CNN’s Fareed Zakaria brings hypocrisy and racism into the asylum discussion

 

Some people just cannot learn to shut up. Take for instance Donald Trump, who must know he has been the subject of ridicule on every late night talk show, and his tireless efforts to insult and heap abuse on his real and perceived enemies has only led to more interest in investigating his crimes. His behavior after the election leading up to the January 6 insurrection has cemented his infamy for posterity. Had he conducted himself with any kind of dignity and civility he might even still be president. But no, he had to let us know what his stupid opinion of Meghan Markle is, although without a social media platform he had to speak through a “spokesman”—and who “better” than his old comrade in infamy, Stephen Miller, as if we should be surprised that Trump would choose to speak through a white nationalist bigot; one suspects, of course, that Trump’s former speechwriter was actually speaking for himself as much as for Trump.

Meanwhile, that conceited bigot Piers Morgan is looking for another job; he supposedly “resigned” from his morning show on ITV after the row with one of his fellow presenters, who suggested that his vicious and constant attacks on Meghan were out of petty personal spite for her not being his “friend” and allowing him to boast of being a “royal insider”—after which Morgan got out of his chair and walked out of the studio. Morgan claims that this is just about “freedom of speech”—as if his fellow presenters didn’t have that “right”—but what this is really about is that he used his media platform to bully and abuse people, and when there was pushback right in front of his face, like all bullies he revealed himself to be coward who could dish it out but couldn’t take the “heat”—especially when it hit the bullseye.

But if Trump and Morgan are of a kind that are easily identified for their uninhibited bigotries, there are others who mask their personal bigotries under the camouflage of the most profound hypocrisy. Take for instance Washington Post columnist and CNN contributor Fareed Zakaria, a native of Mumbai, India who describes himself as a “secular and non-practicing Muslim” who claims that "My views on faith are complicated—somewhere between deism and agnosticism. I am completely secular in my outlook."  

Zakaria must certainly be aware of the prejudices against Muslims in Hindu India, as well as the discriminatory caste system which still operates there, but knowing that doesn’t seem to trouble him much, except how it may or may not affect himself personally. In a 2019 opinion piece that aired on CNN, Zakaria confessed that while he disagreed with Trump on many issues, one of the few that he did agree with him on was the issue of asylum. Trump had begun the “remain in Mexico” program, which Zakaria supported because he thought that the right to asylum was being “abused” by Hispanic migrants, apparently clueless about the fact that Trump and Miller had virtually ended all other avenues of legal immigration from Central America. Despite the fact that in two years almost none of those people languishing in those MPP encampments have had their cases heard, Zakaria’s attitude has clearly only hardened on this issue, if his commentary this past weekend is of any worth, which first appeared on an op-ed in the Washington Post, and then read off a teleprompter on CNN.

First, Zakaria praised Joe Biden’s rollback of what he clearly thought was Trump’s “most egregious immigration policy”—the “Muslim Ban,” which Biden called a “stain on our national conscience,” apparently more a “stain” than locking up children in cages in border concentration camps. He noted that the Biden administration “has begun the work of reversing literally hundreds of other rules (that many?), regulations and fees put in place by Trump—all designed to make it harder for foreigners at every stage of the process, from tourists to immigrants, to enter or stay in the United States.”

Well, so far so “good,” as long as it included people like himself as the “victims.” But…”Unfortunately, all of these vital efforts could be undermined by decisions that are producing a new immigration crisis on the United States’ southern border.”

Okay, we should just stop right there for a moment, because in the minds of the paranoid bigot there is “always” a “crisis” at the southern border (or what WH press secretary Jen Psaki is calling a “big problem”). For 99 percent of the non-Hispanic population in this country, they really have no kind of “negative” interaction with migrants except what infests their feverish minds. Yet there is always this “crisis” when people want it to be one, despite the fact that the number of undocumented people in this country never seems to change from year-to-year (11 million tends to be the number “estimated” every year for the past 20 years or so), and the percentage of those who originate from Asia (and particularly from India) is increasing every year. According to an NPR report, in 2007 there were 76 Indians detained at the southern border; in 2019, the number had risen to 7,600 detained, and they also tried to “abuse” the asylum law under Zakaria’s way of thinking—or at least he should, if he isn’t a hypocrite. Why should they get “special treatment” just because they are not Hispanic?

