Tag: immigration policy

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

The Wall

CREDIT: Reuters | Lucy Nicholson

A report released this week by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency revealed that in the two-and-a-half years since President Donald Trump came into office, 51 miles of border wall have been built — all of it erected to replace barriers already in place.

You may remember Trump’s signature campaign promise was to build a big, beautiful wall that would run the length of the U.S.-Mexico border, and that Mexico would “pay for it.” Not so much, it turns out. The border wall, like so many things the president talks about, exists only in his mind — and in the minds of those who take his words at face value. But the sad truth is, Trump has managed to build a wall. It’s big, but it’s not beautiful — and we’re paying for it.

Trump has built a wall between those who think that separating refugee children from their families and putting them in cages along the border is an acceptable solution to our immigration problem and those who believe that policy is cruel, inhumane, and unworthy of who we are as Americans.

Trump has built a wall between those who believe in the science of climate change and those who believe our rapidly warming planet is just a natural occurrence and we can’t do anything about it.

Reuters | Lucy Nicholson

U.S.-Mexico border fencing in Santa Teresa, New Mexico

Trump has built a wall between those who think Americans should celebrate our country’s diversity and those who think people whose ancestors are from countries that aren’t white should “go back where they came from” if they criticize the president.

Trump has built a wall between those who believe we should work with and respect our traditional democratic allies and those who believe, like Trump, that those alliances are worthless and that murderous dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un should be fawned over and coddled and emulated.

Trump has built a wall between those who think cheating on your wife with porn stars and other women and paying them to keep quiet about it doesn’t conflict with Christian “family values” and those who think such behavior is despicable.

Trump has built a wall between those who believe the Mueller Report’s findings that Russia interfered with the 2016 election and that the president obstructed justice 10 times and those who think the report simply said “no collusion.” That wall also divides those who think our intelligence agencies serve to protect America and those who think those agencies are part of a “deep state” conspiracy to bring down a president who is innocent of any nefarious activity.

Trump has built a wall between those who think the U.S. Department of Justice should be an independent agency serving the American people and those who think it should exist only to protect the interests of the president.

Trump has even managed to build a wall within the Republican Party — between those who think the president doesn’t reflect the party’s values and those who think he is the party. (He’s also built a wall between Lindsey Graham circa 2016 and Lindsey Graham today, but I digress.)

Trump has built a wall between those who think Fox News is a purveyor of misinformation and a blatant propaganda outlet for the president and those who believe the network is “fair and balanced.”

Trump has built a wall between longtime friends, between brothers and sisters, between parents and their children and grandchildren, between blacks and whites and browns, between gay and straight, between women and men — a wall of anger, distrust, and wounds that won’t easily heal.

Trump has built a wall between his lies and the truth, between those who believe him and those who don’t.

Some day, historians will write about all this — the time when America was riven in two by a man who came into the presidency sowing anger and resentment and divisiveness, who disparaged and ridiculed former presidents, war heroes, political opponents, members of Congress, the disabled — a man who told lie after lie, day after day, tweet after tweet, and built a cult-like “base” of followers who bought into every damn word.

Yes, someday, God willing, this will all be in American history books. And your descendants may rightly wonder as they read this odd and terrifying chapter: Which side of the wall were you on?

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Editorial Opinion

Spring “Blessings” from Our Lawmakers

CREDIT: REUTERS | Leah Millis

Spring has come, if you can call it that, what with the more-than-occasional nippy morning, the on-again, off-again temperatures that have been confusing dogwoods’ attempts to blossom, and the sporadic rainy torrents that somehow still feel more wintry than not.
Even so, let us count our current seasonal blessings. The document that presumably contains the truth about some alarming allegations against our president (the so-called Mueller Report) remains a distant, inaccessible mystery under the misleading cover of a four-page attorney general’s gloss. Meanwhile, that president is free to resume his assaults on human dignity, including, reportedly, a new plan by his dead-eyed special assistant Stephen Miller to resume separating children from their immigrant parents along our southern border. (Emma Lazarus and her do-goody inscription on the Statue of Liberty to “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” be damned).

