This is About Race
The New York Times reported today that Trump Administration is rejecting its own studies showing that refugees have brought $63 billion to our economy. Its decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program for the over 800,000 young adults brought to this country illegally as children — who have since proven themselves to be among the best potential Americans — is a startlingly callus move, even for this presidency. It is the same formalized racial profiling as the Muslim ban. We now know the Administration very likely intends to use the sensitive information provided to it by DACA recipients — “Dreamers” — to allow ICE to find and expel them
These decisions are revealing. The primary goal of this Administration is race-based repression and we must stop it. Now.
Yes, our immigration system is broken. But ending DACA isn’t about fixing the system or making it fair. This is about race. There is no longer any way to dance around that fact, especially not when our current president believes that there were “good people” among the hate groups who, even in the age of social media, felt free to show their faces in Charlottesville. Even after meeting about his Charlottesville response with Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only African American in the Senate, President Trump tellingly said, “you have some pretty bad dudes on the other side also” (emphasis added). He couldn’t help himself to somehow put disorganized anti-fascists on the same playing field as Nazis.
Don’t believe that it’s about race? Consider the fact that the overwhelming majority of Dreamers happen to be Latino or Asian Pacific Islander. In California alone, 439,000 DACA recipients are from Mexico, 28,000 Guatemala, 17,000 South Korea, 15,000 El Salvador, and 10,000 hail from the Philippines. Other than 4,000 people from Uruguay (which is still Latino, though largely white), no other country represented among DACA-eligible residents is white majority — not even close. With the highly-racialized rhetoric surrounding a potential border wall with Mexico, a country which America once invaded and chose to not colonize because of its nonwhite, Spanish-speaking, and Catholic majority, is it really that surprising? And the Administration isn’t just targeting the Dreamers: it’s their families, too, many of which have members here legally. Entire communities are under threat. When this comes down, simply looking Latino will make any one of us suspect under federal law enforcement.
There are still some who claim that economic insecurity drives today’s political climate, the most in-depth studies substantiate that racial animus plays the predominant role. Scholars found that white voters were far more likely to support Trump if they held racial resentment and anti-immigration views. In fact, higher levels of economic strife among African Americans in particular meant an even lower likelihood of supporting Trump. In short, Trump has been playing to the dangerous mindset that deporting brown-skinned Americans is going to bring back low-skilled manufacturing jobs for whites. And he’s done it since day one of his campaign when he declared Mexicans were rapists.
Other telling sign of where this administration has set its priorities: U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the individual who is the most responsible for enforcing DACA’s demise, has praised the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which was designed to permanently restrict Jewish, Italian, African and Middle Eastern immigration, with deep quota cuts targeting countries of origin in Eastern and Southern Europe. Under Johnson-Reed, East and South Asian immigration was banned outright. Johnson-Reed happened in a toxic political environment where the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority feared losing their total dominance of American socioeconomic power.
Sounds an awful lot like the Muslim ban, doesn’t it?
The Johnson-Reed Act proved to be fatal. The Nazis came to power in Germany nine years later and by 1945 six million Jews were murdered in industrialized genocide while millions more perished along the way. Families were torn apart or all-out destroyed. Remember the U.S. turning away the St. Louis, filled with Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis? You can thank Johnson-Reed for that.
Stephen Bannon is officially out of the White House, but his influence is still strong through the policies he set in motion and the people he put in place. And he’s made it no secret that he believes that post-Charlottesville racial strife is helpful for Trump. About Democrats, Bannon said, “I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush [them]” (emphasis added). Just in case you thought there was any ambiguity about this, in a 2015 interview (with Stephen Bannon), Sessions linked his own dangerous ideology straight to the “economic nationalism” narrative:
In seven years we’ll have the highest percentage of Americans, non-native born, since the founding of the Republic. Some people think we’ve always had these numbers, and it’s not so, it’s very unusual, it’s a radical change. When the numbers reached about this high in 1924, the president and congress changed the policy, and it slowed down immigration significantly, we then assimilated through the 1965 and created really the solid middle class of America, with assimilated immigrants, and it was good for America. We passed a law that went far beyond what anybody realized in 1965, and we’re on a path to surge far past what the situation was in 1924.
At the core of this statement is the dog whistle that from 1924 through 1965, when America removed many racist barriers to our immigration system, this immigration clampdown somehow “created really the solid middle class of America.” What he means is the solid white middle class of America. For that matter the idea of the “middle class” has always been highly racialized in this country. During and after WWII, America still maintained Jim Crow, restrictive covenants on residential areas, and rampant racial, sexual, and religious discrimination in the workforce. All four of my grandparents in their native Minnesota and New Jersey, respectively, would see signs for housing that said, “No Negroes, No Dogs, No Jews,” faced quotas when applying to university, and were at times socially isolated for being Jewish.
When announcing DACA’s demise, Sessions went on to outright lie when he said that Dreamers “denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same illegal aliens to take those jobs.” Immigration economically benefits America because immigrants overwhelmingly enable native-born Americans to take higher-skill jobs. When our country suspended its agricultural guest worker program for Mexican laborers in the 1960s, wages for farm workers didn’t rise and companies had to automate as many jobs as possible as quickly as possible to compensate for labor losses.
Trump’s pardoning of former sheriff Joe Arpaio further substantiates the race-based animus of the DACA decision. “Sheriff Joe” was convicted of criminal contempt for racially profiling and detaining people solely on the suspicion of their immigration status and no other evidence of laws being broken. Again, the goal of these anti-immigration actions is race-based repression.
Whether exploring how we as a nation favor white Americans over others or how white supremacy lies as the core of President Trump’s ideology, I’m far from alone in raising the alarm about the Administration’s blatant racism. But it bears repeating, again and again, until it is stopped.
At the Jewish Community Relations Council, we have a longstanding immigration consensus policy that highlights the organized Jewish community’s commitment to fighting actions that scapegoat immigrants in ways that increase xenophobia and racism. My own family’s history is demonstrative of the challenges we face today. Despite the widespread and very open anti-Semitism in the U.S. upon their arrival, my ancestors faced far fewer barriers towards absorption in America than anyone attempting to move here today. Towards the turn of the last century, my cousin’s French wife lived in America for over a decade on an education visa because she was prohibited from sponsoring her same-sex spouse; they ultimately fled to Canada in 2007. For many immigrants and their loved ones who have “waited their turn” it’s challenging and painful to see the unfairness of the extraordinarily broken system. But, as members of a community that has faced some of the worst results of closing America’s borders and suffered from millennia of persecution on the basis of simply being ourselves, I’m proud that we’re challenging this attack on the American Dream.
Defeating racism in its many ugly forms is an enormous challenge, but constructively naming it when we see it is the first step. It simply won’t go away unless we force others to recognize the scourge and visualize its destructive effects on our society.
May 5777 be the year that a critical mass of us recognized what too many have known all along about racism in this country, and may 5778 be the year that we collectively raise our voices to overcome it.
