Reflections on Donald Trump's Use and Abuse of Immigrants

Reflections on Donald Trump’s Use and Abuse of Immigrants

Fascism, whether of the right as in Hitler’s Germany or of the left as in Stalin’s Russia, needs an enemy to attack and on which to blame a country’s problems. It matters not that the identified enemy is in no way responsible for the country’s problems. It matters not that the enemy’s characteristic(s) which supposedly make it an enemy are not actually that group’s characteristics at all. By far most of the people Stalin killed as enemies of the people were in no way enemies of the people. Germany’s Jews were not the cause of Germany’s problems. The function of fascism’s identified enemy isn’t actually to be a problem for the fascists’ country. It is merely to serve as a strawman on which the fascists can pin the country’s problems though the strawman has nothing important to do with those problems. It is to act as a distraction from those problems, for it is always easier to blame problems on a strawman than actually to address them in a serious and effective way.

I saw how the fascist use of a strawman enemy worked in Germany. I spent the 1957-1958 academic year in Berlin, Germany, where my father was doing historical research. We shared a large apartment with our German landlady. She may not ever have been a Nazi herself, but her deceased husband had been one. She still had his Nazi party uniform hanging in a big wardrobe in the hall way. She once tried to put the armband off that uniform on me, something I refused to let her do though I was only eleven years old at the time. I knew enough even then about the Holocaust to know how hateful that armband was. I don’t remember how the subject came up, but I sure remember something she said to us once. She said: “It was too bad what happened to the Jews, but then something did have to be done.” That statement is quite simply a lie. Nothing “happened to” the Jews. The German people committed one of history’s greatest atrocities against them. It wasn’t “too bad.” It was a tragedy of unsurpassed proportions. Nothing “had to be done.” The Jews were not responsible for the desperate situation Germany found itself in after its defeat in World War I or for its disastrous economic situation in the 1920s and early 1930s. Our landlady seemed for the most part to be apolitical. She didn’t make up the lie she told us about the Holocaust. She learned it from the Nazis, perhaps most of all from her Nazi husband.

The lie worked. Most German people didn’t kill Jews, but almost all Germans sat idly by as their Jewish neighbors disappeared, never to come back. They didn’t ask questions. They didn’t object. They didn’t protest. That was partly or maybe largely because protesting would get you killed, but it was also because they bought the anti-Jewish lies of European history generally and of the Nazis in particular. Hitler needed that lie, for without it he never would have come to power. He never would have sold his idiotic racist ideology to so many people. It matters not whether Hitler actually believed the lie. What matters is how he used it and how it helped him gain and hold power.

Donald Trump is an American fascist. For a more detailed analysis of that truth see the essay “American Fascist” elsewhere on this blog. He dreams of ruling as an dictator. He calls the free press enemies of the people. He plays to the basest emotions of an ignorant and frightened base of white men who are losing their unchallenged power among us. Most importantly, he has created a strawman enemy on which to blame our country’s problems. Donald Trump’s strawman enemy is immigrants. Mostly immigrants who have come here without proper documentation, but to some extent also immigrants who are here legally. He directs the fear and anger of his base onto those people. He calls immigrants rapists and murderers. He says they take jobs away from “real Americans,” by which he mostly means white American men. Not one of those thigs is true. It doesn’t matter. They are the lie Donald Trump uses in the same way Hitler used his lies about the Jews. In all of these ways and in many others as well Donald Trump is an American fascist.

Of course Donald Trump has erected no Auschwitz. He hasn’t started murdering immigrants, although several of them have died in his custody. He hasn’t yet committed genocide, but he has instituted policies toward immigrants that are horribly cruel and inhumane. He tears children, even nursing infants, from their mothers’ arms. He locks them up in cages. He withholds most of the things, from toothbrushes to medical care, that they need in the same way all children need them. He has incarcerated undocumented immigrants in enormous numbers. I recently heard of one facility in southern California that was designed for less than two hundred inmates that today holds more than nine hundred. Most recently his acolytes in the federal bureaucracy have told parents who have been exempt from deportation because their seriously ill children are receiving lifesaving medical care here they couldn’t get anywhere else to get out of the country. Fascism is heartless. Donald Trump is heartless. Fascism is cruel. Donald Trump is cruel. The cruelty of Donald Trump’s policies toward immigrants is simply unconscionable. It violates everything we Americans have always said we stand for.

It is true that thousands upon thousands of people from Central America enter or at least seek to enter our country without going through lawful immigration procedures. There are a couple of reasons why they don’t go through those procedures. The main one is that if they did they would never be given legal permission to enter, for we allow only a trickle of immigrants to come here legally. That truth combines with a situation that I like to compare to weather pressure gradients. In the atmosphere there are high pressure areas and low pressure areas. The atmosphere always works to even out those areas of different pressure. High pressure air moves into areas of lower pressure until the pressure in the two areas is equalized.

In this metaphor, Central America is a high pressure area, the United States is a low pressure area. Central America is a high pressure area because in most if not quite all of the countries of that part of the world life has become unbearable for millions of people. The economies are a wreck. The governments are so corrupt that they don’t even try to meet their people’s real needs. Violence is rampant. Violent gangs rule the streets, and the governments are powerless to do anything about it or even are the behind that violence. I have heard of mothers bringing their sons to the US precisely so they will not be forced into the gangs. Because of corruption and climate change food supplies are disappearing. I recently heard a story of a woman in Guatemala who watched her child starve to death because there was food that she could give her. All of these conditions motivate millions of people to migrate in search of a better or even a merely bearable life for themselves and their children. That’s the high pressure. It is pressure on people to find a better life.

In this metaphor United States is a low pressure area because for all of our own significant problems we Americans are much safer in our daily lives than are many people in Central America. There is food for children and their parents. There is a functioning law enforcement system that while it may deport these folks also works to make our streets significantly safer than they are in much of Central America. There is employment to be had. It may be illegal for employers to hire undocumented immigrants, and because they are not here legally people who take those jobs may be at the mercy of merciless employers. Still, that work at least pays something of a salary, and such work is not be found in the countries from which these people come. Life is significantly better here than it is for all but a few people in Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador. That’s why the US is the low pressure area compared to most of Central America.

So just as high pressure air moves toward low pressure air, people from high pressure Central America move toward the low pressure United States. Since we haven’t yet turned our country into a high pressure area, the only way to stop Central Americans from entering the US is to reduce the pressure in Central America. I’ve heard brief talk of the US establishing a Marshall Plan for Central America, but that proposal makes far too much sense ever to become US policy. So the pressure of people from the south seeking to come to El Norte will not stop.

Tragically, that reality creates an unending opportunity for Trump to lie about immigrants and use them to whip up the fervor of his bigoted base so that they will continue to vote for him despite the fact that his actual policies harm rather than benefit them. That’s what fascists do. There is no hope that Trump will stop doing it, for he is indeed an American fascist. He will continue to use and abuse immigrants for his own fascist political purposes. The only thing we can do about it is get him out of office. If we do that in 2020 we may have some hope of making American policy decent again. If we don’t, we’re lost.