to the US, as well: "Immigration has become to Germany what Europe has been to the UK - a permanent issue that ends up radicalising both sides in the debate, and society in general."

I wouldn't say that it applies to Austria, at least not yet. The far right (FPÖ) have made significant gains with anti-immigration demagoguery. And the conservative party (ÖVP) has also adopted a hardline anti-immigration program at the national level, although some of the party leaders in the federal states aren't yet willing to go full Orbán yet.

But the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) isn't showing any signs of what I would understand as radicalism yet. Although they have been pretty articulate in criticizing the ÖVP/FPÖ government's showy and highly ideological anti-immigrant policies.

Sweden's election Sunday, the far right, and the struggling center

Sweden had a national election Sunday. The press coverage in Europe and America was focused largely on how well the far-right, xenophobic Sweden Democrats would do.

This Spiegel Online count (Wahl in Schweden 2018: Ergebnisse im Überblick 09.09.2018) breaks the results down this way (rounded here):

Social Democrats 28%
Moderates (a centrist party) 20%
Sweden Democrats 18%
Center Party (liberal in European sense) 9%
Left Party 8%
Christian Democrats 6%
Liberals (in European sense) 6%
Greens 4%
Other 1%

Polls had been showing a potential for as much as a 25% vote for the Sweden Democrats. So even though the party gained significantly over the previous election, it didn't achieve what for democracy supporters would have been the worse scendario of 25%.

It's dilemma enough as it is.

Sweden's current government headed by Prime Minister Stefan Lofven is a coalition of Lofven's Social Democratic party with the Greens, tolerated by the Left Party, which means the Left Party doesn't vote to change the governing coalition but is not a coalition partner and doesn't get ministries.

Nick Rigillo and Amanda Billner run through various post-election coalition options in , A Guide to Sweden’s Next Government After Its Inconclusive Election Bloomberg News 09/108/2018.

It's particularly notable that the two largest vote-getters in the election, the center-left Social Democrats and the center-right Moderates, did not win enough seats to be able to form a majority government by themselves.

Marco Giuli makes an important point.

Would appreciate to see it reported this way: in EU country with largest number of refugees per capita, 82% of voters did NOT vote for far-right nativists #SwedenElection #VAL2018

— Marco Giuli (@MarcoGiuli) September 9, 2018

In the 2015/early-2016 surge in immigrants and refugees into Europe, Germany famously accepted the largest number. But per capita relative to population, Sweden accepted the most, Austria second, and Germany third.

As I dig into immigration statistics in Europe, I've become more aware of the different ways refugee numbers can be parsed. I assume that Giuli is referring to net number of refugees. The numbers can also be parsed by gross numbers of immigrants. There is also a difference among the various concepts of refugees, political refugees, asylum seekers, economic refugees, and immigrants. The xenophobic groups in Austria and Germany prefer to talk about "migrants", to minimize the amount of distress from war and climate change that drives current immigration into Europe. "Migration" invokes less of an image of desperation than, say, "people fleeing for their lives beause they were about to get murdered in a civil war because of their religion."

One of the things that polls in Germany, Austria, and the United States show repeatedly is that people who live in areas where there are immigrants present in significant numbers and people who have personal contact with immigrants are less likely to support anti-immigrant parties than those who do not. There is a strong inverse relationship, in other words, between familiarity with living breathing immigrants and support for anti-immigrant parties and policies.

As imporant as it is to recognize the limited nature of the Sweden Democrats' win Sunday, it doesn't mean that there aren't serious problems for the established parties going forward. Jon Henley discusses this in Real story of Sweden's election is not about march of the far right Guardian 09/10/2018:

The real story of Sweden’s election is not, as the prevailing narrative has it, the irresistible onward march of Europe’s far right but the continuing decline of the major parties of government, the fragmentation of national votes and the rise of a number of smaller parties.

In a trend visible across Europe, the electoral base of the leading mainstream parties is shrinking. “The bigger parties are getting smaller and the smaller parties getting bigger,” said Sarah de Lange, a political scientist at the University of Amsterdam and a specialist in Europe’s radical right.

Across the continent, mainstream parties and alliances that once dominated national politics are in retreat, most notably on the left, making coalition-forming harder – even in countries, like Sweden, long used to coalition government – and producing weaker, potentially shorter-lived governments.

The neoliberal economic and social paradigm that both center-left and center-right parties have embraced over the past two decades and more, the Reagan-Thatcher notion of TINA, i.e., There Is No Alternative to pro-corporate and anti-labor policies, has failed in many ways. The EU's brutal and reactionary handling of the Greek debt crisis is probably the single most dramatic example.

I would argue that the failure of this model is also seen in the inability of the EU to achieve a practical and humane collective policy to address the chronic immigration crisis that has been here since at least 2011.

Since it was the traditional base of the center-left parties that have been the most obviously hurt by neoliberal failures, those parties have shown their loss of voter support more than the center-right in the last 15 years. But the trend is hitting the center-right parties, as well. As Henley notes of Sunday's election in Sweden, "the big established parties of the centre-left and centre-right, the Social Democrats and the Moderates, lost 6.3 points between them."

"Othering" immigrants with lies

Josh Marshall provides a succinct guide to understate a couple of key points on today's anti-immigrant hate-mongering agenda, with particular reference to the United States (Please Bookmark This Post. Seriously. TPM 06/25/2018). There's the "open borders" accusation the Republicans make against the Democrats:

... in 2013 the Senate passed the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act, the most recent iteration of so-called ‘comprehensive immigration reform.’ ... it included a huge amount of money and laws for border security and efforts to prevent illegal immigration. It is demonstrably not an ‘open borders’ bill. All 52 Democratic Senators voted for it as did the two independents who caucus with the Democrats. This is the clearest, most concrete and dispositve [sic] evidence that this repeated claim by Trump, Sanders et al. is a provable lie. [my emphasis]

Then there's the scare talk about immigrant criminals:

The evidence is consistent and overwhelming. Immigrants commit crime at dramatically lower rates than the native born. And large influxes of immigrants actually appear to bring the crime rate down in areas of high concentration. Immigration does not drive up crime rates at all. If crime is our guide we should bring in more undocumented immigrants and boot some native scofflaws. The entire premise of Trump’s immigration arguments are based on a demonstrable lie. [my emphasis in bold]

Obama and the child kidnapping policy of the Trump Administration

It's nothing new for Trump and his minions to blame Obama for whatever Trump himself is doing. So they first claimed that Obama passed a law requiring them to kidnap the children of asylum-seekers (not true) and that the Obama Administration also practiced family separate (unfortunately true).

On Michael Brooks Show for 06/19/2018, Michael has a discussion about how Democrats and the left should approach discussing the conservative immigration politics that Obama practiced in connection with Trump's. Michael stressed the viewpoint that, yes, Obama's policy involved detention of minors, too, but his purpose was to practice a restrictive and punitive immigration policy as part of a strategy to get the Republicans to agree to comprehensive immigration reform. He argued that our legitimate criticism of Obama's policies detract the qualitatively worse and more cruel than Obama's. His concern is that a purist left harping on Obama's policies can function as a kind of concern trolling, validating Trump's claims that his child kidnapping policy is a continuation of Obama's approach.

