A NATIONAL EMERGENCY

The United States is facing a national emergency. But it’s not the one that President Donald Trump just declared. Indeed, Donald Trump is the first and last name of the emergency, one that has nothing to do with illegal immigration, the incidence of which is at an all-time low, but with the president’s consistent efforts to circumvent and undermine democracy while trafficking in lies and titillating his most reactionary base.

Finding ways to duck under and around the rules is not something alien to Trump’s modus operandi. He has turned profiting from bankruptcy loopholes, skirting taxes and non-payment of providers into a sort of cottage industry that has been, perhaps, as much of a core activity in his business dealings as real estate, construction, hotels and casinos have. But it is, clearly, alien to the office of the presidency of the United States. True, not all presidents in living memory have been the choir boy type. But all of them have understood the gravity of the post and responsibilities bestowed on them and the need to govern for all Americans, not just a small proportion of them.

Past presidents have, in short, bowed to the checks and balances imposed by every properly functioning democratic system and by the US Constitution. Trump has not. Just as in his businesses where he has sought to slip past state, local and federal legal codes, as president, he is intent on finding ways around the highest law of the land. And he has further sought to ridicule and vilify the liberal democratic system as a whole in the minds of his most blindly loyal base.

In this sense, the current president of the United States is a clear and present danger to democracy. And his latest attempt to bypass the Legislative Branch by declaring a “national emergency” on the US southern border (an emergency that only exists in his mind and in those of his most xenophobic followers) is a patent example of the disdain with which he views the democratic process and of the invented dread with which he manipulates and indoctrinates the simplest among his constituents. Furthermore, this is a dog-eared page from the playbook of would-be tyrants of every color around the world.

Speaking of tyrants, on numerous occasions, Donald Trump has openly expressed his admiration for, friendship with and trust in the authoritarian leaders of other nations, who should arguably be viewed as potential or effective enemies of the United States, and surely as enemies of democracy. He has demonstrated this bizarre attitude with regard to every dictator from Kim Jong Un (the murderous absolute ruler of North Korea who literally views himself as a god and who has threatened to nuke the Unites States), to ruthless Filipino leader Rodrigo Duterte, who has dispensed “justice” in his country from the barrel of a gun—sometimes wielded by Duterte himself—with a number of other universally condemned dictators in between also being inducted, unsolicited, into the Trump gratuitous admiration society.

Of Kim Jong Un (after first insulting him as “little rocket man” and threatening him with the mass destruction of North Korea) Trump would eventually come full circle and say, “You gotta give him credit. How many young guys—he was, like, 26 or 25 when his father died—take over these tough generals, and all of a sudden ... he goes in, he takes over, and he's the boss. It's incredible. He wiped out the uncle, he wiped out this one, that one. I mean, this guy doesn't play games. And we can't play games with him.” In other words, killing the competition seemed to Trump to be an admirable and respect-worthy leadership trait. This would seem to give new meaning to Trump’s campaign statement—an expression of desire?—that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters.”

Trump said he had “a great relationship” with Rodrigo Duterte, who heads up The Philippines’ current “thugocracy”, which makes former dictator Ferdinand Marcos’s brutal kleptocracy look almost tame by comparison. Trump blithely ignored the worldwide discussion swirling around Duterte’s abominable human rights record which includes literally thousands upon thousands of extrajudicial killings carried out by his government with not only the Filipino strongman’s overt approval but also with his self-confessed participation.

On a state visit to Manila, the US president ignored the issue of human rights altogether and chose to concentrate on his favorite subject: himself.  “It was red carpet like nobody, I think, has probably ever received,” Trump said. “And that really is a sign of respect, perhaps for me a little, but really for our county. And I’m really proud of that.” It might be noted that the way to show respect for the United States is by emulating its liberal democratic tenets and the rule of law, not by imposing or praising a bloody dictatorship. And receiving an extraordinarily warm welcome from a sitting tyrant is something that the leader of the world’s largest democracy should, perhaps, take with suspicion or at least with a grain of salt. But it seems apparent that the advancement of democracy does not form part of the current president’s core beliefs.

Trump has also had words of praise for Syrian dictator Bashad al-Assad, comparing him favorably against by then lame duck US President Barack Obama. “I think in terms of leadership,” Trump said, “he's getting an A and our president (Obama) is not doing so well.”

A staunch ally and virtual dependent of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, Assad is perhaps the most universally condemned authoritarian leader among Western democracies. He is maintained in power (which he inherited from his autocratic father) by Russian military and political backing, despite being directly responsible for the deaths, incarceration and torture of tens of thousands of his own people as well as for triggering the worst civil (and proxy) war in recent memory—a war which has claimed the lives of more than half a million Syrians and has sparked the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II. Recently, Trump announced that US troops would be pulled out of Syria entirely, thus abdicating American resistance to Russia’s geopolitical advancement in that part of the Middle East, and giving Assad a freer hand to crush all opposition to his historically bloody dictatorial regime.

