The Weekly Sift

An anti-immigrant cartoon from 1904. Could those be your people coming over or through the wall?

Dirty, dangerous, diseased, stealing our jobs, and arriving in waves too large to assimilate: Unless your immigrant ancestors were on the Mayflower, they suffered the same abuse.

Wednesday night, Fox News host Laura Ingraham led off her show by quoting Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talking about how the country has changed since the 90s, making fun of her for a while, and then launching into this white-supremacist rant:

In some parts of the country, it does seem like the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don’t like. From Virginia to California, we see stark examples of how radically, in some ways, the country has changed. Now, much of this is related to both illegal, and in some cases legal immigration that, of course, progressives love.

From there she went into a Trump-like cherry-picking of crimes committed by immigrants [1], before coming around again to Ocasio-Cortez and the ultimate threat:

This is exactly what socialists like Ocasio-Cortez want: eventually diluting and overwhelming your vote with the votes of others, who aren’t (let’s face it) too big on Adam Smith and The Federalist Papers. … It’s clear that we need a reset on the entire issue of immigration, illegal and legal.

That segment drew cheers from white supremacists around the country, who recognize their own rhetoric when you repeat it back to them: White Americans are being overwhelming by darker immigrants who will never assimilate, but will instead remake America in their own image. [2]

The timelessness of xenophobia. But there’s a strange thing about that rhetoric: It’s been part of American discourse forever. And most of us here today — including most of the white supremacists — are descended from those darker immigrants who supposedly would never assimilate.

America has always had conflicted feelings about its immigrants. On the one hand, we take pride in being “a nation of immigrants”, a place where people come to be free and find opportunity. When Neil Diamond sang “Everywhere around the world, they’re coming to America” in 1980, that message was celebratory, not ominous. Every well-established ethnic group (except blacks and Native Americans, whose histories are unique, and who even after all these centuries have never completely been accepted as “real” Americans) tells similarly heroic stories about its first generation — people who arrived here with nothing, worked hard, and prospered.

And yet, each new ethnic group faces the same hostile tropes. Unless you arrived on the Mayflower, the white people who were here already probably had the same bad things to say about you and your ilk: You were dirty and carried disease. You brought nothing with you and had little to offer. You ate different food, spoke a different language (or your English was bad and marred by an impenetrable  accent), had different customs, and worshiped at a different church. Your skin (even if your ethnic group is considered white now) was a different shade. Your people brought crime. Having grown up under a different system of government, you were not well suited to American traditions of democracy. You were arriving in numbers too large to absorb, and the prospect of your people assimilating to American ways seemed slight.

Ben Franklin and the Germanization threat. Today, few ethnic groups are as uncontroversial or as seamlessly integrated into the American landscape as mine: Germans. In the 2000 census, we constituted 17% of the population. That makes us the largest group of whites, outnumbering the Irish and English, and puts our numbers about on a par with Hispanics.

My ancestors started coming here in the 1840s, and people who meet me probably don’t even think about Germany; I’m just another white American. I don’t know how to cook any uniquely German dishes. I can barely decipher written German and don’t speak it at all. My European vacation fantasies center on London, not Berlin.

And yet, as Annalisa Merelli pointed out last year on Quartz, if you go back far enough, German immigrants faced the same accusations that Mexican or Muslim immigrants hear today. Ben Franklin in particular worried that Pennsylvania might soon be overrun by them.

Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

Complexion? Weren’t Germans white, like the English? Apparently not, or at least not yet.

Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted.

I don’t know my ancestry well enough to tell you whether I’m Saxon, but if Swedes and Russians are “swarthy”, I doubt I pass muster.

Remember how Trump warned that “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.“? Ben didn’t believe any country did.

Those who come hither are generally of the most ignorant Stupid Sort of their own Nation.

So think about how that worked out. Ben was proved right, mostly: Those stupid Germans did overrun large parts of his colony, becoming the Pennsylvania Dutch. [3] They polluted English Quaker cuisine with their buttery pies and pastries, and marred the countryside with the demonic hex signs on their barns. You yourself may make potato salad in the German fashion, without even realizing that you are betraying authentic American traditions.

That ridiculous train of thought is why, when I watch well-assimilated whites (the kind of people who think of themselves as “real Americans”) denounce the new immigrants, I play a little game with myself: How long ago, I wonder, were similar charges leveled against their ancestors? How few words to you have to change to turn their attacks into diatribes against their own people?

The Irish, Italians, and other Catholics. Take John Kelly, who said that today’s immigrants aren’t “people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society.”

They’re overwhelmingly rural people in the countries they come from — fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm. They don’t speak English; obviously that’s a big thing. They don’t speak English.

The Boston Globe traced Kelly’s great-grandparents: Seven immigrants out of eight. Three from Ireland, four from Italy. Great-grandmother Mary Connelly probably came from Clifden in County Galway, a small town surrounded by farmland. John DeMarco, a fruit peddler,

still didn’t speak English after more than a decade in the country. His wife Crescenza, Kelly’s great-grandmother, lived in the United States for more than 30 years without learning the language.

When Sean Hannity and Newt Gingrich tell us that Muslim immigrants will be bad citizens because Islam is incompatible with American values, I wonder if they realize how closely their rhetoric matches what was said against their own religion (Catholicism) just a few generations ago. In 2010, Gingrich warned:

America is experiencing an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization.

How far is that from what Protestant minister (and best-selling author) Norman Vincent Peale said about the prospect of electing a Catholic president in 1960? “Our American culture is at stake,” he worried.

The Founders saw Catholicism as “popery”, a dangerous authoritarian system utterly at odds with the values of the American Republic. Future Chief Justice John Jay (co-author of those same Federalist Papers that Ingraham — another Catholic — worries new immigrants “aren’t too big on”) wrote to the British people on behalf of the Continental Congress, protesting against the toleration of Catholicism in Quebec:

Nor can we suppress our astonishment that a British Parliament should ever consent to establish in that country a religion that has deluged your island in blood, and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion through every part of the world.

Hannity has called Islamic law, sharia, “the antithesis of our Constitutional republic”. John Adams held similar opinions about the canon law of the Catholic Church’s “Romish clergy”:

All these opinions they were enabled to spread and rivet among the people by reducing their minds to a state of sordid ignorance and staring timidity, and by infusing into them a religious horror of letters and knowledge. Thus was human nature chained fast for ages in a cruel, shameful, and deplorable servitude to [the Pope], and his subordinate tyrants.

I can hardly wait to hear Rudy Giuliani repeat Trump’s rhetoric about Hispanic crime and MS-13, since it is almost a word-for-word reprise of 20th-century denunciations of Italians and the Mafia.

The elasticity of Americanism. At every point in our history, the idea of American has stretched far enough to include past waves of immigrants, while still balking at the more recent ones. At every point, there has been a clear line between Them and Us, and every time the issues seemed totally different than what we had seen before: Once we were an English culture, then a Northern European culture, then a more generally European one (with a possible debt to Africa for jazz and a few other things), and now even that is open to challenge. Once we were a Protestant country, then a Christian country, then Judeo-Christian.

Who knows where this is headed? A few decades from now Muslims may have assimilated, while rising oceans bring waves of immigrants from the vast Indian subcontinent. Maybe then we’ll be a monotheistic or Abrahamic country, and include Muslims in a larger Americanism that still must stand fast against Hindu paganism. Maybe we’ll start to recognize Spanish and Portuguese as European languages and accept Hispanics and Latinos as allies against the new threat, whatever it is.

We have always worried about the newcomers. We’ve always thought there were too many of them, and we usually haven’t treated them well for a generation or two. But eventually we adjust to each other, and the assimilation goes both ways. (The Latinos for Trump leader who warned against a future with “taco trucks on every corner” probably doesn’t even notice that there are already pizza places on every corner. I doubt George Washington ever ate a pizza, or even knew what a pizza was.) America always changes. It changes noticeably from one decade to the next, and pretty extremely with each new generation.

It always has. If your ancestors had wanted to keep living exactly the same way their ancestors did, they probably would have stayed in the Old Country. From the English and Germans to the Guatemalans and Somalians, immigration has always given America a bias towards the New. And that has worked well for us, century after century.

In the end, elasticity has been the most enduring trait of American culture. Massive demographic change is as American as apple pie — which has this tasty Pennsylvania Dutch variant.

[1] This rhetorical trick is in the toolbox of all bigots: Take a common human failing, focus only on how it occurs inside your target group, and then propose solving the problem by discriminating against the people you hate anyway.

I first noticed this back in the late 70s, when anti-gay crusaders argued that gays shouldn’t be allowed to be teachers, and cited cases where gay teachers had sex with their students — as if that were some special gay problem unrelated to all the straight teachers who have sex with their students.

This time, the common failing is crime: Any large-enough group of people is going to have criminals in it. So of course there are criminal undocumented immigrants and horror stories about their crimes, none of which would have happened if only we’d cracked down on all undocumented immigrants a long time ago.

Such arguments can sound very convincing until you imagine one aimed at you. For example, there are probably enough people named Doug in the US to include some murderers and rapists. What if somebody like Ingraham devoted an entire show to telling totally true stories of Doug-committed crimes and the horrible suffering endured by their — I mean our — innocent victims? All that pain could have been avoided if only the law had let police lock up all the Dougs a long time ago.

[2] After seeing the huge backlash her comments had leashed, Ingraham led off the next night’s show by denying that “massive demographic changes” have anything to do with race. Instead, she claimed to have talked about “secure borders” and “families who have suffered the tragic results of illegal immigration”, as if she had never mentioned legal immigrants (and their votes) at all.

This is the dance the Party of Trump does these days: They’re not Nazis, they just re-tweet them and tell America what fine people Nazis are. The day when whites become a minority in America is an approaching apocalypse, but that’s because of “Adam Smith and The Federalist Papers” or something, not race. Republicans are not anti-black or anti-brown, they’re pro-white, like Rep. Steve King who asked: “Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?”

[3] Dutch in this case doesn’t have anything to do with Holland. It derives from Deutsch, meaning German.

It’s not clear what Trump’s executive order means, or what will happen in 20 days.

The national outrage against the Trump administration’s family-separation policy kept ramping up until Wednesday, when Trump seemed to back down. But the executive order he signed is confusing, and what exactly it means is still being hashed out.

The fundamental contradiction. The heart of the problem is that the order mandates two outcomes that look contradictory:

• It apparently endorses the zero-tolerance policy of criminally charging everyone caught crossing the border somewhere other than an official entry point. “This Administration will initiate proceedings to enforce this and other criminal provisions of the [Immigration and Naturalization Act] until and unless Congress directs otherwise.”
• But it also seems to end the family-separation policy that zero-tolerance has led to: “It is also the policy of this Administration to maintain family unity, including by detaining alien families together where appropriate and consistent with law and available resources. It is unfortunate that Congress’s failure to act and court orders have put the Administration in the position of separating alien families to effectively enforce the law.”

So:

• We’re going to continue enforcing the law.
• Enforcing the law required us to separate families.
• But we’re going to stop separating families.

Imagine that you’re a Customs and Border Patrol officer trying to obey this order: What do you do?

Flores. The most obvious answer is to imprison the children along with the parents. However, once you get past 20 days that is illegal under what is called the Flores settlement, a series of consent decrees the government has signed going back to the Clinton administration. Vox explains:

The Flores settlement requires the federal government to do two things: to place children with a close relative or family friend “without unnecessary delay,” rather than keeping them in custody; and to keep immigrant children who are in custody in the “least restrictive conditions” possible.

No judge is going to believe that jail or a government internment camp is the least restrictive condition possible.

The administration can’t just back out of Flores on its own; a court has to let them out of it. The executive order instructs the attorney general to ask the court to modify Flores “in a manner that would permit the Secretary, under present resource constraints, to detain alien families together throughout the pendency of criminal proceedings for improper entry or any removal or other immigration proceedings.”

But there’s really no reason why a court should do that — and the judge in charge seems particularly unlikely to — because the original reasoning of Flores still applies: The kids have done nothing wrong and don’t deserve punishment. The threat that the government otherwise will mistreat them in an even worse way (by separating them from their parents) is simple extortion, as I think the judge will clearly see.

Congress. Congress could supersede Flores by writing a new law explicitly describing how the children of parents charged with illegal entry should be handled. But with the Republican majority deeply divided on how harshly to treat immigrants, and the leadership unwilling to turn its back on its anti-immigrant radicals (and on Trump) to craft a compromise bill that could get Democratic votes, that’s very unlikely to happen, especially in the next 20 days.