Jimmy Dore and Abby Martin make the case that Michael Brooks probably considers more in the purist lane, Hillary: Undocumented Children "Should Be SENT BACK!" Jimmy Dore Show 06/21/2018. The Hillary anti-immigrant clips they feature are important to keep in mind. Hillary was set to play the same game on immigration that Obama did, despite the failure of the fundamental premise that harsh anti-immigrant policies by Democrats would persuade the Republicans to agree to something better.

Sam Stein in this clip calls the Obama Administration's family detention policy and its very explicit purpose to act as a deterrent to asylum-seekers "abhorent," while also characterizes the Trump kidnapping policy as "another level of disgustingness." Does Sam Want Completely Open Borders? Majority Report 06/22/2018. Michael Brooks is also part of that discussion on that clip, noting that the Trump policy has a "fundamental[ly] different premise behind" it.

Digby also joined Sam Stein on Friday to talk about the Trump Administration's child kidnapping, Casual Friday w/ Digby and Film Guy Matthew 06/22/18. Diby appears about 15 minutes into the show.

They also discussed the conservative political calculation behind Obama's related policies. What Digby emphasizes is the progressive critics were criticizing Obama's immigration and detention policies in real time. And also pointing out that the ConseraDem political strategy would not work. The critics were right.

Franco Ordoñez and Anita Kumar, Yes, Obama separated families at the border, too McClatchy Nenwspapers 06/21/2018:

No numbers on children separated from their parents under Obama is available because the Obama administration didn’t keep them, according to Trump DHS officials.

Leon Fresco, a deputy assistant attorney general under Obama, who defended that administration's use of family detention in court, acknowledged that some fathers were separated from children.

Most fathers and children were released together, often times with an ankle bracelet. Fresco said there were cases where the administration held fathers who were carrying drugs or caught with other contraband who had to be separated from their children.

“ICE could not devise a safe way where men and children could be in detention together in one facility,” Fresco said. “It was deemed too much of a security risk.”

One of the most controversial measures that Obama took was to resurrect the almost-abandoned practice of detaining mothers and children to deter future illegal immigration. [my emphasis]

Those of us who criticized Obama's immigration policies in real time obviously want to reject the attempts by Trump and Sessions to use Obama's bad policies to justify or excuse their own qualitatively worse child-kidnapping program.

But I said when Obama took office, his most important Constitutional responsibility was to make sure that the torture crimes of the Cheney-Bush Administration was properly investigated and prosecuted. The torture policy had been approved and implemented by very senior Administration officials. Not only under American law but under the obligations of the Torture Convention signed by St. Reagan when he was President, the US Government was obligated to pursue those crimes. Here again, whatever failings of the Obama Administration in this regard, it's not a serious as the original crimes themselves. And it doesn't change the fact that the Justice Department was obligated to pursue those prosecutions, too. And didn't.

But Obama and Eric Holder did give Dick Cheney the one thing that his own Administration couldn't give itself: a subsequent Administration of the other party that granted the torture criminals de facto immunity. And now the mobsters and grifters of the Trump Administration are driving a fleet of trucks through that de facto immunity.

And, as despicable as the Trump-Sessions child kidnapping policy is, the Democrats should remember and reject the Bad things that Obama did on immigration. And if his motivation really was to get a good comprehensive immigration reform bill with Republican cooperation, it failed. And Hillary Clinton was wrong in her support of the same harsh policies. After the Clinton and Obama Administration, I don't see any excuse for Democrats to pretend that such an approach by future Democratic Administration is anything but bad.

Will Bunch in this column reminds not to be sentimental about Obama's immigration policy, because some of it really was bad. Some of the pictures of border kids that haunt me most are from 2014. Here's why Attytood 06/24/2018:

The immigration lawyer [R. Anderew Free] had been to two large detention centers in Texas where U.S. officials were holding hundreds of migrant families from Central America, often for months at a time. Free said some of the conditions at these makeshift detention camps were appalling.

“I remember hearing the constant, violent coughing and sickness of small children, and the worry of their mothers who stood in the sun outside the clinic all day only to be told their kids should ‘drink water,'” Free tweeted. “I remember nearly doubling over when I saw the line of strollers.”

When Free had a chance encounter with the president at a political event, he warned him that the detention centers would be “a stain on his legacy.” He said the president wanted to know if Free was an immigration lawyer — implying that everyday citizens weren’t worried about what goes on at the border — and then said, according to Free: “I’ll tell you what we can’t have, it’s these parents sending their kids here on a dangerous journey and putting their lives at risk.” The message that Free took away was that the president saw family detention as a deterrent to keep more refugees from coming.

This happened in 2015. The president with the looming stain on his legacy was Barack Obama.

Bunch also makes the important observation that he and Democratic critics generally concentrated at the time on the nasty rightwingers agitating the immigration issue.

US foreign policy in Latin America, including under Obama when it was pretty straightforwardly conservative (and that' not mean to be a compliment), has had and still has a major role in generating refugees and other immigrants to come to the US. This is something we need to keep in mind always on this issue. Because, as Bunch also notes:

But Obama also amped up deportations to record levels — which, in some cases, separated families here in the United States — and he did little to radically alter the sick culture of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that would be “unshackled” the moment that tinhorn despots like Trump and AG Jeff Sessions arrived on the scene. And, probably fearful of midterm election politics, Obama didn’t treat the 2014 event as what it really was: a humanitarian refugee crisis. [my emphasis]

Obama was also moving to phase out the use of privately-for-profit detention centers in immigration, which Trump and Sessions have dramatically reversed. This is a central problem in the child-kidnapping issue. We have private prisons companies with lobbyists who make money off excessive detention and child kidnapping. Private Prisons Cashing In On Migrant Crisis - But Who’s Paying? | Velshi & Ruhle | MSNBC 06/22/2018:

Stephanie Ruhle reports that three of the biggest private prison contractors for the federal government are The Geo Group Inc., CoreCivic, and MTC/Management & Training Corp.

Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton carried on much of the Obama the last several years.

Clinton: Send some immigrant kids home CNN 06/18/2014:

Clinton on unaccompanied children arriving in the US PBS Newshour 02/11/2016:

See also:

Immigration is still really dead this time PBS Newshour 07/01/2014

New surge of familes from Central America prompted immigration raids PBS Newshour 01/12/2016

Such concerns helped prompt the Department of Homeland Security, with the close involvement of the White House, to initiate crack-downs on migrants in several states over the holidays, picking up 121 people for deportation. In some instances people were detained during surprise early-morning home raids that have spread fear across immigrant communities and infuriated the president’s Democratic allies.

“Having people afraid to open their doors to strangers, not going to work, etc., is not a healthy development,” said Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, who is attending a news conference Tuesday where House Democrats will release a letter signed by around 90 lawmakers demanding an end to the raids.