Another authoritarian leader that Trump has praised is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. According to Trump, “Frankly, he’s getting very high marks. He’s also been working with the United States. We have a great friendship and the (two) countries—I think we’re right now as close as we’ve ever been.” He went on to say that “a lot of that has to do with a personal relationship.”

Trump made these statements right after Erdogan’s harshest crackdown yet on his opponents, the media and civil society as a whole. Ever since he first came to power, Erdogan has sought to gradually choke the life out of Turkish democracy. Parallel to this, he has taken Turkey from being a staunch NATO ally on the doorstep of the Middle East to sidling up to Vladimir Putin next door to the country in which Russia is exercising its greatest Middle East influence.

In the Syrian War, Erdogan has played both sides against the middle, pretending to be on the side of the US-led coalition fighting ISIL, but continuing his bitter war against that coalition’s Kurdish allies who have provided the most effective ground-fighting of any combat group against ISIL and other pro-Assad forces. The thanks that Trump has given to the Kurds is to announce US withdrawal and to abandon them to their fate in the face of Erdogan’s vow to wipe them out.

There are persistent reports that, within his delusions of grandeur, Erdogan is even entertaining the dream of seeking to recapture some of the past glory and unbridled expansionism of the now-defunct Ottoman Empire, which ruled a vast part of the world from the 14^th to the early 20^th centuries.

Regarding Egyptian authoritarian Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Trump has said, “We agree on so many things. I just want to let everybody know in case there was any doubt that we are very much behind President el-Sisi. He’s done a fantastic job in a very difficult situation.”

El-Sisi seized power in Egypt by means of a military coup following the country’s fleeting romance with democracy resulting from the Arab Spring uprisings. Trump’s own Department of State has accused el-Sisi of “excessive use of force by security forces, deficiencies in due process, and the suppression of civil liberties.” The civil liberties advocacy group Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, reports that el-Sisi’s regime has “maintained its zero-tolerance policy towards dissent,” adding that it has encouraged “near-absolute impunity for abuses by security forces under the pretext of fighting ‘terrorism.’”

Even China’s so-called “paramount leader”, Xi Jinping, has gotten a shout-out from Trump, despite the trade war that the US president has sparked between the world’s two most powerful economies. Last year, CNN reported obtaining a recording of Trump’s comments during a Mar a Lago gathering praising the Chinese strongman, in which he said, among other things, “He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.”

Everywhere else in the Western world and in much of China itself, Xi’s chairman-for-life power grab within the country’s all-powerful Communist Party (shades of Stalin and Mao) was seen as a highly negative authoritarian trend that drew sharp and widespread criticism. The fact that Trump alone saw it as positive and even “something we’ll have to give a shot someday” is telling...and chilling.

But Trump’s greatest praise and deference have been consistently reserved for Vladimir Putin, who, with the help of his straw man Dimitry Medvedev, has managed to perpetuate his position as the supreme leader of the Russian Federation for nearly two decades, with no sign of giving up that seat any time soon. His regime’s suppression of resistance in Georgia, it’s annexation of Crimea and its military action against Ukraine, as well as its aggressive role in the Syrian (proxy) War in favor of the anti-Western Assad regime have all put America’s Western allies on red alert since Putin has made no secret of his desire to return Russia to the height of its power and hegemony under the Czarist empire and the Soviet Union.

Trump, meanwhile, has famously never had any criticism for Putin’s regime. In fact he has praised it on multiple occasions. For instance:

Just prior to the 2018 US-Russia Helsinki summit, “I'd have a very good relationship with President Putin if we spend time together.” And also in the run-up to the summit, "Hopefully someday, maybe he’ll be a friend. It could happen...”

He also said, “You know what? Putin’s fine. He’s fine. We’re all fine. We’re people.” And when former Fox News superstar Bill O’Reilly reminded Trump that Putin was a dictator and “a killer,” Trump fired back, “There are a lot of killers. Do you think our country is so innocent?”

The cruelest cut of all was when 13 US intelligence agencies told Trump that there was little if any  doubt that Putin would have had to have been involved in the plot to hack the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s emails during the 2016 election campaign and instead of taking his own intelligence chiefs’ word as fact, he stood on a stage in Helsinki in the company of Putin and said,  "Every time he (Putin) sees me, he says, ‘I didn’t do that,’ and I really believe…he means it.”

Also during that campaign he compared then-US President Barack Obama to Putin saying, "He is a strong leader, unlike what we have."

Sometimes his admiration for Putin almost verges on a “boy crush”, like when he said, “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow. If so, will he become my new best friend?"

It seems clear, then, that Trump’s attempt to elude the checks and balances provided by a three-branch system by declaring a phony state of emergency must be viewed against the backdrop of his often repeated admiration for (and tacit envy of) authoritarian leaders. He is a president who clearly seeks by any means necessary to have the prerogatives of an absolute monarch.

But at the same time, it is a no less phony political ploy. He has made it clear that he knows perfectly well that his emergency declaration will face an uphill battle in Congress where even many Republicans think it’s a bad idea. The fear is that if Trump sets a precedent of arbitrary declarations of national emergencies any time he doesn’t like the results of political negotiations, Democrats could invoke “the Trump precedent” to do the same on issues that the GOP, and especially the Trump-usurped GOP, have resisted tooth and nail, like climate change and medical-coverage-for-all legislation.

So in the end, it’s a win-win proposition for Trump, since his “national emergency” will either stand or be challenged and shot down in Congress and the courts. In the first case, he will get his way and energize his base. In the second, he will be able to tell his followers that he tried to “make America great again", but was shot down by the opposition, thus gaining supporter sympathy.

Be that as it may, both major parties should realize that there is a lot more at stake here than immigration, Trump’s wall, or the precedent that a phony national emergency sets for the future. What is at stake is no less than the system of checks and balances that, since the earliest days of the republic, has ensured that no one branch of the government and especially the Executive, ever concentrates a monopoly on power. In short, what is at stake is the essence of democracy itself. And as history has shown again and again, democracy dies by the hand of apathy, vested interests and appeasement.

THE SHUTDOWN IN RETROSPECT

On the whim of a president who only cares about the image he reflects among his largely bigoted base, some 800,000 government workers this past week marked a month without pay. It wasn’t until the weekend that Trump announced he had reached a temporary agreement with Congress to reopen the government after the longest shutdown in US history. But federal workers will face similar uncertainty within the next three weeks if congressional Democrats and the Executive Branch fail to reach a permanent agreement on border security.

Trump is already threatening to shut the government down again if he can’t extract a deal from Congress to fund his much-heralded wall between the US and Mexico. Or failing that, he has indicated, he may try to invoke “emergency powers” that the presidency has in case of a “national crisis” in order to get his wall built. It’s hard to see how the president could deem immigration a “national crisis”, however, especially since immigration levels have dropped steadily in recent years and the “caravans” allegedly bringing countless hoards from Central America to overrun the US border, seem to have slipped from the news cycle and from reality—ephemeral smoke and mirrors designed to stir up the Trump base and get them demanding a wall to save America from a “barbarian invasion”, they seem to have unceremoniously disappeared.

During the early days of the shutdown, Trump insisted that “most” of the government workers who were either furloughed or forced to work without pay were “with him” on the issue of the wall and knew that this sacrifice was worthwhile and necessary in order to force Congress to act in his favor. But as the days wore on, it became increasingly clear that this was not true, and that being forced to make sacrifices because of a virtual federal lockout was not the same as volunteering to do so on the basis of conviction.

So it was that we were “treated” to the spectacle of government workers and contractors who live from paycheck to paycheck finding themselves in a personal state of crisis imposed, through no fault of their own, by the powers that be. Those who had worked through the first days of the shutdown crisis in the belief that it probably wouldn’t last long eventually started staying home from work because they could not only not meet vital payments like electricity, gas, water and mortgages, but because they literally couldn’t afford to fill their gas tanks in order to get to work. Some found that they couldn’t even afford groceries, and ended up resorting to food stamps and soup kitchens in order to be able to keep eating.

By the end of the month-long lockout, government workers interviewed by major news media demonstrated themselves to be highly disillusioned and clearly felt that the president and Congress, whom they blamed almost equally for their plight, should have their backs instead of using them as pawns in a game of Washington in-fighting. They seemed to feel, in the end, that their lives simply didn’t matter to anyone in government. This showed in poll figures in which the president’s popularity lost ground to such an extent that it appeared to have eaten into his base as well as further polarizing independents.

Many federal workers take those jobs precisely to ensure themselves of steady work, a regular paycheck and good job benefits. Working for the government is supposed to be the life of a bureaucrat, which has typically unfolded along flat lines of non-events and stability from entry to retirement. But one of the lessons learned from Trump’s shutdown caprice is that, in today’s world, nothing is stable and everyone is vulnerable to the whims of the rich and powerful. It is, in short, a rich man’s world, and everyone else is basically disposable.       

This should have deeply shamed the Trump camp, whose most loyal base is the paycheck to paycheck white working class. But it didn’t. The president himself suggested that the abandoned workers should talk to their creditors, who, he was sure, would be sympathetic to their temporary situation—a suggestion that seemed almost as naïve as it was cynical and cruel. Perhaps they could also, the president suggested, do maintenance on the buildings where they lived en lieu of rent for as long as the shutdown lasted. And besides, not to worry, because they would get their back pay once the government reopened. But that was small comfort to thousands of workers who depend for their living on government paychecks and found themselves facing immediate obligations that they couldn’t cover.

