Harris rejects 'false choice' between border security & humane immigration during Arizona border visit

Republican mayor of Douglas endorses Democratic presidential candidate, who vows fix to 'broken system'

Posted Sep 27, 2024,
Natalie Robbins
TucsonSentinel.com

Paul Ingram/TucsonSentinel.comVice President Kamala Harris addresses a crowd in Douglas, Ariz. on Sept. 27, 2024.

During a visit to an Arizona border town Friday, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris said she'll take tough steps on border security, restricting asylum claims and combating the flow of fentanyl, while pushing to "modernize" the U.S. immigration system.

“I reject the false choice that we must decide between securing our border and creating a system of immigration that is safe, orderly, and humane. We can and we must do both,” Vice President Harris told a crowd at Cochise College’s Douglas Campus.

“As president, I will put politics aside to modernize our immigration system and find solutions to problems which have persisted for far too long,” she said.

Harris pledged to stop the flow of fentanyl at the border by boosting drug-enforcement staff at the border and increasing screening technology at ports of entry.

The vice president also told the crowd she would double the Justice Department’s budget for prosecuting transnational gangs and cartels.

As California attorney general, Harris said she “saw the violence and chaos that transnational criminal organizations cause, and the heartbreak and loss from the spread of their illicit drugs.”

Harris said she would keep in place the restrictions on asylum claims ordered by President Joe Biden this year, and would propose even more limits.

"If someone does not make an asylum request at a legal point of entry and instead crosses our border unlawfully, they will be barred from receiving asylum," the vice president said.

That would require a change to U.S. law, which lays out the legal process for asylum claims.

"While we understand that many people are desperate to migrate to the United States, our system must be orderly and secure, and that is my goal," Harris said.

The vice president spoke for about 30 minutes to an audience of around 315. For her first visit to the U.S.-Mexico border since becoming the Democratic nominee, Harris met with Douglas Mayor Donald Huish, Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels and Cochise County Supervisor Ann English, along with U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes.

While visiting Douglas, Harris spoke with John Modlin, chief patrol agent for the Tucson sector of the U.S. Border Patrol, and Blaine Bennett, the BP agent in charge of the Douglas station, the Los Angeles Times reported.

During her speech, Harris touted last year's increase in overtime pay for Border Patrol agents.

She blasted Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for tanking a border security bill in Congress earlier this year.

The former president urged Republicans to vote against the Border Act of 2024, which would have increased border enforcement. The measure had bipartisan support — it was negotiated by U.S. Sen. Krysten Sinema of Arizona, formerly a Democrat and now an independent, Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, and Sen. James Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma.

The bill was unveiled in the Senate in February, though it did not pass. House Speaker Mike Johnson called it "dead on arrival."

Harris said Friday that the measure was “the strongest border security bill we have seen in decades.”

“It was endorsed by the Border Patrol union, and it should be in effect today, producing results in real time right now,” she said.

Harris said that even though Trump “tried to sabotage” the border security bill, as president, she would bring it back up and “proudly” sign it into law, amid cheers from the crowd.

Kelly, who introduced Harris at the rally, told the crowd that Trump’s interference with the bill was “the most hypocritical thing” that he has seen “in three-and-a-half years in Washington.”

“He didn't want it fixed because he needed it for the election. That's because he cares more about running for president than he does about communities like yours,” Kelly said.

The morning after the border legislation was introduced in February, Trump posted on his Truth Social Network that "Only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Bill.”

The bill would have tightened border security by hiring more Border Patrol officers and deploying 100 fentanyl screening machines at the Arizona border, where 50 percent of the fentanyl seized in the United States enters the country.

The Democratic nominee had bipartisan support at the rally Friday; she was introduced by former San Joaquin County (Calif.) District Attorney Tori Verber Salazar, a Republican, and the Mayor of Douglas Donald Huish, also a Republican, who told attendees that he and many of his fellow border mayors are endorsing Harris because of her promises to fix the broken immigration system and secure the border.

“The vice president understands the need for a bipartisan solution to border issues, because she's worked on border issues for a long time,” Huish said.

Huish, elected mayor of the predominantly Democratic city — a blue spot in Republican Cochise County — in a three-way race in 2020, did not seek another term this year.

