Trump’s Massive Deportation Plan Echoes Concentration Camp History

2024/08/07 Leave a comment

Good reminder:

The Republican National Convention hit rock bottom on its third day in Milwaukee, Wis., on July 17, with a sea of signs calling for “Mass Deportation Now.” If former president Donald Trump is elected for a second term, he and his advisers promise to remove from the U.S., via forced expulsions and deportation camps, as many as 20 million people—a number larger than the country’s current estimated population of undocumented residents. Put into effect, this scheme would devolve quickly into a vast 21st-century version of concentration camps, with predictably brutal results.

Concentration camps are built for the mass detention of civilians based on group identity, excluding protections normally afforded by a country’s legal system. I wrote a history of these camps that traced an arc from their 19th-century origins in Spanish-occupied Cuba through the development of death camps in Germany and their modern-day descendants around the world.

Trump’s plan to launch a massive deportation project nationwide—the first plank in the platform approved at his party’s convention—draws on the same flawed historical rationales and pseudoscience that built support for concentration camps worldwide in the 20th century. Early architects of these camps veiled their efforts in scientific terms while using terror and punishment to seize more power.

For example, Trump has claimed repeatedly that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the U.S. “Blood poisoning” is a medical condition; saying that foreigners are poisoning a nation’s blood is simply a slur. But perverting scientific or medical language to violate human rights and permit atrocities comes from a familiar playbook.

Justifications for brutal immigration policies have often distorted scientific goals of public health programs. Trump and his advisers have long been prone to panic-mongering over the threat of disease from immigrants. They’ve likewise twisted sociology to stoke anxiety about assimilation to justify a Muslim ban or to try to make racist comments seem less objectionable. Even simple principles of statistics get skewered as Trump lies about crime committed by immigrants.

Trump’s incendiary language echoes dangerous historical precedents. He has called his political opponents “vermin,” referred to immigrants as depraved“animals” and “rapists,” and described the U.S.–Mexico border as an “open wound.” Examples abound of similar rhetoric in Nazi propaganda about Jews.

Less well known is the fact that before World War II, the Nazis framed German Jews as aliens who needed to be forced into emigration or expelled. This was the original logic for stripping Jews of citizenship: to officially render them foreigners. (It should be noted that Trump aims to end birthright citizenship in the U.S.)

Prejudice has always been a part of concentration camps. At the dawn of the 20th century, mortality surged in British camps in southern Africa during the South African War, with children’s deaths blamed on “uncivilized” Boer mothers. Embracing pseudoscientific biology, camp administrators spent about half the money per day for food for a Black African civilian as was spent on white detainees (who themselves received insufficient rations). Bureaucracy and unforeseen crises added immeasurably to the harm. In poorly sited and badly run camps, tens of thousands of noncombatants died.

Other early camp systems included massive networks established on an emergency basis to detain immigrants or expel targeted minority groups. During the Spanish Civil War, when 475,000 refugees poured across France’s southern border in less than three weeks, many were forced into unlivable conditions in remote areas to isolate them from French society. Illness and disease followed on a massive scale.

After the start of World War II, the French government used those same camps to intern foreign Jews who had escaped Hitler’s Germany, detaining them as enemy aliens. And after France fell to the Nazis, French policemen went door-to-door in Paris in May 1941 in the service of the Vichy government to round up foreign Jews who remained at liberty. Some deported Jews were sent to barracks still holding Spanish detainees and “enemy aliens.” Camps often begin as one thing and become something else.

The relocation and detention involved in the deportation project that Trump is proposing are at least an order of magnitude greater than these debacles. The argument that a second Trump administration wouldn’t be able to launch such an operation because of a lack of personnel or legal authority should be understood as largely irrelevant because it presupposes the intention of running a precise, legal project at all.

A professional effort on this scale would be impossible. The mass deportations planned to begin in January 2025 if Trump is reelected are meant to unleash deliberate and collateral mayhem. And if history is any guide, a system of camps built to punish millions represents a threat to every American.

As for what they say they intend, Trump and his allies openly admire the results of the Eisenhower-era “Operation Wetback,” whose very name offers a slur revealing the endemic prejudice that made it possible. This limited deportation blitz led to the deaths of 88 workers in 112-degree-Fahrenheit heat. A new Trump administration would be looking to replicate that operation on a scale heretofore untried, using the largest deportation force ever seen in the U.S., according to both Trump and former director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan.

Trump adviser Stephen Miller has described a plan to create “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers,” and Trump has promised to remove four percent of the current U.S. population in a deliberate plan to spur a massive disruption of the labor market. If Americans took notice of border policy during Trump’s first administration, said Homan earlier this month, “They ain’t seen shit yet.”

The “Mass Deportation Now” signs filling the audience at the Republican National Convention are a grim warning of how much worse the situation could get. Trump, his advisers, the Heritage Foundation (the extreme-right platform that has put forth Project 2025) and countless members of Congress are not only winking and nodding toward detention horrors of the past but also clearly willing to repeat history if it will let them consolidate power.

The U.S. has previously embraced concentration camps during the detention of Japanese Americans during World War II and under the family-separation policy imposed during Trump’s presidency. The broader legacy of camps on six continents offers a panoramic assortment of even more ways in which mass deportations and forced relocation can go wrong. Unleashed on anything close to the scale under discussion, the project Trump and his henchmen are proposing will be lethal to the targeted groups, catastrophic to the stability of the country and extremely difficult to undo. These camps are in no way scientific or even serious policy; they’re the equivalent of dropping a hydrogen bomb to put out a forest fire.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

ANDREA PITZER is author of the books One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov and, most recently, Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World. Follow her on X (formerly Twitter) @andreapitzer.

Source: Trump’s Massive Deportation Plan Echoes Concentration Camp History

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Column: The California roots of Trump’s anti-immigrant pitch to Black voters

2024/08/05 Leave a comment

Of note, 1994 Proposition 187:

Donald Trump is nothing if not consistent, and his Dumpster fire of an interview with reporters at the National Assn. of Black Journalists convention in Chicago this week showed the Republican presidential nominee in full, foul mode.

He lied. He insulted. He whined. He was racist and misogynistic. He evaded questions and elided answers, and showed all the grace and gratitude of a kindergartner who pees in a sandbox and expects others to clean up the mess.

