Due to the progression and consolidation of the supremacist agenda emanating from today’s White House, with Stephen Miller at the helm, immigrants cannot look forward to any type of minuscule, benevolent break on the immediate horizon, especially those on whom the government has focused the full weight of its fiercest attacks.
One after another, the methods adopted against minorities they do not like, whether due to their color or their origin more than their immigration status, have attempted to block them in a war that is unequal from any perspective.
And now that the demons are loose after the “exoneration” of the President by the Republican Senate, the situation will only worsen.
This is what has been found in, for example, the most recent report of the Anti-Defamation League, which confirmed at least 2,713 cases of distribution of white supremacist propaganda in the country in 2019, an average of more than seven per day, which represents a doubling of the number of incidents registered in 2018 (1,214). The study went even further, mentioning that such propaganda was most prevalent in states like California, Texas, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky, Washington, and Florida, some of which contain a large presence of immigrants from Latin America.
That is, with these chilling numbers we can see the wide terrain that has been won in large leaps by different organizations who see intimidation of minorities as the essence of their strength. And that occurs, amplified by the echo of a rhetoric repeated so often it has become normalized to the ears of those who want to see groups of immigrants immediately removed from the country, starting with undocumented people, without caring about or taking into account the context in which most of their journeys took place.
The dehumanization of the immigrants, in fact, is part of the strategy.
So much so that while this explains organizations like the Patriot Front, American Identity Movement, and the New Jersey European Heritage Association —cited in the Anti-Defamation League study as being responsible for 90% of white supremacist propagandist activity— these groups do not even begin to understand the factors that drive a human being to migrate, much less why they still choose the United States as a migration destination.
And here it is necessary to emphasize “still,” as we do not know if it will be forever with confirmation of this new world order.
Situations like the drought in vast regions of Central America, especially the so-called Dry Corridor that borders Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, are added to the violence that strangles this zone, as well as the lack of opportunities that affect a good proportion of its residents, the very same ones who see leaving as an escape hatch. And the same is true for Mexicans and other Latin Americans in vulnerable situations, also fleeing from extreme violence that puts their lives and those of their families in danger. Of course, this situation does not exclude immigrants from the rest of the world.
Yes, we already know the immediate reaction of many is always the same: “that’s their problem.” As if excluding oneself from continental or global inter-responsibility would save us from the anti-immigrant mentality that awaits us unless we work to further the greater, global good.
They are not asking the United States of today to have compassion, of course, because everyone already knows that this has been lost among at least half of the divided population of the United States of late; nor do they pretend that this country is engaged in a “plot twist” in the way in which it interprets this chapter of its history, since at the end of the day the realities are the ones defining the spirit of the people, for good or for bad, especially among those who are able to lend a hand and have even boasted before of their solidarity, which now shines for its absence.
However, they should not fear nor become panicked upon seeing or hearing about the “other,” the different, since this “other” is always looking for its own way out, just like their children and their children’s children. It’s just that in this moment in the world and its migrations, we find ourselves at an impasse due to the momentary boulder arising from deepest racism. But this is not a new panorama, of course. It forms part of the first chapter of the history of this administration that future generations will study, with all of its xenophobia, racism, and discrimination included. Of that, various people have been taking note to record what has happened here, just like the ancient scribes, who also gave faith to the implementation of power.
But this navigation chart that has used the behavior of this presidency to understand the present “American” goes beyond the merely migratory, because the United States continues to lose its global hegemony in all things moral. And that, history teaches us, is impossible to recover.
To read the Spanish version of this article click here.
