4/6/21

By Josh Rubin

Many have probably already seen what I am finally seeing about our country’s immigration policy. I have come to this late. And I think that the things we say about immigration and immigrants are deliberately confusing.

There is the myth of our history. Nation of immigrants, and all that. I will leave aside the Holocaust that decimated the first migrants to arrive, those who came across the Bering land bridge long before the Europeans laid claim to the hemisphere and amassed their wealth on the backs of the unwilling migrants from Africa...leaving that aside, because I cannot do that justice. And isn’t justice a poor word to use?

Let me find a narrower point, one nonetheless is large enough to crush me these days, since, as I say, I come to this late and I am still capable of experiencing painful epiphanies that expose the myths. First, an easy one. The immigrants we actually have put down the welcome mat for are the ones we consider white. Whiteness—and therein lies a myth too large once again for my effort today—is defined on no color wheel but floats about on the winds of power. Suffice to illustrate it by the fact that people now classed white were once classed nonwhite, like the Irish, Italians, and Jews. Abracadabra.

Let me struggle back to my topic. Which is this: what is the goal of our immigration policy, right now, under this administration? And how does it differ from the last administration, and the last few? I will answer this, not exhaustively, but as a lamentation. The goal of our policy is to appear to have as little immigration as possible at our southern border. Witness that each administration defines success this way. And while under the last president the attempt to appear to have stanched the flow of humanity involved behaving as brutally as possible, under our present policy the same goal, to stop migrants, is under cover of a pretense of kindness, which, ironically backs us into corners where we use brutality like the shutdown of the border and all asylum claims to prove that we really are not that nice at all, since our pretense of niceness exposes us to critics who say we are just encouraging migration. Nice, but don’t confuse our niceness with kindness. Or rather, go right ahead and get confused.

The goal is the same. To stop them. That, after all, is what a border is for. A good border is like a one way mirror. It stops people from crossing, while allowing us full access in the other direction, for the full exercise of our hegemony, and for the full range of asymmetrical advantages to strip the land and wealth and wellbeing of our neighbors without bearing the burden of the tragic consequences. So, it should be no surprise that the goal of appearing to have stopped the nonwhite from crossing is shared by those who find power, and those who put them in power. But, still, the rhetoric can be confusing, and the sleight of hand can to various degrees boggle the hearts of the hopeful.

Take now. The camps of the displaced that stood as symbols of the cruelty of the last administration are with fanfare dismantled. We announce, with great feeling, that we will not turn away children, whatever the consequences to family and social fabric. We scurry to move the children off as quickly as we can to places where they cannot be seen. Convention centers, tents in deserts, military bases with millions of acres near nuclear testing grounds. Now you see them, now you don’t.

We surge resources to advertising agencies to design ads to convince the people of the Northern Triangle that they should stay where they are, even if means they will starve, or die of exposure or violence. The ads guarantee them: whatever you think, we will make it worse! We enlist the craven governments of Guatemala and Mexico to raise their terror intensity so high that even fewer might approach our colossal fencing.

Meantime, you and I are prone to the error of believing that what we see in the trickle of misery, the few hungry and frightened families that make it through, the children who break away from their families or seek to mend their families with members already here, that these are the problem to be solved. And not the sea of misery that breaks like huge waves against the buttresses of the wall of nations, just out of sight.

Still, the only metric that counts, Dem or Repub, is how good are they at keeping the colors from mixing. And even keeping the likes of us, activists and witnesses, dazzled by their footwork and misdirection.