Above all, the Republican presidential candidate kept stabbing at the same illegal immigration scapegoat that’s the centerpiece of his 2024 presidential campaign. This time, though, he tried to further his contention that Donald J. Trump is the greatest president for Black people since Abraham Lincoln.

He unveiled the strategy during his June 28 debate with President Biden, when Trump stated that immigrants were a “big kill on the Black people” and were “taking Black jobs.” In Georgia, which he narrowly lost in 2020, his campaign has aired radio and television commercials insisting Biden cares more about illegal immigrants than the Black community.

At the NABJ convention, Trump blamed open borders for endangering the job security of Black workers — never mind that unemployment rates for them have reached historic lows under both the Trump and Biden administrations, a time when illegal immigration has grown to numbers not seen in a generation. When a moderator asked what was his message to all the Black reporters gathered before him and people watching online, Trump responded it was “to stop people from invading our country … who happen to be taking Black jobs.” When asked what he would do on Day 1 of a new term, he blurted out, “Close the border.”

Trump’s gambit is yet another legacy of Proposition 187, the 1994 California ballot initiative that sought to make life miserable for undocumented immigrants. Then and now, GOP politicians figure that the best way to court Black voters — a longtime bedrock of the Democratic Party — is to argue that immigrants in the country illegally are a burden that hits their community harder than others by taking away social services and bleeding jobs away.

Here’s the thing: There is a historical basis for these concerns, even if Trump has pushed the Illegal Immigrant Bogeyman dial to 11.

When South L.A. began to turn from the heart of the city’s Black community to a Latino-majority enclave during the 1980s and 1990s, the subsequent tensions were real. In the wake of the L.A. riots, groups protested outside work sites and blasted contractors for giving jobs to Latinos instead of Black workers because the former group would work for cheaper than the latter. The assumption by Latino political leaders during the fight against Prop. 187 that Black people would join them without question offended leaders and community activists.

Incidents like that led to 47% of Black voters favoring Prop. 187, a margin that helped the resolution pass comfortably.

Some of the most prominent Black voices in the anti-immigrant movement over the past 25 years — homeless activist Ted Hayes, the late radio show host Terry Anderson, the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, former gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder — came from that era. One of the loudest anti-immigrant voices in Southern California today is Fontana Mayor Acquanetta Warren, a Compton native who has scolded immigrants from the dais for not speaking English and has waged an aggressive campaign against street vendors. Throw in deep-rooted anti-Black sentiments among Latinos that got a prominent showcase during the 2022 L.A. City Hall racist tape leak scandal, and no wonder Trump thinks banking on getting Black voters angry enough against a supposed south-of-the-border invasion is a winner.

The reality is that Black people aren’t as receptive to an anti-immigrant message as Trump and the GOP would like to think.

A 2006 Pew Research Center study showed that 47% of Black people thought immigrants in the U.S. without legal documents should be allowed to stay, compared with 33% of whites. But by 2013, a similar Pew report showed 82% of Black peoplefelt there should be a path toward legalization for those immigrants, compared with 67% of whites. The figure dropped in a Pew survey released this year to 73%, but it’s still far higher than the 53% of whites who feel the same, and just two percentage points behind Latinos, who have increasingly turned to the right against illegal immigration since the Prop. 187 days.

This general acceptance doesn’t surprise L.A. Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson. He campaigned against Prop. 187 in 1994, going door-to-door in his native South L.A. to argue that the initiative was a wedge issue being used by Republicans to divide Black and Latino neighbors against each other and make them forget their shared working-class status.

“One line I would tell people is, ‘Do you hear them [Prop. 187 supporters] talk about people from Canada? From Germany?” Harris-Dawson said. “Black and Latino people I talked to understood it clearly.”

Harris-Dawson didn’t have to make the same argument recently in Atlanta, where the subject of illegal immigration came up in conversation.

“They said, ‘We support immigration reform, because we don’t want working-class people who can’t play defense,’” he said. In other words, it was better for the Black community for immigrants to have full rights instead of keeping them without papers and thus easier to use to undercut Black workers. “The sophistication of that! They get that workers don’t take jobs; employers give jobs.”

He can see Trump peeling off Black voters from the Democrats by continuing to hammer on the illegal immigration issue — but “he’ll also lose them” because of Trump’s long history of racist dog whistles. Besides, the councilmember argued, “people have seen it play out. … You see new neighbors come in and think, ‘Oh, there’s a good family.’ And they are. And then 10 years later, the parents still don’t have papers and the kids can’t go to college.

“Black folks can sympathize,” Harris-Dawson concluded, with “people who deal with systems that are ostensibly there to help you, but in fact do the opposite.”

Source: Column: The California roots of Trump’s anti-immigrant pitch to Black voters

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Krugman: Trump’s Cynical Attempt to Pit Recent Immigrants Against Black Americans

2024/07/24 Leave a comment

Indeed. But continue to see from time-to-time articles from Black Americans arguing the same.

Obviously, the big political news of the past couple of days has come from the Democratic side. But before last week’s Republican National Convention fades from view, let me focus instead on a development on the G.O.P. side that may, given everything else that has been happening, have flown under the radar: MAGA rhetoric on immigration, which was already ugly, has become even uglier.

Until now, most of the anti-immigration sloganeering coming from Donald Trump and his campaign has involved false claims that we’re experiencing a migrant crime wave.

Increasingly, however, Trump and his associates have started making the case that immigrants are stealing American jobs — specifically, the accusation that immigrants are inflicting terrible damage on the livelihoods of Black workers.

Of course, the idea that immigrants are taking jobs away from native-born Americans, including native-born Black Americans, isn’t new. It has, in particular, been an obsession for JD Vance, complete with misleading statistical analysis, so Trump’s choice of Vance as his running mate in itself signals a new focus on the supposed economic harm inflicted by immigrants.

So, too, did Trump’s acceptance speech on Thursday, which contained a number of assertions about the economics of immigration, among them, the notion that of jobs created under President Biden, “107 percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens” — a weirdly specific number considering that it’s clearly false, because native-born employment has risen by millions of jobs since Biden took office.

What seems relatively new, however, is the attempt to pit immigrants against Black Americans. True, Trump prefigured this line of attack during his June debate with Biden, when he declared that immigrants are “taking Black jobs,” leading some to mockingly question which jobs, exactly, count as “Black.”

But the volume on this claim has been turned way up.

At the Republican convention, former Trump adviser Peter Navarro, someone very likely to have a role in the next administration if Trump wins, spoke of “a whole army of illiterate illegal aliens stealing the jobs of Black, brown and blue-collar Americans.”