Lofgren said she shares concerns about a renewed Central American border crisis, but like other Democrats argued that the migrants should be treated as refugees. Many are fleeing brutal gang warfare in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, the same countries whose violence and instability forced women and kids to make the dangerous trip north two years ago, overwhelming U.S. facilities and producing disturbing images of frightened children huddling in Border Patrol facilities.

Obama was wrong on this issue in important ways. And progressives, including some Democrats in Congress like Zoe Lofgren, were criticizing him for that in real time.

Stephanie Canizales, How unaccompanied youth become exploited workers in the US The Conversation 03/13/2017


Reunification process for immigrant children uncertain as court cases continue Corpus Christi Caller Times/WZZM13 06/21/2018

Family separation is something that happens constantly, said Diana Abrego, who works at Clinica De Immigracion De San Jose, an organization in Del Rio — about halfway between Brownsville and El Paso — which offers help with legal services such as applying for citizenship and completing legal forms.

“You’ll see those situations happening off and on. (Separation of families) has always been a continuous thing, but it’s just got a little more intense,” she said. “There’s a lot of people that get deported and one half stays here and the other in Mexico. You see that a lot in the border towns.”

And the Washington Post has a new report (Maria Sacchetti et al, Separated immigrant children are all over the U.S. now, far from parents who don’t know where they are 06/24/2018) describing:

...a converted Walmart where each morning they are required to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, in English, to the country that holds them apart from their parents.

Why must they say those words, some of the children ask at the shelter in Brownsville, on the Mexican border in Texas?

“We tell them, ‘It’s out of respect,’ ” said one employee of the facility, known as Casa Padre, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing their job.

Digby on the value of incompetence - for the rightwing Republican cause

Digby Parton has it right in Donald Trump’s staggering incompetence: Is this terrifying bumbler the GOP’s secret weapon? Salon 06/22/2016:

One might be tempted to think this incompetence is a blessing in disguise, considering Trump's authoritarian impulses. But as we've seen with the travel ban and the manufactured border crisis, his incompetence is no protection against cruelty and inhumanity. An unfit president is no less powerful.

The good news for Republicans is that when all is said and done, this train-wreck of a presidency will be repurposed as yet another example of how government can't do anything right. They'll tell us that the only solution for that problem is another round of tax cuts, the cure for whatever ails you. It's quite a racket.

That's an updated-for-the-Trump-Age version of the old Democratic saying, now more accurate than ever: Republicans run on the idea that government can't do anything right, then they get elected and prove it.

In a separate post, she warns about the Democratic leadership unbelievable tendency to duck-and-cover in these situations (Don't make trouble. Pretend Trump doesn't exist and everything will be ok. Hullabaloo 06/22/2018):

The story [from Susan Glasser] goes on to handwring about how this [kidnapping immigrant children] is the one wedge issue that really works for Trump and how dangerous it is for Democrats to stray from their positive message of health care and the minimum wage. The implication is that talking about Trump's incompetence and malevolence will just make his voters love him so we need to complain about the Republicans trying to repeal Obamacare and pretend it's 2008 and say "yes we can!" (Don't say si se puede, though. That might rile up the Trumpies and we need to keep them as happy as possible at all times.)

Trying to appease these people and motivate the Democratic base by re-running their old campaigns and presenting a sunny vision of America is delusional. Republicans can't be appeased by Democrats because they are completely delirious that their Dear Leader is holding a national hatefest. That's what makes them happy. Meanwhile, Democratic voters will think these Democratic politicians are as depraved as Trump if they don't describe this grotesque insanity for what it is.

Pretending that what is happening isn't happening will simply not work. Trump is going to spend the next few months doing what he always does: spew racist to thrill his racist base. The only thing Democrats can do is get their own base out and acting like a bunch of cynical cowards isn't going to get the job done. [my emphasis]

Amen to that!

Steny Hoyer, the second highest Democratic leader in the House, sees it differently: Ashley Killough, Top House Democrat: Congressional Hispanic Caucus protest of Trump was 'not appropriate' CNN 06/21/2018. That's exactly the kind of clueless instinct about which Digby is warning.

This is the problem that Democratic leader Steny Hoyer thinks we should all be strictly polite in protesting, Advocates say government gave no thought to reuniting children separated at the border PBS Newshour 06/22/2018.

My response to Steny Hoyer:

Trump's (alleged) turnaround on kidnapping immigrant children

Joshn Marshall and TPM have been carfully covering the Trump Administration's policy and practices of kidnapping immigrant children and babies on the border.

Josh makes this critical point, "There are many legitimate immigration related policy questions. But controlling crime or safety or security is simply not one of them. It’s the foundational lie of the entire immigration debate." (my emphasis; Trump’s Foundational Immigration Lie TPM 06/20/2018)

And he warns against taking Trump's publicity move today at face value (Trump’s Ploy TPM 06/20/2018):

The President says he’s signing an executive order to end family separations. The actual aim seems to be to pick a fight with the courts and allow separations to continue while blaming judges. According to The New York Times, the President will sign an executive order allowing children to be detained indefinitely with their parents. The problem is that that violates a 1997 consent decree saying that you can’t detain/imprison children for more than 20 days (technically what’s currently happening isn’t detention). It straight up violates that order. So what will almost inevitably happen is that a court will step in, say you can’t do that and then Trump will announce that the judge is forcing him to keep separating families. [my emphasis; internal links not included]

Paul Krugman on longterm 3% growth

The Trump Administration and the Congressional Republicans have been promising that their magic tax cut will produce 3% growth over an extended period. That was part of the official assumption to minimize the projected deficit the tax cut produces.

Krugman explains why that is unlikely, to put it mildly (What the Economic Data Don’t Tell Us New York Times 01/28/2018). It involves an economics theory known as Okun's Law:

Potential output – the economy’s productive capacity – grows fairly smoothly. But recessions leave some of that capacity idle, and the economy can temporarily grow fast as that capacity is put back to use. The unemployment rate is an imperfect measure of idle capacity; still, there’s a strong relationship – Okun’s Law – between changes in the unemployment rate – capacity going into or out of use – and short-run economic growth

The unemployment rate is currently at a low point. Looking at the variable rates of quarterly growth and how 2017 fits into the Okun's Law trend, he concludes that a longterm 1.5% rate is far more realistic:

Why is potential growth so low? Unfavorable demographics are one big culprit: the baby-boomers are getting old (you kids get off my lawn), so the working-age population is barely growing. Oh, and cracking down on immigration is, you know, not likely to help on that front.

Productivity growth is also lackluster, despite all the hype about robots and all that. [my emphasis]

There is a lot more to say about unemployment and the constraints on labor participation rates, of course. But Krugman is giving a brief explanation about why the longterm 3% growth rate the Republicans are projecting/fantasizing is not a realistic expectation.

