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What Would Nellis Say?

The Immigration Conundrum

Immigration_0416 1.jpg
The Immigration conundrum

By Rick Stiller

 

Donald Trump, his MAGA surrogates, and right-wing media have spouted an endless flurry of hateful lies and bombastic threats about immigrants since long before he announced his candidacy in 2015. 

 

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist, said, “Tell the big lie often enough, and it becomes truth.” Our former president’s racist speeches draw their inspiration from the most vicious and sadistic visions authored by Adolph Hitler in Mein Kampf.

 

At a rally in Aurora, Colorado, with no proof or statistical evidence, Trump claimed that “These are the worst criminals in the world…the most violent people on Earth. These are stone-cold killers. You could be walking down the street with your husband, you’ll both be dead.” Dehumanizing the “others” and spreading fear is the point of his violent and detestable monologues, and hate is the magic elixir that binds his MAGA disciples into his delusional nightmare.

 

After nine years of repeating the same disgusting fabrications and exaggerations, gullible followers are numb to the truth. He has normalized his racist rhetoric and justified cruelty, brutality, savagery, and carnage as reasonable. He does not discriminate between legal and undocumented migrants in his rants about “vermin” and “animals.”  To his most ardent supporters, using the military to facilitate mass detentions, incarcerations in concentration camps, and deportations will seem warranted and acceptable if he is elected.

 

With unemployment at a fifty-year low, he proposes removing 11 million workers from our workforce without mentioning the fact that they fill the jobs that white citizens refuse to take in agriculture, construction, and tourism. Think inflation is a problem now? What about your avocados costing  $10 each, or the price tag for your new home increasing by 40%, or your vacation destination being completely understaffed? Our economy depends on immigrant labor, and his plan will affect your budget.

 

He claims that “White Christian Americans” are being victimized by “those people”…which includes anyone who isn’t a White Christian. Immigrants are easily demonized because they’re people of color who speak another language, don’t know our customs, and have yet to become integrated into our society…as neighbors instead of “invaders.”

 

His brainwashed followers are incapable of accepting these people as individuals who have escaped economic disaster and rampant violence, are desperate for opportunity, and anxious to work at any job they can find to provide for their families. They are portrayed as a homogenous mass of killers and rapists coming to take your job, your life, and your place in society, while in reality the vast majority are just despairing families searching for security.

 

White nationalists have spewed this same fuzzy logic about poisoning the blood of the nation, spreading disease, and usurping white privilege with every wave of immigrants throughout our history… the Irish, Italians, Jews escaping Nazi persecution, Eastern Europeans, Hispanics, Vietnamese, Koreans, et al. Native Americans have every right to view everyone who has arrived on these shores since the first Europeans in the 1400s as illegal immigrants…which includes every one of us.

 

It should be noted that Trump employed scores of undocumented Polish construction workers who were paid less than half the minimum wage and forced to work 12-24 hour shifts during the construction of Trump Tower in NYC. In a court case brought by those workers, he settled for $1.375 million. He continues to employ illegal immigrants at his golf clubs and resorts to this day.

 

When Trump was elected, undocumented immigrants totaled less than 250,000 annually. During his four years in office, he had pieces of a wall built along the southern border that did nothing to inhibit clandestine crossings. Using cruelty to instill fear, he ordered ICE agents to seize more than five thousand children, including nursing babies, from their immigrant mother’s arms with no intention of returning them and no documentation that might allow them to be reunited in the future. There are still more than 1400 displaced orphans, and authorities have no idea of how to find their parents.

 

ICE and the Border Patrol raided homes and companies that employed immigrants to arrest and detain thousands of people in the most inhumane roundup since Japanese-Americans were herded into concentration camps during World War II. Many were here legally but lost their jobs, their homes, and their families while they were detained.

 

Despite his administration’s draconian measures, the number of immigrants crossing the border illegally continued to rise to more than a million a year in 2019. It dwindled to a trickle during the pandemic and accelerated after the new administration took office.

 

During Trump’s four years in office, he signed hundreds of executive orders, but his Republican Congress failed to pass any meaningful legislation to resolve the crisis. He had ample opportunity to solve the problem, but the issue was far more valuable as a political cudgel than a legislative success for America’s security.

 

Far too many citizens do not understand the functions of the various parts of our government and why that is important.

 

Under the very first Article of the Constitution, Congress is assigned the responsibility for organizing the executive and judicial branches, raising revenue, declaring war, and making “all laws necessary for executing these powers.”

 

Under Article II of the Constitution, the President is responsible for the execution and enforcement of the lawscreated by Congress.

 

If Congress refuses to pass legislation, the President can issue an executive order to initiate actions to temporarily solve a problem until the legislature provides a comprehensive solution, but he can not appropriate funds.

 

 David Super, a constitutional law expert teaching at Georgetown University, said the president cannot spend money without congressional authorization, "whether by executive order or presidential memorandum or anything else."

 

The House of Representatives normally proposes debates and votes on hundreds of bills each year. Aside from continuing resolutions to fund the government and naming Post Offices, the current right-wing extremist House leadership wasted countless hours and millions of dollars pursuing bogus investigations against the Democratic administration that proved nothing. As we approach the end of this term, they have only passed a handful of meaningful bills, none of which offered any proposals to resolve the immigration issue. 

 

The MAGA caucus has used every opportunity to defund the Border Patrol and the system that processes immigrants entering the country to impede Homeland Security’s ability to stem the flow to prolong their use of immigration as a political tool.

 

In February 2024, Trump rallied Congressional Republicans to tank a $118 billion bipartisan Senate bill authored by radically “conservative” Oklahoma Senator Langford, which would have provided manpower on the border and judges to process the immigrants. Wash Post

 

In May, 2024, House Republicans voted to eliminate 2000 Border Patrol agents.

 

On June 3, 2024, Democrats in the House published a press release explaining why the $93.8 billion 2025 Homeland Security Bill failed to secure the border.

 

“The legislation squanders billions of dollars on useless, ineffective border and enforcement measures while disregarding the threats presented by terrorists, transnational criminals, foreign adversaries, and violent extremists.”

 

After years of stymied negotiations with Republican congressional leaders to reach comprehensive bipartisan legislation, President Biden issued an executive order invoking the Immigration and Nationality Act. This law allows the president to limit the entry of immigrants and restrict asylum-seekers at the US-Mexico border when daily encounters exceed 2,500.

 

This is a temporary fix to a vexing challenge that requires leaders of both parties to agree on a viable remedy that protects the nation’s security while allowing a policy that honors the Statue of Liberty’s inscription,

 

“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!”

 

Nowhere in that beautiful salutation does it say, “But only if you’re white and Christian.”

 

This election will determine whether we are an open society willing to show empathy and kindness not only to each other but to the wayward traveler in need of refuge, or will we become the violent, intolerant mob that our tyrant requires to legitimize and execute the most terrifying and inhumane portions of Project 2025, the Republican’s detailed and explicit plan for dismantling the government, discarding our democracy, and instituting white supremacy as a national standard.

 

Cast a vote to protect our most precious and fragile democracy in November.

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