The president wasn’t the only one, however, in the upper circles of power to demonstrate how clueless he was with regard to the realities of working class people. At a rally in Duluth, Minnesota, Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law (and son Eric’s wife) basically told suffering government workers to suck it up for the good of the country (in Trumpspeak that means for the good of the Trumps and their campaign to remain in power for another four years).

In an administration in which nepotism runs rife, Lara Trump in one of the president’s “re-election advisers”. It was in that capacity that she told federal wage-earners furloughed or working without pay that, in the end, they would realize it had been worth it. She said that federal workers’ “children and their grandchildren will thank them for their sacrifice right now.” She added that she realized “it’s a little bit of pain, but it’s going to be for the future of our country.”

Lara Trump...clueless

In what can hardly be seen as anything but a condescending and hypocritical message, Lara Trump said, “Listen, it’s not fair to you, and we all get this, but this is so much bigger than any one person.”

Well, apparently not bigger than her, her husband or any of the other members of the Trump clan who populate the president’s entourage and who are not affected in the least because they are ridiculously wealthy. Not bigger than the appointed staff in the West Wing, either, or than legislators in Congress, all of whom continued to collect their benefits despite the shutdown.

Another “let them eat cake” moment was when Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross—another of the multi-millionaires with whom Trump has staffed his cabinet—said that he’d heard government workers were eating at food banks and couldn’t understand it. Why, he wondered aloud, didn’t they just go to their financial institutions and take out loans on which to live until the crisis was over? Sure, they might have to pay some interest, but what they heck?

“The idea that it’s paycheck or zero is not a really valid idea,” Ross said. “There’s no reason why some institution wouldn’t be willing to lend.”

The question that must have sprung to the minds of many wage-earners all over the US, whether government-employed or not, was “Why on earth should federal workers take out loans on which they would have to pay interest when the only reason they couldn’t meet their monthly obligations was because the very government that employed them was holding them hostage on a political whim and failing to pay them in a timely manner for their service to the country?”

Wilbur Ross...a billionaire's answer

This added insult to injury, since 20,000 of the 800,000 federal workers who were furloughed or working without pay were in the direct employ of Ross’s bureau. Ross further disrespected federal workers by seeking to make them seem insignificant within the greater economic picture. He downplayed the effects of the shutdown by arguing that the 800,000 job posts affected were only “a third of a percent on our GDP. So it’s not like it’s a gigantic number.”

What he failed to weigh, however, was just how crucial some of the job descriptions involved were to the economy and security at large. Federal air traffic controllers, for instance, who by the end of the month-long lockout were calling in sick in massive numbers, so much so that scores of flights were being cancelled or greatly delayed. Airport maintenance was another area undermined meaning that radar systems were not being properly monitored and maintained. And then too, there were TSA agents, the front line of air travel security, who also started skipping work as they struggled to meet their obligations. And these were by no means the only strategic areas of national security that were affected, as attested by former and current security agents.

Mexican politician Braulio Guerra and friends sit atop a section

of the US border fence.

There were also effects on more internal areas of government that few ever see but that are of vital importance. Journalists John Roberts and Gillian Turner, both identified with the president’s news channel of choice, Fox News, indicated that not enough was being said about how the shutdown imposed by the president was affecting US cyber-security defenses. Turner said that one federal source had told her that in the week before the shutdown ended, the government was more vulnerable to cyber-penetration and online terrorism than at any other point in history. Roberts echoed Turner saying that “a mutual friend of ours was saying if you were going to attack the United States, if you were a terrorist during the shutdown, now would be the time.”

Beyond security concerns, there was a not-so-subliminal message in all of this with regard to the Trump administration. It was that, despite all the talk about this being a “popular” government that had the working person’s back, the truth was plain to see during the shutdown—namely, that Trump’s government was an elitist political machine tacitly representing the upper one percent, an administration that had placed millionaires and billionaires in key decision-making posts, people who had no idea what it was like to live paycheck to paycheck and people with such a low level of human empathy that they were also unwilling to find out. 

ORWELL REVISITED

US President Donald Trump is once again engaging in a tactic used by authoritarians the world over: namely, inventing “national emergencies” and creating the illusion that the country is under attack as a means of bolstering personal power and circumventing the legislative branch. 

In his now classic novel, “1984”, British writer George Orwell imagines a world in which countries have basically ceased to exist, with rule of the planet being divided among three major powers: Eastasia (China and its satellites) Eurasia (Russia and its satellites), and Oceania (the merged US and UK and their satellites). All of these powers, it can be inferred, apparently have similar authoritarian systems governing them. And if Oceania (where the novel is set) is anything to go by, each uses the other as a “boogey man” with which to frighten their respective peoples into submission by holding out the probability of imminent invasion (while, in fact, no such threat exists since the so-called “perpetual war” among these powers is a three-way series of skirmishes that take place in a buffer zone bordering on the territories of all three states which are too evenly matched for any to vanquish the other). 

