Trump May Be Among the Most Vile of Anti-Immigrant Demagogues, But He is Not Original

Bruce Neuburger

 November 18, 2024
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Image by Greg Bulla.

Immigration to the U.S. southern border has long been subject to cold-hearted racial demagoguery. The Statue of Liberty may have welcomed some of the “huddled masses” from Europe at different times, but no such welcome was ever given to people from south of the border. There, a different attitude has prevailed.

Donald Trump’s MAGA hate speech includes such descriptions of non-European immigrants as “stone cold killers,” “immigrant criminals from the dungeons of the world,” “rapist,” “pet eaters” — or “invaders” from across the southern border. Some may find Trump’s words pleasing and others dreadful, but he is far from original.

The story begins in 1846 when U.S. President Polk— encouraged by the slavocracy eager for more land to expand their operations and by the merchant capitalists looking for a gateway to the Pacific — set about to rip off the northern half of Mexico from the rest of that country. Among the European Americans who followed their “Manifest Destiny” west to newly conquered lands after the war in 1848, there was debate about whether the new U.S. territories would be “slave” or “free.” But there was neither debate nor doubt about how to receive the non-white immigrants who made it to those promising lands.

In a Congressional hearing in the 1880s a member of the House committee on immigration questioned a representative from California: “Two years ago California came before this committee and stated herself in opposition to the Chinese and Japanese immigrant and in favor of Chinese and Japanese exclusion, stating that they wanted to develop a great big white State in California, a white man’s country; and now you come before us and want unlimited Mexican immigration . . . I cannot see the consistency.”¹

But there was consistency. Chinese and Japanese workers were among the first waves of non-whites whose labor would lay the groundwork for large scale agriculture and the California dream that would not be theirs. But as important as their labor was it came with a defect making them far from the ideal workers white employers desired: They were difficult to remove thus posing an unacceptable threat to white demographic dominance.2 Mexican labor, however, was close at hand and easily deportable, a quality that made it, by the early 1920s, the immigrant labor of choice.

The southern border became, not the firm line of defense of national sovereignty as our contemporary demagogues would have us see it, but the portal for the low wage laborers on whose backs an empire was being built. But the door was meant to be a revolving one and herein lay the conflict.

Through the years the southern border has been the scene of a schizoid dance of immigration. There were times when employers on U.S. farms, factories, and railroads, couldn’t get enough of those “hard working,” “uncomplaining” Mexican (or Central American) workers—think of the Bracero program during the World War II years.³ Then there were other times marked by furious nativist-driven campaigns to stop the flow and rid the land of “criminals,” “disease ridden delinquents,” “drug runners,” “ants,” “communists” or “terrorists”— depending on the era. Notable in this are the years 1930, 1954, and 1994.

In the early 1930s hundreds of thousands of Mexicans were deported or otherwise forced out of the U.S. having been made convenient scapegoats for a brutal Depression economy. The deportations were massive and indiscriminate and accompanied by a ferocious campaign of racial intimidation and threats so intense that many of those who left the U.S., did so on their own out of fear of violence. Forty to sixty percent of those deported or repatriated were U.S. citizens, and many were children.

1954 was the year of Operation Wetback, a militarized campaign of terror and mass deportation that resulted in the suffering and death of many immigrants. Operation Wetback was principally an ethnic cleansing campaign. Its goal was to reverse the “troubling” growth of Mexican and Mexican American communities in California and the Southwest. But the deportation campaign ultimately failed, not because it wasn’t well planned or brutally executed, but because the immigrant communities had become interwoven in the economic and social fabric of border states. After a military style mass deportation of more than a million immigrants which caused terrible suffering, American authorities appealed to Mexicans to return to the U.S.! The California and southwest economy could not function without them. ⁴

In the intervening years since Operation Wetback the structural dependence of U.S. capitalism on cheap, vulnerable labor has increased. At the same time, one of the foundations of white supremacist control and identity, the demographic dominance of white people, is more challenged than ever. What began as a labor system largely restricted to California and the southwest has now become a key part of the labor structure for the entire country. In places throughout the U.S., and especially in the cities, essential jobs from service to construction to meat packing, child care and elder care, are dependent on immigrant workers. And the countryside? Today nearly 90% of U.S. farm and dairy workers are immigrants, roughly half undocumented.

