Eugene Robinson: No doubt now what drives Trump's border policy [View all]
The Trump administration has manufactured and exacerbated an immigration “crisis” to further the president’s most consistent goal: to Make America White Again.
Tens of thousands of Central American asylum-seekers, even hundreds of thousands, do not constitute a serious crisis; not for a continent-spanning nation of 330 million, a nation built through successive waves of immigration. The migrants have severely taxed and at times overwhelmed the systems at the border that must process and adjudicate their claims for refuge, but this is a simple matter of resources. We need more border agents, more immigration judges, more housing.
President Trump, however, treats the migrant surge like an existential threat. “We can’t take you anymore. We can’t take you. Our country is full,” he said earlier this month at the border in California. But, of course, our vast nation is anything but full. Instead of “can’t,” what Trump really means is “won’t.”
On almost any issue you can think of, Trump is all over the map. But there is one position on which he has never wavered: antipathy toward non-white immigration. From his campaign charge that Mexican immigrants are “rapists,” to his fruitless quest to get funding for a border wall, to his gratuitously cruel policy of family separations, to his declaration of a national emergency, Trump has left not an iota of doubt about how he feels.
To be sure, sometimes the president uses anti-immigration rhetoric to inflame his base. But unlike with other issues, Trump seems actually to believe his demagoguery about would-be Latino migrants.
The administration acts as if it considers the asylum-seekers to be less than human. What other conclusion can be drawn, after thousands of young children were taken from their parents and shipped to detention centers far away, as a deterrent to others who might seek entry? How else can anyone characterize the notion — now under active consideration, according to the White House — of transporting migrants hundreds or thousands of miles, not out of necessity but simply so they can be released in “sanctuary” cities and the districts of Trump’s political opponents?
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