Huish, while publicly declaring his backing for the Democratic candidate, has also signed on to support U.S. Rep. Juan Ciscomani, the freshman Republican in nearby Congressional District 6.

Ciscomani, whose Southeastern Arizona district doesn't cover Douglas (which is represented by U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva, a Democrat) but does include a small rural slice of the border, said the visit by Harris "smells of nothing more than a photo opportunity to try to score political points."

Harris and Trump, whose campaign stopped in Sierra Vista last month, have been polling neck-and-neck in Arizona for the majority of the race. An average of polls compiled by RealClearPolitics showed Trump leading by two points Friday afternoon.

Trump won Arizona in 2016 with 49 percent of the vote against Hillary Clinton's 45 percent, but lost to Joe Biden in 2020 by less than a percentage point, or 10,457 votes.

Immigration and border security continue to be one of the most contentious issues for the two candidates — at a rally in Tucson earlier this month, Trump vowed to begin "the largest mass deportation mission in the history of our country" in his second term as president.

At a campaign stop in Sierra Vista, the Republican nominee told a crowd that he had given Harris "the strongest and most secure border in American history" when he left office in 2021.

At the event Friday, Harris condemned Trump’s response to the crisis at the border.

“Trump did nothing to fix our broken immigration system as president,” she said. “He did not solve the shortage of border agents or address our outdated asylum system. What did he do instead? He separated families, ripped toddlers out of their mothers’ arms, and put children in cages. That is not the work of a leader. That is an abdication of leadership. We cannot accept Donald Trump’s failure to lead.”

Harris advocated for “clear legal pathways” for migrants looking to enter the country and long term residents, like Dreamers, who Harris said are "American in every way."

Among the attendees were Pima County Supervisors Rex Scott and Sylvia Lee, former U.S. Rep. Ron Barber, Cochise County Supervisor Ann English, and former Arizona Rep. Daniel Hernandez Jr. Not at the event was Democratic congressional candidate Kirsten Engel, who is seeking to unseat first-termer Ciscomani in CD6. Engel narrowly lost the 2022 race to the GOP freshman. Grijalva, still recovering from cancer treatments earlier this year, is not yet making public appearances.

 

Will Americans Pay for Israel’s Crimes Again?

by Connor Freeman Posted onSeptember 30, 2024

Originally appeared at The Libertarian Institute.

We should never forget that American civilians were blindsided twenty-three years ago this month when a small group of mostly Saudis and Egyptians hijacked our civilian airliners in a kamikaze mission that murdered thousands. Though none of them were Palestinian, the nineteen hijackers’ indefensible terrorist attack was motivated largely by Washington’s unconditional military, financial, and diplomatic support for Israel’s apartheid system, illegal occupations, and myriad atrocities in southern Lebanon as well as Palestine.

By design, that’s a crucial part of the story never included in the “never forget” file. Such a superficial catchphrase, bereft of any meaningful understanding of why the transformative attack took place beyond the usual “they hate us for our freedom” canard, is just cynical.

Our new national mantra was used to psychologically torment survivors, widows, orphans, and the broader public alike into reluctantly accepting or enthusiastically supporting inexcusable and largely predetermined government policies.

As with anything else in life, our affairs would drastically improve with an objective understanding of cause and effect. If we achieved a realistic worldview following that terrible day in September 2001, it would have been impossible for the likes of Vice President Dick Cheney to justify his ostensible solutions to the attack, which included the largest government crackdown on our inalienable rights and doubling down on the same murderous foreign policies that made our waking lives a nightmare.

On both sides of the aisle, our rulers systematically provoked the attacks, supported Al Qaeda fighters in various theaters throughout the 1990s, and failed their most basic obligation – given the regime’s monopoly on security services – to protect its citizens and their homeland.

Still, instead of being punished with life imprisonment, the government officials responsible for the carnage managed to convince the American people – this author included – that they should punish us with a massive police state, effectively eviscerating our constitutional rights forever.

If our citizenry was properly informed regarding our terrorist enemies’ means and ends, it could have rendered impossible Washington’s objective of manufacturing consent for its subsequent series of unnecessary, endless, multi-trillion dollar illegal wars in Afghanistan, across Africa, and throughout the Middle East.