Walk the streets of major cities, go to the school rooms and work places and the demographic future greets you in all its multiplicity. This is what lies at the heart of the MAGA-fascist immigrant frenzy— a clash of demographics.

For the nativist who has bought into the notion that the U.S. is a “white man’s land” and must always remain so — this is the metastasizing of a nightmare. For those who view humanity through a broader lens, it is a twist of historical irony and the harbinger of a potentially better world.

The Crazy Dance

In the 1980s President Reagan tried to alter the crazy dance of immigration with an amnesty for what were then three million immigrants deprived of documents.⁵ Today, 38 years on, there are at least 11 to 12 million people with this status. Thirty-eight years have passed since there has been any viable path to the most basic “legal residency” for those millions. And the reason for this is no great mystery: No matter how much verbal fog obscures it, the U.S. economy depends on their labor, their cheap labor.

U.S. capitalism admits to no apartheid nor racial caste system, and yet it can’t function – and compete — without workers deprived of basic rights. The endless discussions and promises over the last decades about “comprehensive immigration reform,” have been so entangled in their own contradictions that one residing in Alice’s Wonderland would find it beyond the pale . . . with no end in sight.

Beginning in the 1990s we witnessed with Clinton, Bush and Obama, the border wall constructed, laws criminalizing immigrants enacted, a spectacularly cold blooded decision to drive refugees from NAFTA⁶ into the desert where many died, and an endless raging frenzy over “border security.” Meanwhile, beginning especially under Obama, immigrant detention centers sprouted like diseased deformities on the landscape. In the mid 1990s California’s conservative governor Pete Wilson tried to solve the state’s “demographic problem.” It was called Proposition 187, a draconian plan of ethnic removal that sought to enlist teachers and healthcare workers to its cause. The ballot measure passed easily but the plan failed. Massive resistance by teachers, medical workers, and youth from the immigrant communities, played an important role. The fight to defeat Proposition 187 was a watershed for California. It actually secured greater respect and rights for immigrants, much to the chagrin of the nativists and white supremacists. And they have not forgotten that defeat!

When campaigning for office the first time in 2016, Trump cited and praised Operation Wetback. He even mimicked Herbert Brownell, the Secretary of State in 1954 who, at the height of that Operation, threatened to shoot immigrants to discourage them from coming. Trump, not to be outdone in the verbal thuggery department, said at the time he would machine gun them. And we saw how those words aroused people to horrible actions in 2019 in places like the garlic festival in Gilroy, California and a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.⁷

And now in the Trump2 era, a more rabid fascist nationalism targets the broader non-white community, and non-white immigrants in particular, not only as inferiors, but overtly as racial enemies, and poisoners of blood!

Trump2 is better organized, with a more indoctrinated base, possessed with a histrionic passion for preserving white dominance, or white supremacy, and with the added zeal of racial animus and Christian fundamentalism. It is also linked to the more desperate moment as the U.S. empire confronts greater challenges to its global dominance. The MAGA fascists look to rouse the populace with a racial zeal for the imperial tests ahead.

The depth of Trumpite insanity was spoken to by the MAGA groupie Elon Musk in a conversation with Joe Rogan on November 4 when he referred to then upcoming election as an “existential” moment: “If the Democrats win the election they will legalize enough illegals to turn the swing states. And [then] everywhere will be like California. There will be no escape” (my emphasis)–“Everywhere will be like California.” Such is the vision of hell for the MAGA racial fanatics.

To be sure Trump’s MAGA fascism is more than an immigration and demographics project. It is the fervent vision of a U.S. returning to the unassailable heights of global domination. The glue that holds this MAGA project together bears a striking resemblance to its German counterpart in the 1930s. Racial demagogy, white (instead of Aryan) supremacy, (and misogyny) at its core. While not new, in the world of today, it’s a lunatic vision and its lust for a racial reckoning is more dangerous than it’s ever been.

Postscript:

The opposite of this MAGA vision sees defense of humanity as a whole as our sacred responsibility. And that includes the defense and preservation of this little, abused planet of ours. The MAGAites are going to have to be defeated if we are to succeed in uplifting our humanity. Along with that, the system out of which this MAGA nightmare has arisen will also have to go. Will the coming assaults on immigrants be a spark for a broader, more radical social movement?