In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek published last week, Trump went even bigger, declaring that “The Black people are going to be decimated by the millions of people that are coming into the country.” He continued, “Their wages have gone way down. Their jobs are being taken by the migrants coming in illegally into the country.” He went on to say, “The Black population in this country is going to die because of what’s happened, what’s going to happen to their jobs — their jobs, their housing, everything.”

Trump’s diatribe forced Bloomberg to add this, parenthetically, as a fact check: “According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the majority of employment gains since 2018 have been for naturalized U.S. citizens and legal residents — not migrants.”

There was a time when a rant like this would have signaled that a politician lacked the emotional stability and intellectual capacity to hold the highest office in the land. Alas.

Also, it’s hard to overstate the cynicism here. Trump has a history of associating with white supremacists, not to mention his longstanding obsession with crime in urban, often predominantly Black precincts. Still, he clearly perceives an opportunity to peel away some Black voters by playing them off against immigrants.

But again, even if we ignore the cynicism, this new line of attack on immigration is just wrong on the facts.

If immigrants are taking away all the “Black jobs,” you can’t see it in the data, which shows Black unemployment at historic lows. If Black wages have, as Trump claims, gone way down, someone should tell the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which says that median Black earnings, adjusted for inflation, are significantly higher than they were toward the end of Trump’s term. (You should ignore the spurious bump during the pandemic, which reflected composition effects rather than genuine wage gains.)

You might ask why, given we have indeed seen a surge in immigration, that we aren’t seeing signs of an adverse, let alone cataclysmic, impact on Black wages or employment. After all, many recent immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, lack college degrees and maybe even high school education. So aren’t they competing with native-born Americans who also lack college or high school degrees?

The answer, which we’ve known since the 1990s, is that immigrant workers bring a different set of skills to the table than native-born workers, even when those workers have similar levels of formal education. And yes, I mean skills: If you think of workers without a college degree as “unskilled,” try fixing your own plumbing or doing your own carpentry. It shouldn’t need to be said, but a lot of blue-collar work is highly skilled and highly specialized. As a result, immigrants tend to take a very different mix of jobs than native-born workers do — which means that there’s much less head-to-head competition between immigrant and native-born workers than you might think, or what Trump and Vance want you to think.

The bottom line is that the attempt to portray immigration as an apocalyptic threat to Black Americans is refuted by the facts. Will it nonetheless work politically? I have no idea.

Source: Trump’s Cynical Attempt to Pit Recent Immigrants Against Black Americans

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Krikorian: Donald Trump, Immigration Expansionist

2024/06/24 Leave a comment

From the US right wing largely anti-immigration crowd. Comments on how this approach would “would turn every university (and community college!) into a citizenship-selling machine.” Sounds somewhat familiar to some of our education institutions and provincial ministries?

In a podcast this week with several tech investors, Donald Trump said he wants to give green cards to any foreign student who graduates from a U.S. institution. (The full interview is here; the immigration comments start at about 43:40.)

It’s true that his staff has subsequently tried to walk some of this back, but his comments shouldn’t surprise anyone.

While Trump’s explicit endorsement of this specific “staple a green card to every diploma” scheme is new, he’s always made clear, even during his first campaign, that he favored increased immigration. I’ve written in these pages about Trump’s support for expanded immigration here and here. And here. And here.

That said, this week’s comments by Trump really were more preposterous than usual. While he cited “people who are No. 1 in their class in top colleges,” he specifically added that foreign students getting a two-year degree from “junior colleges” should also automatically get green cards. Even lobbyists for higher ed and the tech industry aren’t this brazen. They exploit the appeal of keeping the “best and brightest” among foreign students as a means of protecting broader cheap-labor schemes, but I’ve never heard one seriously argue for giving green cards to graduates of community colleges.

If a foreign student completes a PhD in a hard science from one of the top research universities in the country, I will personally deliver a green card to their home. But someone who got an associate’s degree in communications? It’s laughable.

Trump promised the tech guys that the current situation would “end on Day One,” which is more nonsense, since any staple-a-green-card ploy would require legislation. But since this gimmick has been floating around for years, it’s worth thinking through what it would mean.

It would turn every university (and community college!) into a citizenship-selling machine. There are no numerical limits on the admission of foreign students — who number about 1 million now — and foreign students are already a major profit center for schools large and small.

But if any degree from any school would guarantee a green card (and thus U.S. citizenship, access to welfare, and the ability to bring your relatives), applications would soar at every kind of school, and new schools would pop up like mushrooms. Any residual connection that taxpayer-subsidized U.S. institutions of higher education (which is all of them, public or private) still have to the interests of the United States would be washed away by the gusher of easy foreign money. Good luck getting your kid into Hofstra, let alone Harvard.

Not to mention that elite higher education has become a hive of anti-American villainy — why reward them with a firehose of foreign cash?

In Australia the connection between foreign-student visas and permanent residence is closer to what Trump proposes, though still not automatic. The result is that foreign students account for more than 40 percent of all college enrollment and total close to 3 percent of the entire nation’s population. It’s gotten so bad there — remember, even without the automatic provision of a green card that Trump wants — that even the center-left Labour government is cracking down on foreign-student admissions.

The silver lining might be that we can start a conversation about our whole system of admitting foreign students. What’s the rationale for it? Why take any foreign students at all? Why is there no numerical limit? Why no percentage cap for any individual school? Shouldn’t the American people have a say in who moves here, rather than just university-admissions officers? Why is the hiring of foreign graduates (masquerading as students) subsidized through the Optional Practical Training program? And why is ICE so lackadaisical (even under Trump) in its oversight of foreign students, through the sleepy Student and Exchange Visitor Program?

Ceterum censeo academiam delendam esse. (The academy must be destroyed)

Source: Donald Trump, Immigration Expansionist

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Trump proposes green cards for foreign grads of US colleges, departing from anti-immigrant rhetoric

2024/06/22 Leave a comment

Always hard to judge his thoughts as to the degree of seriousness in following through if elected. More likely that his harder line immigration views will prevail given the nature of organizations and possible senior appointments but essentially a version of PGWP:

Former President Donald Trump said in an interview posted Thursday he wants to give automatic green cards to foreign students who graduate from U.S. colleges, a sharp departure from the anti-immigrant rhetoriche typically uses on the campaign trail.