Big Brother—the omniscient, omnipresent leader of Oceania—is pictured as the great protector, ever watching over his people and protecting them from immediate external and internal threat. He, they are led to believe, has their back. In reality, however, the powers that be, in Orwell's dark, oppressive, fictional world, are watching their subjects' every move and weeding out the slightest sign of subversion, before the perpetrators have a chance to create a following. Oceania is a nation of sheep kept in line through constant fear of internal and external threat. And it is this constant state of fear that takes the minds of the common people off of their ever more enslaved and repressed existence. 

Orwell may have gotten it right. He just got the date of initiation wrong by three and a half decades.

Tearing Down the Wall

Caption: US Border fence at Brownsville (Courtesy Wikimedia/Creative Commons)

The immigration debate is everywhere. Not just in the United States, where it is focused, but worldwide as well. All eyes are on the country, especially now, with Barak Obama as President, to see if it will remain true to its liberal past of freedom and justice for all, to its immigrant history, to its long struggle to impose respect for universal civil and human rights, to its sense of humanitarianism, to the blood with which it drenched its own soil in order to abolish the enslavement of one race by another and to so many other shining examples of its vocation for often hard-fought, but eventually effective self-criticism and for simply doing the right thing, which, surprisingly enough, is also often the most expedient thing as well.

Quite frankly, after eight long and grueling years in which the administration of George Bush (The Lesser) systematically violated, suspended, ignored and banned rights and principles that had always been considered basic to US-style democracy and decency, a lot of people elsewhere aren’t expecting much of us Americans anymore. Worse still, some Americans even had time during the Bush years to get used to the US thumbing its nose at “corny notions” like multilateral decisions on world security, due process, rule of law and respect for human rights, and started almost finding it ‘cool’ for their leaders to talk like Dirty Harry about such things – about smokin’ out the evildoers and killin’ ‘em – which, in their eyes makes Barak Obama “a wimp”.

But hopefully, the current administration – in spite of a jittery economy, a radically hostile opposition, two wars that are looking more and more like an even longer and more pernicious nightmare than Vietnam, the worst oil disaster in the history of the world and a churlishly impatient public that apparently expected President Obama to soar in like Superman and, with a wave of his hand, fix everything that was not just broken, but utterly demolished, overnight – will find the time and energy to go out of its way toward restoring the battered image of the United States as the intellectual as well as material leader of the Free World.

Like it or not, and whatever your personal stance may be, the immigration debate forms part of this context. It has for some time now, but it recently has been shoved to the forefront as a result of the unilateral decision of Arizona to impose its own rules which – despite all of the skewed logic with which the public is being bombarded by far-right commentators – are tantamount to racial profiling.

Clearly, at this moment in its history, the United States has an immigration problem. And it is, for the most part – though not entirely – an Hispanic problem. Let me hasten to say that what I mean by this is that the main problem is in how the United States will deal with the influx of immigrants from that ‘ethnic’ group (whatever that means, since they hail from highly varied backgrounds), and not that the problem is theirs. The problem is, strictly speaking, a US problem.

An Immigrant Nation

The United States is an immigrant country. While the majority of the US population is made up of whites, it cannot really be said that there is anything like a “typical American”. Unless, of course, you are only speaking of those who have descended from the 53 people who survived out of the 102 passengers who left England in 1620 aboard the Mayflower, bound for Virginia, drifted off course and ended up settling in Massachusetts. If not, then the vast majority of Americans are of immigrant stock and, technically, the first settlers were immigrants as well. The fact is that the only authentically “typical Americans” form less than one percent of the population and are not white, but ‘red’. All the rest of us are the descendants of “intruders” – though I am proud to say that some genuine native blood does flow in my veins, thanks to my great-grandfather, Job Cavinder, who was half American Indian.

Caption: My great-grandfather, Job Cavinder, was half Indian. My Great-Aunt Ruth (standing behind Job) demonstrated clear Native American facial features. Seated with Job is my great-grandmother, Mary Landis, and behind her, my Great-Aunt Edith.

But now, this is where our insistence on placing everybody in neat little pigeonholes gets messy and confusing. My wife, Virginia, for instance, is an Argentine national. She was born in South America and speaks Spanish as her first language. Back in the days when we lived in the United States and she needed a visa, she was pigeonholed by the Federal government as “race: Latino”. (Back then, the Federal government didn’t care about the gender concerns of the Spanish language, so for them, there was no such thing as Latino/Latina: immigrants from “south of the border” were Latino Male and Latino Female). In point of fact, however, Virginia is not latina, or at least not in the American sense of the word, which refers to peoples of Hispanic origin. Both of her grandfathers – Mel and Carlucci - emigrated from their native Italy to Buenos Aires, one from Salerno, the other from near Milan. One of her grandmothers was also of Italian descent – Scoltore – her father having emigrated as a boy to Argentina. Hey! Does that mean Robert De Niro is Latino too? Granted, one of my wife’s grandmothers was of Basque descent. So, yes, that part of her family did indeed come from what in the Roman Empire was referred to as Hispania. “See there! See there!” the racial profilers might shout with glee. “That’s ‘Latino’ blood, then…or Hispanic…or whatever.”