¹ Stoll, Steven, The Fruits of Natural Advantage, UC Press, 1998 p.152

² Throughout the 1800s western nativists waged war on Asian immigrants. This included racist pogroms that literally burned down Chinese communities on the west coast. In 1882 the nativists succeeded in passing the Chinese Exclusion Act.

³ The Bracero program was a wartime measure begun in 1942 that brought millions of Mexican workers under contract to work in California and other states. Their contract stipulated that they had to return to Mexico after their period of contractual labor ended. The Bracero program ended in 1964 but the need for Mexican labor did not.

⁴ Operation Wetback was a militarized operation led by a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General. At least one million workers and their families were deported, sometimes deep into Mexico far from their homes. Some deportees were dumped inside the Mexican border without food or water. Hundreds of deaths resulted.

⁵ In 1986 Congress passed the Simpson/Mazzoli Act (Immigration Reform and Control Act or IRCA) that provided for an amnesty for 3 million undocumented workers to legalize their status. In addition a program for growers allowed for many additional legalizations. One of the aims of this amnesty was to assure employers of a more stable workforce. Simpson/ Mazzoli provided for sanctions for employers who continued to hire undocumented workers. This was meant to stem the flow of undocumented immigrants. But this provision was not enforced and following Simpson /Mazzoli the flow of undocumented immigrants into the labor force continued and increased.

⁶ The North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect in 1994. Among its effects were lowering tariffs on U.S. produced corn. The subsequent flooding of the Mexican market with cheap U.S. corporate grown corn caused corn prices to fall and hundreds of thousands of small Mexican farmers were ruined, a fact that the mainstream media has largely ignored. Many displaced farmers and rural workers, to survive, went north. But just at that time a border wall was constructed in such a way as to force them to make their way north through dangerous mountainous and desert terrains leading to hundreds and then thousands of deaths. According to one estimate at least 8,000 immigrants have died crossing the Mexico – U.S. border since the latter 1990s.

⁷ In August 2019 a mass shooter killed 23 people at an El Paso Walmart in one of the deadliest attacks targeting Latinos in modern U.S. history. This followed a shooting in Gilroy the previous month where three people were killed and eleven wounded. The shooters in both cases were white, those injured and killed, mainly Latinos.

Bruce Neuberger is a retired teacher and author of Postcards to Hitler: A German Jew’s Defiance in a Time of Terror.

GENDER APARTHEID

Taliban seeks to reshape Afghanistan’s schools to push their ideology

Afghan students will get more lessons in religion and resistance under the Taliban’s proposed changes to their schools. Sanaullah Seiam

The Conversation

November 11, 2024

The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 was a blow for education across the country – but especially for girls and women. Since then, the Taliban’s leaders have outlawed education for girls after sixth grade, expanded religious seminaries known as madrasas ninefold and reintroduced corporal punishment in schools.

Now, the Taliban are continuing their assault on education for both boys and girls by changing the curriculum in grades 1-12. They have already revised textbooks up to eighth grade, and they’re on track to finish the rest within months. After completion, the revised curriculum will go up for approval by the Taliban’s supreme leader and will likely be followed by swift implementation. The process is straightforward. The supreme leader of the Taliban controls education policy – including the curriculum. Once submitted to him, he has no reason to reject or delay the implementation.

As an educational policy scholar who pushed for educational progress in Afghanistan before the Taliban takeover, I believe these changes echo the tactics of the Soviet-backed regime in the 1980s to impose an ideology through textbooks. They also reflect the stifling climate of the 1990s, which promoted violence and suppressed critical thinking in education. By controlling education, the Taliban aims to instill their totalitarian and extremist religious-based ideology in young minds, ensuring their grip on power for generations to come

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The Quran, Islam’s sacred text, will become a more prominent part of Afghan education under a series of proposed changes by the Taliban. Wakil Kohsar via Getty Images
The curriculum changes

Afghanistan’s education system is centralized, meaning all schools follow a single curriculum. The current textbooks are the result of two decades of reforms that followed the country’s recovery from the Soviet invasion and civil wars of the 1980s and 1990s.

