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]
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 foundIndependent 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.
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]
Digby on the Trump Family Business Administration's DACA policy as announced by Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (Another step toward Making America White AgainHullabaloo 09/05/2017):
Trump and Sessions and the people who back them are dangerous racist fascists. And the only people who can stop them at this point [i.e., the Republican in Congress] are just as bad. They had their chance to fix this for the last five years and didn't do it. DACA wouldn't have been necessary if they'd passed Comprehensive Immigration Reform or the DREAM Act.
Maybe they'll do it now. But I wouldn't be too sanguine. So far they have not been able to show they can get anything done, much less something that their base hates with a passion. Does anyone believe that after the failure of Obamacare Repeal these people will legalize a bunch of Latinos?
Maybe they'll surprise us. I certainly hope so. This is a nightmare.
"Ausländer, Sex, Gewalt - das ist ein toxischer Mix, der den Leuten den Verstand benebelt. Wen kümmert da noch, was Wahrheit ist, was Lüge?" (Foreigners, sex, violence - that is a toxic mix that fogs people's understand. Then who worries bothers about what is true and what is a lie?") - Jakob Augstein, Die Schaumschlägerei von SchorndorfSpiegel Online 24.07.2017
"The intent of the tale that Trump told his rabid fans in Ohio was simple: foment hatred for immigrants." - Rex Huppke, Donald Trump's behavior is abnormalChicago Tribune 07/26/2017
Augstein was referring to an incident in Germany during a Volksfest in a southern German town. The Volkfests are basically roudy outdoor beer parties that particular attract teenagers and young adults. Reported violence there picked up on an ambiguous local police report that could be read as a thousand people having rioted. Actually, it was pretty clear in the police report that they meant there were 1000 people in attendance and there were some violent incidents, which apparently happen at this event every year. But the rumor mill online and elsewhere took it as a thousand people rioting and treated it up into a model sinister case of criminal foreigners attacking good innocent Germans. The buzzwords became things like "sex crimes," "Migrant" and "attack on police." (Alexander Schulz, Chronik einer EskalationSpiegel Online 20.07.2017)
Although it's worth noting that erroneous version was first promoted not by skinheads or Russian bots, but by the respectable DPA news agency.
In the American case, it was the President himself promoting the foreigner-sex-violence hate slogans in front of a crowd of New York police, some of whom were applauding his nastiest and most violence-encouraging comments. Huppke's take on it was to focus on the demagoguery of Trump's torture porn:
That's a story the president of the United States told at a rally in Ohio on Tuesday night. It's a creepy story, one that mixes unnecessarily detailed savagery with the image of "a young, beautiful girl."
There's no mention of the anecdote's origin, no specifics on when or where a "beautiful, beautiful, innocent" young person was sliced and diced and put through "excruciating pain." There is just the violent imagery, and the repeated reference to "animals."
That's weird. It's intentionally dehumanizing an entire group of people, which I'll get to in a moment, but it's also just weird. Weird in a way that if someone at a bar told you that story you'd excuse yourself and walk away as quickly as possible.
It's sadistic.
And Huppke actually fact-checked a bit:
Did his story of slicing and dicing stem from an actual event? I don't know.
The closest story I could find was the murder of two teen girls on Long Island last year. They were attacked by members of the brutal MS-13 street gang and beaten to death with bats and a machete. Several of the gang members arrested were in the country illegally.
Without question, there are crimes committed by people who are here illegally. But as a group, immigrants — both documented and undocumented — commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans.
Fact-checking and explaining reality will normally not directly counteract the effect of such hate-mongering on those who want to hear it.
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 YorkPBS 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:
The anti-immigrant movement’s base is founded on racism. The comments made by Congressman Steve King about the importance of “American culture” and the difficulty to “rebuild your civilization with somebody else’s babies” is telling, particularly when they come from the leader in immigration issues at the House of Representatives.
This does not mean that people sincerely questioning the presence of undocumented people on legal grounds are racist. However, such people are in really bad company.
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 Timesarticle 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.
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.
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?
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."
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 DemocratsThe Guardian 03/04/2017)
For analysis of the "criminal aliens" hate propaganda technique - and that's what it is - see:
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.
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:
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."
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.
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.
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]
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 EverThe Young Turks 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.
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.]
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."
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.
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.
