January 23, 2018
The last four days could not have provided a starker example of the crippling dysfunction caused when the party in control of two branches of government has racism and xenophobia as its animating principles. On Friday, due to the Republicans’ unwillingness to include CHIP reauthorization and any protection for the Dreamers in the Continuing Budget Resolution, the government shut down. Despite the furious and cynically dishonest propaganda campaign waged by Congressional Republicans, Trump and Pence, the Republicans own this shutdown.
Although the Republicans control the House, the Senate and the White House, the Republicans could not cobble together a budget bill that all of their members would support. Despite the fact that they have repeatedly tried to lay this failure at the feet of the Democrats, Mitch McConnell intentionally manufactured this crisis by withholding a vote on CHIP reauthorization for four months, in order to use the health insurance of nine million children as a bargaining chip. McConnell sought to force Democrats into a “Sophie’s Choice” between saving health care for nine million children or protecting nearly 700,000 Dreamers from deportation. McConnell’s callous calculation was driven in part by the hardliners in his caucus, but also by the blatant racism of both Trump and his closest advisors, Chief of Staff, John Kelly and White House advisor, Stephen Miller. Kelly and Miller have made it clear that The White House won’t allow the passage of any bill that fails to punish people for the “crime” of being brown. A frustrated Lindsey Graham baldly stated, “As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration, we are going nowhere,” (Source: “A President Not Sure of What He Wants Complicates the Shutdown Impasse,” by Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Maggie Haberman, The New York Times, 1/21/18).
Yet, Monday afternoon, faced with a cabal of bigoted nativists led by an unprincipled cynic incapable of acting in good faith, the Democrats blinked. Despite having the wind at their back of the millions of Americans who have engaged in sustained, principled, progressive activism for the past year, Democrats caved and voted for another Continuing Resolution that will keep the government open for less than three weeks, without extracting protection for Dreamers. In fact, the feckless Dems extracted nothing more than a vague promise from McConnell that “it would be [his] intention to consider legislation,” to address DACA. Apparently, Democrats were spooked that Republican demagoguery that they had “prioritized illegal immigrants over American citizens,” would cost them seats in November (Source: “Why the Democrats Lost Their Nerve,” by Robert Costa, Erica Werner and Karen Tumulty, The Washington Post, 1/22/18). In other words, Mitch McConnell’s CHIP hostage gambit worked.
If we are honest with ourselves though, we know that it worked because this current of xenophobic racism has long standing roots in American history. Over the 244 year span of our nation’s history, white men have arrogated to themselves the sole authority to police borders, both real and metaphorical, to decide who gets to be called American. At our country’s founding, despite colonizing a land already inhabited by indigenous people and forcefully kidnapping Africans to cultivate it, the founders excluded both groups from the definition of “citizen.” That designation was begrudgingly and fleetingly bestowed on African-Americans after a bloody, internecine war, only to be immediately snatched back upon the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877. Native Americans were robbed of their land by genocidal westward expansion that herded them into allegedly sovereign reservations and provided the justification for not granting Native Americans citizenship until 1924(Source: “Congress Granted Citizenship to All Native Americans Born in the United States, June 2,1924,” Americaslibrary.gov, Library of Congress).
The point is that we have been fighting these wars for a long time. Throughout our history, America has strictly guarded the borders of race and national origin. Master of. misogynoir, John Kelly probably would not like to be reminded that when his forebears arrived here from Ireland in the nineteenth century, they were not deemed white, or even fully human (Source: “When America Despised the Irish, by Christopher Klein, www.History.com, 3/16/17). Abandoning our deep investment in defining America as white and policing the borders of whiteness is a very recent and far from universally accepted phenomenon. Until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. it was official U.S. policy to explicitly favor immigration from three Northern European countries and disfavor it from Latin America, Africa and Asia. (Source: “The Immigration Act of 1924(The Johnson-Reed Act)”, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State,www.history.state.gov).
This history bears recapitulating because we won’t attain justice for Dreamers or other undocumented people by flinching from the ugly entrenched racism that has always been at the core of our immigration policy. We cannot tell ourselves a fairy tale illustrated by pictures of the Statue of Liberty, with Emma Lazarus’ words etched on its base. Resistance to immigration has always been rooted in white supremacy. The only difference is who gets to be called “white.”
#CleanDREAMActNow
#Bluewave
#Runforsomething
#Resist