Since 2001, when the Taliban’s last regime fell, the Ministry of Education, in collaboration with international developmental agencies, undertook a critical revision of the national curriculum. This initiative aimed to make curriculum and textbooks inclusive, nondiscriminatory and free from promotion of violence – a departure from previous textbooks that included illustrations of tanks, rocket launchers and automatic weapons.

In the last decade before the Taliban regained power, the Ministry of Education was still attempting to reform curriculum to focus on students’ personal and economic growth. Unfortunately, the ministry never completed the reforms.
Taliban soldiers in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Oct. 16, 2024. Wakil Kohsar via Getty Images

Within a few months after their takeover in August 2021, senior Taliban leaders criticized the previous education system and curriculum, saying it was brainwashing Afghan youth and weakening religious values. They called for a reeducation campaign.

Since then, the Taliban have been revising the curriculum and aggressively rewriting textbooks for grades 1-12. This is based on 26 recommendations from their education commission. Some of the changes approved by the commission include:

1.) Removing subjects like formal art, civil education and culture. Instead, schools are increasing time spent on religious studies.

2.) Removing content about human rights, women’s rights, equal rights, freedoms, elections and democracy.

3.) Removing all images of living beings from textbooks, including pictures of humans, animals, sports and anatomy. The Taliban believe that only God creates living beings, and producing or distributing images of God’s creation is prohibited.

4.) Adding religious material to the curriculum that enforces Taliban narratives. This includes teachings that justify violence against those who resist or oppose the Taliban’s views.

5.) Shaping student behaviors to fit the Taliban’s vision of society, similar to what they defined in recent vice and virtue laws that ban women’s voices and bare faces in public, among other rules.

6.) Requiring schools to teach and assess students on “emirate studies,” which glorify Taliban leaders and their history by characterizing the Taliban takeover as a defeat of secular values, including equal rights, civil society and democracy.

The Taliban have also banned women from studying abroad. In addition, they have prohibited the sale, purchase and reprinting of more than 400 science and philosophy books and confiscated at least 50,000 books on democracy, social and civil rights, art, literature and poetry from publishing houses, bookstores and public libraries.

A 2023 Human Rights Watch report noted an increase in corporal punishment in schools. Even some teachers of nonreligious subjects, like math and science, now have to pass the religious tests to remain employed.

Beyond shaping thought processes, the Taliban aim to influence students’ actions. Through rigid rules and corporal punishments – including humiliation, beating, slapping and foot whipping – they seek to produce immediate behavioral changes that reflect their desired norms. Their ultimate goal is to cultivate individuals who embody the regime’s values and ideologies.
Consequences for Afghan students – and the world

During their first regime from 1995-2001, the Taliban used textbooks with biased content that promoted violent jihad. For example, the alphabet taught to first graders included teachings like “J” stands for jihad and “M” for mujahideen – referring to Islamic guerrilla fighters.

They increased religious education to 50% of the curriculum and banned art, music and photography. They deemed music against God’s will, according to their interpretation of Sharia.

As a result, academic freedom vanished. Student enrollment dropped. Families lost trust in schools, and many teachers left the profession, leading to the eventual collapse of the education system in the 1990s.

The Taliban are threatening to do the same today with their latest curriculum changes. Schools may turn into indoctrination centers instead of places for real learning. I fear that the altered curriculum could breed mistrust in public education. Furthermore, the Taliban removed the 2008 law that made school mandatory. As a result, many parents may pull their kids from schools again

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Afghan school girls walk back home in Balkh province on Oct. 22, 2024.

Atif Aryan via Getty Images

The ideologically driven curriculum also raises international concerns and has already led to cuts in foreign aid. Donors won’t support institutions that promote discriminatory ideologies. This is straining an already vulnerable education system, threatening its survival.

Ultimately, the Afghan people will bear the brunt of these policies, but the effects could spill beyond the country’s borders and impact the world.

Enayat Nasir, Doctoral Research Assistant in Educational Policy, University at Albany, State University of New York

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

‘Mass deportations would disrupt the food chain’: Californians warn of ripple effect of Trump threat

WHO WILL DO MY JOB, WHITE MAN?!