REUTERS | Leah Millis

Stephen Miller

And, as if to spread the blessings of Trumpism to those of us who are native-born, the president continues to vow to kill off entirely the Affordable Care Act, which he has so far only managed to cripple or inconvenience, here and there. Never mind the consequences for those rascals among us who have been blessed hitherto by the ACA’s coverage of pre-existing conditions. They can make do, as before — with thoughts and prayers.
There are developments on our state government front, too. Among the bills that have been hurtling toward passage in these last few weeks of the 2019 General Assembly are measures to impose a new state charter-school commission (read: bureaucracy) with the ability to override the wishes of local school boards on charter-school applications; state grants for parents to use in private Tennessee schools, called “education savings account” rather than the justly tarnished term “vouchers,” so as to confuse diehard defenders of public school education; a variety of anti-abortion measures, all anticipating that Trump judicial appointees will at some point achieve the specific gravity needed to ward off judgments of unconstitutionality; more end-run attempts to keep transgenders out of gender-specific restrooms; a bill permitting teachers with carry permits to take their guns to school; and one would-be constitutional amendment attributing all these and other splendors of man’s domain and God’s universe to, well, God.

The legislator who gave us this last one is an East Tennessee guy named James, though he calls himself Micah, after the prophet, something he would have us believe was a suggestion emanating from his personal pipeline to the almighty.

Maybe we expect too much and are ungrateful to the point of ignoring our real blessings like the ongoing presence of spring football and that avatar of the sport known as Johnny Manziel. Wait. It’s over with already? Oh, well, at least it’s stopped raining. Sort of.

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Opinion Viewpoint

“They’re Animals”: Trump Plays to His Base’s Worst Instincts

President Trump’s “animals” comment on May 16th clearly reflects his views on immigrants and immigration from the global south, and it successfully shifts focus away from a presidency fully engulfed in criminal investigations.

Whether the president was referring to all immigrants as animals or only MS-13 gang members hardly matters: What matters is the rhetoric and the political objectives from a man known for exuberance rather than eloquence.

The wholesale dehumanization of vulnerable societal groups is dangerous. History smolders with disingenuous demagogues selectively targeting (and dehumanizing) socio-political opponents to gain/maintain power, while incentivizing others to slaughter the innocent: Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, Guatemala in the 1980s, and Rwanda in the 1990s are but a few examples. While epic killings won’t begin anytime soon in the U.S.A., Trump’s focus on immigration is a source of solace for his loyal base. Their percolating anger holds real consequences for people “not” in the base camp and represents a troubling trend in Trump’s political calculus.

Kirstjen Nielsen

For example, in early May, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that folks crossing into the U.S.A. (usually at the southern border we share with Mexico) without inspection will be prosecuted, using the criminal — not civil — code. Generally, criminal prosecution for entering the U.S. without proper documentation was reserved for those who enter illegally after having been previously deported. Now, anyone caught without proper documentation entering the country, even for the first time, will face criminal, rather than civil/misdemeanor charges. Criminal prosecutions can result in incarceration. Under the civil code, those unlawfully present face deportation and a bar to reentry.

Trump’s administration is seeking to incarcerate those who, in Jeb Bush’s words, are engaged in an “act of love”: They come to the U.S. seeking an opportunity to free their families from grinding, generational poverty or seeking asylum from violence in their home countries.

This aggressive, Department of Justice-sanctioned approach will separate families; Sessions also announced, earlier in the month, that people who cross our border with their children will be prosecuted for smuggling — and separated from their children. The Trump administration is preparing to place the children of those detained parents (awaiting criminal prosecution) on internal military bases. Meanwhile, the Department of Defense is studying the feasibility of sending children under 18 years of age to four or more bases in Arkansas and Texas, reminding some of Japanese Internment during World War II. For those familiar with 20th-century history, the thought of a powerful nation dividing families and placing children at military installations congers up an even darker past, from a distant continent.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen has energetically supported this plan, despite reports of a recent public “dressing down” by the president, she remains a champion enabler. She reflects the administration’s most loyal voters, those who feed on Trump’s cruel demonization of immigrants. These migrants are mostly poor, brown-skinned people who seek asylum, work, or a better life in the United States given that their own countries (especially Honduras, El Salvador, and segments of Mexico) have been ravished by gangs, violence, and drugs. The United States’ recent and historic policy toward the region has exacerbated the upheaval; we’ve provided military and police training to some of the most repressive elements of those societies; and America’s insatiable appetite for illegal narcotics, which drives the illicit markets there, needs no further comment.

