While the deportation-industrial complex is a business based on making profit and maximizing the incarceration of bodies, that entity could not function without an ideological justification. It has to be able to say why it is necessary.
In trying to understand its self-justification, I would begin by looking at statements made by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. Miller is generally acknowledged to be the brains and major mover and shaker behind Trump’s immigration policies. As a guest on Fox News in April 2024 before the last presidential election, Miller said:
“If you import the Third World, you become the Third World.”
After the election, about Trump, he went on to say, “This was a country on the verge of dying and you alone saved it.” He has viewed immigration as an “invasion” by a hostile force. Before Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 race, Miller said re-electing Biden would represent “the assisted suicide of Western civilization.” With no basis, Miller assumes that immigrants to America hate the country and want to promote its demise.
The Miller world view sees nothing positive coming from immigrants unless they are white South Africans or from Scandinavia. Trump himself has repeatedly argued that the U.S. should accept more immigrants from Norway. At the same time he calls Somalis “garbage” and he bemoans migration from “shithole” African countries and Haiti.
Trump officials are only accepting 7,500 refugees this fiscal year (down from 125,000 under President Biden) and they have reserved the majority of slots for white Afrikaners. This appears to be partially based on the false narrative that there is a white genocide going on in South Africa. They are also entirely short-circuiting asylum claims.
The refugee and asylum policies are consistent with the white supremacist outlook embedded in the Miller/Trump perspective. This outlook harkens back to a longstanding American nativist tradition that has divided newcomers to our shores into good and bad groupings. The nativist tradition has long been negatively inclined toward immigration from Africa, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere. It is nothing new in American history although as a society we suffer historical amnesia about it.
In her book, “America for Americans,” Professor Erika Lee brilliantly dissects this history. She shows the roots of our xenophobia. We have both welcomed millions from around the world and deported more migrants than any other country. Lee says we have deported over 55 million people since 1882. She writes:
“Americans have been wary of almost every group of foreigners that has come to the United States. German immigrants in the eighteenth century; Irish and Chinese in the nineteenth century; Italians, Jews, Japanese and Mexicans in the twentieth century; and Muslims today.”
One key insight that Lee offers is that the ruling class benefits when workers are divided along racial lines. Workers become less able to challenge the worst corporate abuses by the billionaire class.
In the early twentieth century, American immigration opponents relied on a pseudo-scientific racism that categorized humanity into a strict hierarchical order based on intellect, ability and morality. Thinkers like the eugenicist Madison Grant saw race as a central determinant in societal fitness. He and other eugenicists wanted to protect the allegedly superior breeding stock of the Anglo-Saxon race and exclude immigrant races they saw as inferior or undesirable.
I would suggest that the thinking of Stephen Miller and Donald Trump is not far removed from these racists. Grant was utterly opposed to the notion of America as a melting pot of different cultures. He believed in the superiority of so-called legacy Americans. Miller shares Grant’s disdain for multiculturalism. The Trump policies opposing diversity, equity and inclusion follow from that.
Miller is on record praising the 1924 Immigration Act signed by President Calvin Coolidge. That law froze immigration at extremely restrictive quotas based on the ethnic composition of the U.S. prior to 1890. The law highly restricted the level of immigration into the U.S. The intent was for “whites only” immigration. The law was also intended to tremendously narrow Jewish immigration. A wide range of Americans indulged antisemitic stereotypes and saw Jews as an inferior race.
Ironically, Miller, who is descended from Russian Jews, was praising a policy that prevented many thousands of Jews from escaping the Holocaust in Germany. Miller’s own cousin, Alisa Kasper, posted a devastating take down on social media saying both sides of his extended family had mostly disowned him. She wrote Miller had become the “face of evil.”
The same racism and xenophobia that constrained immigration to the U.S. in the 1920s is at play now. The strength of nativism is remarkable. Immigrants still seem to be perceived as competitors for jobs, depressors of wages and a burden on public services. This combines with the racist scapegoating of the “they eat dogs, they eat cats” variety. It would appear that many Americans project their fear and anxieties onto the undocumented and irrationally blame them for their troubles.
Unverified allegations of fraud such as in Minnesota are giving license for ICE to run wild and terrorize communities. Because of the ICE gestapo, many people are afraid to leave their homes.
Yet, undocumented workers typically labor in jobs like agriculture, construction and care-taking. These are jobs that most Americans will not do. The undocumented are not causing the affordability crisis crushing American workers and there is no logic behind blaming them.
It is time to call for the abolition and defunding of ICE. Not only are they not protecting the public, they are out-of-control, using excessive force. They apparently think they are James Bonds’ with a license to kill. Executing American citizens is not their mission. ICE has disappeared due process and become a lawless perversion. They are the domestic terrorists.
Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot.