Trump's Garbage Can Attack on Immigrants
When was the last time we heard the words "internment camps?" They were a Hitler thing, and then a failed Eisenhower thing. Now, Garbage Can Man is making it his thing, aimed at black and brown folks.
Is your America a “garbage can for the world?” Mine isn’t, but apparently Donald Trump’s America is.
In using that strange phrase, Trump says the US is a “nation in decline,” dominated by murderous immigrant gangs that will overrun cities, small towns, some states and the entire country if he’s not elected. Factories will shutter. Farmers will lose their farms. The US, he says, will face an economic “blood bath,” all because black and brown folks have crossed our southern borders and are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Come on, folks, really?
Trump routinely describes these black and brown immigrants who have come to the US illegally as murderers, rapists and people from “insane asylums.” He's promised to track down and imprison millions of immigrants in internment camps, and then deport them. So let’s see if we can figure out who he may be talking about, and how they might be affected.
The Latino immigrants I know have kept my lawn pretty nice, taken care of my pool and have helped to cut down trees near me. One drives the ice cream truck that serves our neighborhood, and another very nice woman has baby-sat my grandchildren. I’ve worked directly in journalism with many people with Latino surnames, and I know of several people with Latino names that run developing small businesses.
Maybe all these folks are here legally, maybe they’re not. Frankly, I really don’t care. These aren’t criminals or insane maniacs. They’re hard working, they’re exceedingly polite and they care about the quality of their work. And I seriously doubt any one of them is a former insane asylum denizen, though I do have my concerns about Trump and his increasingly incoherent anger.
Have there been crimes committed by undocumented immigrants on Long Island, where I live? There have been, including the existence of some gang activity, but they’ve been well-handled by local police and the biggest criminal case around here involves a very large, very white New York City architect charged with the murder of several women.
A study in Texas – think about this now, we’re talking Texas here -- found that undocumented immigrants there are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born US citizens for violent and drug crimes, and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes. The study was done by the non-partisan National Institute of Justice examining data from the Texas Department of Public Safety.
I suppose you could argue that if we didn’t have any illegal immigrants at all, our national crime rate — which has fallen steadily under the Biden-Harris team — would be a bit lower. Sure, I get that. But it would be a tiny bit, and we’d also have to figure out how to fill all the jobs these folks are now doing, at the level we’re paying for their work, not to mention identifying who will be willing to pick the vegetables we eat.
I’ve emphasized here that the immigrants Trump focuses on are largely black and brown-skinned. You think his message isn’t racist?
Come on, folks. He won’t be arresting and deporting lily-white immigrants. His wife, you’ll recall, emigrated from Slovenia as did her parents, who came here as part of a program Trump wants to end. And how about his buddy, South African-born Elon Musk, the guy now pouring millions of dollars into Trump’s campaign and using the social media site he owns as a megaphone for Trump’s lies
According to a Washington Post story on Sunday, when Musk came to the U.S. from South Africa, he remained illegally in the US for quite awhile after ditching a graduate studies program to work here full time. He’s never acknowledged this, of course, but Post reporters Maria Sacchetti, Faiz Siddiqui and Nick Miroff talked to former business associates and mined court records and company documents to determine it.
But let’s ignore this little tidbit on Musk, who grew up rich like Trump, and turn our attention the potentially dangerous effects of Trump’s hateful attack on the black and brown folk who have arrived her over the years, and by whatever means, to seek a better life.
Trump’s plan mirrors a 1954 effort under Dwight Eisenhower that was officially referred to at the time as Operation Wetback. The tactics back then included border agents and police descending on poor neighborhoods, demanding immediate identification from anyone on the street, invading private homes in the middle of the night, and raiding businesses.
With no need to allow these people a hearing, and without any legitimate oversight, the agents often seized and deported people who were lawfully in the country, including some American citizens. A close look at the historic record shows that many of the interned had their personal belongings stolen, and some died.
Why haven’t we heard more about the horribly-named Operation Wetback? It was a shameful moment in American life, and we have a tendency to hide such moments under the covers. Now, let’s bring this idea forward to today. The goal, in my view, should be to work forward on the immigration issue, as Kamala Harris has suggested, not backward as Trump is wont to do.
We need to create a plan to improve the border situation, protect good people already here, and put some serious money behind it. We don’t want to cut off immigration altogether, we just want to make the system more easily dealt with for immigrants already here, for those who want to come here to improve their lives, and for our own need to adequately police the border based on our national interests.
The problem isn’t actually the immigrants themselves, despite Trump’s hateful misinformation about them. The problem is a broken US Congress.
Congress has failed to improve the US immigration system over more than four decades despite several attempts. In 1986, you may recall, the Immigration Reform and Control Act was passed under Ronald Reagan. While it granted legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants, it failed to significantly reduce the flow of new undocumented immigrants due to inadequate border security and enforcement challenges.
Since then, there’s been little progress despite numerous efforts.
The latest push came last year in a non-partisan bill that would have meant the hiring of 1,500 more border agents and officers, and paid for 100 more inspection machines to detect the drug fentanyl. It would have allowed an immigration cutoff at a certain level, and the bill would have dramatically strengthened the legal system that decides who can come in and who can’t, moving it along in a decidedly quicker way.
But Trump and his MAGA minions in Congress tanked the bill, concerned that it would take away his use of immigration as an election issue. And Trump, as is his way, is taking advantage of Congress’s abject inability to deal with the problem by demonizing anyone whose skin is brown or black, and who has come to America to find a better life.
Are we ready for armed police or National Guard members trolling our neighborhoods and stopping anyone with brown and black skin to demand that they instantly produce papers or be arrested? What happens if the folks stopped decide to run, and some will? Do we want weapons to be fired in those neighborhoods, or frankly any neighborhood where there might be kids playing in the streets?
Do we want established families broken up, and small businesses destroyed? Do we want police or military folk breaking into people’s homes, demanding papers, scaring children and violently grabbing any adult who disagrees in even the slightest manner? All of this apparently occurred in 1954 under Operation Wetback, according to the historical record.
People will die this time through, as well. I know it and, and if you’re being honest, you know it too. Meanwhile, the costs to our country, both financially and morally, will be immense. Trump apparently sees Adolph Hitler, who killed 6 million Jews, as someone who “did some good things” and
Vladimir Putin, who has killed off several political foes, as his models for how he’ll run the country.
My newest label for Trump is “garbage can man.” I think it fits pretty well. How about you?