Dealing over mass deportation

Leading up to the State of the Union address on Tuesday, the Trump Administration has presented its white supremacist immigration program. (Anita Kumar and Franco Ordoñez, Trump’s swap: Citizenship for 1.8 million Dreamers, legal immigration gutted McClatchy Newspapers 01/25/2018)

Here's today Morning Zoo analysis of the new proposal. Including the pundits talking as if nice Donald Trump would love to accommodate the Dreamers but his mean base won't let poor Don do it. Because Mr. Don is a well-meaning fellow. What’s Inside The White House’s Latest Immigration Plan? Morning Joe/MSNBC 01/26/2018:

Velshi & Ruhle are looking for the pundits' Holy Grail of centrist Bipartisanship on these proposals, White House Proposes Path To Citizenship For “Dreamers” MSNBC 01/26/2018:

Out here in the real world, the Democratic Kinda-Sorta Resistance Party just took a huge dive on immigration just this past Monday. William Rivers Pitt (Bellycrawling Through History With Schumer and the Democrats Truthout 01/24/2018) charaterizes that cave-in well:

If the current iteration of the Democratic Party is what passes for "The Resistance," we may as well slap a gaudy crown on Trump's head and name him "Emperor Of All The Things."

The Democrats lost in 2016 for the same reason they got rolled so completely on this shutdown/Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) deal: The so-called "opposition party" has a genuine knack for being strategy-free when it matters most, and they keep managing to forget who they're dealing with on the other side of the aisle. "I wonder how many times you have to be hit on the head," President Harry Truman once asked, "before you find out who's hitting you?" The modern-day inheritors of Truman's party still have no answer to that question.

That metaphor doesn't work for the Pod Pundits at MSNBC, though. On a normal day, their view of the political world sounds like it could be the result of head injury.

Since the Democrats reverted to their comfort zone of Preemptive Surrender on Monday, the pundits are free to repeat their stock fantasies about bipartisan harmony and the infinite virtue of the Center which moves farther and farther to the right by the week.

Pitt is more realistic in evaluating the current moment:

Pressure from a variety of pro-Dreamer organizations, as well as from within the Democratic Caucus, was brought to bear: Attach the looming government spending bill to a deal for the Dreamers, and if the GOP balks, let the government shut down. Schumer and the Democrats did exactly that... for less than 72 hours.

It was at this juncture that the Democrats once again decided to showcase their uncanny talent for self-immolation. By Monday perhaps the most preposterous deal in recent political history was struck: If Schumer and his people voted to reopen the government, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell promised with sugar on top to allow debate on an immigration bill aimed at salvaging DACA and the Dreamers sometime in early February. Note well: McConnell didn't say he would do this. He said it was his "intention" to do this.

Schumer went for the "deal," backed by a clutch of Red State Blue Dog Democrats who couldn't summon a single damn for the 700,000 people who got hung out to dry, again. DACA recipients, many of whom have put themselves on the line with bold action to protect themselves and their peers, now know full well who it is they can count on when the chips are down. Hint: Few with a (D) after their name make the cut.

Pitt closes by saying, "The same "leaders" keep bellycrawling through history, and this time, it's quite possible that a million people -- the Dreamers and their families -- are going to pay a brutal price."

Charlie Pierce just wrote on a different aspect of the Trump Disaster something that applies at least as much to the immigration travesty, as well: "History’s not going to be kind to a lot of people who are living through these insane times." (The Mueller Bombshell Proves Republicans Are Running Out of Time Esquire Politics Blog 01/26/2018)

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.

Immigration and austerity, Brexit version

Simon Wren-Lewis takes on the ever-vexing question of class-vs.-identity politics, which is a lively one at the moment in Europea as well as the Democratic Party in the US, Links between austerity and immigration, and the power of information Mainly Macro 11/01/2017.

Wren-Lewis looks the role of xenophobia in rightwing nationalist politics in Britain, and argues that:

... it is a mistake to imagine it is all about economics, or even ‘culture’. One of the unfortunate consequences of the culture vs economics debate over populism is the implication that one way or another views are deterministic, and the only issue is what kind of determinism. The reason I go on about the media so much is that information matters a lot too. Although people may be anti-immigration because they have xenophobic tendencies which are reinforced when times are bad, they can also be anti-immigration because they have poor information, or worse still have been fed deliberately misleading facts. [my emphasis]

Political motivations are overdetermined, in other words. A good formulation of it, and that's important. "Operationalizing" it in practical politics is considerably more complicated.

He links to an article by Roger Scully, I spent a year researching why working-class Welsh people in the Valleys voted for Brexit, and this is what I found Independent 10/26/2017. Scully reports on the findings of a Cardiff University study that analyzed the Brexit vote in the Wales Valleys, a longtime Labour stronghold that voted Leave, despite the Labour Party's pro-EU position. Scully notes that elections in June 2017 showed that Labour still remains strong in voter preferences. The study found that immigration stood out as a key issue in the Leave voters expressed motivations for their vote:

Focus group participants in Merthyr and the Rhondda were notably unhappy at the increase in the Polish communities in those places. This was not articulated simply as xenophobia: a specifically working-class objection to immigration advanced to us was that, by making the jobs market much more competitive, the wages of locals were driven downwards. Thus, immigration was viewed as working much more to the benefit of managers and companies than for ordinary working people. Immigrants willing to work for low wages were also seen as contributing to the decline in some town centres, and in particular leading to the growth of charity and low-value shops catering to the needs of a low-wage economy.

Scully also wrote about the findings of the study in New research shows deep divisions persisting on Brexit Welsh Brexit Blog 10/26/2017:

• There remains substantial hostility among many of these voters towards immigration, with specific problems cited being immigrants taking jobs from locals and driving down wages – to the benefit of employers rather than ordinary workers;
• The statement that Wales is a net beneficiary from the EU budget was treated with significant scepticism by focus group participants. And much EU spending in the valleys was viewed as wasteful ‘vanity projects’.
• Many Leave voters expect that Brexit may cause short-term problems, but they expect it to be worth it in the longer-term.

Wren-Lewis uses the findings to discuss how austerity economics interacts with fear about immigration:

Why might attitudes to immigration change? I strongly suspect that anti-immigration attitudes, along with suspicion about benefit claimants, become stronger in bad times. When real wages are rising it is difficult to fire people up with arguments that they would have risen even faster in the absence of immigration. But when real wages are falling, as they have been in the UK in an unprecedented way over the last decade, it is much easier to blame outsiders. Equally when public services deteriorate it is easy to blame newcomers.

It is wrong to think that this only happens among working class, left behind communities. Catalonia is a relatively rich part of Spain, and there has always been resentment about this area ‘subsidising’ the rest of the country. But it is very noticeable how support for pro-independence parties increased sharply as Spain turned to austerity, although that could also be a reaction to corruption scandals. [my emphasis]

The dominance of neoliberal economic policies and their endorsement by the Labour Party for many years also meant in practice slow in real wage growth and a decline in public services, both key parts of the neoliberal gospel.

