Let Them All In! US Immigration Policy Imagined as Atonement for Crimes Against Humanity

Immigrants and asylum seeking refugees are the political props that fascists exploit to seize control of all US government institutions. The white supremacist, masculinist Republican Party deploys a "persecutory narrative" to do three things - 1) Brainwash the public to believe that the utopian dream of "Leave It To Beaver" America has been squashed by illegal, dark skinned, radical Islamic communist serial killers from all the world's prisons and insane asylums. 2) Create a quid pro quo between the terrified white working class and the corporate oligarchy that involves tax breaks, kickbacks and federal contracts for the rich in exchange for working class votes. The (mostly white) working class receives – in payment for their approval of corporate aspirations – protection from “migrant crime.” 3) Provide massive spectacles in which the public is encouraged to enjoy a front row seat for viewing the brutal and increasingly fatal decimation of "invading" migrants. The use of The National Guard or The Marines as a means of intimidating protesters during ICE roundups in LA ought to be understood to be a public theater production. This is not "the theatre of cruelty" in the manner of Antonin Artaud, intending to make the bourgeois audience uncomfortable, but its opposite, pandering to the worst impulses of spectators who experience sadistic pleasure.

The "persecutory narrative" traces the social ills caused by capitalism to a targeted group - a collection of people with little political power but an established history of drawing public ire. The Jews in Nazi Germany were the props for Hitler in the same manner that Trump now weaves a vicious tale about immigrants. It may seem like an impossible task to convince much of the population that people with nothing are an existential threat, and corporate rulers are not, but that is fascism’s essential artistic gift – turning the world upside down. Fascism’s hand is quicker than the eye, and the baffled citizen views the farm worker picking their cucumbers with mortal fear, while the insurance CEO picking their pockets goes unchecked. Fascism creates magic.

Discourse around immigration in US media has been dependably shallow - liberal pundits and Democratic Party apparatchiks live in terror of being accused of favoring “open borders.” Even the best appeals to political morality often tiptoe around the historical context - immigration policy in the US is not merely a matter of ethical intentions, it ought to be driven by a spirit of atonement. The United States, like Nazi Germany, has committed offenses against humanity that demand a deep sense of national remorse and an obligation to provide reparations at scale. Consider this paragraph by Bradley Hillier-Smith, published in Aeon, depicting wealthy nations from the global north as well-meaning bystanders:

“States and their citizens may have a right to control their borders, based on legitimate political, economic and cultural interests, but can this justify such harms to refugees? Evidence shows that refugees can and do provide significant contributions to states in the Global North, especially advanced capitalist economies with ageing populations. Even if protecting refugees would require some costs, are these costs morally important enough to outweigh refugees’ urgent needs for protection, let alone morally important enough to justify harming them? We already accept it would be wrong for states to aggress against other states and harm and violate the rights of foreign populations, even if that would greatly serve their political, economic and cultural interests.”

The argument that nations have a moral obligation to help refugees (who will, ln turn, be good citizens and workers) may be self-apparent, but we miss two key narrative features in the above statement:

1) The immigrants who exist in the real world bear no resemblance to the immigrants that inhabit the fascist mind.

2) Immigrants from Latin America are not victims of natural events, they are survivors of generations of colonial brutality, US engineered military coups, US funded death squads, puppet regimes beholden to United Fruit, and environmental/climate catastrophes resulting from profit driven industrial practices.

Therefore, a narrative that fully promoted a moral and humane immigration policy would need to come to grips with the realities of US history – a past focused exclusively on plunder, extraction and violent repression of foreign populations in Latin America and elsewhere. No longer would we be able to comfort ourselves with slogans about being the “beacon of democracy” or wallow in myths about the rule of law, free speech and the separation of powers. We would have to look at ourselves in the mirror and confront the ugly reality – the US has built a vast empire based on exploitation, military force and systematic atrocities performed upon defenseless civilians.

The US aspiration to act as the world’s most insane psychopath requires an oblivious, distracted, addicted, depressed, checked out citizenry. Systematic propaganda involving mass media and government collusion rages without interruption to the point where propagandists and their targets carry on in a subconscious stupor, unquestioning and robotic. Our entire political system is utterly dependent on the public’s abdication of critical scrutiny.

Thus, regarding immigration, the public has been offered a confused, absurd conceptual choice between the following distortions:

1) Migrants are criminals whose very existence begins with the flagrant decision to cross national boundaries unlawfully when they could have simply applied for admittance by legal means (even though there are no legal means – US immigration policy channels Kafka). When they are deported they get what they deserve.

