As U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents sweep down upon undocumented immigrants, a line from a sermon by poet and churchman John Donne resounds with the same authority it did 400 years ago: “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” The arrests of about 5,500 (and counting) undocumented immigrants over the past few days, and the continuing operation that has turned ICE into a full-blown authoritarian police agency, speaks not only to the threat of illegal detainment spreading to other groups of Americans (bell number 1). It also tolls for America, proclaiming our descent into political brutalization that, if not resisted, will take this country down.
The great majority of the 11,000,000 people (including 5,000,000 children) targeted by Trump’s ICE are building lives here, working hard, and raising families. Without them core industries such as construction, agriculture, hospitality, general services (landscaping, house cleaning), and warehousing, transportation, and manufacturing, will be depleted of workers. Largely due to their immigration status, these workers are concentrated in the “low-skill” positions without which none of the work gets done. Their loss will deal a severe blow to the economy and the basic services that life in America depends on.
Big Facts #1 and 1a that Answer the Big Lie: Undocumented immigrants paid 96.7 billion dollars in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022. They contributed $22.6 billion to social security and $5.7 billion to Medicare. They commit crimes at a significantly lower rate than American citizens. The very conservative Cato Institute conducted a study of crime in Texas in 2019 and found that undocumented immigrants were 37.1% “less likely to be convicted of a crime” than other Texans. Other studies have ratified that undocumented immigrants in effect reduce crime rates.
None of that matters to the mob mentality of Republican voters and politicians. Trump’s entire rise to political prominence was based on lying about immigrants as shamelessly as Hitler and Goebbels lied about Jews. Echoing Nazi propaganda, Trump accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country”. The attack on immigrants isn’t the first in our history but it is being done with the brutal systematic efficiency that marks the authoritarian state.
Many millions of Americans disapprove of this police action while reassuring themselves that they themselves are immune to its reach. Pastor Martin Niemöller’s 1946 poem reading “First they came for the Communists…then they came for the Jews…then for me” can’t really apply to America, can it? “Sure, immigrant families have been rounded up and confined to camps and children misplaced but it’s thousands, not millions, and we’re not putting them to death…” American exceptionalism at its best: we can be proud that we haven’t yet reached a state of absolute degradation. Just a few more stops…
Big Fact #2 that Undermines the Big Lie: The average length of time undocumented immigrants have been living in the United States is about 16 years. An estimated 80 percent have lived here for more than 10 years.
U.S. law recognizes the principle of “Adverse Possession” where a person who has openly used a property not belonging to them for a given number of years can either lay claim to continued use of that property or, in some cases, claim ownership. While this does not apply to citizenship, most undocumented immigrants can make a similar claim regarding their presence in the United States.
Our laws are fluid in this regard. There are various regulations about the status of immigrants who have lived here for 7 years, 10 years, etc., but their very variability and lack of clarity regarding their citizen or resident status is proof enough of the arbitrary, stitched-together nature of those regulations. The fact is, there is a legal basis to grant citizenship to any number of undocumented immigrants. It just takes political courage.
Big Fact #3 that Demolishes the Big Lie: “The act of being present in the United States in violation of immigration laws is not, standing alone, a crime.” In other words, rounding up undocumented immigrants without an arrest warrant for arrest naming a specific crime is, arguably, a violation of habeas corpus, perhaps the keystone right of any free society. It’s what protects all of us against unwarranted, arbitrary, frivolous seizure and imprisonment.
A few days ago Trump’s presss secretary, Karoline Leavitt, called the arrested immigrants “criminals”. They are not. Trump considers them criminals. As a criminal convicted of 34 feloinies himself, he should know better.
So now we are terrorizing these people. ICE already has, during Democratic and Republican administrations alike, subjected immigrants and refugees to violence, confinement in brutal conditions, and separation of family members. The confinement camps are, technically, concentration camps. They are not death camps but they are, as were Stalin’s gulags and the early, pre-Holocaust German camps, places where “undesirables”—Jews, Roma, politicos, gays, disabled persons—were concentrated, the very groups that became the Holocaust victims of Hitler’s white supremacist regime. And just as German companies used concentration camp inmates as forced labor during World War II, private companies in the United States during Trump’s first term and Biden’s presidency are using detained immigrants as forced labor, paying them (at one time) $1 a day.
As so many historians have documented, genocide does not spring up overnight. It creeps up on a society one step at a time. In fact, the early Nazi “solutions” to the “Jewish problem” were not death camps but various deportation programs. Eventually, the thinking and actions involved in scapegoating entire populations led to the final solution.
There is always some rationale for the descent’s early stages. Kristallnacht in 1938 had its rationale as did the early confinements of the Nazi era. Stalin and Mao had their pronouncements regarding the disloyalty and insidious danger posed by the tens of millions they arrested and killed. One rationale sets the stage for the next. Trump and his political ducklings justifications have no more truth than those of other dictators.
This police action is not a sign of strength. A weak man’s exaggerated pretense of strength usually strips bare his weakness for all to see. The inability of our government to develop good faith solutions that benefit the nation and all its people is a sign of a sickness in the body politic. For instance, one study indicates that if all undocumented immigrants were granted citizenship, national GDP would rise 1.7 trillion dollars over 10 years and 438,800 new jobs would be created. Solutions exist. We resist them for the same reason the war on drugs has wasted countless lives and over a trillion dollars. It’s why lead was left in paint and gasoline for so long, or abortion is being outlawed, or gun control can’t find any traction. These are knee-jerk issues politicians and corporations use in the most cynical and depraved ways to assuage their greed for money, power, and control.
When Donne spoke of the bells tolling “for thee”, he was referring to death. But it applies every time we turn a blind eye to those whose lives are being violated in our name. The U.S. government acts in the name of its citizens. Whom will the next sweep be aimed at? Doctors who perform abortions? Women who seek abortions? Community organizers labeled as terrorists? Parents whose poverty is taken as a sign they cannot take care of their children? Transgendered people and the parents and doctors who facilitate their transition? Teachers who won’t teach the prescribed, approved curriculum? Our government imposed mass sterilizations on between 25 and 42 percent of Native American women of child-bearing age in the 1960s and 1970s. Whatever excuse is being used for rounding up undocumented immigrants, that same bell will toll for you and for me, for all or any of us.
As for Niemöller, he had been a Nazi supporter and anti-Semite (he finally renounced anti-Semitic views in 1963). However, beginning in 1934 he began to question Nazi policies towards the church and grew repulsed by the atrocities of the regime, including those aimed at Jews. As a result, he spent, and survived, 1938-1945 in concentration camps, including Dachau.
They did, in fact, come for him.
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