Wren-Lewis emphasizes the pro-immigration politicians can't just cower in fear of xenophobic propaganda and sentiments, they need to make the case for the benefits of immigration:

Of course most people want to stop immigrants coming here and claiming unemployment benefit. This is why newspapers keep playing the trick of talking about the large number of migrants ‘who are not employed’, conveniently forgetting to mention that this includes people like mothers looking after children. In reality unemployment among EU immigrants is below that among the native population. In addition, we can already deport EU immigrants that remain unemployed under EU law if the government could be bothered to do so.

For politicians who do want to start making the case for immigration, the place I would start is public services. Few economists would dispute that immigrants pay more in tax than they take out in using public services. Yet most of the public believe the opposite. [my emphasis]

Why Democrats lose (one big reason among several)

I haven't been following the Virginia Governor's race closely. But this PBS report from yesterday sounds like yet another example of the intensity gap. The Democratic Ralph Northam got criticism for calling Trump a "narcissistic maniac" in an ad. Criticism is understandable, because only about 2/3 of the public would recognize that as an obvious statement of fact. So he ran a new ad saying, "As a doctor, nobody ever asks if I'm a Democrat or Republican. They just want my help. So if Donald Trump is helping Virginia, I'll work with him." Awesome. Why Trump is on the minds of Virginia voters picking a governor PBS Newshour 11/03/2017:

And a Latino group ran an ad suggesting that the Republican candidate Ed Gillespie was supporte by white supremacist a******s. So Ed Gillespie the Republican candidate fell all over himself denouncing white supremacists and segregationist voter suppression and ... Oh, wait. That was on Bizzaro World.

Here on Earth Prime, Northam scrambled to say how badly he wanted to crack down on these darkie immigrants and would never allow sanctuary cities in Virginia. Which he had previously supported. So the Latino group stopped supporting him. Can you believe that? They decided they couldn't support a candidate just because he spit in their faces over their most urgent issues?! Utopian hippies, clearly.

It reminds me of the ACORN fiasco, where the Democrats folded to Republican criticism of the voter registration group based on the fraudulent propaganda videos that James O'Keefe put together.

One of the two major parties is just more interested in winning elections than the other one.

Maybe if the corporate Dems can purge all the Sanders supporters from the party, this approach will start working. I mean, they don't have any place else to go, right? It's not like the Democrats have to care about their voting base, they just need to pander to conservative white people, obviously! What could go wrong?

Andrew Sullivan in How the Democrats Are Failing the Resistance New York 11/03/2017, whose left-liberal leanings always have to be viewed with a skeptical eye, rights about the Governor's race. And he blames the Latino hippies for the problem in more-or-less sneering terms:

Enter the resurgent activist left. Yes, the party needs more direct aggression and energy and left-populism. But the Latino Victory Fund, worried about low Latino enthusiasm, put out an ad last week that shows how much of the energy in the party is now dominated by the fight against “white supremacy.” And so the LVF ad would give your average Vox or Coates reader an intersectional orgasm - while dooming the party on the ground. [my emphasis]

Let's pause for a brief moment to reflect on how far right the political "center" has moved when a well-known writer can assume his audience will take it for granted that explicitly criticizing white supremacists has "doomed the [Democratic] party on the ground." [my emphasis]

It depicts a white man in dark glasses in a pickup truck wth Gillespie and tea party bumper stickers, brandishing a Confederate flag, and driving aggressively through a suburban neighborhood, terrifying young Latino and Muslim kids, and forcing them into a back alley. Just as this Republican terrorist seems about to murder the children, the scene changes and we realize that this was all a nightmare for the kids. And they wake up. This, the ad hammers home, is what the “American dream” means for the GOP. Cue to scenes from Charlottesville.

The ad was aimed at Latino voters. But, of course, it went viral, instantly erasing Northam’s relatively clean image, and tripling contributions to Gillespie’s campaign overnight. It helped cement the Trump base’s support for Gillespie. [my emphasis]

It's always the fault of the hippies and those people that Democrats lose, amirite?

It seemed to imply that every Virginia Republican is a terrorizing white supremacist, and makes the fatal Clinton mistake of attacking a swath of actual voters. And, of course, it was about immigration. The GOP are on the smart side of this issue; the Democrats still don’t have a clue. [my emphasis]

Excuse me while I whack my head against the wall ...

In one final flailing, Northam first distanced himself from the ad, and then was shown to have helped finance it. Then the GOP managed to ambush him on the bogus “sanctuary city” issue. [Bogus??] In the closing stages of the campaign, he said he would now veto any attempt to establish such a law-free enclave, a position he had once voted against. Even now, it appears, the Democrats have no practiced response to a GOP attack on this question. They don’t want to offend Latinos, and they don’t want to alienate whites. So they twist in the populist wind. Are they capable of focusing on economic populism and a defense of the working classes against GOP plutocracy? At this point, the answer is no. [my emphasis]

On a quick reading, this might sound like Sullivan actually thinks "economic populism" is a good thing. Well, at least as long as he can use it as a throwaway phrase to trash the idea of defending civil rights. But don't expect to see Andrew Sullivan calling to "expropriate the expropriators" anytime soon.

Also, didn't he just say in the previous sentence that it's a bad thing for the Democrats to "twist in the populist wind"? And, no, I don't know what that means, either.

Trump makes "MS-13" a slogan of fear and hatred against Latinos and immigrants

Bundespräsident Von Trump spoke before a crowd of uniformed police in New York today, smearing Latinos as sadistic criminals and encouraging brutality and criminal behavior by the police. He used the longtime nativist bogeyman of MS-13 as his excuse. Trump discusses immigration and crime in New York PBS Newshour 07/28/2017:

His speech was basically white supremacist torture porn.

Hearing Trump as President in full Duterte mode today made me feel ill. Part of why his white supremacist fans love him is that he says things that upset Mean Libruls. And I assume that a majority of his white voters approve of seeing nonviolent immigrants brutalized and terrorized by ICE agents.

And why police sworn to uphold the law were applauding this is another reminder of how badly corrupted and lawless too many of our police forces have become.

The use of MS-13 at a symbol of and incitement to fear and hatred against Latinos was a popular theme among white supremacists since at least the early 2000s. Like various other themes, this one migrated from the white supremacist gutter to the position of the Republicans President.

MS-13 is a real gang, or a "brand" of gangs. But I won't stop to cite any reality-based sources here. In this speech, Trump uses "MS-13" as a ritual buzzword. I've focused lately on Islamophia in Austria. And one thing I took fromr a couple of extended TV panels featuring Muslim-hating participants was the way they made a point of tossing in a set of buzzwords: "jihad," "headscarves," "sharia," "salafi," "Saudi Arabia," "political Islam."

Tossing out "MS-13" along with torture-porn accessories functions in the same way: to promote fear and hatred rather than thought or understanding. And Trump is using it in this speech as a symbol against Latinos and immigrants.

