Trump's Brutal & Bellicose Bill; Standing Up for America as a Nation of Immigrants
Since I last wrote to you, America has been set on a trajectory to become a police state. Thanks to Congressional passage of the Brutal & Bellicose Bill (BBB), ICE is poised to be funded more lavishly than the entire militaries of Brazil, Israel, Italy, and other countries. This level of investment, coming so early in Donald Trump’s time in office, makes clear ICE’s key role in a developing infrastructure of repression. What they are “enforcing” are racist ideologies of national purity.
An ethos of dehumanization unites the Brutal & Bellicose Bill, the ICE assaults, and the allied attacks on birthright citizenship. The Trump administration and the GOP are targeting people for detention, violence, and expulsion on the basis of their faith, skin color, and provenance, regardless of their legal or citizenship status.
Trump called America “the garbage can for the world,” during his election campaign, using this dehumanizing term to refer to the immigrants who come here, but his Brutal & Bellicose Bill also tells millions of Americans that they are trash, undeserving of health care or even basic relief at times of disaster. Only the already wealthy merit assistance from the state, so they can become even richer.
“I am everything, and you are nothing,” is the mantra of strongmen such as Trump. The Brutal & Bellicose Bill translates that ethos into state policy, and brings it into the streets as vicious ICE agents beat and kidnap their targets. You deserve to know nothing about why we are arresting you and sending you to a concentration camp, because you are nothing. This is how security forces in dictatorships treat people, and it is the attitude of guards, torturers, and enforcers in Communist, Fascist, and every other kind of concentration camp.
To understand the moral collapse that prepares and supports such attitudes, here is my essay on the subject. It is how we got to the Brutal & Bellicose Bill, “Alligator Alcatraz,” and all the rest.
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For this belated July 4 essay, which updates thoughts I have published on this holiday over the years, I prefer to focus on a more positive trajectory, one associated with America as a country where you could arrive with next to nothing, in the material sense, and make something of yourself —you had the democratic freedoms to do that, and the culture supported those aspirations. This was a basis for patriotic feelings —immigrants can be the most fervent patriots—based on a sense of America’s singularity in this regard.
I was surrounded with this ideal as I grew up in California as a first-generation American with parents from two different cultures and faiths (my mother was born in Edinburgh, my father in Jerusalem). Their social circle included people from all over the world --people who had come to America to escape political repression or simply to have a better life for their families. Scientists who had fled Communist Czechoslovakia lived next door to us; a professor, originally from Poland and a survivor of Auschwitz, lived on the other side.
My parents may have come from very different places, but both saw America as a place where you could develop your dreams into something tangible. My mother, whose education stopped at high school (her mother was a night laundress, and her father a baker and laborer), often expressed amazement that she had a daughter with a Ph.D.
This sense of possibility runs through the essay I wrote for Lucid in 2021 as a July 4th celebration of America as a multiracial and multifaith democracy.
It is the idea that it is possible to transform one's life and the destiny of one's family that has distinguished America in the global imagination and made it a destination for millions of impoverished, oppressed, and ambitious individuals...everyone, in theory, could have a chance, with dizzying improvements in standards of living within the scope of one or two generations --- both for immigrants and for people born here, of every race and religion.
At a time when the future of America may seem bleak to many, we must harness this sense of positivity and possibility that comes with America’s identity as a nation of immigrants and make it central to a revitalized patriotism that can help to mobilize our fellow Americans on behalf of those who are being targeted.
"In progressive circles, claiming patriotism is, at best, an eyebrow-raiser,” wrote Jedediah Britton-Purdy in a 2022 New York Times essay, and something of this still remains. Yet it's precisely when democracy is under attack that patriotism is most important. Now, as a White Christian supremacist autocracy descends on America, finding the right visual and verbal language to motivate others to stand up for America as a multiracial and multifaith nation of immigrants is more important than ever.
The Trump administration’s Fascist population engineering schemes cannot erase this identity. The latest census document, updated in 2020, confirms that the non-Hispanic White population is shrinking. People classified by the Census Bureau as belonging to "Two or More Races" are the fast-growing group, followed by Asians and Hispanics.
We must explicitly associate patriotism with defense of an America made stronger and more productive by immigration. A patriotism devoted to protecting that can be powerful. As Britten-Purdy concludes, reclaiming love of country from the right is a way of saying that at a difficult time "we will not give up on one another, because the country that ties us together also gives us the power to remake it."
I find hope in your words and will remain positive as long as I can
A more fitting name may be Alligator Auschwitz.