Under the guise of fighting terrorism, these unconstitutional mass murder campaigns killed between four and five million people via direct or indirect violence, sending Al Qaeda recruitment soaring. The administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden went on to actively support Al Qaeda shock troops in Washington’s proxy wars launched against the people of Libya, Syria, and Yemen.

Americans have been so apathetic, demoralized, and propagandized during the last twenty-three years that we are now, in fact, waging wars against groups like the Shi’ite militias of Iraq and Syria, Lebanese Hezbollah, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Yemen’s Houthis. These entities constitute the region’s foremost enemies of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. But this, like Israel’s artificial intelligence programmed genocide, never seems to trouble the voter base of either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. We find ourselves in this absurd situation because our government is co-bylining a holocaust on our dime and in our name, unleashed on the Palestinian people by Israel, one of Al Qaeda’s regional benefactors in recent years.

Yet there is no outrage, no national scandal, nor even basic questions being asked. American protesters should be flooding the streets daily demanding answers as to why our government is again switching sides in the so-called “Global War on Terrorism” just so the IDF can safely torture, starve, rape, ethnically cleanse, and exterminate an entire nation of people whose land is coveted by the Israeli settler movement.

When American activists peacefully protest the illegal expansion of ethno-exclusivist colonies or U.S. citizen journalists cover other heinous crimes against the Palestinians, they are liable to be executed with IDF sniper rounds to the head, as occurred earlier this month. On September 6, in cold blood, an Israeli military sniper shot dead 26-year-old peace activist Aysenur Eygi during a demonstration near Nablus.

As if this were a scene in some dystopian novel, a White House occupied by Democrats predictably gave Israel a gentle tap on the wrist while the docile GOP “America First” movement did nothing.

While Israel wages a U.S.-backed war of genocide against Muslims and Christians living in occupied Palestine, its apartheid army concurrently bombs the people and infrastructure of Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran.

This is all headed in one direction: a likely surge of Al Qaeda terrorism at home and the final transformation of the United States into an overtly totalitarian state, all amid a massive and costly war involving multiple nations simultaneously with American troops suffering enormous casualties.

The coming nightmare will surely dwarf the catastrophes already caused by our government alongside its client states across the region this century.

In the name of Aysenur Eygi and the victims of the September 11 attacks, it is imperative that any “America First” movement worth its salt target the heretofore “ironclad” U.S.-Israel partnership. The American people must permanently cut off our government’s military, financial, intelligence, and diplomatic support for this parasitic pariah state immediately.

Connor Freeman is the assistant editor and a writer at the Libertarian Institute, primarily covering foreign policy. He is a co-host on the Conflicts of Interest podcast. His writing has been featured in media outlets such as Antiwar.com, Counterpunch, and the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. He has also appeared on Liberty Weekly, Around the Empire, and Parallax Views. You can follow him on Twitter @FreemansMind96.

Who’s Nazi Now? The Dangerous U.S. War on Immigrants

Stephen F. Eisenman

SEPTEMBER 27, 2024
Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Alfred Rosenberg at the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, April 16, 1946. National Archives and  Records Administration, College Park, MD.

The wrong question

Faced with two wars, nuclear confrontation, extreme economic inequality, and a climate crisis — not to mention threats to reproductive rights, forever chemicals, housing shortages, gun violence, and rising educational debt – what do 82% of Republican and 39% of Democratic voters, according to a Pew Research poll, say is the most important issue in the Presidential election? Immigration. A nation of immigrants, with dying main streets, empty classrooms, and labor shortages in key industries, is about to cast its votes based in large part on which candidate can best be trusted to reduce rates of both legal and illegal immigration. The biggest news story in the past several weeks was whether or not Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio (population 58,000) have been snatching and eating their neighbors’ pets. (It was quickly established they haven’t.)

How did it come to this? What individuals and institutions created and sustained the notion of a “migrant crisis”? What dangers does the myth pose to U.S. democracy and immigrants themselves? Are there historical parallels that may shed light on the false narrative, and can it be challenged? That’s what these brief observations are about.

Jews; Hitler; immigrants

Donald Trump has called immigrants criminals, gang members, murderers, rapists, invaders, diseased, insane, vermin and blood poisoners. The list isn’t exhaustive. Though he hasn’t called for them to be killed, he has proposed arresting twenty million of them, (even though there are only about 11 million undocumented workers in the U.S.), and confining them in concentration camps before deportation to parts unknown. Trump’s chief advisor on immigration Stephen Miller – channeling Alfred Rosenberg — told The New York Times last November: “Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown.”

The scheme has a familiar ring. In 1940, Hitler instructed Adolf Eichmann to plan the deportation of 4 million Jews over four years to the French island-colony of Madagascar. The idea was quickly dropped because of cost and British control over the necessary sea-routes. (Two years later, a different “solution” was agreed.) As a candidate, Trump has no power to do anything, much less mandate confinement, deportation, or genocide. And it’s possible Trump’s rants against immigrants – they become crazier every day – will cost him the election. But if he instead prevails, his rhetoric about an alien invasion will have been validated by a national referendum, and he will try to make good on his word. (Despite claims to the contrary, presidents usually do.) The recent supreme court decision granting presidents almost unlimited power in the performance of “official acts” will be Trump’s Enabling Act; that was the 1933 decree that granted Hitler unfettered power to violate the German constitution and make laws without the participation of parliament (the Reichstag). Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is Trump’s Paul von Hindenburg.

Does that all sound overheated? Consider that Trump isn’t alone in his revilement and that there exists a vast organizational and personnel infrastructure dedicated to expelling immigrants and asylum seekers and denying sanctuary to new ones, especially any with dark skin. It includes anti-immigrant think tanks, such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform, founded by the eugenicist and white nationalist John Taunton; the Center for Immigration Studies, which has promoted the canard that pregnant immigrants are pouring across the border to give birth to American children; and ProEnglish which promotes laws mandating that English become the “official language” of the United States and that all federal and state initiatives promoting multilingualism and multiculturalism be halted.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, intended as a blueprint for the next Trump administration, and authored in part by key, Trump advisors, would deport so-called “Dreamers” (undocumented immigrants who entered the U.S. as minors), force states to hand over to federal authorities the driver’s license and tax ID numbers of undocumented workers, and suspend most legal immigration. The Republican controlled U.S. House of Representatives introduced a draconian immigration bill last April (the Border Security and Enforcement Act of 2023 H.R.2640) that would essentially halt all immigration into the U.S., but congressional Democrats have so-far blocked passage.

Among Trump’s most committed individual allies in the anti-immigrant onslaught is his vice-presidential running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance. He has parroted his master, and sometimes gone further, falsely claiming that immigrants to Springfield, Ohio are both spreading disease and eating resident’s pets. His doggedness is such that he insisted upon repeating the libels even after the parents of a local boy accidentally killed by a Haitian driver begged him to stop. Under close questioning by CNN reporter Dana Bash, Vance admitted that: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” This was a clear case of letting the cat out of the bag.

Many other prominent Republicans, including Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton have similarly extremist views. The two governors have usurped the power of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and undertaken relocations and deportations on their own initiative. The House Speaker tried passing a budget bill that includes a measure requiring proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections; his rationale was that hordes of illegal immigrants are being let into the country to vote and elect Democrats. The idea derives from “White Replacement Theory”, a racist fantasy that gained national attention when neo-Nazis at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 chanted “you will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us.” Cotton recently unveiled legislation, supported by Vance and Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, to end constitutionally enshrined, birthright citizenship.

Former Fox News star Tucker Carlson, now a popular podcaster, regularly spreads the Replacement conspiracy, claiming that Democrats and “global elites”, led by Jewish billionaire George Soros, plan to replace “legacy Americans” with “a new electorate from the Third World.” Lately, he has endorsed Neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers, including Daryl Cooper, whom he described to his audience as “the best and most honest popular historian working in the United States today.” Cooper claimed Churchill not Hitler was the reason “the war become what it did” and that the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust died because the Nazis lacked the resources to take care of them. Vance has defended Carlson’s embrace of Cooper, saying that while he may not share his views, Republicans like himself value “free speech and debate.” Vance, however, should watch his back; Carlson is positioning himself as Trump’s most likely successor as head of the MAGA movement.

