gracchusdixit

To hear Donald Trump and his sycophantic enablers tell the tale, the United States of America is being overwhelmed by a tsunami of illegal immigrants who pose an existential threat, not only to this country, but to “civilization” itself. Bellowing in Hitlerian terms that these desperate people are “vermin poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump has declared his intention, if he regains the White House ten months from now, to use the military to expel them from the country or to lock them away in what used to be called “concentration camps”.

Far from alienating voters, this vicious rhetoric has thus far served Trump well. In Iowa, where he clobbered the pathetic remaining candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, the number one issue was immigration. Even in New Hampshire, where one might have expected a more rational response, angry fantasies about the dangers of immigration loomed large. All this, despite the fact that these small and comparatively isolated states are among the most lily-white in the nation, in which immigrants are only slightly less rare than unicorns and just about as dangerous.

If Trump succeeds in defeating Joe Biden this November—the horrific possibility of which seems likelier by the day—the proximate cause will surely be America’s hysterical overreaction to the so-called “crisis at the border”.

As if that prospect weren’t depressing enough, Joe Biden himself has all but abandoned his promise to bring about a more humane immigration regime, in effect kowtowing to Trump’s preposterous and vicious claims. It would seem that the geriatric establishment in charge of the Democratic Party is terrified that if their geriatric president dared to tell the American people the truth, both he and they would soon be out of work.

And what is the truth?

That truth is that the “crisis at the border” is a hoax conjured up to serve the demagogic purposes of a nihilistic Republican Party that has no political program beyond slavishly supporting Donald Trump, without regard for facts or evidence, common sense or common decency.

The truth is that millions of helpless yet hopeful people yearn to immigrate to the United States legally, as they have for generations, but we make it all but impossible for them to do so, not because they pose any sort of threat but, rather, because we refuse to let them in. Fewer than 15 percent of Americans were born outside this country. In neighboring Canada, the number is 21 percent. Indeed, the number of immigrants in this country, as a share of our total population, is close to an all-time low, ranking us 56th in the world.

The truth is that, far from being a land that welcomes the “huddled masses yearning to be free,” our country is deeply xenophobic. Not only do we prevent immigrants from entering our country legally, we make it even harder for them to become citizens. Still worse, we turn our backs on those seeking asylum from the chaos and violence created by our very own political and economic misdeeds: countless CIA coups against democratically elected governments, innumerable assassinations of left-leaning politicians, and the utterly immoral practice of propping up right-wing dictators whose only virtue is their willingness to do the bidding of our nation’s biggest corporations.

The ultimate truth is that the “crisis at the border” is not caused by desperate immigrants and refugees trying to get in; it is caused by the cruel and perverse efforts of the United States to keep them out.

No amount of truth, however, is or will ever be enough to prevent right-wing fear-mongers from demonizing immigrants and peddling outrageous lies to justify their authoritarian purposes. To cite but one example, a “senior research fellow” at the Heritage Foundation named Robert Rector, posing as an expert on immigration, recently testified before Congress. Whatever expertise Mr. Rector may or may not possess, the Heritage Foundation is little more than a front for the anti-democratic agenda of the right-wing billionaires who control the Republican Party and have saddled us with the conservative majority now in charge of the Supreme Court. It was therefore not surprising that Mr. Rector’s testimony was riddled with falsehoods and misrepresentations. Here is one of the most egregious:

An extensive study by the National Academies of Science (NAS), “The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration,”…confirms that immigrants with low levels of education impose large fiscal burdens on U.S. taxpayers.

And here is the actual text of the study Rector cites:

“The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration” finds that the long-term impact of immigration on the wages and employment of native-born workers overall is very small…This report concludes that immigration has an overall positive impact on long-run economic growth in the U.S.

From the very first day Europeans set foot on the North American continent, searching for a better life, hoping to escape the political, social, and economic tyrannies that oppressed them at home, one wave of immigration after another has enlarged and enriched the nation. What would this country be without the millions of Irish, Italian, German, Jewish, Dutch, and Scandinavian immigrants who poured into this country in the 19th and early 20th centuries? Why do we imagine that the contributions of Spanish-speaking or Asian immigrants will be any less?

The terrible truth is that, throughout the tortured history of our nation, the immigrants who were lucky enough to get here first have routinely demonized those who followed. It wasn’t that long ago when the high-and-mighty descendants of the English Protestants who settled New England were decrying the arrival of Catholic immigrants from famine-ridden Ireland and impoverished Italy, Jewish refugees from the pogroms of Imperial Russia, or Poles and Slavs striving to escape centuries of oppression, war, and rapine. The irony is that the descendants of those once despised and downtrodden immigrants now eagerly embrace the brutalizing demagoguery of Donald Trump, because the immigrants he demonizes have brown or black skins and speak Spanish, Chinese, or Hindi.

The anodyne and shopworn cliché that the United States is “a nation of immigrants” misses the point. The point is that, without immigrants, the United States would not exist at all. Without a steady influx of immigrants, the population of the United States would age and wither on the vine, like the populations of so many European countries. Far from being a drain on our economy or a threat to our culture, immigrants are, as they have always been, the very lifeblood of the nation.