That’s Lou Reed in the prescient album “New York” artistically warning us, with his sardonic wit, of Trump nativism way back in 1989 (Trump’s brand name is expressly invoked on the album). It sounds like one of Trump’s Hannibal Lecter forays along his meandering, unhinged campaign trail, paved with open misogyny (“I will protect ‘our women’”), overt race war talk (promising us immigrants with serial numbers in camps, guilty of blood poisoning) - in short, White Christian Nationalism. His Christians. His brand of Orwellian nationalism.
Why doesn’t the press ask him if he’s trying to start a race war? He even promises a “bloodbath” if he loses. One where I imagine he sees himself as Hannibal Lector, eating your dogs and cats. Trump regularly projects the hell scape he will make America into, with rampant violent crime and immigrants from shit-hole countries invading and taking over our communities, and then casts himself as the savior from this imaginary hell realm that, fact check, exists only in his Adderall-addled, porn-polluted mindstream.
The overriding campaign symbol for Trump’s bloody constitutional coup is the border, which somehow now ranks right behind or even with the economy (read: “my pocketbook”) as the top issue in this general election. And rather remarkably, if you ask me, the Democrats are forced defensively to treat the border as a matter of urgent national security concerns. Kamala has to project toughness there to win the White House, and has ‘progressed’ from her position in 2019 that illegal immigration should not be criminalized to ‘we need to effectively close the border.’
Nobody dares ask why we need a closed border. It is one thing to intercept drug cartel’s efforts to smuggle fentanyl and humans into our country, but quite another thing altogether to talk about turning back the world’s displaced people. It isn’t as if they are coming from mental asylums and prisons, after all! Nobody is eating your pets, people! And “blood poisoning” is the kind of talk that precedes genocide.
I submit to you that the vast majority of Americans - like me here in Boise where Ethiopians have been welcomed over the last decade into a fairly conservative community, to the people of Springfield, Ohio, where 20,000 Haitians re-settled - have only positive experiences with recent immigrants. They’re wonderful human beings that model our American values more than we do ourselves.
And this matter of where people are permitted to live is not a zero sum game. America’s edge in the world has always been it’s attractiveness to immigrants. Our entire society and economy is based on centuries of migrations from all over the world. Even Ronald Reagan, a closeted racist, openly welcomed immigration. I’ve lived in California - the fieldworkers that harvest our fruits and vegetables are beautiful people. We’re lucky to have them.
What really bugs Trumpers about the Haitian community in Springfield is that they showed up the white trash addicted to opioids and meth who couldn’t hold down the very jobs those Haitians are performing reliably, superbly, and joyfully.
The white workers displaced by their own incompetence and social sloth are victims not of Haitians, but rather of the broken American Dream which, in spite of politicians continuing efforts to resuscitate it, has been dead ever since Reagan hollowed out the middle class and we learned about the ways in which our climate, and thus the world, is changing (while our political leaders are not). How can you talk about the American Dream during an age when young women and men are choosing not to have babies because scientists are telling us we are making the future world uninhabitable?
No, we are living the American Nightmare now with Trump, one we’ve been caught up in now for eight years. The American Dream is but a distant echo in MAGA time.
While the Haitians, gosh-darn them, give every appearance of living that very same dream, in fact the dreams of immigrants are very different than those of un-souled consumers who’ve been fed a a pack of lies their whole lives. The kind of lies that makes it so easy to accept new lies.
They’re eating the pets where we live. They’re invading and taking over our villages and towns - Aurora, Colorado! (home of the Joker in Trump’s dementia).
For Trump, the imaginary conflict in Springfield, Ohio is as good a flash point as any to start a race war in this country. After all, Haitians were the first enslaved people to break the chains and assume control of their own country island. They’re like “anti-slaves.” And the people of Ohio love Trump, granting him the cover of vigilant ignorance. Ohio ranks No. 2 for most extremist anti-government groups of any state. I’m sure the police love him there as well.
And Trump is able to funnel all this vile hatred at scapegoated black and brown communities of immigrants precisely because the Democrats have conceded Trump’s point that the southern border is a huge problem in this country. Wasn’t the specter of hordes of immigrants approaching our border originally a figment of Trump’s imagination in the run-up to the midterm elections in 2018?
Closing Borders is a Global Phenomenon
Of course, this is the same story we are seeing play out right now in many parts of the white world. Animus towards people of color from foreign parts of the world, even though crime rates among immigrants are much lower than the general populations that are resisting them. Murderous riots in UK sparked by disinformation that spreads online like a psycho-virus.
As a retired lawyer, allow me to prove that all border policies are overtly racist, and that the problems with borders exist largely in our minds:
Border problems are just a proxy for climate policy in a rapidly shifting world.
The climate policies of the developed world are racist at their core.
Allow me to present exhibits in support of these assertions.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) is an autonomous intergovernmental organization established in 1974 by Western governments to inform its member states about developments in international oil and energy markets.
In 2011, the IEA released a report, only weeks before Obama delivered his State of the Union address, in which it warned the world leaders to which it owed its existence that
“Unprecedented climate change has Earth hurtling down a path of catastrophic proportions.”
The 2011 IEA report went on to predict the consequences of inaction: “giant waves of migration and mass mortality” absent drastic actions taken by world leaders in the next 8 years (before 2020).
