Trump—not migrants—is the country’s “National Emergency”

Donald Trump has never had any use for the “experts” in any field—not concerning the environment, not in tax (and by extension, budget) policy, not in climate change, not in the use of military force, not foreign intelligence, not trade, you name it. Not even in business; he inherited his father’s real estate empire, and it has grown in value no more than what would be expected from normal dollar inflation. His claim that he is “smarter” than people like Starbucks’ founder Howard Schultz who built their business empires from scratch is ludicrous and demented. Trump ran into the ground easy money winners like a casino operation, and he completely failed in selling numerous products with his “personal brand” because he had utter contempt for the wants and needs of “lowly” consumers. One should remember that his “reality” television show dealt with small change that was merely subject to his personal whims; anything bigger was likely to end up in bankruptcy court, where Trump’s lawyers made sure that other people paid for his incompetence. 

Trump is the only “expert” he knows, in much the same way that Adolf Hitler considered himself a “genius” despite a lack of “expertise” in any field save the delivery of propaganda—particularly of the racist variety. Much like Hitler’s, Trump’s “method” of “governance” is indifferently orchestrated chaos held in check (barely) by the threat of retribution, as has been chronicled in numerous “tell-all” books that have been published just in the past year. Whatever insane policy pops into Trump's head, there are fanatical sycophants (like Stephen Miller) a-plenty to be found to massage the Cult of Trump, and those who refuse to are eventually given the “You’re Fired!” treatment, victims of a reality show of Trump’s own fantasy. As we have repeatedly seen, Trump (like Hitler) only listens to his self-described “superior instincts” and his political “advisors,” never first taking into consideration the advice of those who are in the business of truth or consequences before he formulates policy.

What we see now is policy turned upside down, where our allies and neighbors are “enemies” and Trump willfully and blindly dances to the tune of his power mad new “friends,” like Kim Jong-Un and Vladimir Putin, foolishly believing that their interests are “our” interests. Kim is playing Trump for a fool, only playacting until his nuclear weapons infrastructure is repaired after the destruction of North Korea’s main nuclear site that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of workers—which “coincidentally” occurred just before Kim sent his oversized letter to suit Trump’s oversized narcissism.  Russia—which intelligence agencies say is preparing for more election shenanigans in 2020—is acting like the Soviet Union of old, seeing the world in adversarial terms, and in the past decade has been developing a dozen or so new nuclear weapon systems, although lack of funds has delayed or scuttled some of them. The announcement of an intercontinental nuclear-tipped cruise missile should be especially concerning to the U.S., but Trump’s “response” has been what was already in the works, a low-grade submarine-based replacement missile. Trump seems to be dancing to the tune of Russia’s strategic interests in Europe, as well as in the Middle East, not just in Syria and Iraq but in Afghanistan as well; Trump even has mused that he might not be adverse to Russia invading the latter again, which would be made easier after the U.S. and NATO troops pull out of the country for good. 

China, meanwhile, is just stringing Trump along, maybe offering a few crumbs so he can declare “victory” out of plain defeat. George Soros recently derided Trump’s foolishness in starting trade wars with our friends and neighbors (that is, countries he doesn’t have a Trump-branded hotel located in) instead of focusing squarely on China, which not only accounts for half the U.S. trade deficit, but that deficit has grown 10 percent since Trump slapped on his tariffs. U.S. attitudes toward China is schizophrenic to say the least; there is a lot of talk about “buying American,” but practically every article of apparel and electronics product sold here has a “Made in China” label (but Trump’s MAGA hats are made in the USA—by an 80 percent Hispanic work force in California). China has been accused to stealing or confiscating other countries technology; in fact its military is almost entirely built on the “best” of foreign know-how, and is now a far cry from the incompetence of its military exposed by the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979. So confident now is China militarily that it has made moves in the region to suggest they are willing to use it without fear of U.S. response. 

And yet we hear stories like that out of Duke University, which has gone out of its way to welcome and protect Chinese students who form 2/3 or more of students in certain STEM fields;  U.S. universities seem eager to recruit as many international students as they can because of the high tuitions they are required to pay. But in the case of Chinese nationals, this is more likely a form of “soft” spying and “technology transfer,” since China certainly wouldn’t “expose” their own citizens to American political culture if they already had the technology themselves.

Trump clearly cannot differentiate from friends and foes on the international stage, especially if there are certain other considerations involved, like money. In the cases of Saudi Arabia and Russia, Trump’s reaction to murder of their regime opponents is just a “business” matter. Trump’s foreign policy is based solely on his personal prejudices and the potential of moneymaking now or in the future; the national interest is secondary at best, something that many millions of his purposely ill-informed supporters share. Trump’s decisions to pull out of the Middle East will likely result in the resurgence of terrorist groups that are a direct threat to U.S. citizens, since frankly our opposite numbers in the region (including Russia) have no motivation to “help” the U.S. Thus it is not a stretch to observe that Trump is the nation’s number one threat to its national security. 

