No Room at the Inn
“Our Country’s full – we’re full – no one can come in” – Donald Trump 4/6/19
President Trump has declared our nation closed. He says “we’re full,” whatever that means. He’s fired or left vacant virtually the entire top management of the Department of Homeland Security; they aren’t giving him the options he wants to deal with the border “crisis.” There’s so much more to Homeland Security than ICE and the Border Patrol; it’s worrying that they may not be so focused on terrorism, or internet security, or election infrastructure.
The President is even rumored to want to fire the Homeland Security Counsel, the head lawyer in the agency. The counsel keeps saying “no,” they can’t ignore court orders and laws, they can’t just “do what Trump wants.” Mr. Trump is instead putting his alt-right advisor Stephen Miller “in charge” of the border situation. Miller is one of the authors of the child separation policy (and wants to bring it back again) and has had his ideas stymied again and again by the Federal Courts, even as recently as this week.
Meanwhile, the President has doubled the number of H-2B visas. These are worker visas issued to “guest workers,” mostly from Mexico, who serve as landscapers, and workers in hotels and amusement parks. He has added 30,000 more visas to the program. Maybe we are “sort-of” closed.
There is no question that there are more migrants at the border than in the past few years. The situation in the Northern Triangle of Central America has gotten worse, that is the condition driving migration. The American mantra, “Send me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free,” is now “go back, were closed,” unless you’re a good gardener or hotel maid for Mara Lago. Trump needs sixty-one workers there, and more than 400 total at his properties. He doesn’t seem to be able to afford Americans.
Current asylum laws and treaties came as a result of World War II. The world recognized that the cost of the Holocaust was exacerbated by the unwillingness of nations to accept Jews and others running from the Nazis. The United States strictly limited immigration, and many were trapped in Europe to face concentration camps and gas chambers. After the war, the United Nations developed a “right to asylum” based on credible fear of persecution or harm. The United States was a leader in those negotiations, and signed onto the treaties.
Stephen Miller’s ancestry belies his political positions: his Jewish family emigrated from Eastern Europe to escape pogroms in the early part of the 20thcentury. But his view of the migrants leaving the Northern Triangle is different, he sees them as both a racial and political threat to his ideology. Miller fears the “browning” of America, where the white population for the first time is faced with a loss of majority. Regardless of the policy at the border, within twenty years America will be “majority-minority” nation. It’s not just racial, the nation of 2040 is more likely to support the Democrats rather than Republicans who have committed to a political death sentence by harnessing themselves to the “white middle class.”
So instead of following US law and treaties and sending more judges to adjudicate asylum claims, the Trump Administration has slowed the process down, stacking the migrants in Mexican border towns, then blamed Mexico for the migrants trying to cross illegally. Their strategies have been struck down by Federal Judges time and time again, including the child separation strategy to deter migration, and the new MPP policy of denying migrants who reach US soil the right to request asylum.
The Dustin Hoffman movie of the 1990’s, Wag the Dog, was a story of a President beset by scandal, who created a war in the Balkans to take the country’s mind off of his personal problems. This President is creating a similar crisis at the Southern Border; trying to focus away from his ongoing legal issues. It’s a “win-win” for him, it not only distracts but also works for him politically. The Trump Administration has clearly determined on a 2020 election strategy of “threading the electoral needle” once again by winning with a minority vote. They can only make this work by gaining a huge turnout from the 40% that supports Mr. Trump, the “…I could shoot someone in the middle of 5thAvenue” supporters. Trump’s manufactured crisis on the border fits the bill.