Thursday, a far-right immigration bill failed to pass the House by a wide margin, 193-231. That vote was supposed to be followed by a vote on a less draconian “compromise” bill. (The compromise was between moderate and conservative Republicans. No Democrats were consulted.) But that vote was postponed until next week, because supporters couldn’t round up enough votes. In a tweet Friday, Trump reversed course on his demands for a new law, and instead urged Congress to “stop wasting their time on Immigration” until after the November election.

What does he think should happen to the families between now and November? It’s a tweet; there’s no space to spell that out. At any rate, it’s quite likely that neither the courts nor Congress will resolve the executive order’s contradictory instructions. What then?

Confusion within the administration. Thursday, CBP and the Justice Department made contradictory statements. A CBP official said:

We’re suspending prosecutions of adults who are members of family units until ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) can accelerate resource capability to allow us to maintain custody.

But a DoJ spokesperson (coincidentally named Flores) said:

There has been no change to the Department’s zero tolerance policy to prosecute adults who cross our border illegally instead of claiming asylum at any port of entry at the border.

So it looks like the return to the previous procedures is temporary: Zero-tolerance prosecutions will resume as soon as CBP can find space to house the families, which will number in the thousands. Immigrant detention camps — there’s a debate about whether to call them “concentration camps” — are being assembled on military bases. This also was envisioned in Trump’s executive order:

Heads of executive departments and agencies shall, to the extent consistent with law, make available to the Secretary, for the housing and care of alien families pending court proceedings for improper entry, any facilities that are appropriate for such purposes.

These camps will set up a conflict with the courts: Flores allows holding children in such settings for 20 days. Trump wants to hold them “throughout the pendency of criminal proceedings for improper entry or any removal or other immigration proceedings”, which could be years. (The current average wait time at the most overloaded immigration court, in Houston, is 1751 days, or more than four years.)

Changing the process. That time could be reduced under a proposal by Ted Cruz to hire more judges, open more courts, and make decisions in 14 days. (That raises its own problems: A family that runs for its life and arrives on our border with nothing can’t put its asylum case together in 14 days.) Another option is to abandon due process altogether, as Trump proposed Sunday, tweeting:

We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country. When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came.

I’ll repeat a point I used to make when the Bush administration was threatening habeas corpus: Any time people can be imprisoned, deported, or otherwise harmed without a hearing, there’s a hole in the legal system that all kinds abuses can slip through. Suppose you, an ordinary American citizen, get swept up in an ICE raid by mistake. If there’s no hearing, who will you explain the mistake to? Or suppose it’s not a mistake, and somebody in ICE just doesn’t like you? You may find yourself on a street corner in Juarez, telling your story about how unfair this is to anybody who will listen.

If all this sounds crazy, that’s because it is. There actually is no emergency that requires this kind of response. There is a problem of rising backlogs in immigration courts. Cruz’ additional judges would help with this, but there’s nothing wrong with a case taking, say, months to assemble and decide, rather than 14 days.

In the meantime, there are far less cruel (not to mention less expensive) ways to handle the families than to lock them up, either together or separately. Sonia Nazaro explained in Friday’s NYT:

The family case management program, a pilot started in January 2016, allowed families seeking asylum to be released together and monitored by caseworkers while their immigration court cases proceeded. Case managers provided asylum seekers with referrals for education, legal services and housing. They also helped sort out confusing orders about when to show up for immigration court and ICE check-ins. And they emphasized the importance of showing up to all court hearings, which can stretch over two or three years.

The pilot was implemented with around 700 families in five metropolitan areas, including New York and Los Angeles, and it was a huge success. About 99 percent of immigrants showed up for their hearings.

It also did something Republicans love: It cut government spending. The program cost $36 per day per family, compared with the more than $900 a day it costs to lock up an immigrant parent with two children, said Katharina Obser, a policy adviser at the Women’s Refugee Commission.

The pilot, scheduled to last five years, was abruptly canceled by the Trump administration almost exactly a year ago.

Other alternatives to prison have also excelled. ICE has two programs that use electronic ankle monitors, biometric voice-recognition software, unannounced home visits, telephone reporting and global positioning technologies to track people who have been released from detention while their cases are being heard, at a cost of 30 cents to $8.04 per person per day. In 2013, 96 percent of those enrolled appeared for their final court hearings, and 80 percent of those who did not qualify for asylum complied with their removal orders.