Un mes y pocos días después de tomar posesión de la Casa Blanca, el presidente Donald Trump ha dictado órdenes ejecutivas amplias para la ampliación de deportaciones, reafirmado su compromiso con el uso de cárceles privadas para inmigrantes, iniciado el proceso de buscar constructores para el muro fronterizo y prácticamente ha eliminado el uso del español en su gobierno, a excepción de una pírrica cuenta de Twitter (@LaCasaBlanca) que no ha tenido una actualización desde hace 24 días.
[A month and a few days after taking possession of the White House, President Donald Trump has issued broad executive orders to increase deportations, reaffirmed his promise to use private prisons for immigrants, initiating the process of looking for builders for the frontier wall and practically eliminating the use of Spanish in his government, with the exception of a Pyrrhic Twitter account that hasn't been updated for 24 days.]
Since private prison companies will be making money and getting lots of new detainees to hold in the Trump mass deportation operation, it's worth remembering always what a truly bad idea that private prisons are in any case. The story gives us a reminder, Private prison deprived inmates of heat and hot water for months, lawmaker finds by Mary Ellen Klas Miami Herald 02/25/2017:
The 284 women housed in C-dorm at Gadsden Correctional Facility lived for months without hot water or heat, faced flooded bathrooms daily and endured water rations when the septic tanks were jammed with food waste.
After state Rep. David Richardson demanded action following a series of surprise visits over the past 18 months, the private prison operator that runs the facility — Management Training Corp. of Centerville, Utah — received approval from the state to repair and replace the water heater, at a cost to taxpayers of nearly $10,000. But Warden Shelly Sonberg never authorized the work.
Religious communities are playing an important part in immigrant support. Here's just one of many local examples: Sarah Tan, Piedmont: Crowd turns out for immigrant-aid workshopThe Montclarion/East Bay Times 02/20/2017:
More than 100 people — including Kehilla Community Synagogue members and the general public — turned out Sunday to find out how to support immigrants.
Kehilla Community Synagogue hosted an “Accompaniment Teams” workshop to enlist those interested in helping the newcomer families acclimate to life in the United States.
The project, called “Nueva Esperanza,” has four teams. At Sunday’s meeting, members of the teams spoke to the public about how hosting asylum-seeking and refugee families from Central America has been an enriching experience for all involved. ...
Kehilla’s accompaniment teams are organized through Nueva Esperanza, which is a project of the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity, and the Rev. Deborah Lee, the interfaith group’s director, was also present at the workshop. The Nueva Esperanza program was established in 2014, and Lee said she began it to help the growing number of immigrants fleeing violence in Central America.
“There was so much negative anti-immigration sentiment, even back then, that we wanted to show people there was a group that said, ‘Welcome,’ ” Lee said. “And also, not only did they need to know they were being welcomed, they also needed concrete support.”
Catholic campus groups and Catholic colleges are also stepping up to support immigrant students, especially DACA students (Dreamers), as Shireen Korkzan reports for the National Catholic Reporter Online (Despite Catholic campus support, DACA students fear deportation 02/23/2017)
Trump's views of DACA recipients seem ambivalent. In a press conference Feb. 16, he said DACA is "one of the most difficult subjects I have because you have these incredible kids, in many cases, not in all cases. And some of the cases, having DACA and they're gang members and they're drug dealers, too. But you have some absolutely, incredible kids, I would say mostly. They were brought here in such a way — it's a very — it's a very, very tough subject."
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security says Trump's new immigration policies will leave DACA alone for now, but the fear of possible arrest and deportation still lingers.
CNN reported Feb. 14 that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, commonly known as ICE, detained Daniel Ramirez Medina, a 23-year-old DACA recipient living in the Seattle area. ICE has alleged Medina is a gang member and a "risk to public safety," even though his attorneys denied all accusations. Medina, who doesn't have a criminal record, has a bond hearing Feb. 24.
Immigration rights groups say Medina might be the first DACA recipient who has been arrested without cause.
Catholic institutions of higher education across the country are also concerned about their undocumented students. After the presidential election in November, the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities released a statement expressing support for undocumented students at its member institutions through "campus counseling and ministry support, through legal resources from those campuses with law schools and legal clinics and through whatever other services we may have at our disposal."
Pilar Marrero's report describes the mounting effects of the emerging state terror against immigrants:
Según PEW, el 55% de los inmigrantes indocumentados, 38% de hispanos nacidos en Estados Unidos y 49% de residentes legales hispanos, están preocupados por su futuro en el país. Un 47% de los adultos hispanos, de cualquier estatus migratorio, está “muy preocupado” o “algo preocupado” por las deportaciones, sea la suya propia, amigo o familiar.
