Yesterday the Trump regime announced two major moves toward the “Make America White Again” fascism that they have been promising from the beginning. With far too little opposition to the terror that has ripped through immigrant communities from ICE raids and deportations, Trump has now seized an opportunity to expand his attacks to legal immigrants. This week, he announced plans to cut legal immigration to the U.S. by half, and remake the immigration system as a so-called merit-based system, allowing visas only for certain highly skilled workers rather than family relationships. His regime also announced that it is out to end university admission policies that discriminate – against white people! These two moves are straight out of Hitler’s playbook.
One can imagine what the merits for legal immigration under consideration will be. Wealth, education, race, language … whatever they are stated to be, the goal is to limit and eventually eliminate immigration from non-white countries. To cut off any way for immigrants to bring their loved ones over means they cannot put down roots in this country, that they are here only to provide their labor, and that they are condemned to a perpetual status as outsiders. And it will not stop there. The Department of Homeland Security has vowed to crack down on “fraud” among skilled H1B visa holders, the removal of Temporary Protective Status of 60,000 Haitians is looming, and immigrants are being threatened with deportation for minor bureaucratic violations. We should not limit our imaginations on where this can lead. Deportations and expulsions of entire immigrant populations, undocumented or documented? Revoking the rights of naturalized citizens? Yes, all of that is possible because this is a white supremacist, Christian fascist regime.
At this point, we shouldn’t require any more proof of that fact. We have Muslim bans and a border wall and ICE raids and returns to mandatory minimum sentencing. We have pleas for more police brutality and calls to defend “Western Civilization.” Now, there is also a leaked Department of Justice memo that revealed plans by Jeff Sessions to redirect civil rights resources toward litigating college affirmative action cases as “intentional race-based discrimination.”
This is an open threat to admissions policies that aim to give traditionally underrepresented groups a chance at higher education, or even to attempt to achieve some level of diversity in the student body at universities. In these investigations and lawsuits, Asian Americans could be co-opted with temporary status as honorary whites, but only for the sake of political expediency. The bitter irony is sickening: the civil rights division is being used to foster a false sense of victimhood for white students and to further degrade the already limited educational opportunities for disadvantaged students of color. Like other racists before them, this regime attempts to hide its racism behind a veil of meritocracy, but just barely. Alongside these disguises, there is the open demonization of immigrants, Muslims, Latinos and Black people.
The instability in the ranks of this administration is not slowing down the fascist locomotive. If anything, it is having the opposite effect. Consider how much Trump has done to solidify his base in the last two weeks: turning the Boy Scouts jamboree into a Trump youth rally, banning transgender people from the military, calling for increased police brutality in his speech to law enforcement in Long Island, whipping up hatred and blind loyalty among his supporters in Ohio, and proving to his supporters that he can tolerate a high level of chaos in his administration. He is giving them what he promised.
To be honest, not enough people are standing up to the racism and white supremacy of this regime. The millions of people who were out for the Women’s March in January need to be back out demanding that the Trump/Pence regime must go. Out in the streets, standing up for the undocumented immigrants, standing up for the Black and brown youth that are being brutalized and incarcerated, standing up against the fascists in the streets waving their guns and their confederate flags, and standing up for women whose basic right to control their lives is under ever-increasing threat. It is time to get off the sidelines and get on the right side of history. The lessons of Nazi Germany are available to us, but we have to heed them.
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