2) Migrants do not threaten US law and sovereignty but the authorities ought to deport them in vast numbers anyway (as a matter of fidelity to Republican narratives). This ought to be done quietly and un-theatrically with as little visible cruelty as possible – in the manner of Obama and Biden.

Of course, all deportations put victims at grave risk to be murdered or held in the stifling, life threatening conditions of ad hoc holding facilities.

Both of these frameworks for immigration require that the public be absolutely clueless about historical context. But it would be wrong to conclude that there is no difference between the Republican and Democratic immigration narratives. For Democrats, migrants have little narrative value and they seek to remove them secretly, if for no other reason than to mollify the Republican source of propaganda. Republicans, on the other hand, wish to milk the story of immigration as its primary unifying tool – immigrants become the Anti-Christ, the racial polluters of a mythic past, the destroyers of pristine rural and suburban whiteness. Republicans scream that Immigrants vote illegally for radical Democratic Stalinist Jihadists. The Democrats, in their silent and secretive abuse of migrants, may allow humane treatment for a small number of refugees (“dreamers,” for example), but the hysteria manifest by Republicans oddly comes across as more honest. Albeit, the Republican narrative exudes psychotic rage, and a virtual crusade against basic truth, but its high pitched, public visibility is often mistaken for sincerity. The Democrats understand that Republican cruelty sells like hotcakes to the masses, and they, thus, endorse the value of “strong borders” as a concession to their doctrine of political necessity. Progressive voters justly see the Democrats as vapid, feckless and lacking moral resolve. The anti-immigrant rhetoric of Republicans may be deeply disturbing to many, but it resonates with voters who long for human emotion in their leaders – even if that emotion is merely perseverative, outraged hatred. Impotent policy on war and immigration has destroyed the Democratic Party.

Fascist leaders always project their own corruption onto a chosen scapegoat. Migrants soak up tax payer money, carry fentanyl and vote illegally according to Republican myths. As Jason Stanley points out in his superb book “How Fascism Works” the Nazi’s accused the Jews of surreptitiously directing the Weimar Republic to destroy Germany via corruption. In Nazi myth, the Weimar state stole the hard won wages of German workers to fund institutions to support worthless eaters (handicapped people, the mentally ill and alcoholics). People with handicaps were the first targets of mass murder as the Nazi’s developed the mechanisms of mass gassing to first obliterate handicapped victims, and only later the Jews of Europe. The staff members of Nazi death camps were trained in the T-4 program. The idea that the Democratic Party misappropriates tax money to benefit unworthy grifters aligns with Nazi ideas of liberal state corruption. In Repulican/fascist narrative, the beneficiaries of Democratic Party state corruption are migrants who live lavishly in tax payer funded hotels.

Stanley tells us that the fascist focus on corruption aims to dismantle the democratic institutions of constitutional law, and replace them with the arbitrary authority of the leader and the party upper echelon. As we have already seen with the antics of Trump, Musk and cabinet appointees like RFK Jr., Pete Hegseth and Linda McMahon – all saddled with charges of being grossly unqualified with ties to scandals involving either sexual transgressions, mismanaged funds or substance abuse – the state apparatus has become fair game for corporate plunder. Musk has received billions in government contracts while oversight of corporate behavior has been fully disassembled. Science, research and environmental projects have been defunded as a means to allow corporate schemes to escalate without restraint.

The most focused aspiration of the Trump/fascist regime, however, has been the elimination of all legal protections for migrants. Victims have been seized on the streets by masked kidnappers empowered by the fascist state to conduct raids and deportations with no due process. This policy has created a backlash of protest in Los Angeles leading to even more flagrant executive attacks on constitutional rights and legal protocol, as Trump has usurped the authority of California officials to illegally send in military troops under federal control.

The Democratic party, as I have previously noted, lip synchs to Republican songs. There is no answer to fascism without an opposition manifesto on immigration, and toward that goal I will present a rough template.

The manner in which the victorious western nations sought to make amends for the Nazi Holocaust gives us a precedent for the analogous predicament suffered by refugees from the global south. Those liberated from Nazi camps at the war’s end were offered support and medical treatment in Swedish rehabilitation camps. Allied nations realized that Jews required a system of reparations for the crimes of European nations, and if allied guilt ultimately resolved at the expense of Palestinians, the idea of global responsibility now, as in postwar Europe, begs for an international plan. The displaced people of Latin America, like the Jewish victims of the Nazis, need a home. The Germans set a precedent for atonement that the United States must now reenact. Over the years, the German government has paid out billions in reparations and has offered to repatriate all Jews who were illegally stripped of citizenship. Other European nations, like Poland, also offer citizenship to descendants of Jewish Holocaust survivors.

