The Opening Paragraphs on an as yet unnamed piece on immigration.....

I will be in NYC for No Kings Day. There will be protests everywhere! I will finish this piece next week.

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 contracts for the rich in exchange for working class votes. 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.

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.

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 historical context. Consider this paragraph by Bradley Hillier-Smith, published in Aeon:

“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:

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

2) Immigrants are not victims of natural events, they are survivors of generations of colonial brutality, US engineered military coups, US funded death squads and puppet regimes beholden to United Fruit.

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 overwhelmingly focused 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 myths about the rule of law, free speech and the separation of powers. We would have to look at ourselves in the mirror and conclude the most obvious reality – the US has built a vast empire based on exploitation, military force and systematic atrocities performed upon defenseless civilians. This US aspiration to act as the world’s most insane psychopath required an oblivious, distracted, addicted, depressed, checked out citizenry.