Right, so what am I, then? Somewhere way back, part of my family (the Newlands) came over from Scotland, another part from Germany (the Webers and the Leningers), still another part from Ireland (the Cavinders). My paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Henry and the other side of her family were the Hamiltons. So, English, then? But wait: The name Henry, if you check back, is Norman and the Normans were originally Norsemen (Vikings), who settled in France. So, French, then? But then there’s that other part, the British Isles part, what about that? Well, let’s simplify: The British Isles were originally settled by Germanic tribes (Anglo Saxons). And then there’s that other part of my family that’s German and the Norsemen were the originators of the Germanic tribes, Teutonic peoples all. So, okay, if we’re going to racially profile, then I’m Teutonic, right? I mean if I were just now moving to the USA and they wanted to figure out which pigeonhole to place me in, “race: Teutonic”, wouldn’t it be? But wait just a darn minute, now. I get to the States and who do I find there, since…um, forever? My Native American great-grandfather’s maternal family. So what the heck am I doing immigrating, since ‘we Indians’ once owned the place. But then, that racially profiles me too, doesn’t it? Yes, definitely, unquestionably, Teutonic-Celtic-Native American…I think.

We’re All Africa

My point here is that there is no such race as “Latino”. Race is all about skin color – and implicitly profiles people anyway, since there is no race but the human race, with the rest being a matter of complexion and environmental adaptation. Trace us back far enough and, if noted paleontologist Richard Leaky is right, we all started out black, on the plains of Africa. As Shakira puts it, we’re all Africa (waka-waka). This thing of classifying people from ‘south of the border’ as “race: Latino” is just the Federal government’s ‘secret’ code for, “This person speaks Spanish and comes from ‘someplace down there’. Nor should it be an issue in the decision to grant or not grant a visa, since just by placing a race-heading on a visa application, the government is implicitly discriminating by bringing a piece of data into the mix that will permit those making the final decision to decide on the basis of skin color/‘ethnicity’. We are all, then, mixed-race, in a sense…well, except for (if Leaky is right) the purest of African tribes.

The population of Argentina as a whole is a good case in point. Argentina, like the United States, is an immigrant nation, a melting-pot, if you will. Just as in the States the most common ethnic combination is Scots-Irish, English and Germanic, in Argentina, the majority of the population is made up of people of Italian and Spanish origin. Another large segment of the population is made up of people of criollo descent (the mix of Spanish and Amer-Indian bloods). These last are people who would immediately be profiled as “Latinos” because of their dark hair, eyes and complexion, if they were to try to move to the United States. The others would have to speak before their “race” could be determined.

Since Argentina’s history with its natives is much like that of the United States – the Indians were, as in North America, systematically removed, driven out, pushed westward, pursued and slaughtered in order to take their land away and give it to white European settlers – there is only a small pure American Indian population. Most of these people would probably also immediately be considered ‘Latinos’ by US Immigration (and curious police officers in the state of Arizona), since they are dark, speak Spanish and come from “south of the border”. But Argentina also has an eclectic mix of other ethnicities: The country’s quintessential literary figure, Jorge Luis Borges, once quipped: “The Mexicans descended from the Aztecs, the Peruvians from the Incas and the Argentines from boats.” I have known Anglo-Argentines, German-Argentines, Czech-Argentines, Irish-Argentines, Scottish-Argentines, Welsh-Argentines, African-Argentines, Rumanian-Argentines, French-Argentines, Basque-Argentines, Slovenian-Argentines, Austrian-Argentines, Armenian-Argentines, Syrian-Argentines, Lebanese-Argentines, Russian-Argentines, Greek-Argentines, Turkish-Argentines, Japanese-Argentines, Chinese-Argentines, Korean-Argentines, and so on. I am willing to bet that most of these would be profiled as “race: Latino” because of their nationality and language were they to try to immigrate to the United States – with the exception of the “Orientals” (many of whose families have lived for generations in Argentina) since, despite speaking Spanish and having Latin American passports they don’t “look Latino”.

People who are “tough on immigration” but who don’t want to give the impression of being racist will argue that the problem isn’t immigration as such, but the ‘illegals’. (That they are talking about Hispanics is a given). But at the center of mainstream calls for ever-tougher immigration measures in the United States is a fear not just of undocumented immigrants of Hispanic descent or from so-called ‘Hispanic countries’, but also of the exponential expansion of the Latino community in the United States. This segment of the US population has increased more than four-fold since 1970 and is up 22% since the start of the 21st century. Predictions are that by 2050, nearly one in three Americans will be Hispano-American.