In 2023, state was nation’s sole producer of almonds, artichokes, figs, olives, pomegranates, raisins and walnuts


Cecilia Nowell

THE GUARDIAN

Mon 11 Nov 2024


Take a drive through the Salinas or Central valleys in California and you’ll pass from town to town advertising its specialty fruit or vegetable: strawberries in Watsonville, garlic in Gilroy, pistachios in Avenal and almonds in Ripon. More than 400 types of commodities are grown in the Golden state – including a third of the vegetables and three-quarters of the fruits and nuts produced in the United States.

Much of that food is grown by immigrant farm workers – many of whom are undocumented. According to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), about half of the country’s 2.4 million agricultural farm workers do not have legal status in the US. But farm worker advocates say the number is much higher in places like California, where it can be “as high as 70% in some areas”, according to Alexis Guild, vice-president of strategy and programs at Farmworker Justice, a non-profit based in Washington DC.

Donald Trump’s campaign promise to “launch the largest deportation program in American history” by targeting millions of undocumented immigrants could upend the lives of the majority of these agricultural workers who grow and harvest our food – which would dramatically hit California’s communities and economy, with ripple effects that would touch every table in the country.

“Without undocumented immigrant labor, we wouldn’t be able to sustain a food supply at the capacity that we have right now,” said Ana Padilla, executive director of the Community and Labor Center at the University of California at Merced.

Farm workers already perform dangerous and often underpaid labor. In the fields, they are vulnerable to pesticide exposure and workplace injuries doing work that is exempt from federal overtime laws. Trump and his allies have repeatedly said that undocumented immigrants have “taken” jobs from Black and Hispanic Americans, but farm worker advocates say these are not jobs US citizens are eager to hold.

“Rather than thinking about how immigrants ‘took’ jobs that existed, the historic wave of migration from Mexico that began in the 1970s is really a story of the growth of an industry and a very large and profitable one at that,” said Edward Flores, a sociologist and faculty director of the Community and Labor Center, who compares the size of California’s agricultural industry to Hollywood.

“The fact that there were so many people working in agriculture meant that the nation exported much more produce than it otherwise would have – that it opened up opportunities for people all along the supply chain.”

In 2023, California’s agricultural exports totaled more than $24.7bn, according to the USDA. The state was the nation’s sole producer of many specialty crops – including almonds, artichokes, figs, olives, pomegranates, raisins and walnuts – and the leading producer of other staples, such as lettuce and celery.
Proposed deportations would be absolutely devastating not just for immigrant households, but most American householdsEdward Flores, University of California at Merced

“Proposed deportations would be absolutely devastating not just for immigrant households, but most American households,” Flores said. “Mass deportations would disrupt the food chain at a time when inflation is one of workers’ most pressing concerns.” He added that such deportations would slow production and increase prices of many grocery store staples, including milk, wheat and eggs.

Without the undocumented immigrant workforce, the United States would probably import more of its food supply – making food prices vulnerable to fluctuations and to Trump’s proposed tariffs. (The United States currently imports about 15% of its food supply – including about a third of vegetables, half of its fruit and 94% of seafood.)

A mass deportation operation would face logistical and financial hurdles: a recent report from the American Immigration Council estimates that a one-time mass deportation would cost at least $315bn – so the real reason to threaten to deport undocumented farm workers, advocates and academics say, is to discourage immigrant laborers from organizing for better working conditions.

“There’s a contradiction in business owners who employ undocumented immigrants and at the same time support Trump and his proposal for the largest deportation initiative in US history,” said Flores. “Unless your aim is to have greater control over labor than ever before. Because under such a proposal, an employer could recruit a vulnerable workforce and then government would provide the means to get rid of them at will.”
An employer could recruit a vulnerable workforce and then government would provide the means to get rid of them at willEdward Flores, University of California at Merced

During his previous administration and the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump expedited H-2A visas for agricultural workers – but his allies have voiced disapproval of even legal immigration options for farm workers. The now infamous Project 2025, authored by former Trump administration officials, proposes capping and phasing down the H-2A visa program in order to “put American workers first”.

Farm worker advocates worry that other immigration and labor protections for farm workers, especially ones recently introduced by the Biden administration, are at risk. Republican-led states have sued the Biden administration over a rule allowing H-2A workers to unionize. And Padilla worries that the upcoming Trump administration would also challenge a Biden policy called Deferred Action for Labor Enforcement, which protects undocumented immigrants from deportation when reporting labor violations.