Yet Trump is sending thousands more active duty troops to where he claims is the greatest “national security” threat to the country, from where fascist “thinkers” like Pat Buchanan and Anne Coulter believe an “infestation”  will come to “destroy” the country. The problem isn’t just the far-right’s lack of understanding about the complexities of this country’s give-and-take activities on the southern border, but also of the media and the public in general. It is interesting to note that the Border Patrol was initially formed not to prevent Mexican immigration, but Chinese immigration after the institution of the Chinese Exclusion law. As late as 1950 we were seeing movies like The Breaking Point, where John Garfield’s fishing boat captain, short of cash, was agreeing to illegally transport Chinese immigrants from Mexico to the U.S. 

But as chronicled in the book Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration In An Era Of Economic Integration by Douglas Massey, Jorge Durand and Nolan Malone, “If there is a constant in U.S. border policy, it is hypocrisy.  Throughout the 20^th century the United States has arranged to import Mexican workers while pretending not to. With the sole exception of the 1930s, when the Great Depression effectively extinguished U.S. labor demand, politicians and public officials have persistently sought ways of accepting Mexicans as workers while limiting their claims as human beings.” The current spate of anti-Hispanic immigrant hysteria is “justified” by the “legality” argument which is pure hypocrisy at least from the right; while illegal immigration from Latin America has stagnated (meaning as many leave as enter) since at least 2008, illegal immigration from Asia and India has climbed 300 percent since 2000, yet they have avoided any scrutiny by the media or anti-immigrant fanatics, talking about “merit” when that has nothing to do with the “law.”.

If immigration hysteria was not merely an expression of racism against Hispanics, then we should expect mention about what groups are in fact the fastest growing illegal immigrant groups as well. Currently, two women who are U.S. citizens are suing the Border Patrol for being detained merely because the agent thought it was "suspicious" to hear people speaking Spanish in Montana. According to a website devoted to statistical data in regard to Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (aapidata.com), one-in-seven immigrants from South and East Asia are in the country illegally; so why shouldn't people who usually converse with each other in their various Asian tongues also be regarded as arbitrarily "suspect" by  Border Patrol agents?  Instead, in the state of Washington where it is believed that there are more Asians and Indians illegally here than from Latin America, news media like the Seattle Times are too busy covering immigration stories accompanied by photos that make Hispanics appear as wild animals trying to break out of a cage.  Nor does the media or anti-immigrant fanatics like Ms. Anchor Baby herself, Michelle Malkin, wonder about the legality of Russian “birth tourists” in Florida. 

While every crime committed by an illegal immigrant from Mexico seems to be worse than any  10 committed by a “real” American (including a mass shooting or two), violence perpetrated against Hispanics by “real” Americans tend to be treated as a matter of indifference. For example, the 2006 Hamilton Avenue Massacre in Indianapolis, in which a family of seven Hispanics was murdered, including four children execution style, was never treated as a hate crime, as was the more recent Thornton, CO  killing of three Hispanics “randomly” selected at a Walmart by a white man who had previously threatened his Hispanic neighbors. While the story of a kidnapped white female Jayme Closs was in the news for weeks on end, the kidnapping, rape and murder of 13-year-old Hania Aguilar while she was waiting for a school bus by a “real” American in North Carolina was notable only for the fact no one responded to FBI and local authorities request for leads before her body was found by accident more than three weeks later, and law enforcement expressed frustration by the public’s dissemination of unhelpful accusations and name-calling against her mother.  

Since I am just an observer of this hypocrisy with no “credibility” I will let the experts (the aforementioned authors) explain what has changed since 1986 in regard to political and public attitudes in regard to the border, when the unspoken acceptance of Mexican labor in exchange for being used as convenient “scapegoats” morphed into pure scapegoating: 

The year 1986 was pivotal for the political economy of North America. In that year, two events signaled the end of one era and the beginning of another: Mexico’s entry into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the passage by the U.S. Congress the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). On Mexico a new political elite had succeeded in overcoming historic opposition within the ruling party and orchestrated the country’s the entry into GATT. Then they boldly approached the United States to forge a new alliance that would ultimately create a free trade zone stretching from Central America to the North Pole. Even as U.S. officials worked closely with Mexican authorities to integrate the North American economy, however, they simultaneously acted to prevent the integration of its labor markets. Rather than incorporating the movement of workers into the new trade agreement (as was done in the European Union), the United States insisted on the right to control its borders, and to underscore its resolve Congress passed IRCA.