The fear that is motivating demands from the fundamentalist right for the deportation of all Hispanic 'illegals' (this is the height of racial profiling) and radical measures to ensure that no more get into the country has little to do with either the lax immigration policies or the shaky border security that they cite. At its core, the issue is about the mainstream white population’s fear of its eventual loss of supremacy.

Parallels with the Past

I'm old enough to have grown up in the so-called civil rights era. I was reared in a predominately (98%) white Midwestern town where there were no blacks. (I see from the latest Census that this has changed: African Americans now form 0.19% of the town’s population – or approximately 18 people out of a total of 9,474). So I can recall hearing the facile racist arguments of white supremacist fundamentalists who, upon hearing of protest marches, riots and other disturbances taking place all over the United States in the 1950s and ‘60s, as blacks sought to back demands that their civil rights be respected, would snarl, “If they don’t like it here, we can always ship ‘em back to Africa.” In many cases, this suggestion was being made about people whose presence in North America pre-dated the arrival of the Mayflower, since African slave labor was already present in the then-Spanish colony of Florida in the mid-1500s. And Dutch slavers first traded African captives to the pre-Mayflower Virginia settlers in 1607. Historically, then, these African people were more American than the European ones who signed the Mayflower Compact. They just weren’t white Americans.

Nor should we forget that during the country’s long immigration history, the push by rightwing fundamentalists to close the gates to certain types of immigrants is nothing new. Today it’s the “Hispanic problem”. Yesterday it was the “Polish problem”, the “Italian problem”, the “Irish problem”, the “Chinese problem”. And the problem has always been a two-way street: people from countries in political or economic turmoil seeking a new home and new horizons in combination with greedy economic interests only too happy to exploit the cheap, sometimes bordering on slave labor that these mass movements of desperate people could provide.

The fact is that many of those who are the staunchest opponents to Hispanic immigration today are the descendants of people who came in droves to the United States and stayed by any means they could a century and a half ago. To hear these descendants tell it today, their families were welcomed with open arms and were respected and well treated because they knew how to appreciate what America offered them and America knew how to appreciate what they had to offer. It’s a nice story, and perhaps there were some cases like that, but generally speaking it is exactly that – a story. The fact is that every new immigrant group has had to carve a place for itself in American society. Typical of mass movements of any kind, the first ones to arrive have quickly staked their claim, fenced off their territory and then tried to keep any new aliens from coming in and messing up a good thing.

The Irish (an ethnic group that today forms about 12% of the US population) are a case in point. Although Irishmen had formed part of the original colonies almost from the outset, the huge waves of Irish immigrants who arrived in the 19th century, and especially during the Great Irish Famine of the mid to late 1840s, arrived in the United States destitute and desperate. They, like many unskilled immigrants from the Hispanic community today, took the jobs that no one else wanted – hard, poorly paid jobs involving grueling manual labor. Notably, they were hired at starvation wages – beggars couldn’t be choosers – to do the grunt work in the building of much of America’s rapidly expanding infrastructure. They dug canals, laid rails, built ports and did any other task where picks, shovels, sledges and a strong back were required. They were often exploited and mistreated. During the civil war, the US government also exploited this wave of largely English-speaking immigration, drafting penniless Irishmen, with the promise of US citizenship, directly off the boat into the Army to serve as new cannon fodder in mounting massive offenses against rebel forces in the South.

As Irish workers building the railroads became more consolidated and banded together to try and form unions, they were unceremoniously cast aside for newly arriving Chinese labor that would work for even less pay. The lot of 19th-century Irish immigrants in the United States was so grim that, following the civil war, they considered the wave of recently emancipated former slaves that migrated northward to be a competitive threat and there are reports from those times of blacks being attacked by Irish-immigrant mobs who beat, clubbed and stoned them. Problematic Irish immigration was, then, also a problem of desperate foreigners fitting perfectly into the exploitative designs of greedy business interests – the same problem as today’s, but with a different ethnicity.

Can’t Have It Both Ways

There appears to be a growing tendency among far-right thinkers today to consider the plight of the undocumented Hispanics as being their problem. It is of little importance to such anti-immigration activists how long these undocumented aliens have been inside the United States. If they don’t have the proper papers, these people say, they should be thrown out at once.

Caption: The Border Fence at Tijuana (Courtesy Wikimedia Creative Commons)

This stance tends to see ‘illegals’ as lawbreakers who have whimsically and maliciously skulked across the border in flagrant contempt for sovereign US authority, so the ostensible solution is to round them up and send them packing. But to look at it this way is an oversimplification of the facts: the fact, for instance, that although it is illegal for them to be in the United States, certain American employers – traditionally in the agricultural and textile sectors but elsewhere as well – gladly hire them at starvation wages; the fact that lax policies in the past tacitly permitted undocumented workers to stay and make a home (albeit humble) for themselves in the USA despite not having a green card; the fact that precisely because they have family members who have lived legally in the States or have been born there, it ends up being, irrationally, next to impossible for them to get permanent residence visas, and so on and so forth.

