Pogroms, American Style

The Trump administration’s attack on immigrants isn’t about rule of law, crime or jobs. It’s racism and sadism all the way down

There was a time when anti-immigration activists claimed not to hate immigrants as people. Their concern, they insisted, was only about illegal immigrants, the purported crime wave they caused, or the loss of jobs for the native born.

If you believed any of that, you were naive. The Trump administration is trying to drive out all immigrants, legal as well as undocumented, with almost no pretense that its pogroms serve any wider social or economic purpose. And I use the word “pogroms” deliberately. The MAGA anti-immigrant campaign relies on cruelty toward immigrants, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding and a key source of American prosperity. And it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the cruelty isn’t just instrumental. Rather it’s the purpose of the whole endeavor.

To understand what’s happening, a good starting point is the more or less official acknowledgement that virtually all immigrants — I’ll talk about the few exceptions shortly — are viewed as undesirables to be pushed out in any way possible. The New York Times recently published an article with the headline “Trump squeezes immigrants by cutting them off from jobs, health care and housing.”

As the article explains,

For more than a year, administration officials have sought to pull every bureaucratic lever possible to cut off immigrants — both documented and undocumented — from jobs, medical care, financial services, tax credits and even from enrolling their children in day care. The goal has been to compel immigrants to leave the country, and, in the long run, to eliminate incentives that draw many people to the United States in the first place.

According to the Times, Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration czar,

has asked White House officials to work with federal agencies to make sure they are using regulations against immigrants throughout the areas of American life they oversee

So Federal policy at all levels, including policy tools that were never intended to be used for immigration enforcement, are being weaponized against anyone born outside the US — and some people born here, including American-born children. These days I am rarely shocked by Trump administration actions, but this is truly shocking:

Federal officials are planning regulatory changes to prevent American-born children from receiving federal day care subsidies if one or more of their parents are not citizens.

So we’re going to deny care to children born in the United States — that is, birthright citizens — if they have foreign-born parents, presumably even parents who came to America legally. What’s next? Will these children be required to wear labels on their clothing to reveal that they had a foreign-born parent? A latter-day Star of David badge?

Beyond trying to make daily life for immigrants impossible, the Trump administration is trying to terrorize immigrants into leaving.

We have only fragmentary information about conditions inside ICE detention centers, largely because ICE has repeatedly blocked independent investigation of what’s happening in these facilities — it has, in particularly, repeatedly broken the law by denying access to members of Congress. A few days ago federal agents pepper-sprayed Sen. Andy Kim outside the Delaney facility in Newark, New Jersey. ICE is also playing hide and seek with detainees, repeatedly transferring themamong facilities to make it hard for families and lawyers to track them down. And there have an alarming number of detainee suicides.

Efforts to suppress information about detainee conditions are implicitly an admission that these conditions are terrible, that reports of severe overcrowding, lack of medical care, and insufficient and tainted food are true.

According to one detainee, a guard told him that

It’s part of my job. I have to make your life miserable so that you request your own deportation.

Everything we know suggests that this quote is an accurate description of what’s happening.

And the campaign of harassment and terror against immigrants is working. ICE doesn’t have to be able to find and arrest every immigrant to make life in the United States impossible to endure, just as Iran doesn’t have to be able to target every oil tanker to make passage of the Strait of Hormuz too dangerous to try. Net immigration into the United States has probably turned negative — that is, more people are leaving the country than entering.

The Trump administration is pleased. In March it issued a press release hailing Census estimates that show plunging net immigration across U.S. metro areas.

There were two notable features of the release’s triumphalism. First, it hailed falling immigration in general — nothing about distinguishing between legal and illegal entry to the United States. Second, it said nothing — nothing at all — about why falling immigration should be considered a good thing.

The truth is that none of the claims made by anti-immigration hardliners about the benefits of driving the foreign-born away has survived contact with reality.

The virtual end of net immigration hasn’t led to a boom in jobs for the native-born. Growth in the working-age population has stalled, but so has job creation, and the employment rate for native-born adults is lower, not higher, than it was before the pogroms began:

And the idea that immigrants are, as a group, especially crime-prone, has been extensively debunked. Notably, cities like New York that have huge immigrant populations also have very low crime rates by historical standards.

It’s important to realize that the pogroms, aside from objectively failing to help native-born Americans, aren’t popular. Donald Trump’s approval rating on immigration, which was positive when he took office, is now deep in negative territory.

And the American people are, in general, much more benign in their views about immigrants than the likes of Stephen Miller. On one side, we have the Trump administration trying to deny child care to children of all immigrants. On the other, according to Gallup, 78 percent of adults believe that people who immigrated illegally should nonetheless have a chance to become U.S. citizens — and 85 percent support offering that chance to children brought in illegally by their parents.

So what is all of this about? A lot of it is racism. The Trump administration has essentially ended refugee admissions to the United States, with only one exception, for whom refugees quotas have been hugely expanded and backed by federal aid to immigrants: white South Africans. Need we say more?

And one final observation: The atrocities being perpetrated by ICE — atrocities that are almost surely far bigger and worse than we know about — are in part instrumental, a way to frighten immigrants into self-deporting. But is there any real doubt that mistreating and terrorizing people, especially people of color, is for some MAGA types a goal in itself — something they always wanted license to do?

As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote in a justly famous essay, The Cruelty Is the Point. And what does it say about us as a nation if we accept this?

Too angry for a musical coda today