Trump was asked about plans for companies to be able to import the “best and brightest” in a podcast taped Wednesday with venture capitalists and tech investors called the “All-In.”

“What I want to do and what I will do is you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically as part of your diploma a green card to be able to stay in this country. And that includes junior colleges too, anybody graduates from a college. You go there for two years or four years,” he said, vowing to address this concern on day one.

Immigration has been Trump’s signature issue during his 2024 bid to return to the White House. His suggestion that he would offer green cards — documents that confer a pathway to U.S. citizenship — to potentially hundreds of thousands of foreign graduates would represent a sweeping expansion of America’s immigration system that sharply diverges from his most common messages on foreigners.

Source: Trump proposes green cards for foreign grads of US colleges, departing from anti-immigrant rhetoric

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Ibbitson: Canada may need to brace for influx of undocumented immigrants if Trump becomes president

2024/06/21 Leave a comment

Quite astounding that Ibbitson would essentially advocate an open door policy for the American undocumented that would likely seek coming to Canada. Such a wholesale approach, in the context of already excessive levels of permanent and temporary migration, would undermine further any pretence of a managed immigration system, not to mention the increased burden on healthcare, housing and infrastructure.

Since many of the undocumented are lower skilled, such an approach would further weaken Canada’s productivity.

In terms of the academics quoted, Macklin is correct regarding the practical difficulties of effectively expelling over 10 million people but may be discounting that a Trump 2 administration will be more ideological and is actively looking at how to effect such policy.

Somewhat puzzled by Lieu’s comment dismissing the importance of numbers on public confidence. While true that it may depend more on “proper supervision,” rapid growth in numbers becomes a proxy for lack of proper supervision, as Roxham Road and previous irregular arrivals attest, not to mention IRCC’s many issues and challenges in managing current flows.

In any case, Mr. Trump might welcome the departure of undocumented immigrants across the northern border and scrap the agreement himself.

In the event of a Trump victory, Canada should be ready to welcome as many new arrivals from the United States as possible, regardless of their immigration or citizenship status.

They would represent a silver lining to the very dark thundercloud of a second Trump presidency.

Source: Canada may need to brace for influx of undocumented immigrants if Trump becomes president

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What the [USA] Birthright-Citizenship Debate Is Really About

2023/07/04 Leave a comment

More on political posturing by DeSantis and Trump with relevant background:

When my Google Alerts sounded this past week, I knew that birthright citizenship was again lighting up in the news. My interest in debates over birthright is professional and abiding: I’m a historian who in 2018 published a book, Birthright Citizens, that traced this approach to national belonging from its origins in debates among Black Americans at the start of the 19th century to 1868, when the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment established that, with a few exceptions, anyone born on U.S. soil is a citizen.

On Monday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, looking to advance his presidential campaign, promised to reverse more than a century and a half of law and policy and, as he put it in a statement, “end the idea that children of illegal aliens are entitled to birthright citizenship if they are born in the United States.” A few days later, a spokesperson for another GOP presidential candidate, Nikki Haley, said she “opposes birthright citizenship for those who enter the country illegally,” and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign said he would reform birthright by adding new citizenship requirements. Having lived through more than one such outburst in recent years—the first in 2018, when then-President Donald Trump proposed to do away with birthright—I know that any promise to transform our citizenship scheme is sure to set off a debate.

But what, we should ask, is that debate really about? Why does it keep coming up? When we talk about birthright citizenship, we are talking about democracy—its fundamental component that grants equal status to every person born in this country and affords them all the same rights of citizenship.

Let’s briefly review. Although the 1787 Constitution did not bar Black Americans from citizenship, it also did not plainly state what made any person a citizen. The result was that Black Americans received profoundly uneven treatment before the law; most authorities leaned toward the view that color, with its implied links to slave status, disqualified Black Americans from citizenship. Black activists waged a long campaign arguing that, on the face of the Constitution and as a matter of natural rights, Black people were citizens by virtue of their birth on U.S. soil.

Notoriously, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the 1857 case Dred Scott v. Sandford, concluded that citizenship was beyond the reach of Black Americans; their race disqualified them. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, lawmakers remedied this circumstance: first in an 1862 opinion from Attorney General Edward Bates, then in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and finally in the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which installed birthright in the Constitution, guaranteeing that Black people and all those born in the United States were citizens.

Calls today to do away with birthright citizenship are, in large part, political theater, often a way to project a tough stance on immigration. DeSantis outlined only a very loose strategy, saying he would “force the courts and Congress to finally address this failed policy.” Trump, too, was light on specifics. For all the noise that his administration generated around doing away with birthright citizenship, which he threatened to do multiple times as president, nothing came of it. The meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment as we knew it before the Trump era remains unchanged.

Campaign pledges to end birthright citizenship might get people’s attention, but lawmakers have kept this objective alive in other quarters. Less well known, for example, is how in every session of Congress from 2007 to 2021, a Republican representative introduced something called the Birthright Citizenship Act. The legislation would have redefined the meaning of a minor clause in the Fourteenth Amendment—one that limits birthright status to persons “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. In 1868, this exception excluded the children of visiting diplomats and those of Native American sovereign nations. Today, some lawmakers propose to newly expand the meaning of this clause by defining children as subject to U.S. jurisdiction, and thus birthright citizens, only when they have one parent who is a U.S. citizen or national, a permanent resident residing in the United States, or an alien on active duty in the Armed Forces. In Congress, opposition to birthright simmers on the back burner, but it demands our vigilance lest it boil over.

When politicians dispute birthright, they also open up legal questions about where the power to interpret the Fourteenth Amendment resides. Trump suggested that with his authority, as exercised through an executive order, he could reinterpret who is subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and thus a birthright citizen. Members of Congress similarly have taken the view that that body can legislate the amendment’s meaning. Many legal commentators rightly argue that the U.S. Supreme Court has the final say when it comes to the meaning of the Constitution. Our recently constituted Court has not been tested on the issue of birthright, and we must allow for the possibility that it might defer to Congress or the president when it comes to interpreting its meaning.