Therefore, the problem isn't theirs, at least not completely, but a problem that the United States government must address in some more rational and humanitarian way. As for those who claim that cleaning up the illegal immigration problem will create a new problem for the business activities that use ‘illegals’ as cheap labor, I can only say that, first, my heart absolutely bleeds for those shameless and unscrupulous exploiters, and second, that you can't have it both ways. You can’t hire undocumented workers as dirt-cheap labor and then turn around and not want to see them on the street. Nor can you clamor for the cheap goods and services that their labor provides but then expect them not to have a life beyond the fields or the sweatshop walls. This kind of hypocritical double standard is unethical and immoral and is a mindset that should have gone out with the Civil War and, if not, then at least with the advances fought and won in the civil rights era. Because there can be no kidding ourselves: Although they may be paid, if miserably, for what they do, the exploitation of the undocumented status of ‘illegals’ makes them the modern-day slaves of industrialized white America, and it makes their bosses the supremacist slave-drivers of the 21st century.

‘Tear This Wall Down’

Caption: President John F. Kennedy and his entourage survey the Berlin Wall. "Ich bin ein Berliner," JFK declared.

As I am writing this, an image keeps popping into my head of John F. Kennedy standing before the Berlin Wall and declaring: “Ich bin ein Berliner.” I was a boy at the time, but already a thinking, conscious human being and I recall feeling a thrill of excitement and pride at this admirable statesman’s declaration of war on that wall and on the totalitarian mentality on which it was constructed.

Built by the repressive Soviet Bloc in 1961 to separate East and West Germany from one another, the Berlin Wall was the quintessential symbol of the Cold War. But it was also the symbol of the darkest kind of fundamentalism, of an archaic mindset that actually believed that an ideological line could be drawn in the sand and a material wall erected to separate one culture (political in this case) from another, that barbed wire, searchlights and machine guns could keep ideas and advancement from spreading, that harsh repression was a viable way to impose a system or that such repression was sufficient to suppress people’s natural desire for freedom, progress and a better, happier life.

I was a quarter-century older and a politically savvy newsman when an American president again stood before that wall. I was no longer an innocent and had serious issues with this leader, but I still couldn’t help but identify when Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and challenged: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear this wall down.”

Now when I see footage of our border with Mexico, I can’t help asking myself how the same nation that fought so hard, so long and with such sound reason against the ideological more than the material symbol of the Berlin Wall can now be supporting the building of just as horrendous and futile a wall between it and one of its two closest neighbors. A political cartoon is taking shape in my mind that makes me sorry drawing is not one of my strong talents: It shows America’s “Berlin Wall” manned by armed Border Guards along the Río Grande. On the other side of the wall, standing waist deep in water are Mexican immigrants clamoring to come over. On their shoulder stand other immigrants and on their shoulders, still others. A dialog balloon coming from a guard’s mouth says, “We gotta make it taller!” Behind the guards, facing the American side of the wall, wringing their hands, their faces wrenched with fear and worry, are a crowd of white Americans led by Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. A dialog balloon coming from a frightened-looking Beck says “Gosh fellas! I sure as heck hope it holds.” And while all of their eyes are on ‘The Wall’ the tide of change continues with the birth of a million North American Hispanics a year behind their backs.

Caption: A wall of our own, and every bit as futile and odious as the Berlin Wall. (Photo by Omar Bárcena. Courtesy Creative Commons. Public Domain.)

Because this is precisely what’s happening. The point that the anti-immigration (e.g., anti-Hispanic) fundamentalists are too self-obsessed and too obtuse to understand is that building a wall between themselves and the Hispanic world is as idiotic and futile an idea as the Berlin Wall was. While they are desperately seeking to plug the leaks in the illegal immigration dike with their fingers and toes, the inexorable trend toward a changing face (a pan-American face, if you will) for North America continues unabated. There were 9 million Hispanics and North American-born Latinos living in the United States in the 1970s. Today they number over 40 million or about 14 percent of the population. And the current birth rate among the Hispanic community in the United States totals over one million babies per year. This is a trend that isn’t going away no matter how scared fundamentalist white supremacists might be of losing their grip on power.

The worst thing that could happen is that the immigration issue should drive an ever-increasing wedge between the white and Hispanic communities. Should that happen, the future scenario could only be one of increasing tension between the two. The violence, disruptions, riots and bitterness that marked the white versus black integration clashes of the 1950s and ‘60s need to be established as a lesson learned in this respect. The Obama administration has the singular opportunity to take strides toward avoiding this kind of scenario, not by bowing to pressure for a “bigger and better wall”, but by studying creative ways to develop more rational immigration legislation and to take advantage of the extraordinary potential of a multi-racial, multi-cultural America.