“These types of programs are essential – especially in certain industries like meat packing, agriculture, construction, food service – to report employer noncompliance, unsafe conditions, so [farm workers] could feel protected in doing that,” she said.

“Most undocumented farm workers in California and across the country have been here for at least 10 years,” said Antonio De Loera-Brus, communications director for the United Farm Workers of America. This means “they’ve lived through a Trump presidency before”, he added.

Although many farm workers are anxious about another Trump administration, he said, “what we need to do is reassure communities that they will not be left alone, that they will not be abandoned” and “this union is your union, and your union will always stick up for you”.

Last week, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, called for a special session of the state’s legislature “to protect California values” including “civil rights, reproductive freedom, climate action and immigrant families”. In 2018, California became the first “sanctuary state” in the nation when its legislature enacted a law limiting local and state officials from cooperating with federal immigration authorities.

“Farm workers of all immigration statuses are going to continue feeding America just like they have every day,” said De Loera-Brus. “And they don’t care if the food they’re picking is going to end up on a Democrat or Republican table. They just want to be paid fairly and treated with dignity for their literally essential work. And then they want to go home safely to their families.”

Trump’s mass deportations will raise grocery prices even higher: Nobel-winning economist

Erik De La Garza
November 11, 2024 

Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump reacts as a scoreboard in the background displays "Trump 45" and "Trump 47", referring to Trump as the nation's 45th president and his bid to become the 47th president, during a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, U.S. October 22, 2024. REUTERS/Carlos Barria


President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to institute across-the-board tariffs and mass deportation of undocumented immigrants will likely usher in the unintended consequence of “soaring inflation,” according to a Noble Prize-winning economist, who added that grocery and housing prices will specifically be affected.

American consumers feeling the grocery store pinch are not likely to see any relief if Trump follows through on his threats of deporting en masse immigrants, a group that New York Times columnist Paul Krugman added make up a large segment of the agricultural workforce.

“If these workers are deporte, the food industry will probably have great difficulty replacing them,” Krugman wrote Monday, noting that undocumented immigrants also play a major part in food processing. “Even in the best case, the industry will have to offer much higher wages — and, of course, these higher wages will be passed on in higher prices.”

The longtime columnist continued his bleak assessment of the “downstream economic effects” of two of Trump’s major campaign pledges – sweeping tariffs and mass deportations – by writing that housing would also take a hit.

“What will Trump do if inflation rises? Bear in mind that his campaign was replete with false claims — about immigration, jobs, inflation, crime and more. And one of his go-to tactics for dismissing data that shows his claims are false is to insist that the data is fake,” Krugman wrote.

He added that consumers shouldn't expect Trump to acknowledge the “inflationary consequences” of his policies, noting that it’s “far likelier" that the former president will “deny reality or blame bad actors and try to order prices back down again.”

Krugman concluded by writing that while his concern about the threat Trump poses to democracy is greater than inflation worries, the nation’s future will depend greatly on how Americans, including those who voted for Trump, will react “if they come to find that they bought into a false belief in Trump’s ability to manage the economy.”

Trump's ex-DHS head cornered on massive impact of deporting '5 percent of the workforce'

Matthew Chapman

RAW STORY
November 11, 2024 

Former Trump acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf. (AFP)

CNN's Jake Tapper cornered Donald Trump's one-time acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf on how the president-elect's plans for mass deportation — which could cost massive amounts of money and require the deployment of the military — would actually work, and how the administration would avoid catastrophic economic damage.

Tapper began by noting that a huge amount of the workforce would meet Trump's apparent standard for deportation.

"What happens to the economy if 5 percent of the workforce is deported?" he asked

"Again, you've got to prioritize the removals ... making sure you're removing the worst of the worst," said Wolf. "But this idea that you've got to turn your head and just exempt people from the law or from consequences of the law, deportation and the like, because they have a job here in the United States — we certainly need to take a look at that, but there are other ways and other mechanisms and, certainly, other visas that allow individuals to come in and to contribute to the U.S. economy. If the Congress wants do more, that's a debate they should have. But to simply say that we're going to turn our head and just ignore the fact that the law's being broken, I don't think right approach."

"Are Trump transition team members talking to Republican lawmakers to figure out how Trump will fund this plan?" asked Tapper.