When Trump first promised to undo birthright, I was primarily concerned about how immigrants and their U.S.-born children would be harmed by such a change. Today, this worry still figures importantly in my mind, but my concerns have grown broader. Calls to undo birthright, though couched in terms of immigration reform, ultimately aim to undo a key precept of our democracy: equitable access to citizenship. Birthright sets an even bar when it comes to being a citizen—all those born here are subject to the same threshold test, no matter whom they descended from. It ensures that, for those born in the United States, citizenship will not be conferred depending on their politics, race, faith, culture, gender, or sexuality. Birthright safeguards those born here from political leaders who would mete out citizenship as a reward or withhold it as a punishment.

The wielding of citizenship as a weapon is precisely what the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to prevent. In 1868, birthright undid the Dred Scott decision. It ensured that the right of Black Americans to belong to this nation was neither open to debate nor susceptible to shifting political whims. Since its ratification, the Fourteenth Amendment has guaranteed the belonging of some of the most vulnerable among us, including generations of children born to immigrant parents. It has protected marginalized, despised, and unpopular people who, when born here, do not need to fear exile or banishment. Birthright citizenship has always been a solution rather than a problem, and our democracy depends on it remaining just that.

Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, a professor of history, and a Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Source: What the Birthright-Citizenship Debate Is Really About

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Trump vows to end birthright citizenship for children of unauthorized immigrants if he wins in 2024

2023/06/01 Leave a comment

Usual floating to get media attention. Will be interesting to see if CPC picks up on change to Canadian birthright citizenship (former Minister Kenney tried in 2012):

Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday pledged to challenge a long-standing interpretation of the U.S. Constitution in an attempt to end birthright citizenship for children of unauthorized immigrants if he defeats President Biden in the 2024 election.

If he secures a second presidential term, Trump said he would issue an executive order during his first day back at the White House in January 2025 instructing the federal government to deny citizenship to children with parents who are not American citizens or legal permanent residents.

Under a decades-long interpretation of the Constitution, children born on U.S. soil are automatically bestowed American citizenship, even if their parents are not themselves citizens or legally present in the country. Some immigration hardliners have long criticized the policy, saying it encourages parents to come to the U.S. illegally. While he was in the White House, Trump repeatedly floated the idea of challenging the interpretation, but never took action.

In his announcement Tuesday, Trump portrayed the move as part of a broader crackdown on unauthorized immigrants and asylum-seekers that he has promised if he returns to the White House. He has also vowed to launch the largest immigration roundup and deportation operation in U.S. history.

“My policy will choke off a major incentive for continued illegal immigration, deter more migrants from coming and encourage many of the aliens Joe Biden has unlawfully let into our country to go back to their home countries. They must go back,” Trump said in a video message on Tuesday.

If Trump wins the 2024 presidential election and follows through on his promise, the move to end birthright citizenship for children of immigrants living in the U.S. without legal permission is all but certain to face significant legal challenges.

Is birthright citizenship in the Constitution?

The 14th Amendment of the Constitution, adopted following the Civil War, declares that all “persons born or naturalized in the United States” are “citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

“Any executive action that a president might try to end birthright citizenship would be challenged in court and would be likely struck down as unconstitutional,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration law professor at Cornell University.

While the move would likely not pass legal muster, Yale-Loehr added, it could be a beneficial campaign tactic for Trump, especially during the Republican primary.

“I think it’s pretty clear that, for political purposes, he thinks that this kind of announcement will appeal to his base. It shows that he has anti-immigration credentials. And most of his voters don’t know or don’t care about whether such an executive order would be legal,” Yale-Loehr said.

Ron DeSantis’ immigration policies

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the 2024 Republican presidential candidate currently Trump’s closest challenger in the polls, has also sought to make immigration a top issue of his campaign.

A measure championed by DeSantis that was recently passed by the Florida legislature will be among the strictest state immigration laws in American history. Among other things, it will invalidate driver’s licenses other states provide to unauthorized immigrants, require hospitals to document whether patients are in the country legally, fund efforts to relocate migrants to “sanctuary jurisdictions” and impose fines for employers who don’t verify the immigration status of workers.

In addition to sharply criticizing the Biden administration’s handling of the record number of migrant crossings reported along the southern border in recent years, Trump and DeSantis have feuded over which candidate has the toughest immigration platform.

DeSantis recently accused Trump of supporting “amnesty” by endorsing a bipartisan proposal that would have traded border barrier and security funds in exchange for the legalization of some unauthorized immigrants, including those brought to the U.S. as children.

Source: Trump vows to end birthright citizenship for children of unauthorized immigrants if he wins in 2024

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with

How Did Hasidic Jewry Become a Stronghold of Trumpism?

2020/12/03 Leave a comment

Of interest:

Is American Hasidism in crisis? After successfully rebuilding its institutions after the war, Hasidism in America has flourished. And yet, its response to COVID and its newfound reactionary political populism, leads us to ask the question: is something changing in contemporary Hasidism that’s worth examining more closely?

Much has been written lately about the politicization of the Hasidic world in America, particularly its full-throttled support of Donald Trump. In fact, Hasidic voting patterns now closely resemble those of evangelical Christians. Scholars and pundits have weighed in on this surprising political activism in a community that usually keeps a low profile and focuses on its internal needs. And this activism has become even more visible as Hasidic communities have flouted health guidelines in the COVD crisis and made a public health issue into a political one. While the fact of these phenomena have been well documented, what are some of the underlying conditions that have contributed to a kind of “perfect storm” of populist reactionary Hasidic activism?

Part of what we’re witnessing in this new Hasidic populism is another stage of Hasidic Americanization in the wake of the loss of the last vestiges of European authority. The great Hasidic figures from Eastern Europe commanded intense devotion and respect from their communities, representing an authentic world destroyed in the Holocaust. Others emerged to take their place but it’s arguable that the weight of authority of these masters was not replicated in their American or Israeli born successors.

This isn’t to argue that these new rebbes haven’t commanded respect; they certainly have. It’s simply to point out that the force of their authority is diminished in comparison to those who arrived in America from prewar Europe. Eastern Europe was the fertile ground of Hasidic aristocracy. America, Mandate Palestine, and Israel, stood in its shadow. The loss of first-hand exposure to those halcyon years diminished Hasidism’s luster and authenticity. It continues, albeit in a different register.

If this is true, it’s worth considering how it contributes to a rise of the Hasidic populism that’s taken to the streets to express disdain for the government and its health mandates. It’s a complicated situation and is certainly the result of many factors. In one sense, this is a classic example of a popular revolution when individuals without much authority somehow evoke a rebellion against authority (think of Castro and Che in Cuba), be it religious or civil, by touching the nerve of a rapidly growing community in crisis coupled with a weakened stature of leadership.