Trump’s former Senior Policy Advisor, Miller, cited above, was among the most rabid white nationalists to hold a high administration position. In a series of leaked emails from 2015-6, he was revealed to have endorsed openly racist, online publications such as VDARE (now defunct) and American Renaissance. Recent article titles in the latter include “Building White Communities,” “Fear of a White Planet,” and “Anti-White Manifesto Leaked.” Miller championed the Trump Muslim travel ban and use of Title 42 to block asylum seekers at the Mexican border during the pandemic. He remains a close advisor to the former president and will almost certainly return to government if Trump is elected again.

And there’s more: Former White House Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon has explicitly embraced the ideas of Julius Evola, the Italian fascist philosopher who supported both Mussolini and Hitler. Evola wrote about the superiority of men over women, and “higher castes” (powerful, spiritual, “Aryan” men) over lower castes (slaves, blacks, Jews and women). He called Jews a “virus” and applauded Mussolini’s 1938 anti-Semitic laws. Bannon’s fervent Zionism has largely protected him from charges of anti-Semitism by conservative Jewish organizations, despite his embrace of Evola and a history of anti-Semitic remarks. His racism, however, is open and unapologetic. He told a meeting of France’s National Front in 2018: “Let them call you racist. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists,” he said. “Wear it as a badge of honor. Because every day, we get stronger and they get weaker.” Bannon, who is now serving a three-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress, recently told a BBC reporter that on “day one.” Trump would “stop the invasion” and begin the “mass deportation of 10 to 15 million illegal alien invaders”.

Finally, Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr., also a close advisor to his father, openly expresses racist views. He told far-right broadcaster Charlie Kirk that Haitians have congenitally low IQs and that if they continue to be admitted to the U.S. “you’re going to become the third world. It’s not racist. It’s just fact.” Don Jr. was repeating long debunked ideas linking IQ (itself a discredited measure) with ethnic or national origin. Such views were commonplace among Nazi doctors, such as Karl Brandt and Joseph Mengele, as well as Rosenberg, editor of the rabidly anti-Semitic newspaper Völkischer Beobachter (Racial Observer) and author of Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts. That book argued that the Nordic-German soul was under attack from subversive, Jewish modernism and cosmopolitanism. It sold more than a million copies in Nazi Germany, second only to Mein Kampf. In Trump’s circle and among Republicans generally, biological and cultural racism are ascendant.

A vicious circle of hate

Trump’s popularity among many Republican voters is not despite his racism and xenophobia, but because of it. Polls and scholarly papers reveal consistently high levels of racial animus among Republicans, and strong support for Trump’s extremism. But it’s not clear how much that racism preceded Trump, and how much was generated by him. To understand the dynamic, another parallel with Nazism must be drawn.

Before Hitler’s ascendency to power in 1933, anti-Semitism was widespread in Germany, except among supporters of Social Democratic and Communist parties. But it was a dilute brew of longstanding religious and cultural prejudices, nothing like the toxic Judeophobia of Hitler and the Nazi party he directed. But after passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, which restricted Jewish participation in civic and social life, and especially after the Austrian Anschluss in 1938 and invasion of Poland a year later, racial attitudes hardened to the point that Judeocide could be publicly espoused by Hitler, Goebbels, Heydrich, Rosenberg and others. While the details of the Holocaust were never presented to the German public – indeed an effort was made to hide them from the world – the facts of Jewish deportation, ghettoization, concentration, and murder – were an “open secret” as the historian Richard Evans writes, available to anyone who cared to know. The German public had largely internalized Hitlerian anti-Semitism and shrugged at its genocidal consequences.

The point here, is that anti-Semitism and racism may exist at relatively low levels in a society, without doing great damage. But when they are amplified by a demagogue and repeated by other politicians and the mass media, they become a powerful force. Jewish assimilation became “the Jewish question”; immigrant integration becomes “the migrant crisis.” Who’d have thought, a dozen years ago, that a major party candidate for President would propose the round-up, concentration, and mass deportation of between 10 and 20 million American residents? Trump inflames his core of racist supporters, who then encourage him to even more extreme slanders, which further excites his followers, and so on.

Can anti-immigrant views be changed?