"Well, I'll let the transition team speak for itself," said Wolf, adding that he "would suspect" they are.

"I think that's really important because it's not only just a change in policy, which obviously the president can do, but obviously there's going to be some resources required to make sure that those policies are implemented in a way that's smart and consistent and that's sustainable over the long term," he said.

"What about the impact — again, I'm not arguing in favor, pro or con against any of this," Tapper pressed him. "But what about — say there is an undocumented gentleman and he's married to an American citizen and they have children. Does he get deported? What if both parents are undocumented, but the kid was born in this country? Do all three get deported? Is somebody gaming out all of these different permutations of the various statuses of these people?"

"Well, Jake, I'm not going to get into hypotheticals because the background of all these individuals really, really matter," he said, but repeated, "You go back to the prioritization of removing the worst of the worst first."

 Watch the video below or at the link here.

- YouTubeyoutu.be

A COUPLE OF ARYAN NATIONALISTS

Indian-origin Ramaswamy backs Trump's mass deportation plans

Indian-origin Ramaswamy backs Trump's mass deportation plans

YOU GO FIRST


PTI
Washington,

 Updated At : Nov 11, 2024 

Photo: @VivekGRamaswamy/X

Vivek Ramaswamy, top Indian-American aide to President-elect Donald Trump, expressed his support for the mass deportation plan of illegal immigrants and said that the legal immigration system in the country is "broken".

He said that those who broke the law while entering the United States have no right to stay here and they need to go.

"Do we have a broken legal immigration system? Yes, we do. But I think the first step is going to be to restore the rule of law, to do it in a very pragmatic way,” entrepreneur turned-politician told ABC News in an interview.

“Those who have entered in the last couple of years, they haven't established roots in the country. Those who have committed a crime, should be out of this country. That is by the millions. That alone would be the largest mass deportation. Combine that with ending government aid for all illegals. You see self-deportations,” he said.

Ramaswamy appeared on multiple Sunday talk shows, the first after the stunning win of Donald Trump in the November 5 presidential elections. He told ABC News that he is having some “high impact” discussions on his future role in the administration, Congress of the party.

From being a rival of Trump during the Republican primaries, Ramaswamy has emerged as a staunch supporter and confidant of Trump.

“I think he cares about uniting the country. I think that is Donald Trump's number one focus. I do think we have to get back to a place after this election after that decisive victory, which I do think was a gift to the country, get back to a place where ordinary Americans who might have voted differently amongst their family members or their colleagues or their neighbours, to be able to get together at the dinner table and say, we're still Americans at the end of this, that's very much Donald Trump's headspace,” he said.

“He's also learned a lot from that first term, and I think he's going into this second term even to take to new heights some of the things he wasn't able to accomplish in the first term, which I think is going to be a good thing,” Ramaswamy said.

The Republican Party, he said, is now a multi-ethnic working-class coalition. “You saw black voters, Hispanic voters, young voters. That was a big one. A much younger composition of the Republican primary base came together on basic principles that really weren't as beholden to older Republican orthodoxies, but principles like free speech, anti-censorship, meritocracy, and staying out of World War III. These are some of the common threads that bring together what is a pretty diverse and broad tent coalition to restore those basic constitutional principles,” he said.

“Here's a big one. And Donald Trump talked for a long time about the deep state. But this idea of restoring self-governance is big in this new coalition. The idea that the people we elect to run the government, they haven't been the ones actually running the government for a very long time," Ramaswamy said.

"Donald Trump is going to be the president of the United States in the real sense of that word. Capital P president where he is actually making the decisions with the democratic will of the people behind him, not the unelected bureaucratic class underneath him,” the Indian American said.

“That's something that unites a common thread of even former Democrats to independents, to libertarians, to, of course, traditional Republicans as well. I think that that's a common thread that unites us,” he said.

Trump, he said, is focused on what makes people's lives better. “And actually, my message to Democrats out there, even those who didn't vote for Donald Trump, is to give them a chance to actually make your life better. A lot of people across the country, even those who have bought into some false narratives about Donald Trump, are going to be pleasantly surprised to find more money in their paychecks, prices coming down in the country, and a secure border. Those are things most Americans actually care about,” Ramaswamy said.