After complaining about more people crossing the border in the first two months of 2021 than in 2020, which certainly shouldn’t be a “surprise,” Zakaria makes the absurd comment that the numbers will increase as the temperatures get “warmer.” Who does he think migrants are, “reptiles” or rodents coming out of hibernation? If there are more coming when it is “warmer,” that is always to be expected because of something he’s probably never done in his whole life—a honest day’s work. These people are coming here “when it’s warmer” because of the need for their seasonal labor, especially in agriculture. Zakaria’s educational pedigree is in government, which just because you get your degree for it from Yale doesn’t make it any more useful than from any other institution—especially when it is only “good” for commentary that anyone who can read and think can do. One thing for certain—it can’t provide the sustenance that people need to survive.

Zakaria notes that there are 3,500 children languishing at border patrol stations, but of course he only cares because they really shouldn’t even be allowed in there. And why are they “languishing”? Because of the inhuman Trump policies that Zakaria de facto supported—which was the “remain in Mexico” policy, shuttering facilities and refusing to expand HHS housing in which COVID-19 protocols halved the occupancy of existing facilities that were used until the children could find permanent homes with relatives or guardians. Then he says this:

The truth is the asylum system is out of control. The concept of asylum dates to the years after World War II, when the United States created a separate path to enter the country for those who feared religious or political persecution—a noble idea born in the shadow of the United States refusal to take in Jews in the 1930s. It was used sparingly for decades, but mostly applying to cases of extreme discrimination. But the vast majority of people entering the southern border are really traditional migrants, fleeing poverty and violence. This is a sad situation, but it does not justify giving them special consideration above others in the world who seek to come to the United States for similar reasons—but patiently wait go through the normal process.

Isn't it "ironic" that many of terms the Nazis used to describe Jews are similar to the ones that many people in this country use to describe migrants from Mexico and Central America to deny them entry? Hell, just ask Stephen Miller, except that he just replaced the Indian hordes in The Camp of the Saints with that Mexican "infestation."

Anyways, how can it be “out of control” if almost no one at the border was even allowed to apply for asylum during the Trump years? Maybe he is talking about the over half-million people of his own former countrymen who are in the country illegally, up from 28,000 in 1990? Who is really “abusing” the immigration system in this country, overstaying their work visas if not illegally crossing borders north and south? And let’s not forget the great irony here: people on the southern border are looking for a better life and willing to do the work that many Americans would prefer not to do—while those that Zakaria champions would still be doing very well for themselves if they stayed in their own home countries, even with servants (lower caste, of course). 

Why do they come here? They come here because they don’t like the noise, the crowds and the smells. And all they need to do is get an Indian manager in a U.S. company to claim he can’t find any “native” workers to do data processing or answer phones. And as pointed out a few paragraphs before, not all of them are "waiting patiently" to enter the country legally. 

So Trump is smelling blood? So WTF else is new? If that is Trump’s only “trump card” at this point, people will tire of him, as they already are beginning to. Then Zakaria really exposes himself as a bigot: “Asylum seekers make up a small minority of immigrants. But there is a much larger group that includes those who have skills the United States needs as well as those entering to reunite with their families.” He goes on to bemoan that the “best and brightest are choosing to go to “more hospitable” countries, and that this is the “real immigration crisis, not the one at the southern border.”

One reason why this country has a “skills” deficit among the white master race is because of the horrible funding for public schools and higher education in this country. Colleges and universities are deliberately recruiting as many foreign students as they can because of the much higher tuition they are forced to pay, many of them—such as students from China—have their fees paid by their governments for reasons that may not hold up to scrutiny. Millions of Americans students are locked out of STEM programs because they are told they are not as “smart” as students from south and east Asia, or at least that is the “justification” for loading up on foreign students and their money.

