Authoritarian persecution of state enemies proceeds step by step
Also they’re ratcheting up the actions as well as the rhetoric.
Today’s news that Trump admin is now targeting legal immigrants who use state services warrants a reminder. Authoritarian persecution of state enemies proceeds step by step.
So I look for the news, and find it:
The Trump administration is moving forward with one of its most aggressive steps yet to restrict legal immigration, denying green cards to many migrants who use Medicaid, food stamps, housing vouchers or other forms of public assistance, officials said announced Monday.
Federal law already requires those seeking to become permanent residents and gain legal status to prove they will not be a burden to the U.S. — a “public charge,” in government speak —but the new rules detail a broader range of programs that could disqualify them.
It’s part of a dramatic overhaul of the nation’s immigration system that the administration has been trying to put into place. While much of the attention has focused on President Donald Trump’s efforts to crack down on illegal immigration, the new change targets people who entered the United States legally and are seeking permanent status. Its part of an effort to move the U.S. to a system that focuses on immigrants’ skills instead of emphasizing the reunification of families.
In other words poor people need not apply.
The acting director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, Ken Cuccinelli, said the rule change fits with the Republican president’s message.
“We want to see people coming to this country who are self-sufficient,” Cuccinelli said. “That’s a core principle of the American dream. It’s deeply embedded in our history, and particularly our history related to legal immigration.”
The hell it is. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” Remember? That’s deeply embedded in our history too.
It’s one more step.
My ancestors (on my mother’s side) came here during the Irish potato famine. They were not self-sufficient. I wouldn’t be here today, providing vitally important services (teaching, though I do think work in the arts is also important) if this really were deeply embedded in our history. Nor would the vast majority of the early settlers, many of whom arrived in debt and with very little, and quite a lot as prisoners.
Clearly someone failed this man in teaching him American history.
Is it though?
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
I am reminded of an amusing bit of history from my great-grandfather as related to me by my mother (he was her maternal grandfather) about arriving in the US around 1890 from Slovakia/Austria*. At the time you couldn’t enter the country “empty handed”, so there was a certain $10 bill that was being passed back to the next person in line.
* Borders and records etc. are murky given the era, his village was apparently on the border which probably changed a lot.
It took the Nazis eight years to go from mere scapegoating of Jews to designing and building trucks whose exhaust fumes would flood the trailer compartments in just enough time to smother their cargo when they arrived from the concentration camps to the fields where that cargo would be buried in the first mass graves. By then they’d expanded the compass of their targets beyond Jews, though of course Jews were still the main focus.
It remains to be seen just how far the dark American id will take it during this current foment. In some ways it’s reassuring that American racial institutions are centuries old, and that (among other things) the Nazis took inspiration from Jim Crow when they were crafting the Nürnberger Gesetze, and in their zeal and haste they simply went overboard trying to compress centuries of American white supremacy into a single decade, to the tune of over twelve million deaths.
But then I remember that there were two millennia of low-simmering antisemitism in Europe, and its slow acidic drip did not ease the pressure, but rather only increased it until people felt justified in turning their brilliance toward mass extermination. There is absolutely nothing standing between America and that kind of abyss, except maybe for the people in America willing and able to stand and fight.
I wonder (as I often do) how much I am like the Germans who knew and we’re not ok with the concentration camps but ultimately didn’t do all that much.
I vote but how good is that in a lawless society?
@Blood Knight
Yeah, I worry about that too. How complicit am I in the awful things my country does if I don’t really do all that much about it?