Under Trump's auspices, the agency in charge of applying the law to immigrants, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has taken the concept of criminality to new heights in order to justify expanded priorities for deportation. His sweeping references to "foreign bad guys" and "shithole countries" suggest that he applies the same set of judgments to the international arena. He emphasizes the violent criminal nature of immigrants and the undocumented, repeatedly highlighting and falsely generalizing from relatively rare cases in which one of them committed a violent crime like the San Francisco killing of Kate Steinle. It won't surprise you, I'm sure, to learn that Donald Trump portrays the world in a strikingly black-and-white way when it comes to immigration (and so much else). No matter that they hold the only morally coherent position in town - and a broadly popular one nationally as well - DACA's congressional backers seem to have already conceded defeat. In the swirl of all this, the demands of immigrant rights organizations for a "clean Dream Act" that would genuinely protect DACA recipients without giving in to Trump's many anti-immigration demands have come to seem increasingly unrealistic. Add to that a 2,000-mile concrete wall or some combination of walls, fences, bolstered border patrols, and the latest in technology and you're not just talking about some benign waste of money in return for hanging on to the DACA kids. The significant fortifications already in place on the U.S.-Mexican border have already contributed to the deaths of thousands of migrants, to the increasing militarization of the region, to a dramatic rise of paramilitary drug- and human-smuggling gangs, and to a rise in violent lawlessness on both sides of the border. While in Gutierrez's neck of the woods, favoring Dreamers may seem politically expedient, giving in to Trump's wall would result in far more than just dirty hands, buckets, and bricks, and the congressman knows that quite well.
We will dirty our hands in order for the Dreamers to have a clean future in America." Meanwhile, Chicago Democrat Luis Gutierrez - a rare, reliably pro-immigrant voice in Congress - recently swore that, when it came to Trump's much-touted wall on the Mexican border, he was ready to "take a bucket, take bricks, and start building it myself. These days, the hearts of conservative Republicans, otherwise promoting programs for plutocrats, are bleeding for low-wage workers whose livelihoods, they claim (quite incorrectly), are being undermined by competition from immigrants. Politicians and commentators who once denounced "illegal immigration," insisting that people "do it the right way," are now advocating stripping legal status from many who possess it and drastically cutting even legalized immigration. These ranged from a narrow proposal to punish sanctuary cities that placed limits on local police collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to major overhauls of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act that established the current system of immigration quotas (with preferences for "family reunification").Īnd add in one more thing: virtually everyone in the political sphere is now tailoring his or her pronouncements and votes to political opportunism rather than the real issues at hand. On a single day in mid-February, the Senate rejected no less than four immigration bills. (Meanwhile, the Supreme Court recently stepped in to allow DACA recipients to renew their status at least for now.) President Trump claims to support it but ordered its halt, while both Republicans and Democrats insist that they want to preserve it and blame each other for its impending demise. President Obama's widely popular Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which offered some 750,000 young immigrants brought to the United States as children a temporary reprieve from deportation, is ending. The immigration debate seems to have gone crazy.
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