Suffice it to say that Obama did not deem this 5-alarm scientific warning worthy of passing on to the American people in his “State of the Union” a few short weeks later. A gross dereliction in duty that characterizes his stance towards the climate crisis up until the last 6 months of his 8 years in office.
I’m sorry. We liberal Americans are not supposed to talk about that. Those were the good years. Let’s move on.
The Global South is the frontline for climate disruption and displacement, with impacts having drastic repercussions starting decades ago, when farmers displaced by unprecedented drought in rural areas of Syria began tapping groundwater outside Damascus in order to eke out a subsistence living. Government troops fired on those climate refugees, and that was the start of the Syrian War that still rages today, and which has forcibly displaced tens of millions of people who just want to live.
And that was just the beginning of political tumult resulting from growing conflicts of displaced peoples in a rapidly changing global climate. By 2050, up to 1.2 billion people could be displaced globally because of climate chaos, with 14.5 Million deaths. This is not a figment of Trump’s dark imagination. We are actively causing this.
These waves of immigrants can best be understood in relation to that mass mortality the IEA predicted would occur as a result of this climate disruption.
According to a 2012 report
An estimated 400,000 people die each year due to hunger and diseases related to climate change. By 2030, the death toll is expected to rise to 700,000 per year,
The authors of the report point out that “droughts, floods, fires, extreme weather, desertification, loss of biodiversity, sea-level rise, water scarcity, and declining fishery and agricultural productivity are just some of the consequences of climate change.” And look where those consequences are concentrated:
We were warned. Our politicians chose to do nothing to bend the greenhouse gas curve. And now, predictably, we have waves of migrating people displaced by intolerable conditions and the political conflicts that have resulted from a squeeze on resources in the Global South. Not to mention matriarchal elephants leading their families to watering holes squirreled away in their memory as reliable in periods of drought, only to find dust at the end of their long march of death.
And you could also say, of course, that WE did nothing. Because the increasing CO2 levels driving climate disruption is caused by OUR accustomed life styles, OUR consumer and eating habits, right here in the Global North, while the consequences are mostly being borne by humans and animals in the Global South, or those who are LEAST responsible for global heating.
To turn them away at the borders is thus immoral, a convenient way of continuing to externalize the costs of our profligate, colonialist and genocidal enterprise. Because we like eating cows, basically. And going wherever we please by car or plane. Because we, somehow, won the racial lottery of the last 11,000 years.
It’s racism, pure and simple. “We’re better than they are.” And so authoritarian leaders rise up in this era of global chaos, racial mixing, and climate trauma to demonize and dehumanize those climate refugees at our gates. “They’re the problem! THEY’RE the barbarians!”
Not us. Them. How despicable.
The Humane Solution to the ‘Border Crisis’
The correct political response to this anti-American, inhumane attempt to scapegoat people from the Global South, based upon the color of their skin, this political campaign to spark a race war without regard to the outcome of the general election in November, is to openly acknowledge our complicity in their suffering - it’s called empathy - and to courageously advocate for a world without borders, one based instead on the need to build Gandhi’s and King’s beloved community in the face of what promises to be our growing climate maelstroms.
A beloved community of human beings based on Pope Francis’ prescription for the climate crisis:
“We require a new and universal solidarity.”
We allow our corporations to run roughshod across borders, even in pursuit of modern slave-wage labor. But we don’t allow human beings to move where they will? There’s still ‘no room at the Inn’ for the less fortunate, those very same men, women and children whose pernicious turn in fortunes we helped facilitate? And those who oppose open borders conceive of us as a Christian Nation?
Really??
The Democratic response to this fabricated crisis is weak tea and counter-productive. In a fully interconnected - and arguably overpopulated - world where we humans will be called upon as a species to continually adapt to cascading, dramatic changes in our climate, and to work together to reverse global warming with Indigenous-led (not corporate co-opted), natural solutions, borders have become obsolete.
As long as we continue to cling to them, however, they are the ostensible justification for nearly every conflict in the world right now. They’re almost anachronistic at this point.
What are we, Anglo-Saxons? Visigoths? Conquistadors? Cowboys??
Let’s grow up. We’re human beings, and we all emanated from one of a few tribes in Africa. Geneticists have conclusively proven that there is no scientific basis to our perception of different races of human beings. Those only exist in our mind, based upon external appearance. But nothing exists the way it appears to us. Just ask a physicist.
We developed different skin colors based upon how far our ancestors migrated away from the equator. And we’ve developed lots of diverse, beautiful local cultures that only benefit from cultural contact and exchange. There is no reason to believe that these unique in-situ cultures would be threatened in any way by open borders. Unless you’re a racist who believes in blood purity and poisoning. But we’ve already fought a world war over that, haven’t we?
“The world is on fire,” as the Buddha liked to say. We all have to recognize our home is the planet, not some Arthurian mythical place of castles and moats, and we have to come together to put out the global fire and turn back the floods.
But unfortunately, the first tide we need to turn back is that of residual racial hatred and inhumane ignorance that are rooted in colonialism (slavery and genocide) and the Discovery Doctrine. We all need to recognize that we of the Global North still have a slave-owner mentality (with corporations being the plantation bosses we empower) when it comes to our exploitative relationship with the Global South.
According to President Biden’s final address to the U.N., all human beings deserve “the chance to live in dignity,... protected from the ravages of climate change, hunger, and disease.” I agree.
”Madame President-elect Harris: TEAR DOWN THESE WALLS!