My father was amazed that Hitler was a German and not an American, since the United States had always been a hotbed of the most virulently racist and anti-immigrant sentiment in the West. Even in modern times, when racism was put to shame in the wake of the Holocaust and the black civil rights movement, a strong bigotry toward other races and nationalities, motivated in large part by a thorough ignorance of the rest of the world, has found broad adherence among so-called middle America. To be sure, the more overtly malicious forms of racism have been replaced by relatively benign prejudices in most quarters, but the old antipathies and fears remain buried in the psyches of many. It only takes one deranged populist, incapable of filtering his id, to bring a new legitimacy to old bigotries.
The Orange Tyrant has exploited the baser impulses of the electorate, demonizing immigrants with fictions borrowed from the first ten minutes of Scarface or from whatever he saw on social media. Support for his immigration policy has stayed above 50% long after his perceived competency on the economy and other matters tanked, but at last his nakedly Nazistic practice of deporting people to hellish foreign prisons without due process has scandalized the sensibilities of middle America to the point that a majority disapprove.
Just like the original Nazis, the Trumpistas garner public support for their extremist anti-foreigner policy by appearing to limit it at first to the most distasteful and unsympathetic minority, supposedly the worst of the criminals. Exploiting the false perception that these violent criminals are numerous, they expand to an ever-wider net and hope no one notices. At first the Jews had to present papers in order not to be sent to the camps; later the Gestapo stopped checking papers. Similarly, we find summary deportation expanded even to those with legal status, and even permanent residents are not exempt from having their status revoked on specious national security grounds. The deportations to Third World prisons are defended legally on the grounds that immigration constitutes an “invasion.”
Who invaded whom? Do we need to recount all the broken treaties and genocides perpetrated against the Native Americans, who are far less numerous in this country than in most of the Americas? Should we remind the ignorant that the Republic of Texas was founded by Southern U.S. migrants to Mexico who wished to introduce slavery in a nation where it was illegal? On behalf of that noble cause, the U.S. invaded and conquered a third of Mexico, in a war that was opposed by Abraham Lincoln and for which Ulysses Grant considered his country had earned God’s punishment in its own Civil War. Long before the Orange Tyrant, this country had built its own Berlin Wall on the border between San Diego and Tijuana, keeping out the undesirables. In the aptly named Operation Wetback, the Eisenhower administration conducted mass deportations based on ethnicity, even including some U.S. citizens. Immigration is an “invasion” only when the immigrants have the wrong skin tone and language.
The aggressive “Gulf of America” nonsense is a fitting example of the pettiness and ignorance beneath this bigotry. It is only because the United States is among the least American nations on the continent that it can think of itself as simply “America” without irony. The USAers neither know nor care about what goes on in America as a whole. There is more in common between Brazil and Mexico than there is between the U.S. and America. To the ignorant Americans, everything south of the border is one big impoverished blob indistinguishable from northern Mexico. El Trumpo often refers to Central American immigrants as being from “South America,” as though the “South” meant anything south of the U.S.
With the current regime, as in the Nazis, the anti-foreigner hatred is much more acute than in the general population. Thus their agents wear masks, abductions are made quickly to more favorable jurisdictions, and cruelty is deliberate. The idea is to intimidate many into registering, surrendering themselves or self-deporting. These tricks were all used on the Jews, and they are surely tricks again. The Orange Tyrant has repeatedly proven that his word is worthless, tearing up his own agreements on a whim. This is why he is worthless as a “deal-maker” and nothing he does will last. A one-trick pony, he only knows how to threaten and intimidate the weak into bending to his will.
The courts have been wise to the transparent bad faith of this government, but nonetheless have been extraordinarily patient and given it ample opportunity to offer some token defense. In some cases, the government cannot even meet this low bar, so Rumeysa Ozturk was released due to complete lack of evidence. In other cases, one fiction forces another. The claim that someone was sent to a Salvadoran prison due to “administrative error” was a laughable falsehood, designed to avoid admitting that the deportation was in willful defiance of a court order. But this claim is now in the record and the government was operate as though it were true. Now it will claim that it is unable to facilitate the return of that person. Yet its pathetically limp non-efforts belie the initial claim that this was a deportation in error, for if that were so, surely the government would make some attempt to correct it. Caught between two lies, it will surely at some point be forced into outright contempt of court. Then what?
How about the biggest scandal of all: that a nakedly tyrannical regime can establish itself without resistance, and with only a minority willing to call it a tyranny? Was my father right about this country? Are we more fertile ground for a Hitler than Germany was? Surely, there is no talk of genocide against the immigrants; the crimes of the first Hitler has made such talk forever unthinkable. But the other aspects of dehumanization remain. It is even less forgivable in the twenty-first century than in the twentieth that we should regress into this tribalistic alienization on the basis of race.