A nation built on the shoulders of immigration like the United States should already have a mechanism to legally detect, and thus immediately stop, all indications of racism and anti-immigrant rhetoric via any presidential aspirant.
There should be a type of legal filter that disqualifies them from within their own political parties, and disrupts the candidate registration of those with attitudes, statements, and above all xenophobic proposals who are intent upon promoting campaigns with hate, terror, and exclusion.
This, contravening history, philosophy, culture, and the ethical principles of democracy that always aspires to achieve equality and equilibrium of powers —independent of ideology or political position— in the framework of development and benefit to society as a whole, and not of its involution toward retrograde levels that contradict the advances of humanity, its values, and rights.
Put simply, to not repeat ignominious stages in other latitudes where the human race had everything to lose, including life, at the hands of autocrats of any type who aspired only to perpetuate their own power, whipping their followers into a frenzy over destroying “the other,” those who are not like them.
The idea is, of course, a utopia equivalent to preaching in the desert at this precise moment in this country’s history, which allowed, with deceptively democratic complacency, someone to take office in 2016 who is now trying to win reelection with the same strategy of anti-immigration and racism that showed up a few nights ago in Orlando, Florida, in the midst of a display of well-calculated histrionics before a torrent of followers that, of course, echoed each and every one of his studied poses, as well as his verbal expressions, gesticulations, and easily-digestible, prepared slogans.
All this at the expense of the “enemies” that have also become the objective of his policies: immigrants. Especially those he does not like, those who are not, for example, “from Norway.”
Based on this scenario, the weeks and months to come will not be easy for millions of immigrant families. Especially so for those whom the president of the United States has chosen, once again, to bear the full weight of his anti-immigrant rhetoric and who he has threatened to deport “by the millions” next week.
Actually, the anti-immigrant strategy worked for Trump the first time around because it awakened a feeling somewhere between racism and xenophobia in a certain segment of the U.S. population which, we now know, was always there and latent, but half-asleep, until it was woken up completely by his rhetoric of hate, like a perverse “Pied Piper of Hamelin.”
But to create the image of this “other” that “takes advantage” of the poor, little U.S. system is nothing more than betting once again on the resource of fear, with threats and insults, which could instead be producing a “boomerang” effect. This has been proven by the results of a recent poll from Mason-Dixon, which revealed that 56% of Hispanic voters in Florida said that they would vote against Donald Trump so that he is not reelected, including 61% of women and those under fifty who say they do not want the president to repeat his White House success in 2020.
However, more emboldened than ever, the leader in search of reelection has uncovered a second, reckless Pandora’s box, which makes it easy to predict that we will be seeing in the short term new attacks on Spanish-language, insults toward minorities, jokes at the expense of those with dark skin or who have an accent. Essentially, those who do not resemble the “Trump model.”
But while the epithets that the president of the United States has intentionally proffered regarding immigrants who are not of his preference continue to rumble in the four corners of the planet, right now there are around 70 million people displaced from their homes by wars and violence, an increase of more than two million people in this situation, according to the most recent data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The UNHCR chief, Filippo Grandi, rightfully warned the world’s superpowers, especially the United States, that calling migrants and refugees “threats” to jobs and security is detrimental, as these people are nothing more than victims fleeing from that very insecurity and situations that put their lives and those of their families at risk. Situations that they did not create, but in fact those external agents with power and resources did.
It is unclear whether “Trumpism” reflects, in turn, a reality bigger than our own human race, in the moment we are living, in this preamble to an exclusionary social transformation in the United States. But whatever the result of this new attack on immigrants, we must do everything possible to ensure that this violent verbal rhetoric does not open the door to fascism.
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