The transformation of COVID from a health crisis to a political movement in the Hasidic world is a phenomenon that merits deeper study. When and why did this happen? Why and how did street protests against mask mandates and synagogue and park closings turn into Trump rallies in Hasidic Brooklyn? It’s true that Trump espouses conservative values that many Hasidim identify with, but so did Ronald Reagan and he didn’t enjoy such passionate support. And Reagan arguably did more for Hasidim than Trump ever did when, in 1984, he granted them “disadvantaged minority status” enabling them to apply for federal funding for businesses.

Whether, in fact, this speaks to a significant shift in Hasidism’s politicization or not remains to be seen. What I’m pointing to here is the rise of a populist mind-set where a rabble-rousing radio talk show host and Hasidic outsider like Heshy Tischler, who has no authoritative role in the community whatsoever, can attract the attention of young Hasidic boys and compel them to take to the streets.

One could view this as a positive manifestation of the growing autonomy of these communities and their increased involvement in public political life. And yet, as I will suggest below, an unreconstructed Hasidism will invariably—and, given theological considerations, understandably—be attracted to a reactionary political agenda and autocratic leadership.

The Americanization of Hasidism 

Hasidism rose from the depths of Jewish traditional society in Eastern Europe during a tumultuous time. The Napoleonic Wars were changing the map of Europe, autocratic rule was slowly transforming into early stages of tolerance and later democracy. Emancipation may still have been decades away, but encroaching modernity from the West was making inroads into the traditional Jewish world, attracting some of its most talented youth.

In some way, Hasidism was both a rebellion against the internal autocracy of the rabbinic elite and the modernizing mind-set of the enlightenment (haskala). It made a play for both power and piety in a very unstable period. Among the challenges of a nascent Hasidic world was one of political alliances; in one case between Napoleon and the freedoms he promised, and in the other, Czar Alexander I and an autocracy that allowed Jewish enclaves to continue their traditional lives.

Similar debates made their way westward questioning whether emancipation was good for the Jews; that is, whether the modernization that accompanied the promise of freedom ultimately threatened the Jewish tradition. As told by Chaim Heilman in his Beit Rebbe, Shnuer Zalman of Liady offered a cogent assessment of the wager: if Napoleon wins, Jews will be materially successful but will suffer spiritually, and if Alexander wins, Jews will be materially impoverished but will spiritually flourish. Throughout its history, Hasidism has lived in the balance of that wager. It arguably filters through Hasidism’s entire negotiation with modernity. Perhaps until now.

America presented another way to understand this bargain. What we may be witnessing today is another layer of the complex process of the Americanization of Hasidism. The first stage may have been propagated by Eastern European Hasidic immigrants, many of whom were survivors of the Holocaust, in their initial reconstruction of Hasidic dynasties in America. Schneerson’s (Lubavitch) advocacy of a moment of silence in public school (supporting Jerry Falwell), his campaign to erect Hanukkah Menorahs in public squares, and his Noahide Law campaign to gentiles, all illustrate his deep belief in America.

And Teitelbaum’s attempt to secure public funding for special education in the yeshivot in the Satmar enclave, Kiryas Joel, speaks to the extent he too understood America as holding potential for his own religious vision. The Satmar enclave of Kiryas Joel isn’t a replica of something that existed in prewar Europe. It was, as David Myers and Naomi Stolzenberg write in their upcoming book, Teitelbaum’s American fantasy; an American shtetl.

In the street protests and general political activism in present day Hasidism we may be witnessing yet another iteration of Hasidism’s developing Americanism. While Hasidim have always supported political candidates and voted in relatively high numbers, most of the advocacy was primarily transactional; they supported candidates they thought could maximize their resources. In 2020, impromptu pro-Trump rallies in Flatbush and Boro Park, a pair of Brooklyn neighborhoods with high numbers of Orthodox Jews, illustrates a new kind of political populism seldom seen in communities that often prefer to stay out of the spotlight.

The question as to why Hasidim overwhelmingly supported an immoral, autocratic, and reactionary candidate with such verve and vigor is multivalent. One reading may have to do with a lopsided equation of integration. That is, on the one hand Hasidim are becoming politicized as a result of their developing Americanism, which values public political expression. At the same time, however, they haven’t revised their general worldview, which was built on earlier political realities, a theology and religious ideology founded on chosenness, and historic feelings of exclusion and resentment.

The “us vs. them” mentality that grew over time and the theology that informed traditional Jewish teaching in large part followed suit. In many ways the binary of “friend vs. enemy” plays into the Trump vision of America. Traditional Jews, like the Ultra-Orthodox Hasidim, have historically been attracted to strong autocratic leaders who shared their binary view of the world. In this sense, their support of Trump is predictable

The challenge of emancipation, or the “liberal social contract” with the Jews in Europe, required Jews to revise those ideological principles to become fully a part of larger society. Non-Orthodox Judaisms, Jewish secularisms, and to some extent Neo- and Modern Orthodoxy engaged this challenge in different ways. But American democracy demanded an even stronger revision.

American rabbi Mordecai Kaplan argued that chosenness simply could not survive American democracy intact. One cannot easily be full members of a democratic society and maintain a theologically exceptionalist status. He was right, until he was wrong. By the 1950s, sociologists talked of the “death of Orthodoxy” in America while Hasidism was just beginning to rebuild in this new land of tolerance—what Rabbi Schneerson called a “medina shel hesed” (a land of kindness). Whether and how Orthodoxy could bear the weight of American integrationism was an open question.

What the sociologists of the 1950s could not have predicted was the rise of the counter-culture that would re-frame America’s conformism into a multitude of expressions of difference, pluralism, and later, multiculturalism. This would not only save Orthodoxy but enable Hasidism to enter the public square with minimal ideological and theological revisions. Schneerson saw this in the 1960s more than any other American Jewish religious leader and his movement flourished, riding the wave of multiculturalism. One of the byproducts of the multicultural turn was the ability of more traditional Jewish communities, Hasidim among them, to maintain strict observance and retain their ideological and theological commitments while increasingly becoming a part of American society. By the 1960s, acculturation was no longer a prerequisite for integration. Hasidim entered the public square without having to pay much of a theological or ideological price. The “liberal social contract” no longer carried the weight it once did.

