Trump's deliberate efforts to end all immigration from "shithole" countries mostly to blame for the current border "crisis"

 

We have been hearing, now and forever, the expected war dancing, woops but mostly smoke signals from right-wing media and politicians who make their bread-and-butter by stoking paranoia and fear about immigration, principally from the southern border. If we look at the history of this country, this isn’t anything new; yesterday it was the Germans, Irish, Chinese, Italians and Slavs—and in the future it might be those who are taking “high-paying” jobs away from “real Americans.” We know from the mouth and writings of Stephen Miller that most of this, deep down, is about people who just don’t like “Mexicans” because they are “ethnic,” and they don’t like sharing the same space with them.

What else are Republicans and right-wing media to do? They just look like idiots complaining about cartoon characters, and they are not gaining much traction attacking Joe Biden’s COVID-19 program and stimulus package, so for now they are falling back on that old stand-by that Donald Trump employed to excite his masses of destruction: hatred for immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Look, the right claims this is only about “illegal” immigration, but if you ask Miller, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin and Pat Buchanan, this is about an insane “fear” of cultural annihilation, and to quote Buchanan, “Hispanics are out to destroy America.” What such outrageous claims in fact do is allow us to question their motivations and credibility.

This of course is just another way of expressing the fear of white nationalists and nativists of losing “control” at the ballot box—because if that happens, it won’t be so easy to stomp on what many think of as “vermin” (remember that Trump used the term “infest” to describe their presence in this country). Of course, this imagined “destruction” would be less likely to happen without the toxic solution of racism, prejudice and discrimination mixed in. Xenophobes and nativists like to throw the word “assimilation” around, but that term is usually twisted around to mean “stay out of sight” and “don’t make a fuss.”

Now, is there a problem at the border, and who caused it? When you turn off the faucet of legal immigration for a long time, turning it back on even a little bit seems like an out-of-control fire hose to anyone who doesn’t want any of the “others” coming into the country, regardless of the economic need for them. Some people just need someone to hate on as a scapegoat to explain how miserable their lives are—and it is the policies that fed off that hate is what is causing most of the present “problems” at the border since Biden rescinded some of Trump’s executive orders. The “infrastructure” to process legal immigration and asylum that was removed by Trump on the instigation of Miller needs to be built back up again. As Sabrina Rodriguez in Politico noted, the Trump administration’s only immigration “plan” on the border was to keep people out—not to facilitate a legal process to get in.

The present influx of migrants crossing the border in the past month is only noticeably “high” in relation to the past few years of “zero tolerance,” not in years past, although the media in general leaves out such context. Adding to the pile-on, Republicans in Texas and Florida are playing the scapegoat card for all its worth; a Trump-appointee judge ruled against a Biden’s 100-day moratorium on deportation, and Florida’s attorney general is suing Biden for what she claims is allowing “criminal aliens” to endanger the citizenry; she undercuts her argument, if you “read between the lines,” when she claims that “some of them” are guilty of drug dealing and the like—meaning that she thinks all undocumented are “criminals” for just being here, when “just being here” was before Trump took over was a civil offense.

The “irony” of all of this is that particularly in Texas, the actions of the governor and attorney general in regard to the COVID-19 and the built-in failure of its health care system have been a much bigger danger to the public. More people have died of the virus in one year than all the murders in the U.S. in the past 30 years—they are just more “newsworthy.” On the other hand, we see people not guilty of any crime being rounded-up in workplaces to be expelled (the Mississippi poultry plants), and there are more reports of mothers with U.S.-born children being deported by over-zealous ICE agents.

There are still unaccompanied minors crossing the border, and Mexico recently passed a law banning the incarceration of small children at the border.  Many Democratic lawmakers have called on DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to stop the Trump policy of expelling migrants for “public health” reasons, because it was being used as a convenient excuse to ban all immigration. However, one public health rule that cannot be easily overlooked during the pandemic are the COVID-19 protocols—deliberately ignored in overflowing ICE detention centers—which are more stringently observed in HHS facilities for children, although to be “honest,” this also played into the hands of white nationalists in the Trump administration to keep the numbers down; by not expanding those facilities, there would be fewer children to find sponsors for.