[According to Pew [Research Center], 55% of undocumented immigrants, 38% of Hispanics born in the United States and 49% of legal Hispanic residents are preoccupied about their future in the country. Around 47% of Hispanic adults, of any immigration status, are "very preoccupied" or "somewhat preoccupied" by the deportations, whether its themselves, a friend or a family member.]
Meanwhile, the conservative government of Mexican President Eenrique Peña Nieto is handling Central American refugees in a dubious way itself, Mexico doubles deportations of US-bound migrants 02/14/2017:
In a more decent North America, the governments of the United States, Canada and Mexico would be cooperating constructively on ways to combat violence in Central America, create jobs in Mexico and set up sane, humane and realistic immigration policy in the US. As important as it is to debunk false comparisons between Obama's immigration policy and the far more radical and draconian mass deportation Trump has set in motion, the fact is that Obama's Administration had a conservative policy in Latin America, the Cuba normalization notwithstanding. Supporting the 2009 coup in Honduras was not only a particularly bad decision, one of the which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was very proud, contributed directly to dangerous conditions in that Central American country.
It's worth remembering that when the Bill Clinton Administration made its big push for the NAFTA treaty negotiated under Old Man Bush's Administration, one of their arguments in favor of it was the idea that the treaty would create more jobs in Mexico and thereby reduce unauthorized emigration from Mexico to the US.
It didn't work out that way, as James Patterson explained in Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (2005):
NAFTA did not seem to greatly benefit Mexico, which suffered, as earlier, from widespread poverty and unemployment. Struggling peasants raising maize, hit hard by competition from the United States, were devastated. These and other desperately poor people continued to stream into the United States, provoking rising tensions in many parts of the Southwest.
Of course, when production of grains shifts from Mexico to the United States, displaced Mexican farm workers migrate in greater numbers to work for big growers in California and Texas and elsewhere.
We need really different kinds of policies. And not the different kind the Trump Family Business Administration is implementing.
The ABC story reports, "She said the border agents appeared to have been given "turbocharged power" by an executive order signed by President Donald Trump to 'humiliate and insult' a room full of people they detained to check visas."
Mexico is reacting with anger to a Trump administration plan to deport non-Mexican illegal immigrants over their border if they entered the US from the southern neighbouring nation.
One official called the new US immigration guidelines "hostile" hours before senior Trump administration envoys began arriving in Mexico City for talks on the volatile issue. ...
Mexico's lead negotiator with the Trump administration, Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray, said there was no way Mexico would accept the new rules, which among other things seek to deport non-Mexicans to Mexico. ...
Roberto Campa, who heads the human rights department of the Interior Ministry, said the plan to deport non-Mexicans to Mexico was "hostile" and "unacceptable."
One of the dangerous moves of the Trump government is a push to quickly expand ICE enforcement with contractors, aka, rent-a-cops.(Pilar Marrero, La rápida contratación de agentes migratorios tiene sus peligrosLa Opinión 02/24/2017) Private security in an office building is one thing. Inadequately trained rent-a-cops on highly sensitive border enforcement is a different thing.
Keeping an eye on the role of private contractors will offer revealing insights the Trump mass deportation. Private for-profit prison businesses will get a cut of the action - and cash, of course! - in the vast new detentions by the Trump Family Business Administration as part of the mass deportation drive. (Madison Pauly, The Private Prison Industry Is Licking Its Chops Over Trump's Deportation PlansMother Jones 02/21/2017)
It's worth keeping in mind that our anti-public-education Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos' brother is Erik Prince, Yes, the Blackwater guy. (Jeremy Scahill, Notorious Mercenary Erik Prince Is Advising Is Advising Trump From the ShadowsThe Intercept 01/17/2017) I will be astonished is he doesn't get cut in on some major business in this process, i.e., the mass deportation and the rest of the Trump fiasco.
The risks to Mexico in this mass deportation are enormous. If this Administration does what President Tinyhands proposed to do during his campaign and pushes out 11-12 million undocumented immigrants, and pushes the bulk of them into Mexico, that would be a real humanitarian catastrophe with Mexico bearing the brunt of it.