The problem, however, is that Hasidim entered the public square with their old-world chauvinistic and xenophobic inclinations intact and residual fears of the left stemming from the days when the left meant socialism in Europe and when Russia used communism as a tool to attack and demolish religion. Given Jews’ complicated relationship with race, and African Americans in particular, this fear easily transformed into a belief that the progressive left, in part in the BLM movement, was inherently anti-religious, and antisemitic. Interestingly, the antisemitism of the right seemed less threatening, perhaps more familiar, than the antisemitism of the left. Trump subtly exonerating the marchers at Charlottesville seemed less problematic than Linda Sarsour’s anti-Zionism. Even though they weren’t Zionists, “Jews will not replace us” seemed less threatening to the Hasidim than “Israel is a colonialist state.”

Another paradoxical twist in this story is that the antisemitism of the left today in America is largely targeting Zionism, which the Hasidim largely don’t support either, albeit for very different reasons. Thus, what’s emerged is a kind of Hasidic anti-Zionist pro-Israelism; tacit support for Israel as an act of tribal fidelity rather than any form of Zionism. Ask a Hasidic Jew touting Trump’s moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem whether he is a “Zionist” and he will think you’re crazy. Anti-Zionism has been part of the very fabric of Hasidic Judaism for a long time, even now in muted form. But somehow without abandoning that, they found a way to support Israel and deem left-wing anti-Zionism a form of antisemitism, while their form of anti-Zionism is protecting Judaism.

The Trumpization of Hasidic Jewry should not be surprising and it can be thought of as the byproduct of multiculturalism’s enabling. When Hasidic groups can enter the public square without compromising their theological and ideological commitments—that is, without a “liberal social contract”—they can easily be attracted to right-wing reactionary movements. They will support the Czar over Napoleon.

In earlier times, as Shneur Zalman of Liady suggested, they had to compromise their material wealth for the sake of spiritual survival. In America that’s no longer necessary. They can have both and in addition they can partner with a segment of the majority (white evangelicals) that has ostensibly found its own tacit acceptance of the Jews through its own version of Zionism. Just as Hasidim can be anti-Zionist and pro-Israel, evangelicals can be antisemitic and pro-Israel. It’s not very provocative to say that when Hasidic ideology, founded on the kabbalistic tradition, becomes politicized, it can easily support a kind of autocracy—as long as they are the beneficiaries.

On this reading, the origin of Hasidic Trumpism may be Schneerson himself. It was Schneerson who believed Hasidic Jews could enter the public square without sacrificing any of their ideological positions. He couldn’t have predicted Trump but he enabled the Hasidic support of a candidate not merely as Jews, but as “Americans,” while holding onto views that reflect a Jewish experience of the old world.

Schneerson’s success is undeniable, but we may be seeing the dark side of that success in Hasidic Trumpism. Chabad has been adept at presenting its Jewish vision in the form of a sweetened Judaism to non-religious Jews and to the world more generally. But the support of a political figure who expresses a different form of chauvinism is telling in regards to how the deep-seated ideological core of Chabad, and Hasidism more generally, remains operational.

Source: How Did Hasidic Jewry Become a Stronghold of Trumpism?

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , , , ,

Commentary: The Claremont Institute and Trump’s Politics of White Fear

2020/09/12 Leave a comment

More useful background on the anti-immigration zealots:

An hour east of Hollywood, where America’s cultural fetish for stories of apocalypse and antiheroes is made, the Claremont Institute lies in a nondescript beige building in the Pomona Valley. Created in 1979 to educate a new generation of conservative leaders through the study and reinterpretation of the American founding, the think tank has long peddled dystopian delusions, including that the U.S. faces an existential threat from a “Third World” invasion; that diversity “dissolves” the country’s unity; and that the many-headed monster of “wokeness,” “identity politics,” and “multiculturalism” seeks to “destroy the American way of life.”

“The mission of the Claremont Institute is to save Western civilization,” buttoned-up president Ryan Williams, who has been with the institute since 2005, declares in a welcome video on the Claremont’s YouTube page. “We’ve always aimed high.”

The institute was founded by students of the political scientist Harry Jaffa, who in the 1960s helped radicalize the Republican Party through his participation in the presidential campaign of the right-wing zealot Barry Goldwater, writing the lines of his acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican National Convention: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Jaffa was a prolific author and scholar of Abraham Lincoln and other founders. He likened “political correctness” to Leninism and Stalinism.

The Claremont Institute, which has no affiliation with the Claremont colleges, publishes the Claremont Review of Books and awards fellowships to applicants interested in studying the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and other founding documents. Last year, it awarded a fellowship to Jack Posobiec, a Pizzagate conspiracy theorist with ties to neo-fascist groups, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The institute teaches and publishes new takes on America’s founding that whitewash history, insisting that the country was never racist and that those who argue otherwise seek to annihilate the United States. The mission statement says it seeks to “restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life.” Its scholars launder white supremacist ideas through the language of heritage and the self-aware performance of erudition.

Most recently, Claremont Institute helped perpetuate the racist birther lie that Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris isn’t a legitimate American citizen. Senior fellow John C. Eastman wrote the debunked article in Newsweekquestioning Harris’s citizenship with his tortured reading of the Constitution. The institute has long challenged birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment. Newsweek editors have since apologized for the op-ed, albeit after saying it had “nothing to do with racist birtherism.” Notably, Newsweek opinion editor Josh Hammer is a former fellow of the institute. Trump refused to condemn the birther lie, calling Eastman “brilliant” and saying he won’t be “pursuing” the theory but adding, “You would’ve thought [Harris] would’ve been vetted by Sleepy Joe.”

It is no accident that the white supremacist fantasies buttressing Trump’s reelection campaign were born in Los Angeles County. The region gave us Trump’s chief advisor and top speechwriter, Stephen Miller, whose parents have donated to the Claremont Institute and whose indoctrination in white supremacist ideas I report on in my book Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda. Miller’s father Michael is a former Democrat who veered right in his politics after troubles with his real estate company led him to complain of the “ridiculous liberal elite” and their intrusion into his personal and business affairs, according to his brother-in-law David Glosser and others who knew him. He complained that universities were all controlled by left-wing extremists, a view espoused by the Claremont Institute.