People are not animals; even the worst people are still people. People are never “illegal”; they sometimes commit illegal acts. Murderous regimes, like the Third Reich, which categorized their neighbors as “subhuman, inferior races” are not remembered fondly. Demagogues, like Cuba’s Castro, referred to those who disagreed with him and fled the Marxist island he commanded as escoria — literally, scum.

President Trump, the leader of the free world, must do better than referring to people as animals. The comment is shameful, but the real shame is born by all citizens of this nation who willfully refuse to understand the magnitude of the dangerous demagogue dug-in at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It is time to act, and the most significant next step in restorative justice, for our nation, takes place on Tuesday, November 6, 2018.

Bryce Ashby is a Memphis-based attorney and board chair at Latino Memphis; Michael J. LaRosa is an associate professor of history at Rhodes College.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

ICE, ICE Baby

Last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents knocked on a door in Southaven. They had a warrant for a Hispanic man who had a criminal record, and they found him. He was living in a house with six other men, all of whom worked at an area restaurant. The other men had no criminal records, and ICE had no warrants for their arrest — in fact, had no idea who they were. But they were brown, so they got taken into custody.

Within 24 hours, all seven men were shipped to a federal prison in rural Louisiana. They didn’t get a bail hearing or access to a lawyer before being hauled off. They sit in cells in the middle of nowhere, hoping somehow their case will be taken up by an attorney, somewhere, before they are summarily deported. There have been thousands of cases like this since Attorney General Jeff Sessions unleashed ICE and gave them carte blanche to disrupt our Hispanic communities.

Yeah, I get that there are some of you reading this who’ll say, “What part of ‘illegal’ don’t you understand?” To which I say, “What part of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ do you not understand?” This is not how the American justice system is supposed to work, even for non-citizens.

But these raids — these stakeouts at schools and churches and restaurants, these overnight deportations — are doing what they’re designed to do. And that is to demonize and terrify men, women, and children of Hispanic descent.

So, the restaurant where the men worked had to close. The owner is still seeking replacement workers but has had little luck. This, in microcosm, demonstrates a larger problem, one that may at first seem unrelated.

In a new report on the impact of opioids in small town and rural areas, some employers stated that their biggest problem was finding “clean and sober” workers. One in 10 Mississippians is on opioids. Similar numbers abound in other mostly rural states.

Nine rural hospitals have closed in Tennessee in the past couple of years, a number that leads the nation. A study by the Rural Health Reform Policy Research Center says 17 rural Tennessee counties rank in the bottom 10 percent of counties in the country in unemployment, poverty, and per capita income.

In Tennessee, the legislature declined to take advantage of the billions of dollars in Medicaid and Medicare funding that were offered gratis via Obamacare, thereby putting the health of hundreds of thousands of the state’s residents — and many of its hospitals — in serious jeopardy, in the name of partisan politics. Meanwhile, in Washington, the Republicans have utterly failed to come up with a plan to fix health care.

So, in sum: We have a huge opioid crisis that is crippling our potential work force, yet we’re not funding hospitals in the areas where they are most needed, ensuring more poverty, more addiction, and more unemployment. On the other hand, we’re rounding up and sending off thousands of willing workers with no due process, most of whom have lived here for years — building our homes, doing our yardwork and housework, working in our restaurants. It’s tough to be an employer if most of your potential blue-collar workers are addicted or are being summarily deported. It’s dumb and dumber.

Our priorities and our politics are terribly out of whack right now. Letting partisan politics drive actions on issues such as health care and immigration seldom benefits the general public’s welfare. Or much of anything, for that matter.