Charlie Pierce tweeted a series of comments on Trump's speech:

We're back in American Carnage.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) July 28, 2017

President Endorses Police Violence.
Applause line.
Man, double-fck these people.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) July 28, 2017

Yes, organized crime never occurred to the previous waves of immigrants to this country.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) July 28, 2017

The Trump image of immigrants as a terrorist threat

Kate Brannen at Just Security (More Info Needed on Travel Ban’s Claim that 300 Refugees Under Counterterrorism Investigations 03/06/2017) has an update on the demagogic claims that the Trump Family Business Administration is making about "criminal aliens" to justify their mass deportation program that is primarily aimed at Latinos residents in the US.

A key point is that being investigated for something at all terrorism-related is not at all the same as being charged, much less convicted. And as Brannon writes, "It goes without saying that just because there is an investigation, that does not mean terrorist activity has been established."

... Faiza [Patel] notes that it’s important to know whether the word “investigation” is actually referring to an “assessment” or a full investigation. “An assessment is an early stage investigation which does not require suspicion of criminal activity, but rather can be started by an agent with an ‘authorized purpose,'” Faiza says. “The overwhelming majority of assessments do not result in full investigations — not surprising because they are not based on facts.”

This New York Times article from 2011 shows that from December 2008 to March 2009, only 3.7 percent of 11,667 assessments led to full investigations.

The number of investigations leading to successful prosecutions is even smaller. According to Justice Department statistics, there were 580 terrorism and terrorism-related convictions from Sept 11, 2001 through the end 2014. That’s roughly 41 to 42 per year, so about 10 percent of full investigations lead to a conviction (assuming the numbers obtained by the NYT are representative of the rate at which investigations lead to convictions).

Also of note is the fact that terrorism-related suspicions can cover a broad category of offenses, including immigration violations, according to Faiza. “These may have started as terrorism investigations, but we cannot know whether they actually have anything to do with terrorism.”

I would be very careful reporting this claim that 300 refugees are under counter terrorism investigation. Very fishy, no back-up.

— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) March 6, 2017

Andrew Lindsay analyzed the information on immigrants and terrorism last month for the Brennan Center in What the Data Tells Us About Immigration and Terrorism 02/17/2017, reminding us that many of the actual "terrorism" convictions since 2001 have been FBI stings, some of very dubious quality:

For example, Laguerre Payen is one of four convicted in a Newburgh, NY sting operation made infamous by an HBO documentary. An FBI informant recruited James Cromite, a low-level drug dealer and offered him $250,000 to recruit three other Muslims and carry out an attack. The informant recruited Payen, a homeless crack addict and paranoid schizophrenic. When told of a trip to Florida as reward, Payen said he could not go because he had no passport. He hardly posed the type of threat on which the government should expend resources.

Another example is Patrick Abraham, one of five convicted in a Miami sting operation. An FBI informant targeted a group of poor African-American and Haitian men, offering them $50,000 to join a terror plot. Subsequently, the informant recorded Abraham and the other men pledging allegiance to al-Qaeda. The group, dubbed the Liberty City 7, was not even Muslim, but a sect of the Moorish Science Temple that called itself the “Seas of David.” According to Mother Jones, the men were financially strapped misfits who operated out of a warehouse, where they had no weapons save a ceremonial sword. They were clearly misguided in seeking support from a purported member of a terrorist group but not, as the government asserts, domestic al-Qaeda operatives intent on, much less capable of, committing harm to the United States.

"Relying on raw and undifferentiated data," he writes, "serves to obfuscate rather than assist the development of an effective response" to terrorism.

And there's this: Fahgim Abeb and Rod Nordland, Afghans Who Worked for U.S. Are Told Not to Apply for Visas, Advocates Say New York Times 03/10/2017.

Officials at the International Refugee Assistance Project at the Urban Justice Center in New York said they had learned that as of Thursday, Afghans were being told that applications were no longer being accepted, though the suspension had taken place on March 1. “Our worst fears are proving true,” said Betsy Fisher, the group’s policy director.

Mac McEachin, another official at the organization, said the decision could affect the 2,500 soldiers of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division who might be deployed to Syria. “Now that the world has seen how we turn our backs on our Afghan allies, there is almost no chance that local allies in Syria will be inclined to work with us,” he said.

American military officials are also requesting an increase in troops deployed to Afghanistan.

Does anyone in this Administration know what they're doing except for hustling sweetheart deals for the family business?

"Family values" in Deportation Nation

A new cruelty being floated by the Trump Family Business Administration in its immigration policy is report by Julia Edwards Ainsley for Reuters, Exclusive: Trump administration considering separating women, children at Mexico border 03/04/2017:

Women and children crossing together illegally into the United States could be separated by U.S. authorities under a proposal being considered by the Department of Homeland Security, according to three government officials.

Part of the reason for the proposal is to deter mothers from migrating to the United States with their children, said the officials, who have been briefed on the proposal.

The policy shift would allow the government to keep parents in custody while they contest deportation or wait for asylum hearings. Children would be put into protective custody with the Department of Health and Human Services, in the "least restrictive setting" until they can be taken into the care of a U.S. relative or state-sponsored guardian.

Currently, families contesting deportation or applying for asylum are generally released from detention quickly and allowed to remain in the United States until their cases are resolved. A federal appeals court ruling bars prolonged child detention.

This idea provides yet another way to provide more business paid by the public to the private for-profit prison companies that are already handling a lot of the deportation detentions:

Holding mothers in prolonged detention could also strain government resources, said Randy Capps of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based non-profit.

“You are talking about a pretty rapid increase in the detention population if you are going to do this," Capps said. "The question is really how much detention can they afford."

See also: Adam Raymond, Mothers and Children Would Be Ripped Apart Under Reported DHS Proposal New York 03/03/2017

Trump's "criminal aliens" hate-mongering

Shirin Sinnar writes about the Trump Family Business Administration's evil demagoguery against immigrants in More Misleading Claims on Immigrants and Terrorism Just Security 03/04/2017:

In President Trump’s speech to Congress Tuesday night, he claimed that, “[a]ccording to data provided by the Department of Justice, the vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism and terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our country.” The following day, the Justice Department elaborated to the Washington Post that it had obtained convictions “against over 500 defendants for terrorism or terrorism-related charges in federal courts” and a “review of that information revealed that a substantial majority of those convicted were born in foreign countries.”

The Justice Department did not provide the raw data to support its assertion, but if that data derives from the source it appears to come from – a Justice Department National Security Division (NSD) list of terrorism and terrorism-related convictions – the claim is highly misleading. That’s because the NSD list is designed in ways that seriously undercut its ability to shed light on the scope or source of the terrorist threat.

This is yet another reminder of why its so important to be cautious about unsubstantiated official claims and about the attempts of Trump and his xenophobic supporters to generate fear and hatred by distorted and/or dishonest claims about "criminal aliens."