California revealed the political utility of white fear for the state’s Republican Party in the ‘90s of Miller’s youth, when non-Hispanic white people became a minority in the state, triggering a backlash with bipartisan attacks on bilingual education, affirmative action and more. In 1994, deeply unpopular Republican Governor Pete Wilson won reelection by blaming all of the state’s problems on a migrant “invasion.” Proposition 187, launched that year in Orange County by people fearing a “Third World” takeover, targeted social services for undocumented migrants, including public school for migrant children. (The prop was later found unconstitutional).

In his 1996 book The Coming White Minority, Dale Maharidge—a professor of journalism at Columbia University—predicted of California: “The depth of white fear is underestimated … these anxieties will blow east like a bad Pacific storm as whites are outnumbered in other parts of the country.”

The wind that blew the white fear east came from think tanks like the Claremont Institute, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and other groups funded by the Scaife Foundations that helped give white supremacist ideas a pseudo-intellectual air and an exciting cinematic veneer by casting them as the “light” side in a battle between light and dark forces. Located in Sherman Oaks,  the David Horowitz Freedom Center is led by David Horowitz, Miller’s lifelong mentor, who says liberals pose “an existential threat” to the country because of their allyship with Muslims and others. Both the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the Claremont Institute co-sponsored an event this April to bring the Dutch politician and Islamophobe Geert Wilders to Chapman University and screen a film painting Muslims as a danger to civilization. Both think tanks deny the existence of systemic racism against dark-skinned people while at the same time arguing that multiculturalism is deadly to America. The Claremont Institute’s podcast cheekily debates the merits of eugenics, and features a clip from the band Imagine Dragons’ song “Monster”: “I’m taking a stand to escape what’s inside me: a monster, a monster…and it keeps getting stronger!”

Members of California’s far right seem to revel in their antihero status. When I visited the Claremont Institute last year, president Ryan Williams told me conservatives like him see human nature as fixed and flawed, unlike liberals who see it as “perfectible.” The policies they support reflect their pessimistic view of humankind. They see themselves as clear-eyed warriors in a dystopian drama, living out the white supremacist conspiracy theory that says brown and Black people are replacing whites and endangering civilization. This false notion of white genocide, or the “great replacement theory,” has motivated self-styled heroes to commit acts of white terrorism, such as the massacre of 23 people in El Paso, Texas, last summer.

California has also bred commentators such as Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson, whose Hollywood-style apocalypse-mongering was noted with appreciation by the Claremont Institute: “[Republicans] would do well to follow Tucker Carlon’s lead. Night after night, in appropriately apocalyptic terms, Tucker explains the revolution,” the chairman of the Claremont Institute’s board, Thomas D. Klingenstein, told Orange County conservatives in August. Carlson has called himself a “libertarian right-winger,” which is how Miller identified in college.

In California, the myth of rugged, rigid, ruthless individualism that feeds right-wing libertarianism is trafficked like a drug alongside similarly addictive dystopian fantasies that inflate self-importance. Miller recently tried to justify the use of federal forces to crack down on antiracist protesters by telling Carlson on his show, “This is about the survival of this country and we will not back down.”

California conservatives like Miller and Tucker Carlson have mastered the art of conflating people of color and their allies with welfare-guzzling criminals: dog whistling, demonizing, and declaring doomsday in response to anything threatening the dominance of white men. The birther lie attacking Senator Harris is rooted in apocalyptic racism, as is Trump’s immigration agenda.

Miller’s immigration policies come from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an anti-immigration think tank created by John Tanton, a white nationalist who believed in population control for non-white people and led successful efforts in California to mandate English as the official language. Tanton, who passed away in 2019, sought to coordinate attacks on affirmative action with Frederick R. Lynch, whose article “Immigration Nightmares,” was published by the Claremont Review of Books in 2003, arguing that California was turning into “Mexifornia.” Tanton also published an English translation of a novel about the destruction of the white world by subhuman brown refugees, The Camp of the Saints, which spoke to Miller and which he promoted through Breitbart in 2015.

It’s important to connect the dots between the White House and California’s long legacy of white supremacy to demonstrate that Trumpism is not an aberration but rather the culmination of long-fueled politics of hate. In 1991, when Miller was five years old in his home city of Santa Monica in 1991, hundreds of families with Hispanic surnames received a letter in their mailboxes that appeared to be from the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District headquarters. It featured the district’s bulk-mail permit number and address labels. Inside was a typed, one-page hate screed. The author said Mexicans were making the community unsafe and using up welfare. It called Mexicans “brown animals” and read: “We’ll gas you like Hitler gassed the Jews.”

The screed denied the existence of racism among white people and accused Mexicans of being “the real racists.” It singled out Mexican American Santa Monica High School alumnus Oscar de la Torre, alleging that he had been elected student body president the previous year because he was Mexican. “Why should there be a double standard for these wild beasts?” the letter asked. It called for a boycott of Mexican celebrations such as Cinco de Mayo, and of the student group MEChA, the Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán. The letter said Mexicans “infest our community with gays and lesbians.” It encouraged them to put on bulletproof vests and get ready for the gun battle.

De la Torre was 19 at the time, and his family received the screed under the letterhead of a “Samohi Assn. for the Advancement of Conservative White Americans” (Samohi is a nickname for Santa Monica High School). De la Torre called for an investigation of the hate crime. Police said they suspected someone in the school was responsible, but the crime remains unsolved three decades later. A public records request turned up a single police report. In an interview last year, de la Torre told me the lack of a resolution is indicative of how Santa Monica leaders felt, and feel, about racism. “Put it under the rug, let’s not talk about it,” he says.

In 2001, ten years after the letter was distributed, de la Torre was a counselor at Samohi and co-chaired a committee on equality. Stephen Miller, then a teenager, showed up to one of the first meetings. “Racism does not exist,” de la Torre says Miller told him. According to de la Torre, Miller also said the school was excusing black and Hispanic misbehavior by holding those students to a lower standard. Miller became a regular at the meetings, arguing against bilingual education, Spanish-language announcements, and multicultural activities such as Cinco de Mayo celebrations. He reportedly said the club for gay people was ruining the school.

It didn’t escape de la Torre that Miller’s rhetoric echoed that 1991 hate letter. Miller came to personify the nameless author who had haunted de la Torre for years.

“Stephen Miller did not invent that ideology,” he says. “He learned it from somewhere. And the person who wrote that letter also learned it. These feelings that divide our country, they exist, they can morph, they can grow.”

Jean Guerrero’s book, Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda, is on stands now.

Source: Commentary: The Claremont Institute and Trump’s Politics of White Fear

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , , , ,

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