There is a debate on the left, here in England, about whether recent anti-immigrant violence masks legitimate, working-class grievances. One side argues that the rioters in Rotherham, Hull, Sunderland, Leeds and elsewhere, were primarily poor whites whose communities have been devastated by decades of neo-liberal privatization, Tory austerity, and infrastructure disinvestment. They are badly paid (when they have work), ill housed (rents and home prices have risen to exorbitant levels across the U.K.), and in poor health (the NHS has for years been in a parlous state.) They suffer high rates of alcoholism and drug addiction and live in blighted cities and towns in the north. While attacks on immigrants are both misdirected and abhorrent, it’s unsurprising that oppressed people object to the government paying almost $3 billion a year to house migrants in hotels and guest houses. With modest adjustments to migration policy, a modicum of social spending, and considerable grassroots education and organizing – so the argument goes — these supporters of Nigel Farage and the Reform UK Party (the Trumpist, anti-immigrant party) could become a progressive, vanguard proletariat that renounces racism.

The alternative view, however, seems more persuasive. According to a recent survey, 36% of Reform UK Party voters (a bloc that largely approves the anti-immigrant riots) are upper-middle class (professionals and managers); 22% are middle-and lower-middle class (supervisory, administrative, and clerical workers); and 42% are working-class (unskilled, semi-skilled or unemployed). Just under 40% were over 65 years old and 80% say that “immigration has made life worse in Britain.” The anti-immigrant riots were not desperate outcries by an oppressed working class but pogroms by white men (and some women), schooled for decades in nationalism, xenophobia, and racial hatred, and prodded to violence by Tory and Reform UK Party politicians.

The anti-immigrant rhetoric heard on the streets in England was coarser but, in substance, little different from what has long been spouted by leading British politicians. Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his Home Secretary Suella Braverman, for example, pushed a policy – as impractical as it was mean-spirited – to deport to Rwanda a small number of migrants as a way of deterring others from attempting to cross the English Channel in small boats. The plan, which recalls Eichmann’s Madagascar scheme, advanced in fits and starts for about two years before finally getting binned by the new Labor Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. The latter too, however, is promising to reduce immigration, possibly by holding and processing all immigrants offshore.

Trump’s anti-immigrant MAGA base comprises about 35% of the U.S. electorate. Like Reform UK voters, they are mostly older, middle-class (or at least, in the middle of the income distribution, or Lorenz curve) and white. They have been a powerful force in U.S. politics for generations. In presidential contests, they supported Goldwater, Nixon, Wallace, Reagan, both Bushes and Trump. Because of their concentration in rural states, or ones with low populations, they have controlled a solid bloc of seats in the U.S. Senate and votes in the Electoral College, giving them an outsized role in U.S. politics. The idea that this constituency, any more than rioters in Rotherham or voters for Reform UK, can be seduced, persuaded, or cajoled into changing its stripes is ludicrous.

Solutions to the so-called “migrant crisis”

The “migrant crisis” must indeed be addressed. But the issue is not the immigrants; their positive contribution to the U.S. economy is incalculable. Without the infusion of new workers – legal and informal — productivity and living standards would be reduced and inflation would rise. Whole industries – agriculture, hospitality, construction and healthcare – would grind to a halt if Trump was able to implement his promised deportation scheme. The real problem is a political and economic order that leaves masses of the population hungry, badly housed, sick, poisoned, drug addicted, isolated and angry. The best responses, therefore, to Trump’s and other Republicans’ Nazi-like calls for arrest, confinement, and mass deportation of immigrants are progressive programs that will appeal to the two-thirds of voters who do not march in MAGA goosestep. That means an increase in the minimum wage, affordable health care for all, federal housing initiatives, guaranteed higher education or job training, investment in a green transition, protection of reproductive rights, and other measures to achieve greater social and economic equality.

I admit these proposals are both predictable and common sense. Implementing them is more challenging. Doing so starts with defeating Donald Trump in November, quickly followed by mass, community organizing to inspire and empower a nation alienated from government and politics. Progress will also require registration of young voters, infiltration of Democratic party cadres at local, state, and federal levels, strategic and sustained protests of corporate titans and the billionaire class, and mobilization of support for legislation that benefits working-class voters. When that gets underway, the “migrant crisis” will magically disappear, and American Nazis recede from view.

 

Stephen F. Eisenman is emeritus professor at Northwestern University. His latest book, with Sue Coe, is titled “The Young Person’s Guide to American Fascism,” and is forthcoming from OR Books. He can be reached at s-eisenman@northwestern.edu