Trump’s ‘No Vacancies’ sign to halt nonwhite immigrants
WASHINGTON >> The Trump administration has manufactured an immigration “crisis” to further the president’s most consistent goal: to Make America White Again.
Tens of thousands of Central American asylum-seekers, even hundreds of thousands, do not constitute a serious crisis — not for a continent-spanning nation of 330 million, a nation built through successive waves of immigration. The migrants have taxed and at times overwhelmed the border systems that process and adjudicate their claims for refuge, but we just need more border agents, more immigration judges, more housing.
President Trump, however, treats the migrant surge like an existential threat. “We can’t take you anymore. We can’t take you. Our country is full,” he said earlier this month at the border in California. But, of course, our vast nation is anything but full. Instead of “can’t,” Trump really means “won’t.”
Trump is all over the map on almost every issue but one. He has never wavered on his antipathy toward nonwhite immigration. From his campaign charge that Mexican immigrants are “rapists,” to his fruitless quest to get funding for a border wall, to his gratuitously cruel policy of family separations, to his declaration of a national emergency, Trump has left no doubt about how he feels.
Trump uses anti-immigration rhetoric to inflame his base, sure. But unlike with other issues, Trump seems to believe his demagoguery about would-be Latino migrants.
The administration seems to consider asylum-seekers to be subhuman. What other conclusion can be drawn, after thousands of young children were taken from their parents and shipped to detention centers far away, as a deterrent? Or from the notion now under active consideration of transporting migrants hundreds or thousands of miles simply to release them in “sanctuary” cities and the districts of Trump’s political opponents?
That last Bond-villain idea is apparently the brainchild of White House adviser Stephen Miller.
Miller’s history as an anti-immigration zealot goes back to his time as an aide to then-senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama. Sessions, both in the Senate and while in Trump’s Cabinet, was obsessed with reducing immigration, legal as well as illegal. Sessions left, but Miller remains.
Trump has said that the countries from which asylum-seekers and economic migrants are fleeing are not sending “their best” people, and that entry should be based on “merit,” not on family connections. That’s a complete departure from the immigration policies that allowed Trump’s and Miller’s forebears to come here, but it sounds debatable — until you take into account Trump’s other remarks: disparaging nonwhite countries with a vulgar epithet; expressing a preference for immigrants from places like Norway, one of the whitest countries on the planet; telling crowds the story of his friend who used to go to Paris all the time but doesn’t anymore because “Paris is no longer Paris.”
Trump isn’t talking about gridlocked traffic. He’s talking about the black and brown immigrants who are changing Paris’ complexion.
Does Trump seek political gain by stoking white Americans’ fears of the “browning” of America due to Latino immigration? Absolutely.
He could feign compassion for people who risk their lives to flee deadly violence at home. Instead, Trump cut off foreign aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, the countries most asylum-seekers are fleeing. He does not comfort or embrace. He seeks only to punish.
The real crisis is that we have a president who wants to put up a “No Vacancies” sign for nonwhite immigrants — just like the “No Coloreds” signs I used to see in the Jim Crow South.