She gets into the weeds of this claim. And who should turn up there but now-Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III of Alabama? We have reason to suspect AG Sessions may not be above processing evidence with highly political motives in mind. (Jon Swaine and Oliver Laughland, 'Gun for hire': how Jeff Sessions used his prosecuting power to target Democrats The Guardian 03/04/2017)

For analysis of the "criminal aliens" hate propaganda technique - and that's what it is - see:

• Digby Parton, Trump’s “Office of Immigrant Crime” has sinister implications — and dark echoes of history Salon 03/02/2017
• Peter Beinart, Trump Scapegoats Unauthorized Immigrants for Crime The Atlantic 03/01/2017

Meanwhile, here in the real world of Deportation Nation (Jenny Jarvie, Attorneys for Mississippi 'Dreamer' say they're racing to prevent her deportation Los Angeles Times 03/03/2017):

Attorneys for Daniela Vargas, a young “Dreamer” who was detained by immigration agents in Mississippi after speaking to the media about her family’s plight, say they are racing against the clock to prevent her from being deported without a court hearing.

While an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman continues to maintain that Vargas will appear before an immigration judge, Vargas’ attorney, Abigail Peterson, said ICE officials informed her Thursday that Vargas would be processed as a “visa waiver overstay” and is likely to be flown back to Argentina without a court hearing or bond.

And there's this, Children Sob As Father Arrested By ICE The Young Turks 03/03/2017:

Daniela Vargas and the Trump mass deporation

Daniela Vargas, the Dreamer busted by ICE in Jackson MS after participating in a press conference criticizing the Trump mass deportation, facing an ICE attempt to rapidly deport her:

Matt Kessler, Dreamer in process of Daca renewal to be deported without court hearing The Guardian 03/03/2017
Sarah Fowler, Immigrant detained after press conference Clarion-Ledger 03/01/2017
Julianne Hing, Daniela Vargas’s Detention Shows How Vulnerable DREAMers Are Under Trump The Nation 03/02/2017

Hing writes, "Despite dangling the possibility of immigration reform before the nation this week, the Trump administration continues to show exactly what its immigration intentions are where it matters most: in the streets."

The Young Turks reported on Daniela's story on Thursday, Did Trump Target This Immigration Activist? 03/02/2017:

Daniela and her family are from Argentina, though Daniela herself grew up and finished college in the US. The Buenos Aires Herald reports:

Argentine art curator Juan García Mosqueda, a legal United States resident, was deported from the country after he was detained in an airport for 14 hours, becoming the first known case of an Argentine expelled from the country since President Donald Trump promised to implement stricter border controls. “The process was dehumanising and degrading at the same time,” Mosqueda had posted in an Instagram photo. He complained that he had been interrogated for 14 hours and was threatened from returning to the country for five years. Another Argentine immigrant, Daniela Vargas, was also arrested in Jackson, Mississippi later in the week over immigration issues yet unlike Mosqueda she had been illegally residing in the US.

She was arrested after she decided to publicly denounce on TV that her father, a painter, and brother, a construction worker, were arrested on February 15 by US immigration authorities. Vargas had applied for the Dreamers immigration programme for youths who want to regularise their situation. [my emphasis]

That's not the best report, though. Daniela hadn't just applied for the Dreamers (DACA) status. She had been covered by it and was eligible to renew it, which she had applied to do.

Fowler reports:

Vargas was 7 when her family came to America from Argentina, placing her under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, immigration policy. Under the policy, DACA recipients have to reapply every two years.

Vargas' DACA expired on November 11, 2016. Due to the $495 filing fee, Vargas waited several months to refile. Vargas previously told The Clarion-Ledger she recently had to drop out of school at The Univeristy [sic] of Southern Mississippi for financial reasons.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services received Vargas' renewal paperwork Feb. 10, 2017.

Hing explains:

In those years [of Obama's Presidency], undocumented immigrants repeatedly told me that “coming out,” as declaring one’s status publicly came to be known, was actually a safer move, because at least their neighbors and coworkers and friends and fellow churchgoers could know and then help wage a public campaign to support a person should they get caught up in the immigration system. It was hiding in the shadows that put a person at greater risk of being deported.

But Obama is not the president anymore. And while we’ve already seen just how important political protest is in the Trump era, Trump’s executive orders on immigration have explicitly liberated ICE agents to pursue any and every undocumented immigrant. This is the reality—despite Trump’s wishy-washy public statements about DREAMers, whom he’s said he’d deal with “with heart.” The Trump administration has yet to dismantle the DACA program, which exists at the discretion of the president. It is one of Trump’s immigration campaign promises that he’s actually held off on fulfilling, and it’s one of the easiest programs to dismantle.

Yet Trump’s executive orders, the recently released implementation memos from the Department of Homeland Security, and Vargas’s arrest show that DREAMers should consider themselves vulnerable.

Mass immigration and political repression

In at least one case in Jackson MS, it appears that ICE specifically went after an immigrant activist because she spoke out publicly against the Trump mass deportation: Daniela, la “dreamer’ que denunció el arresto de su padre y su hermano y fueron por ella La Opinión 03/02/2017

Daniela Vargas is a native Argentinian. Her parents brought her to the US when she was seven years old. She's a graduate of the University of Southern Mississippi, which I attended for my first year in college.

This is a wretched situation that Trump and ICE intend to make much, much worse.

The Trump Family Business Administration is using the specter of "criminal immigrants" to encourage support of his mass deportation.

Erika Andiola talks about Trump's plan to create an anti-immigrant propaganda operation in Trump Creates "Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement" The Real News 02/28/2017:

Robert Pollin discusses another aspect of anti-immigrant demagoguery in Trump's Big Lie: Blaming Undocumented Immigrants for Unemployment and Low Wages The Real News 02/28/2017:

The Deportation Nation policy continues

This is an encouraging report on two Protestant pastors who are providing sanctuary for undocumented immigrants, Jacqueline García, Una casa religiosa en L.A. se torna santuario para inmigrantes La Opinión 01.03.2017.

They are part of the immigrant-support network Rapid Response Team (Grupo de Respuesta Rápida). CNN also reports on the same story in a piece with the melodramatic title, Underground network readies homes to hide undocumented immigrants by Kyung Lah 02/26/52017.

Adele Stan highlights the xenophobic emphasis of Trump's speech on Tuesday, reminding us of how it meshes with his Islamophobia (No, Trump’s Address to Congress Wasn’t ‘Presidential’ The American Prospect 03/01/2017):

But with his speech, Trump again called for the deportation of millions of Americans, falsely claimed that only immigrants who committed crimes were being thrown out of the United States, promised a massive increase in military spending, and exploited the pain of a family grieving the loss of Chief Petty Officer William Ryan Owens, Navy SEAL, in a raid gone awry in Yemen, which the president deemed to have been a great success, despite the killing of civilians in its execution. Earlier in the day, the president seemed less certain of the mission’s glory, blaming the loss of Owens’s life on “the generals.” Trump must have been profoundly irked when Bill Owens, the slain SEAL’s father, told the Miami Herald that he had declined to receive Trump when the president requested to meet Owens at Dover Air Force Base, where they had each come to witness the arrival of the younger Owens’s body.