It is not enough for the US to streamline the immigration process. The US policy in Latin America parallels the Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe. Even a cursory list of inhumane, murderous events that the US government has orchestrated in Latin America makes it clear that the moral debt that the United States owes to Latin America cannot be repaid with pocket change.

Where does one begin in compiling the history of US atrocities against Latin America? Do we speak about the arming of death squads in Honduras? Do we focus on the overt criminality of the Iran Contra Affair or direct our historical gaze upon the US support for Argentina's dirty war and its “disappeared” victims? Perhaps we ought to consider the 1954 CIA orchestrated coup ousting democratically elected Guatemalan president, Jacobo Arbenz whose progressive reforms upended the privileged status of US agricultural companies. Or should we leap another forty years forward into Guatemalan history to contemplate Ronald Reagan’s support for General Efrain Rios Montt whose regime carried out the genocide of indigenous Mayans with a death count estimated at 200,000? Maybe, instead, we ought to view the CIA instigated coupe overthrowing democratically elected Salvador Allende that installed Augustan Pinochet whose persecutory policies caused thousands to “disappear.” There is also the matter of US funding and supplying weapons to Salvadoran death squads leading to tens of thousands of deaths and culminating in Trump’s transactional relationship with the ghoulish Nayib Bukele, builder of a massive gulag industry currently undergoing expansion for Trump’s dreams of racial cleansing.

How many Venezuelans have been starved by the US embargo, how many Cubans?

In some cases US corporations directly funded death squads to protect business interests - a recent Florida court decision ordered Chiquita (currently controlled by Swiss interests, but centered in the US at the time of the allegations) to pay 38 million dollars to the families of eight Columbian nationals murdered by a Columbian counterinsurgency group that Chiquita had paid. While the AUC (United Self-defense Forces of Columbia) did not have direct US support for their terrorist campaign against leftist organizations, these operatives were trained by US ally, Israel.

Long ago the United States expanded its borders via military expansion into Mexican lands bringing Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California and parts of Oklahoma and Kansas into the union at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War ending in 1848. This episode brought decades of US military attacks upon indigenous tribes native to the annexed territories – policies that we currently recognize as genocidal.

These crimes that began shortly before the civil war cannot be contemplated as discreet events – the US has mutilated the nations and historical trajectory of Latin America via military force and clandestine manipulation. The United States has also caused incalculable ruin to Latin American agriculture via CO2 emissions, deforestation and chemical toxins unleashed by agricultural practices perpetrated by corporations supplying meat and palm oil for the US fast food industry.

Migrants are the final product of the nearly two century long US rape of Latin America. Millions of people flee death, starvation, death squads and political repression. Climate caused desertification drive whole communities in a desperate search for respite. We have been warned by climate scientists that climate refugees will number as high as a billion people in the next two decades. The moral issue of our time pits genocide against rescue, fascism against equity, violence against compassion.

The United States, for all of its reprehensible crimes against peace, the biosphere and human well-being, has what post war Germany did not - the capacity to pay full reparations for its criminal history. While Germany was destroyed at the conclusion of WW II, it also had little space to offer its victims the territory for a homeland since Germany is about seven times more congested than the US. Trump has lied about the “country being full” - the US is one of the most spacious, underpopulated countries on earth.

As a thought experiment imagine that every resident of Latin America crosses the southern border – all 662 million – Brazilians, Mexicans, Peruvians, Hondurans, Chileans, Argentineans and on and on. The population density of the US after it graciously expands its hospitality to truly embrace immigration, diversity and equity at unprecedented scale, would then have a little more than a third of the population density of Japan. Japanese citizens enjoy universal health care, some nine years longer life expectancy than do US residents, and much higher quality of life satisfaction by almost every metric. Obviously, in all reality, refugees from Latin America will only amount to a trickle - a few million people fleeing for their lives, a small fraction of the numbers we could safely accommodate.

The narrative for a truly moral leftist movement in the US will pivot upon the issue of migration. It is time for us to radically and loudly reject the tepid, fearful stingy narrative on immigration promoted by the feckless Democratic Party. Fascism cannot be opposed with moral capitulation. At the conclusion of WW II the Western victors decided to pawn off the restitution owed to Jewish victims upon the Palestinians, and we see how that worked out. This moment in time demands better. The US has a mandate to make amends for its bloody assault on human rights. We are now confronted with a dress rehearsal for the coming climate catastrophe. The US must become a lifeboat for the forsaken and damned.

I will conclude with an unimaginably radical tract on immigration:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “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-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” - Emma Lazarus