Thereafter the United States would pursue a politics of contradiction—simultaneously moving toward integration while insisting on separation. In time-honored fashion, the United States sought to have its cake and eat it too—to move headlong toward a consolidation of markets for capital, foods, commodities, and information, but simultaneously to pretend that North American labor markets would remain separate and distinct. In the ensuing years the United States would spend increasing financial and human resources to demonstrate to the American public that the border was under control and not porous with respect to migrants or drugs, even as it was becoming increasingly permeable with respect to numerous other flows. Admitting Mexican workers while pretending not to do so was nothing new. But whereas this sort of hypocrisy could be maintained at a relatively low cost during the bracero and undocumented eras, after 1986 the illusion became increasingly expensive to sustain, not only for the migrants themselves but for citizens and taxpayers on both sides of the border.

“Manufacturing a Border Crisis”

This sort of schizophrenia toward Mexico is nothing new. If anything, it is typical. Throughout the twentieth century the United States regularly encourage or welcomed the entry of Mexican workers while publicly pretending not to do so. Only the mechanism of self-deception has changed over the time. The current institutional arrangement has its roots in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As we (have seen) there is little statistical evidence that undocumented migration was accelerating at this time. What did change was how political and bureaucratic actors framed the issue. Neither the numbers nor the legal status of immigrants is particularly relevant to understanding the policy regime that emerged after 1986. More important are U.S. political and economic conditions which provided a context that allowed immigration to be framed in crisis terms. The Arab oil embargo doubled and then tripled petroleum prices after 1973, sending industrial nations into a deep and prolonged recession. The U.S. dollar lost more thn half its real value between 1970 and 1980, the rate of unemployment increased by 50 percent, median income fell by 5 percent in real terms, and income inequality rose by 15 percent.

Faced with voter anger over intractable economic problems that lacked obvious or easy solutions, Reagan fell back on two-time honored strategies—ideology and scapegoating. During the 1980s immigrants increasingly were cast in the role of the scapegoats for the nation’s ills. Ronald Reagan led the way by framing border control as an issue of national security. As a result of Communist insurgencies in Central America, he foresaw “a tidal wave of refugees—and this time they’ll be ‘feet people’ and not boat people—swarming into our country seeking safe haven from communist repression tom the south.” The media immediately picked-up on the imagery of the “tidal wave” and extended the metaphor, referring to Latin American migrants as a “steady stream” or a rapidly rising “tide” that was close to becoming a “flood.” 

(The 1984 movie Red Dawn was a far-right nightmare vision of this, where Russian and (apparently) Cuban forces invade the U.S. while Europe falls to far-left parties, forcing the end of NATO.)

In 1986, President Reagan exacerbated the cold war hysteria by linking border control not only to national security but to the threat of foreign terrorism. In a televised speech, he reminded viewers that “terrorists and subversives are just two days’ drive time from (the border crossing at) Harlingen, Texas.” A year later Reagan’s cabinet-level Task Force on Terrorism warned that extremist groups could be expected to “feed on the anger and frustration of recent Central and South American immigrants who will not realize their won version of the American dream.” Byt the late 1980s the tidal metaphor of a “flood” had given way to martial images of threatened “invasion.” The border was “under siege,” Border Patrol officers were “outgunned,” and they constituted a “thin green wall” trying to “hold the line.” Loss of control became the dominant narrative used by politicians and the media to discuss the border and movements across it. It was in this atmosphere that a new regime of immigration control would emerge.

As early as 1982 the Reagan administration had introduced legislation to give the president new authority to declare “immigration” emergencies” of up to 120 days, during which time the border could be sealed by the military and aliens deemed threats to national security could be rounded up and detained without warrant (although Congress did not pass this bill, certain aspects of it would resurface later). 

The demonization of Latino immigrants as “invaders” and “terrorists,” the linking of border control to national security, and the cultivation of public hysteria about undocumented migration was not lost on enterprising INS bureaucrats, who detected a means of increasing both their prestige and their resources (we can see this happening with the Department of Homeland Security—the creation of which was supposed to be to stop terrorism,” not immigration—thus the border “emergency” is as much a “business” deal as is a matter of “law”). The rise of the Immigration and Naturalization Service as a powerful and wealthy bureaucracy began in earnest in January 1992. As undocumented migrants were returning to the United States from their Christmas visits home, the Border Patrol chief in San Diego, Gustavo de la Vina, erected a new fence, deployed additional Border Patrol agents, and installed new detection equipment along the westernmost section of the border…When they encountered these new obstacles to clandestine crossing, undocumented migrants and smuggler did the obvious thing: they attempted to go around them…In essence, the new border policy funneled all migrants within an extended sector to a single crossing point. (the images of large numbers of people crossing over at one point allowed for images that were) assembled into a public relations video entitled Border Under Siege that was released to the public. The video was a public relations bonanza for the agency. The images of undocumented migrants running across the border and risking life and limb to cross an eight-lane freeway quickly became a powerful symbol of “a border out of control.” Clearly a national boundary was being “invaded” by “desperate” aliens. Lost in the uproar was the fact that the images were a direct consequence of the Border Patrol’s own policies—neither the number nor the characteristics of the migrants had changed. 