Because facilities on the southern border to process migrants and asylum seekers are simply lacking, the Biden administration has had to reopen—to the anger of progressives—some notorious camps as “temporary” facilities, although he promises to make the processing of migrants faster than the deliberate snail pace of Trump’s border policy. Biden ended new enrollments in the so-called Migrant Protection Protocols (“remain in Mexico), but is only allowing a dribble of asylum seekers from those encampments to enter the country for the time being. Mother Jones reported that 25 were allowed in the country on one day to report to the closest court site, but the online “portal” to set up an appointment “crashed” and it wasn’t until four days later that just those people were able to get “imputed” into the system; but those asylum seekers had already waited in some cases for two years in MPP camps, so what was a few more days just to have their cases heard at least?

The Biden administration can only do so much to upend the quasi-legal maneuvers of the Trump administration; the executive branch is given wide latitude over the implementation of immigration policy, but right-wing politicians and media seem to think that this power should be used for less, not more. They prefer that Trump’s policies that violated the spirit of especially asylum law should stay in place, their beings clearly disturbed about executive orders that merely return some semblance of humanity to the original laws. There is of course no way that there is ever going to be any kind of comprehensive immigration policy in this country unless one party or the other has 60 votes, and even if one does, promoting policies too “radical” in one direction or other will probably peel off one or two of those 60 votes. But who really wants to change immigration law? It’s too good of a political football to toss around.

Despite criticisms, DHS Secretary Mayorkas insists that the Biden administration is making the best of a bad situation left by the Trump administration, and there is presently no “crisis” at the border as being painted by the right. But he told ABC News that “I learned that we do not have the facilities available or equipped to administer the humanitarian laws that our Congress passed years ago. We did not have the personnel, policies, procedure or training to administer those laws. Quite frankly, the entire system was gutted.”

Of course, this was precisely what the Trump administration and its head nativist, Miller, intended with the “zero tolerance” policy. Mayorkas has put out the “word” that asylum seekers should “wait” before making dangerous journeys until the infrastructure is rebuilt to process their requests, and in the meantime the Biden administration is facilitating humanitarian aid in their countries of origin, which the Trump administration withheld to threaten those countries—another bit of the “failure of planning” that has been a hallmark of the ineptitude of the Trump administration and its “America First” mantra.

Not surprisingly, the ineptitude of the Trump administration’s immigration policy has been hailed in some quarters precisely because if its inhumane characteristics. The right-wing media and race-baiting Republicans have focused all their energy on proving their total lack of humanity, let alone simple human decency. To them, even asylum seekers are “animals” who are a threat to the lives of every American who claims to be "human," whether through crime, disease, stealing jobs, allegedly not paying taxes and allegedly “public drain.” But mostly because they just don’t like the way they look—and their most “disturbing” feature, that these people have a better “nose” for where the work is, and how to transport themselves to it—and once there, their employers know they will show-up for work every day no matter how shitty the job is. “Real Americans” don’t like that kind of “competition.”

The number of arrests on the border last month was reportedly 100,000. This was not a “record” by any past metric, but it does remind one that Barack Obama was referred to in some quarters as the “deporter-in-chief.” The White House policy coordinator on the border, Roberta Jacobson, insisted that ‘The border is not open,” and that any announced policy change should not be taken to be interpreted as a license for families or children to “make dangerous trips” to try to enter the U.S. “in an irregular fashion.” Presumably that means illegal border crossing, although there seems to be a “fine line” about what is or isn’t “legal” when crossing the border to claim asylum.

We must remember that the intent of the Trump MPP policy was to force people to wait in encampments so long that they just decided to go “home”—no matter how many years that took. Jacobson suggested that the alleged surges over the past month (these “surges” tend to be irregularly “relative” to each other) were a “response to hope,” and that since Trump has been out of office, there has been a four year “pent up demand” of “hope.” This should have been the expected result of Trump’s doing everything “on the fly” without any planning or understanding of consequences.