Olga Pellicer is not impressed so far with the cautious approach Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has been taking to the new US administration so, as she explains in México en la política exterior de TrumpProceso 24.02.2017. She references the multi-city demonstrations on the 12th of February encouraged by Peña Nieto's political operation to show solidarity with the Mexican President against the US that had a notably modest turnout:
La falta de una narrativa convincente que vaya desglosando objetivos, estrategias, costos y logros en el acercamiento al gobierno de Trump es una de las debilidades más evidentes del camino seguido por Enrique Peña Nieto. No hay un discurso que concite el apoyo de grupos amplios de la sociedad mexicana a los objetivos que se fijen para la relación con Estados Unidos. Al no existir ese discurso, los intentos de movilizar a la población para expresar su agravio por los mensajes humillantes de Trump a los mexicanos han sido un fracaso. La falta de claridad respecto de las causas a defender en una marcha explica los resultados tan limitados de las que se llevaron a cabo en diversas ciudades del país el domingo 12.
[The lack of a convincing narrative that breaks out objectives, strategies, costs and benefits in the approach to Trump's government is one of the most evident weaknesses of the [conciliatory] road chosen by Enrique Peña Nieto. There is no discourse that draws the support of broad sections of Mexican society to the objective on which they are focused in the relationship with the United States. Since this discourse doesn't exist, the effort to mobilize the population to express their insulted from the humiliating messages from Trump to the Mexicans has been a failure. The lack of clarity to respect of the causes to be defended in a march explicates the so limited results in the turnoout of those in various cities of the country on Sunday the 12th.]
Here is yet another example of how implemented standard neoliberal Washington Consensus economic policies leaves the public of a country doubtful about whether they can trust the established political elites to get even a critical matter of national interest right.
President Tinyhands yesterday told a group of CEOs with whom he was meeting - in the interest of the common people I'm sure! - described his mass deportation operation as a "military operation."
Trump sowed confusion over the military’s role in immigration enforcement with his remarks earlier Thursday at the White House.
“We’re getting really bad dudes out of this country,” he said at a meeting with manufacturing CEOs. “And at a rate nobody has ever seen before. And they’re the bad ones. And it’s a military operation.”
Using the military to apprehend people living illegally in the interior of the country would be highly unusual — and possibly a violation of U.S. law.
Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly later clarified that military troops would not be used to enforce immigration laws after meeting with Mexican officials.
Mexico in its diplomatic pushback is also insisting on the US doing a better job in controlling drug trafficking on the US side and restricting the flows of guns and cash into Mexico.
Woody Guthrie's song "Deportees" has gained a new, immediate significance with Trump's mass deportation program underway. This version by Delila Paz and Edgey Pires ("The Last Internationale") is my favorite version of the song. Because Delila delivers the lyrics beautifully but with a touch of anger in her voice, which seems very appropriate for this song:
The moment at the end where the names of the dead scroll across the screen always gets to me.
Washington—Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) today released the following statement in response to guidance released by the Department of Homeland Security to implement the president’s executive order on immigration.
“The guidance released by the Department of Homeland Security creates an unprecedented situation for undocumented immigrants living, working and paying taxes in the United States, as well as Homeland Security, which is now charged with picking up otherwise law-abiding people in their homes and places of work.
“Up until this point, the priority for removal has been dangerous criminals. But under this new guidance, 11 million undocumented immigrants are now priorities for deportation. This is simply unparalleled in its meanness, scope and most likely its enforceability.
“The solution that will prevent the separation of families is passing our bill to repeal President Trump’s executive order, introduced last week by Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto from Nevada.”
Rick Perlstein in 2015 described in dramatic terms what a complete deportation of all 11-12 million undocumented workers in the US (Donald Trump and the “F-Word”Washington Spectator 09/30/2017):
Trump has now provided more “specifics” about his immigration plan: a forced population transfer greater than any attempted in history, greater than the French and Spanish expulsions of the Jews in 1308 and 1492; greater than the Nabka of approximately 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from British-mandate Palestine; greater than the 1.5 million Stalin consigned to Siberia and the Central Asian republics; greater than Pol Pot’s exile of 2.5 million city-dwellers to the Cambodian countryside, or the scattering of Turkey’s Assyrian Christians, which the scholar Mordechai Zaken says numbers in the millions and required 180 years to complete. Trump has promised to move 12 million Mexicans in under two years––“so fast your head will spin.”
There's always a danger in comparing various atrocities by headcount that by doing so, there is the risk of implying some sort of relative justification for the action with the smaller number of victims. One horrible thing does not make another one less horrible. But numbers do matter. A single case of the flu is an illness. Several million cases are more of an epidemic.
One other notable mass relocation of people that I thought of in this connection was the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans after the Second World War from countries in central and eastern Europe, including Czechoslovakia and Poland.
