Since I wrote this piece in 2018 the situation hasn’t really changed. The major mania for the Trump camp is still immigration and exclusion. Now it’s the Hatians who have displaced Latinos at the bottom of the immigrant barrel.
My great-grandfathers on both sides were German immigrants who came to America in the mid-late 19th century. You can be sure they were not as reviled as the Irish and Italians who came a bit later. Yet Trump and his father long denied their German ancestry, buying into the tradition of hate and exclusion that now extends to Latinos, the new vassals for the GOP.
Prejudice to me is the flip side of identity politics. And drawing immigration lines in the sand is like pulling up the drawbridge after the last good guys are inside. I’ve generally been thought of as one of the good guys (despite being Jewish) because of family, social class, education, and skin color. See Jive-Colored Glasses.
But you soon come to understand if you’re at all aware that the deck is unfairly stacked—even though (to mix the metaphor) you paid to sit in first class. Looking at the lives of the poor and the excluded, it’s hard to feel real empathy unless you have been there yourself. Sympathy is easier and more socially acceptable. Ultimately, I don’t aim to feel either: I want to change the politics of exclusion to one of inclusion.
Trump of course was the perfect GOP candidate to exploit fears of immigration, just as Stephen Miller became the perfect guy to push the policy of zero tolerance. Now Miller and his cohorts want to reduce the “refugee cap” to as low as 15,000 in 2019.
The recent separation of parents and children, and the chaos it caused, is in my view the most inhumane (if not the most politically stupid) thing that Trump has done. Now the administration compounds its culpability by telling the ACLU it should be the responsible agency for finding the separated and deported parents. One might call this wagging the dog or, better, weaseling out.
The White House thinks its stance will play well with the base because they will stick with anything. It will not play well with Hispanics, suburban women, resettlement groups, and the two-thirds of the country that opposes Trump’s immigration policy.
Separating kids from their parents is what the Nazis did. The consequence is trauma and severe long-term consequences for the kids. And what is to be done for those 463 parents already deported without their children? This sick series of government-provoked horrors ought to be the number-one focus for Democrats in November.
But immigration is surely the knottiest issue—politically and policy-wise—of all. Trump’s approach does violence to everyone. And so far, Democrats are all over the map on the issue. The one thing I can think of is to increase the number of judges so that the asylum seekers can be processed with some fairness and dispatch. This is more than a crisis in border security; it’s an ongoing political crisis.