A federal court in Oregon blocked
the Trump administration’s latest anti-legal
immigrant rule, which would deny visas to immigrants, who have otherwise
legally satisfied all other requirements, if they cannot “prove” they will immediately
have health insurance. Obviously this ruled targeted immigrants from poor
countries and those who did not have “high tech” jobs already waiting for them.
Judge Michael Simon ruled that the Trump administration’s use of a “public
charge” rule—which has a sinister history and responsible for the deaths of
untold thousands during World War II—was “inconsistent” with the Immigration
and Nationality Act in its de facto effect of discriminating against those races
and “ethnicities” regarded as “undesirable,” especially by the definition of
white nationalist and neo-Nazi sympathizer Stephen Miller.
But that is only one of the many
schemes that Miller and the far-right have been cooking-up in order to lower
and even eliminate the legal immigration of those considered “undesirable”—which
in the case of Miller and a battery of far-right commentators who have the ear
of Trump, like Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Michelle Malkin, Lou
Dobbs and Tucker Carlson, the target is Hispanics in the particularity. Coulter
complains that there are just too many for her to tolerate looking at, Dobbs
thinks they bring in diseases, Buchanan and Ingraham complain that Hispanics
are to “destroy” American culture, Malkin fulminates over crime (even though
Hispanic crime rates are in line with their percentage of the population and
far lower in real numbers than either whites or blacks), and Carlson complains
that they make the country “dirtier.” Carlson’s complaint is somewhat ironic
since people like him actually make the country dirtier with all the waste they
generate to support their extravagant lifestyles, and someone has to clean-up
the mess they leave behind.
Carlson’s “dirty people”
campaign, like so many other Fox News “causes,” seems to have caught the
attention of Trump and his familiars, especially Miller. While it is “hard” to
say for a certainty, Trump’s complaint about homelessness in California and
threats to “do something” about it sounds like it is just a cover story for a
plan that Miller is just the type to cook-up: in the “assumption” that many if
not most homeless people in California are immigrants and “probably” illegal as
well, this is another way to clear the “undesirables” out of the country. Note
that Trump’s complaints about the homeless creating “water pollution”—an
absurdly out-of-proportion charge given the amount of chemicals, sewage and
waste dumped into the oceans by businesses and municipalities—are very much in
line with Carlson’s “dirty people” complaints.
But as The Nation points out, the Trump plan to fix the problem of
homelessness in California—a state that “presumably” has a “lot” of homeless
Hispanics than in other states, save “red state” Texas—has a police state-like
dimension, and it has perhaps another,
more sinister, intention. The Trump anti-homeless (the more appropriate
designation than “anti-homelessness”) program mentions “affordable housing”
only twice in its 41-page “action plan,” but it does spend a lot of ink on the
role of law enforcement in rounding up homeless people and incarcerating them
in what it calls “government-run facilities.”
Some cities already have a policy
of arresting homeless people, ticketing them and throwing them back out on the
street—changing nothing about their lives except that they are now homeless
people with “criminal” records. The Trump administration obviously wants to
take this a step further: to target specifically not just homeless illegal
immigrants, but legal immigrants who are homeless, and by Miller’s and ICE’s
definition, subject to deportation. Just as Trump doesn’t really “care” about
corruption unless “investigating” it benefits him politically, Trump doesn’t
really “care” about the homeless other than as a talking point to bash
Democrats and advance his and Miller's anti-immigrant campaign.
If Trump was actually “serious”
about combatting homelessness, that problem is in every state; in the state of
Washington, I’d say about 90 percent of the homeless population is white male,
at least in King County. But Trump is clearly targeting just California for
both political and immigration reasons, having already suggested that San
Francisco’s “sanctuary city” status is the “cause” of its homeless issues. Doubtless
carrying out this intention would raise more issues about the Trump
administration’s inhumanity, but like the policy of holding children in concentration
camp-like facilities, this likely will “blow over” in a short time as well,
because, well, these people are not quite as “human” as others people—as the
Trump administration’s continuing refusal to release disaster relief funds to
Puerto Rico is proving even now.
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