By mid-1945, not merely the largest forced migration but probably the largest single movement of population in human history was under way, an operation that continued for the next five years. Between 12 and 14 million civilians, the overwhelming majority of them women, children and the elderly, were driven out of their homes or, if they had already fled the advancing Red Army in the last days of the war, forcibly prevented from returning to them.
I won't try to summarize the complicated political and ideological and historical questions around that event here. Douglas covers some of it.
I'm not sure how directly that complicated event compares directly to the Trump deportation under way now. For one thing, that one happened in the wake of the most destructive war in human history. The hatred and hysteria behind the Trump mass deportation is far more subjective and wildly out of proportion to any actual threat involved from the undocumented Latino immigrants in the US to the country. And it's certainly not coming in the aftermath of any war with a Latino country.
Norman Naimark in The Russians in Germany: A History of the the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949 (1995) cites the figures from Gerhard Ziemer, estimating "that 2,280,000 noncombatant Germans out of a total off 11.5 million refugees died as a result of the transfer from the East." It was truly ugly stuff.
I would also note that forced relocations and more voluntary refugees - if that's a meaningful concept at all - would further complicate the comparison of the postwar expulsions of ethnic Germans to the events Perlstein lists or to Trump's mass deportation.
Hans Lemberg and Erik Franzen include a table in Die Vertriebenen: Hitlers letzten Opfer (2001) showing 11.2 million displaced persons taken in by East and West Germany combined by 1950. Not incidentally, this is something to keep in mind when you hear about European rightwingers complaining about all the refugees they are getting today. And of what an obscenity it is for the United States today to refuse to take more than a few thousand refugees from the Middle Eastern wars for which the US bears such a large responsibility.
An expulsion of 12 million people from the United States is an ugly, ugly prospect. Postwar German politicians often used the formula that there is no such thing as collective guilt, but there is collective responsibility.
That is true for Americans today with Trump's mass deportation.
The White House has approved some drastic new Homeland Security guidelines in new memoranda dated February 20 that are clearly aimed at mass deportation and the state terror against Latino communities that comes with it. Simon Maloy summarizes some of their provisions in Mass Deportation Is ComingSalon 02/21/2017:
Despite the president’s insistence that “criminals” will be the focus of his deportation policy, both his executive order and the Homeland Security memoranda make clear that pretty much any undocumented immigrant detained by authorities will be subject to removal from the country. The Department of Homeland Security states that undocumented immigrants who have “committed acts which constitute a chargeable criminal offense” will be prioritized. As The New York Times wrote in January, this is an expansive designation that encompasses “anyone the authorities believe has broken any type of law — regardless of whether that person has been charged with a crime.”
The department’s guidance also states that undocumented immigrants who “pose a risk to public safety or national security” in the judgment of an immigration officer should be prioritized for removal. That nebulous phrasing puts immense power in the hands of individual immigration enforcement agents to determine who is kicked out of the country.
Above all, the memos indicate that the policy of the Trump administration will be to remove as many undocumented immigrants as it can in the shortest amount of time allowable. The criteria for expedited removal has been expanded so that any undocumented immigrant who can’t prove he or she has been in the country for more than two years can be deported without being able to make a case before a judge. Under the new guidelines, undocumented immigrants who crossed the southern border and are waiting to appear before an immigration judge can now be pre-emptively deported to Mexico, where they will hypothetically have access to “a functional, interoperable video teleconference system” to complete their deportation proceedings.
I think the headline on the piece understates what's happening. Because mass deportation is here. This is an early moment of it, and it can still be stopped. But it's underway.
Here is a discussion from The Young Turks, Ana Kasparian and John Iadarola in this case, discussing the mass deportation and the dishonest argument is supporters use that it's just a continuation of what Obama was doing. It's still all Obama's fault in the Republican corner of the universe. Abused Woman Goes To Authorities, Gets Deported 02/20/2017:
Some Republican big growers in California have apparently talked themselves into thinking the Trump mass deportation of undocumented workers won't affect them much.
Living is easy with eyes closed
Misunderstanding all you see.
It's true that the State of California under Gov. Jerry Brown has made it clear that it won't willingly cooperate with a mass deportation program. And California growers have gone through various cycles in which xenophobia against Latino immigrants attracts more attention and support from politicians. But California agriculture depends on undocumented immigrant labor. So the growers in the past have always been able to count on wink-and-a-nod laxity in enforcement, even while they can hold the threat of deportation or illegal firings over their workers' heads.