Zakaria is only telling the “truth” from his arrogant, self-serving perspective. And it is also not surprising that Zakaria is ignorant of this country’s history with Mexico and Central America. The U.S. has been meddling in those countries internal affairs for 200 years, whether as theft of territory, their governments and population cowed into submission to serve U.S. economic interests (the “banana republics”), and  left-wing and democratic movements subverted in favor of right-wing murder regimes (especially during the 50s and 80s) seen as more “pliable” to U.S. interests. 

Had these countries been left to their own devices, as were those in South America, there wouldn’t be this state of “crisis” at the border that disturbs Zakaria's mind. Further, the U.S. has plagued these countries by "deporting" to them violent gangs that were “incubated” in the American prison system; if for no other reason, granting “asylum” to those people victimized by a U.S.-bred problem is the right thing to do. And we don't need to discuss what the insatiable appetite for drugs in the U.S. has done to Mexico.

Zakaria also predictably isn’t aware that most of these people are indigenous to this part of the world—unlike say, white people and people such as himself. Europeans created the borders, not indigenous peoples—they would have created their own borders. The Rio Grande wasn’t a “border” until the U.S. made it one after the Mexican-American War that it instigated. Since that time Mexican labor has been an important part of the U.S. economy, especially during WWII, and afterwards in agriculture with the bracero program. And it still is; when unemployment was at 3.5 percent, they were here because their labor was needed. They not only paid taxes, but also contributed to the Social Security fund which they could never dip from themselves.

On the other hand, what we see here is “double-dipping” of another kind—people like Zakaria coming here because they want to be somewhere that they don’t have to be confronted on a daily basis the evidence of what their prejudices has wrought, and not to worry because Indian managers of “American” companies only hire other Indians, because even white Americans are “stupid.” The other “dip” is the  “off-shoring” of millions of customer service and so-called “technical support” jobs, most of them to India; I’m sure many of us know the frustration of dealing with the know-nothings Amazon employs, and with “technical support” people who you have this idea that you know more than the “expert” on the other line.

And it isn’t just in the U.S. where one immigrant group thinks they are more “special” than another. The UK’s Home Secretary, an Indian named Priti Patel (her name identifies her as one from a “privileged” caste) is currently trying to “rehabilitate” her image by promoting policies protecting women from sexual abuse, but this is just a PR stunt to get people’s minds off the fact that she is a racist. Patel has long been accused of promoting various racist policies, including a “point” system based on a “streaming algorithm” deliberately set to “weed out” as many potential legal immigrants as possible, allowing only those like herself to legally immigrate. Outrage concerning the deliberately discriminatory system led to its abandonment last August.

But in November, Prime Minister Boris Johnson ignored an ethics report that accused Patel of bullying, foul language toward subordinates, discrimination, racism and a “lack of commitment” to “equality” and “human rights,” in particular in regard to the victims of the Windrush scandal, which began when then Home Secretary Theresa May instigated the “hostile environment” policy, and later HS Amber Rudd sought the arbitrary deportation of thousands of people who were British citizens when they immigrated to UK from the Caribbean, simply because they had black skin. Thousands who were illegally detained lost their jobs and homes, and rights as legal residents in general.

The Guardian reported that Sir Phillip Rutman had resigned from office after accusing Patel of conducting a “vicious and orchestrated briefing campaign” against him, and Alexandra Ankrah, who headed the compensation program for victims of Windrush, also resigned because of an atmosphere promoted by Patel that was “not supportive” of the victims, and was slow to approve dispersals of the funds, or to insure that the victims were fully aware of their rights.

It is one thing that we live in country where the “natives” are deliberately ignorant of this country’s history and act on that ignorance; it is quite another that there are people who only add to that ignorance, importing more prejudice and discriminatory attitudes that this country has fought mostly unsuccessfully to rid itself of.