The Trump administration isn’t being driven to harshness and cruelty, it is seeking out ways to be harsh and cruel. As Jeff Sessions and several other administration officials have admitted, the point is deterrence. Families that are being terrorized by gangs in Guatemala or Honduras need to understand that if they come here, we’ll terrorize them too.

Dehumanization. The main thing that has gone wrong for the administration these last two weeks is that the American people have been seeing asylum-seeking families as human beings. The recording of crying children at a toddler jail was effective because it brought home the point that these are just children, like your kids or anybody else’s. (This was precisely the point Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade needed to deny: “Like it or not, these aren’t our kids.“)

Trump has responded to this outpouring of human sympathy by doubling down on his dehumanizing rhetoric and his effort to raise fear of an imaginary immigrant crime wave. In Trump’s version of reality, families aren’t coming here to escape danger or seek a better life, they “invade our Country“. They “pour into and infest” America. They don’t establish families like human beings, they “breed” like rats. He responded to the sympathy Americans have shown for migrant families by hosting a meeting of people who have had relatives killed by undocumented immigrants. Unlike the families Trump has separated by government policy, these families are “permanently separated” — implying that the latter injustice somehow justifies the former. [1]

Sarah Jones writes in The New Republic:

Trump did not invent this language from whole cloth. Modern history is full of examples of political regimes that has described certain populations as subhuman—often to justify treating them as such. In the most extreme cases, that rhetoric preceded mass killing.

Trump’s dehumanization of Hispanic immigrants doesn’t have to go that far, but we don’t actually know where it’s going, and this kind of thing never goes anywhere good. Once you start thinking of people as less than human, and you gather thousands of them together in camps, how do you argue against any form of cruelty someone wants to inflict on them? (Miniver Cheevy makes the case that the Nazis (or at least not all of them) didn’t set out with the intention of genocide. But their short-term solutions to “the Jewish problem” left them with camps that were expensive to run and filled with subhuman vermin. When the Final Solution of annihilation was proposed, the logic seemed inescapable.)

Reunification. Even if the prosecutions and separations are suspended, what happens to the kids the government has already taken? CBP claimed on Friday that the 500 or so kids it hadn’t yet turned over to other agencies would be reunited with their parents by Sunday. But that leaves another 2,300 or so. (Homeland Security claims 2,053.) Often the parents have no idea where their children are, and it’s not entirely clear that the government knows either. (DHS claims it does.) A public defender described the situation in The Washington Post:

In a typical meeting, the defendants in a federal criminal case ask the same questions: How much time am I looking at? What do these charges mean? Is my judge fair? Should I go to trial or plead guilty? But things are different in El Paso now. In the wake of the Trump administration’s policy to purposely separate parents and children at the U.S.-Mexico border, my clients now ask: Where is my little girl? Who’s taking care of her? … I have to explain to these parents that I might never be able to answer their questions.

… At another hearing before a different judge, as one of my colleagues asked the agent on the stand about the whereabouts of our client’s child, the prosecutor objected to the relevance of the questions. The judge turned on the prosecutor, demanding to know why this wasn’t relevant. At one point, he slammed his hand on the desk, sending a pen flying. This type of emotional display is unheard of in federal court. I can’t understand this, the judge said. If someone at the jail takes your wallet, they give you a receipt. They take your kids, and you get nothing? Not even a slip of paper?

But that’s only a problem if you picture these families as human. If “they’re not our kids”, if they represent an invasion or an infestation that’s going to come here and breed, then everything is going fine. Carry on.

[1] For what it’s worth, I’ve discussed this fallacy before: You can play the same trick on any large group of people. For example, take Americans whose first names begin with D, a group that includes both myself and Donald Trump, plus millions of other people. Undoubtedly, some of those millions are criminals or even murderers. You could host a meeting of their victims, who do indeed deserve sympathy. But would that really make a case for throwing Trump and me out of the country?

Even if you ignore the collective-guilt problem — what does a murder committed by David or Denise have to do with me? — you’d need more than just anecdotes to make any kind of case at all. Are D-named people statistically more likely to commit violent crimes? Immigrants — illegal or otherwise — aren’t.