Some of the roughest people you’ve ever seen, people that look like they should be fighting for the UFC [Ultimate Fighting Championship mixed martial arts promotion company]” he said. “They read a little page given by lawyers that are all over the place — you know lawyers, they tell them what to say. You look at this guy, you say, wow, ‘that’s a tough cookie.’
In fact, though, many of the asylum seekers are fleeing from ruthless drug gangs, threats of rape, and human trafficking in the Central American countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.
The mass shooter at the New Zealand Mosques recently praised Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose” in his extensive online political manifesto.
Trump reiterated his claim in front of the Jewish group that “our country’s full.”
Obviously, Trump lacks even the scantest foundation in U.S. or world history.
In 1939, just before the breakout of war in Europe and prior to our country’s entry, for some refugees, primarily those within Europe’s Jewish communities, the exit door, though slammed tightly shut for the majority, contained a slight and brief open crack for some.
During that year, two legislators in the U.S. Congress, Senator Robert F. Wagner (D-NY) and Representative Edith Rogers (R-MA) proposed an emergency bill, which, if passed, would have increased the immigration quoted by allowing an additional 20,000 Jewish children under the age of 14 (10,000 in 1939, and another 10,000 in 1940) from Nazi Germany to come to the United States.
Though the bill was roundly supported by religious and labor organizations, conservative and isolationist groups mounted wide-scale campaigns to prevent its passage. Public opinion polls at the time showed that 83% of U.S. residents opposed any increases in immigration. Though First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, implored her husband to advance the bill, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt failed to publicly support it.
In fact, Laura Delano Houghteling, the president’s cousin and wife of the U.S. Commissioner of Immigration, James L. Houghteling, sternly warned:
20,000 charming children would all too soon, grow into 20,000 ugly adults.
The bill never came up for a full vote in the Congress, and it died, like the children it could have saved.
Also in 1939, on May 13, 937 Germans and other citizens from Eastern European nations, mostly all Jews fleeing Nazis brutality, booked passage on the German transatlantic ocean liner, St. Louis, from the port of Hamburg bound for Havana, Cuba. Most passengers had applied for U.S. visas, and they planned to wait in Cuba on their previously-approved landing permits and temporary transit visas until U.S. officials accepted them into the U.S.
Even before embarking from Germany, the passengers became the source of bitter political cross-partisan rivalries in Cuba as a number of conservative politicians and newspapers demanded the immediate cessation of its policy of admitting Jewish refugees on its land. The Cuban government, therefore, reneged on its offer to honor the passengers’ landing permits when the St. Louis entered Cuban waters.
Faced with this unforeseen development, the ship’s captain, Gustav Schroeder, turned the St. Louis toward the Florida coast of the United States in hopes that U.S. government officials would allow passengers entry on refugee status by processing their visa applications.
Unfortunately, though, the political wars transpiring in Cuba on the plight of Jewish refugees were even more intense in the United States. Within the United States, President Roosevelt succumbed to conservative political pressure by following his immigration officials’ decision to deny safe haven to the ship’s passengers.
The captain had no other choice than to turn his ship around back toward Europe. On route, knowing that returning to Germany meant certain death for his passengers, he negotiated with several governments, whereby Great Britain allowed entry of 288, the Netherlands admitted 181, Belgium took 214, and France took 224.
By the end of the war, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that all but one in Great Britain survived, approximately half of the remainder on the continent, 278, survived the Holocaust, and 254 died: 84 who had been in Belgium; 84 in Holland, and 86 who had been admitted to France.
Throughout U.S. history, rather than characterizing refugees and refugee issues in humanitarian terms, many conservative and nationalist activists use narratives representing refugees as invading hoards, as barbarians at the gates who, if allowed to enter, will destroy the glorious civilization we have established among the “lesser” nations of the Earth.
The day Donald Trump descended the escalator in his tower of gold, with head raised forward as he held court at his press conference announcing his run for the presidency on June 16, 2015, he tossed down the bodies of Mexican people as if they were red Trump steaks as his initial stepping stones on his march to the White House.
[Mexico is] sending people that have lots of problems, and they are bringing those problems to us,” he warned. “They are bringing drugs, and bringing crime, and they’re rapists.
The German Nazis used similar language in its propaganda film “Der Ewige Jude” (“The Eternal Jew”) representing Jews as plague-ridden hordes of rats. The Nazi’s accepted and advanced the “scientific” view that European-heritage Jews, in fact, all Jews of every so-called “race,” constitute a separate and lower “race” as justification for extermination as if we were vermin.
On a more basic and personal level, the rhetoric of invasion taps into our psychological fears, or more accurately, terrors of infection: our country, our workplaces, and more basically, our private places in which “aliens” forcefully penetrate our bodies, into our orifices, and down to the smallest cellular level.
Politicians and most other residents of the United States alike, from every rung along the full political spectrum, generally agree on one issue: our immigration system is severely broken and needs fixing. Seemingly insurmountable gaps in political solutions to repair the system along with Congressional inaction to the point of blockage have brought the country to the point of crisis.
Though politicians and members of their constituencies argue immigration policy from seemingly infinite perspectives and sides, one point stands clear and definite: decisions as to who can enter this country and who can eventually gain citizenship status generally depends of issues of “race,” for U.S. immigration systems reflect and serve as the country’s official “racial” policies.
Today the United States stands as one of the most culturally and religiously diverse countries in the world. This diversity poses great challenges and great opportunities. The way we meet these challenges will determine whether we remain on the abyss of our history or whether we can truly achieve our promise of becoming a shining beacon to the world.
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