- A letter left at several homes in McKinney, Texas: “Our new president Donald J. Trump is God’s gift to white nation. We want to get our country back on the right track. We need to get rid of Muslims, Indians, Blacks and Jews.”
- Letter sent to a mosque in Northern California: “Trump is going to cleanse America. And he’s going to start with you Muslims. He’s going to do to you Muslims what Hitler did to the Jews.”
- "Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on," Trump said in a news release posted to his website on Dec. 7, 2015.
- “Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who helped write tough immigration laws in Arizona and elsewhere, said in an interview that Trump's policy advisers had also discussed drafting a proposal for his consideration to reinstate a registry for immigrants from Muslim countries.
- “Kobach leaves little doubt that they’re coming for the Muslims. First.” Mark Sumner, “The Precedent for Trump’s Muslim Registry is Japanese Internment Camps,” Daily Kos, November 17, 2016.
- “You’re going to have a deportation force and you’re going to do it humanely.” Donald J. Trump, December 2015. While Trump now says he will focus first on the “two to three million” undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes, it is unclear whether he will stand by his promise to deport the 8 to 9 million who have not violated the law (other than remaining in the country without necessary documents, which includes people brought here as children).
- “President-elect Donald J. Trump’s promise to deport two million to three million immigrants who have committed crimes suggested that he would dramatically step up removals of both people in the United States illegally and those with legal status. If carried out, the plan potentially would require raids by a vastly larger federal immigration force to hunt down these immigrants and send them out of the country.” By Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Julia Preston, “What Donald Trump’s Vow to Deport Up to 3 Million Immigrants Would Mean,” The New York Times, November 14, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/us/politics/donald-trump-deport-immigrants.html
- “Earlier this year, Mr. Gingrich called for a new House Un-American Activities Committee to deal with ‘Islamic supremacists.’ That notorious committee’s hearings and the investigations by Senator Joseph McCarthy into suspected Communists represented some of the most severe political repression in American history and destroyed lives. Today, as falsehoods are spread quickly on the internet and accepted as true, this risk may be even more acute.” Faiza Patel, A “'Commission on Radical Islam' Could Lead to a New McCarthy Era,” November 18, 2016, https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/commission-radical-islam-could-lead-new-mccarthy-era
* * *
Maybe I’m slow, but it took me until a few days ago to realize that opposition to immigration and support for deportation of immigrants with or without documents is not solely based on fear of losing jobs. The majority of those targeted for exclusion are Latinos and Middle Easterners. That is not economic based. That is xenophobic based. The fear is of a non-white non-Christian majority, loss of power, and loss of a European and Christian culture. The goal is ethnically cleansing the U.S. of as many “others” as possible to maintain white dominance.
A state can accomplish ethnic cleansing in several ways: by “voluntary” exodus or exchange of populations (unlikely); by forced removal assisted by threats, burning homes, attacking and killing people; by mass murder of a large segment of the hated group. That is called Genocide. I’ve seen it before when I lived in the former Yugoslavia, the violent breakdown and separation of a multiethnic, multi-religious society into ethnic and religious groups: Orthodox Christian Serbs, Catholic Croats, Muslim Bosniaks, Kosovar Albanians (though a large percentage are Muslim, the attempted cleansing of Kosovo was based on ethnicity). Ethnic cleansing begun as a forced movement of people ended in mass murder and the genocide of Bosniak Muslims. It nearly ended in genocide for the Kosovar Albanians. And the once multinational Bosnia-Herzegovina is now split in two: the predominantly Bosniak and Croat republic and Republika Srpska, the predominantly Serb republic. After massive loss of life, genocide, and the destruction of cities and homes, the U.S. brokered a deal to end the war in Bosnia (the Dayton Accords), a deal that rewarded the aggressor Bosnian Serbs with the land they’d taken by force.
Before I left for the Balkans, I was chatting with a clerk in a small Grants Pass shop. By then, the Bosnian war had ended and the war in Kosovo was two years away. The clerk decried the fighting among citizens of the same country, neighbor against neighbor. “It could never happen here,” he assured himself. Apparently, his high school history class did not teach about the Civil War . . .
• Or the U.S. government’s genocide and removal of Native Americans from their tribal lands onto reservations.
• Or our second original sin, the kidnapping, rape, and enslavement of millions of Africans who created a big chunk of American wealth.
• Or state constitutional amendments, passed on the eve of the Civil War, prohibiting African-Americans from residing or remaining after dark (including in Oregon). Thousands of towns and cities, called sundown towns, followed suit.
• Or Jim Crow segregation, forced labor on chain gangs, and lynching that eviscerated the emancipation of black people.
• Or the internment of 100,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry during WWII.
• Or the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, prohibiting the immigration of Chinese, not repealed until 1943.
• Or the American Eugenics Movement that sterilized 70,000 people, mostly women, and confined in mental institutions a long list of undesirables (including among many others paupers, blind and hearing impaired people, promiscuous women), a movement brought to its ultimate conclusion by the Nazis, at which point it lost favor in the U.S.
• Or F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover’s and Senator Joe McCarthy’s Communist witch hunt of the forties and fifties that ruined people’s lives for mere association with Communists.
• Or President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1953 executive order banning gays and lesbians from federal employment.
• Or today’s imprisonment of one out of three young black men, denying millions of them participation in civil society as voters, candidates, and jurors. Think how that might change election results. Forty percent of the 2.2 million people locked up in U.S. prisons are African American. Their percentage in the U.S. population is 6.5%.
Guantanamo Bay lay in the future. As did the Draconian local and state laws banishing anyone convicted of a sex offense (including consensual sex between youth, streaking, public urination, all lumped together with serial rapists) to the outskirts of towns, placing them on a “sex offender” registry, and stamping sex offender into their passports.
Throughout U.S. history, we have isolated and demonized an ever-changing group of people to scapegoat as “the other,” placing them outside constitutional protections. The template was created at the formation of the United States. It’s handy because it can be reused and applied to any disliked group.
Will we ever learn?
To end on a more positive note, I will quote a letter from my senator:
“Like you, I'm stunned.
“This is a dark and disturbing moment for our country, and you have every right to feel the way that you do right now.
“This election result is troubling in what it says about American values and what it means for our future. But that's not a reason to despair. It's a reason to work even harder.
“It's going to be more important than ever in the wake of this election that we stand up for equality, diversity, and justice. That we love and support our fellow citizens, immigrants, refugees, and anyone fearing a surge of hate, discrimination, and exclusion. It's up to us to fight for the values we cherish and the progressive vision we hold dear." Sen. Jeff Merkeley