Some of them apparently think things will go on as in past cycles of xenophobic hostility. Others are more apprehensive about not being able to hire enough workers, probably the more realistic perspective at the moment. But Carroll observes, "Both versions, for now, are accurate – a dissonance stemming from ambiguity over current government policies and the fact that no one has any clue what will happen next."
“It’s a lot of hype from the advocacy groups and the media,” said Rob Roy, head of the Ventura County Agricultural Association. “I deal with over 100 farms and not had one farmer come to me with any complaint about immigration issues or raids.”
Ice enacted similar raids under Barack Obama, who deported a record 2.5m people with little media outcry, Roy said. “But with Trump, suddenly the moral fibre of our country is coming apart. I don’t think Ice is going to start running into fields and taking away farm workers. I don’t believe that.”
This also struck me:
“It’s a lot of hype from the advocacy groups and the media,” said Rob Roy, head of the Ventura County Agricultural Association. “I deal with over 100 farms and not had one farmer come to me with any complaint about immigration issues or raids.”
Ice enacted similar raids under Barack Obama, who deported a record 2.5m people with little media outcry, Roy said. “But with Trump, suddenly the moral fibre of our country is coming apart. I don’t think Ice is going to start running into fields and taking away farm workers. I don’t believe that.”
Breitbart faults the Guardian for using the oft-cited statistic that the Obama administration deported a record 2.5 million people, saying this is misleading or inaccurate because authorities have “inflated” the number by including a category of border crossers which used to be counted as “returned” rather than formally deported.
It is true that authorities are now prosecuting and often jailing more border crossers before formally deporting them, whereas in previous eras most were swiftly returned to Mexico with little formality. If you include returnees as well as deportees, the Clinton and Bush administrations sent back far more people than the Obama administration.
But the fact remains that Obama has formally deported more than his predecessors. This table from the Department of Homeland Security’s annual yearbook of immigration statistics shows the record going back to 1892.
One reason formal deportations have risen is deterrence. The strategy is to punish illicit border crossing with months or even years in jail. Another reason is demographic shifts. The number of Mexicans trying to cross has plunged while the numbers from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador have surged. They latter cannot simply be dumped back across the Rio Grande.
The Obama Administration didn't undertake the kind of systematic mass deportation of current undocumented residents that Trump promised on the campaign trail and is clearly trying to implement in practice. That doesn't mean that Obama's deportation policy was a good one. But it is important to make distinctions, both to understand what's going on and to counter the stock propaganda justification of "well, Obama did it, too!"
The December 15 article includes this chart based on Homeland Security data:
But Obama's immigration policy was a prime example of the toxic brand of "bipartisanship" he practiced. He justified his aggressive detention and deportation program to Democrats by packaging it as an attempt to get comprehensive immigration reform by convincing Republicans he was serious about border enforcement. Not only did it not achieve the alleged goal of getting enough Republicans to support comprehensive immigration reform to get it passed. It also reinforced the Republican framing of the immigration issue as one of law-enforcement in which harsher is better than humane.
How could a Democrat frame the immigration issue differently? Like Jerry Brown did in his State of the State address this year:
A few moments ago, I swore into office our new attorney general. Like so many others, he is the son of immigrants who saw California as a place where, through grit and determination, they could realize their dreams. And they are not alone, millions of Californians have come here from Mexico and a hundred other countries, making our state what it is today: vibrant, even turbulent, and a beacon of hope to the rest of the world.
We don't have a Statue of Liberty with its inscription: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..." But we do have the Golden Gate and a spirit of adventure and openness that has welcomed - since the Gold Rush of 1848 - one wave of immigration after another.
For myself, I feel privileged to stand before you as your governor, as did my father almost sixty years ago. His mother, Ida, the youngest of eight children, was born in very modest circumstances, not very far from where we are gathered today. Her father arrived in California in 1852, having left from the Port of Hamburg, aboard a ship named "Perseverance."
It is that spirit of perseverance and courage which built our state from the beginning. And it is that spirit which will get us through the great uncertainty and the difficulties ahead.
... in California, immigrants are an integral part of who we are and what we've become. They have helped create the wealth and dynamism of this state from the very beginning.
I recognize that under the Constitution, federal law is supreme and that Washington determines immigration policy. But as a state we can and have had a role to play. California has enacted several protective measures for the undocumented: the Trust Act, lawful driver's licenses, basic employment rights and non-discriminatory access to higher education.
We may be called upon to defend those laws and defend them we will. And let me be clear: we will defend everybody - every man, woman and child - who has come here for a better life and has contributed to the well-being of our state.