“The Symbolic Politics of Bonder Control”

By the early 1980s Mexico-U.S. migration evolved into a stable system based on the circulation of undocumented labor. This migration system began to take shape in 1965 to replace the bracero system that had prevailed between 1942 and 1964. Movements under the undocumented  regime were governed by stable parameters, which yield relatively steady probabilities of first migration, border crossing, remitting, return, and remigration. Border enforcement selected for working-age males who were married but traveling without dependents. Migrants were very likely to remit money home to return after limited sojourns north of the border. As documented (before), there is little evidence that the likelihood of undocumented migration was rising before 1986, or that the total rate of Mexico-U.S. migration exceeded that which had prevailed during the bracero era.

Nonetheless, actors inside the and outside of government found it politically useful and materially profitable to make undocumented migration and drugs salient political issues during the 1980s. Framing them as issues of border control and national security, they offered U.S. citizens two new “enemies” upon which their insecurities could be projected. Both were seen to emanate from malevolent foreign sources, and both constituted grave threats to national security. Drugs were foisted upon Americans by sinister foreign cartels and malicious traffickers who were taking advantage of America’s openness to flood it with cheap drugs, bringing  a wave of addiction, violence, and mayhem to U.S. cities (as if native-born citizens were doing just “fine” on their own). Immigrants, especially those without documents, were depicted in one of two ways: as desperate people fleeing poverty and despair at home, or as potential terrorists who, if they did not already have terrorist aspirations when they arrived, would become easy prey for Communist provocateurs and agents loose among them.

Nonetheless, political leaders in the United States prefer border policing over other approaches to dealing with the issues of drugs and immigration. This seeming contradiction persists because border enforcement represents more of ritualistic performance than an actual strategy of deterrence. (a quote from a Peter Andreas):

“The popularity of the border as a political stage is based as much on the expressive role of law enforcement (reaffirming moral boundaries) as it is on the instrumental goal of law enforcement (effective defense of physical boundaries). High profile law enforcement campaigns that fail in their instrumental purpose can nevertheless be highly successful in their expressive function. Border control efforts are not only actions (a means to a stated instrumental end) but also gestures that communicate meaning. Even as the enforcement performance has failed to deter illegal border crossings significantly, it has nevertheless succeeded in reaffirming the importance of the border.”

A recent shootout between police and two heroin dealers in Houston resulted in the deaths of the dealers (a man and his female partner), and the wounding of five officers. Don’t tell a lie: you thought for sure they were “Mexicans” and probably illegal. It turns out that they were two white people, Rhogena Nicholas, 58, and Dennis Tuttle, 59, a little old to be heroin dealers seemingly, but not so if they were anti-government types who thought it was their Constitutional “right” to do whatever they pleased--and to defend that "right" as they believed was given them in the Second Amendment. Border? What border? The police crossed their "border."

 

I may not be an “expert,” but I know better than most people the hypocrisy inherent in this subject; when I was working at the airport, I was sent to the ID office to get a DHS decal stamped on my ID badge so that I could work on international flights. It should have taken only a few minutes, but I ended up sitting in the office for two hours while a DHS officer, concerned because my appearance and the name on my birth certificate didn’t “match,” called in and “consulted” with an ICE agent about what to do—this despite the fact that I had to have been cleared by an FBI background check to be issued an ID badge to begin with. I was reluctantly allowed to go when one of my supervisors was called in to vouch for my “legality.”  As for Trump, he certainly is not an “expert” on the border issue, and only has brought ignorant racist hysteria to its “natural” concluding phase with all his bluster about building his “wall.” When Trump calls the border something it is not--"very dangerous"--he not only exposes his own ignorance, but that ignorance is at the service of demonizing and dehumanizing a whole group--just like another "genius" dictator did.

There is a 1965 Russian documentary called Ordinary Fascism, which uses almost exclusively Nazi newsreel footage to portray what this looked like; this documentary is quite fascinating, exposing with dry witticisms the hypocrisy of Nazi racial and social beliefs, including mocking the “Aryan” skull shapes of “master race” Nazi leaders. After showing some  scenes from former death camps, the film segues into one of a motorcade in which Hitler is being serenaded by many thousands of apparently joyous Germans lining the streets; the narrator tells us “Certainly, these are human beings too—well, they think they are.” With all the talk of "infestation," "animals" and other dehumanizing descriptions of Hispanic immigrants, it is pure hypocrisy to deny that there is a connection in this somewhere.

The reality is that Trump has manufactured a “national emergency” in which he is the central villain. He thinks that the country should "unite" behind his racist agenda like another "genius" dictator managed to do--and like that "genius" dictator, he may yet run our country into the ground, if not during his presidency now, but as a result of it.