A Brief Comment on Immigration
The shame that is our immigration system — and our immigrant-detention system — is not new. The aggressive policing, the demonization of…
The shame that is our immigration system — and our immigrant-detention system — is not new. The aggressive policing, the demonization of migrants, the xenophobic calls to essentially close the border predate the current occupant of the White House, are in fact bipartisan and long in development. As immigration attorney Rachel Wilson of Arizona says in the July issue of Harper’s, “things were unbelievably bad before Trump.” The disease of xenophobia, like the disease of racism, is baked into our national fabric. Emma Lazarus’ poem on Lady Liberty has always been more myth than fact, more aspirational than actual lived reality. Every group that has migrated here — but especially Jews, Asians, Muslims, and Latinx — have been met with a hysterical fear and deep hatred, based on the lie that these new immigrants are undermining what it means to be American. We need to remove Trump from office — he is the most hateful and aggressively anti-immigrant of all — but we shouldn’t assume that tossing him from office will fix this. The rot in the system and the soul made him possible. We need to address the rot or someone worse, an authoritarian who fully understands the workings of power, will show up.