Bill Owens told the Herald’s Julie K. Brown that he was deeply offended by Trump’s treatment of another Gold Star family—the parents of U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan, who was killed in 2004 in Iraq. The late captain’s father, Khizr Khan, addressed the Democratic National Convention, demanding that Trump read the U.S. Constitution before pledging to ban Muslims from entering the country. (The Khans are Muslim.)

She also comments on Trump's attack on sanctuary for immigrants in his Tuesday speech:

The narrative created for the president by chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon and his deputy, Sean Miller (the two are reported to have written the speech) also squared nicely with Trump’s frequent demonization of Muslims, painting all with a terrorist brush. What Bannon and Miller lack in rhetorical artistry was matched for the speech’s sinister arrangement of words, as when the president said, “We cannot allow our nation to become a sanctuary for extremists.”

By deploying the term “sanctuary” in the context of terrorism, Trump conflated the dangers he says are posed by undocumented immigrants with those posed by thee maybe-terrorists his travel ban ostensibly targets.
The term “sanctuary,” of course, has been much in the news as of late, thanks to Trump’s constant attacks on “sanctuary cities”—municipalities that have declared that they will not contribute resources to federal efforts designed to deport undocumented immigrants. By deploying the term “sanctuary” in the context of terrorism, Trump conflated the dangers he says are posed by undocumented immigrants with those posed by thee maybe-terrorists his travel ban ostensibly targets. Neat trick.

The president also used the grief of families to paint undocumented immigrants, en masse, as murderers, having invited to the chamber the families of people who had lost their lives at the hands of criminals who had crossed the border. While Trump claimed that his deportation orders only target the “bad ones,” some 25 percent of those deported since Trump took office, according to PolitiFact, had no criminal records. [my emphasis in boldDepo]

Trumpism with a not-quite-so-nasty face but still xenophobic

Trump's budget State of the Union address to both House of Congress Tuesday evening sounded a lot like his campaign speeches. But since he omitted his attacks on those he and his base consider enemies, like the press or Hillary Clinton, many pundits in their theater-criticism commentary on the speech will find a gleam of statesmanship in it.

What stood out to me is that he devoted a large portion of the speech demagoguing against immigrants, linking them rhetorically to violent crime and murder and terrorism. He also signaled that he wants to escalate the decades long War on Drugs. The two together add up to many more Latino and African-Americans stuck in penal institutions.

Cenk Uygur grudgingly rates it as Trump's best speech, though he has major policy criticisms of the content, Best Trump Speech Ever The Young Turks 02/28/2017:

This report from The Real News from before Trump's speech takes a sobering and harsh though realistic look at that prospect in Is Trump Preparing a Wave of Mass Criminalization? 02/28/2017:

In a maudlin twist that Cenk calls "emotional porn," Trump had three people who had a close relative killed by undocumented immigrants sitting in the Presidential box and told a version of their stories. This kind of story was a standard feature in his campaign speeches and a key way he tried to rouse and appeal to xenophobic fear and hatred.

Sabrina Siddiqui and Lauren Gambino reported on that tactic in a pre-speech article, Trump invites relatives of those killed by undocumented people to Capitol Hill 02/28/2017.

This cartoon was featured today by Proceso using the face of our ExxonMobil Secretary of State to stand for the hostile policy of the Trump Family Business Administration toward Latino immigrants and toward Mexico in particular:

In the article La 'diplomacia' del desprecio that the cartoon accompanies, La "diplomacia" del desprecio," (The "Diplomacy of Contempt), Héctor Tajonar writes:

La manifiesta hostilidad de Donald Trump hacia México coloca al país en una situación de vulnerabilidad y riesgo acaso no vivida desde 1846, año del inicio de la guerra planeada por el presidente James K. Polk para apoderarse de la mitad del territorio nacional.

[The manifest hostility of Donald Trump toward Mexico puts the country in a more vulnerable and risky situation that we have seen perhaps since 1846, the first year of the war planned by President James K. Polk take over half of the national territory.]

The historical refernce is, of course, to the Mexican War. Or as it's known in Mexico, La guerra entre Estados Unidos y México.

Deportation Nation unleased

Digby Parton takes on the mass deporation issue in her Salon column today, Trump takes the “shackles” off: Mass deportations begin as the world looks on in outrage 02/27/2017:L

We know that a serious concern about the threat of terrorism is not the motivation for the travel ban. Echoing George W. Bush administration’s treatment of intelligence analyses that showed little evidence that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear program, the Trump administration has apparently rejected a Department of Homeland Security report indicating that “country of citizenship is unlikely to be a reliable indicator of potential terrorist activity.” Claiming that the report was politically motivated and poorly researched, a White House spokesman said, “The president asked for an intelligence assessment. This is not the intelligence assessment the president asked for.” That’s not how this works. ...

[It is clear] that those called “bad dudes” by Trump and his Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are all undocumented immigrants, and the Trump team wants to deport every one of them. Horror stories are multiplying like the one of agents arresting a woman seeking shelter from an abusive boyfriend, and another tale of officials detaining a woman with no criminal history who was in the hospital seeking treatment for a brain tumor. Incidents have been reported of Customs and Border Patrol agents demanding that all passengers on a domestic flight provide IDs when disembarking the airplane, which is highly unusual.

And I certainly won't quarrel with this judgment of Digby, "African-Americans and Latinos living in urban neighborhoods can be sure that he plans to “take off the shackles” there, too."

The Stream from Al Jazeera English reports on current developments in Trump's mass deportation program, Trump’s immigration crackdown: Part II 02/27/2017:

Part 1 02/23/2017, with the same panelists, from 02/23/2017:

One of the panelists is Jessica Vaughan from the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). The Southern Poverty Law Center said of CIS in 2010 (Fudging Facts: A Look At CIS' Studies 01/29/2010):

CIS has blamed immigrants, both legal and undocumented, for everything from terrorism to global warming. To make its case seem as strong as possible, CIS often manipulates data, relying on shaky statistics or faulty logic to come to the preordained conclusion that immigration is bad for this country. But CIS studies have been regularly debunked by mainstream academics and think tanks including the Immigration Policy Center, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and America's Voice.

Vaughan in both videos makes a polite version of the hardline pro-mass-deportation pitch. But she also does crass fear-mongering about "criminal aliens." It's cheap demagoguery, even when delivered in a relatively polite tone.

And, as I've mentioned before, the Trump mass deportation offers rich prospects for the private prison industry, as the Young Turks report in Trump Team Can't Wait To Fill More Private Prisons With Minorities 02/26/2017

And Erik Prince is there looking for new bitness in the Trump Family Business Administration.

Erik Prince is Back: Former CEO of Blackwater Offering Services to the Trump Administration

I haven't seen any indications yet that Prince's company is under consideration for private prisons or domestic law enforcement.

The instances of white people behaving badly in the United States aren't made any less deplorable by white people in Europe behaving badly. Though that's occurring, too.