There is no precise date, in our long history of the ethnic cleansing of indigenous people, creating the institution of slavery and slave patrols, maintaining racist immigration laws, perverting justice to maintain Jim Crow, or cracking down on dissidents, when we finally became the police state that we are today. But here we are.
Today’s proliferation of cameras and license plate readers, the near-constant surveillance of citizens, the policing of speech and thought, warrant-less searches, ballooning police budgets, a now trillion dollar military budget, increasing police militarization, the metastasis of an already vast “Homeland Security” apparatus, the transformation of “La Migra” into a Republican Guard, razor wire on border walls and even rivers, and exemptions to accountability for killer cops, federal “law enforcement” officials, or for sitting presidents — all of this is the logical consequence of creeping American institutionalization of authoritarian control and a contempt for real justice, if not democracy itself.
“If you want an emergency,” so goes the street expression, “call the cops.” Well, we’re in the middle of a five-alarm emergency that our police state has made possible.
We have lived with this police state so long now, that when ICE stops someone without a warrant and without identifying themselves, or grabs someone off the street, stuffs them into an unmarked van and whisks them away to a black site or a foreign prison, so conditioned are we to these screaming violations of the Constitution that we somehow regard the gestapo tactics as completely “normal.”
This week in Los Angeles some of us decided that none of this is normal.
In a further demonstration of unchecked neofascism, der liebe Führer deployed the California National Guard to quell demonstrations against massive, simultaneous ICE raids in LA. The demonstrations were nothing that the LAPD itself could not handle but Trump needed to make the point that he was in control — not only of the country, but of every state and every city.
California Governor Gavin Newsom, despite a brief post-election effort to make nice with MAGA World, accused Trump of “inciting and provoking violence, […] creating mass chaos,” [… and] “militarizing cities,” adding “These are the acts of a dictator, not a President.”
Newsom was certainly right about Trump’s dictator moves, but the Führer’s white supremacy and his desire to ethnically cleanse the United States of Muslims and Hispanics are an ugly side that most presidents have had the decency to keep under wraps, at least for the last few generations.
Jason L. Riley is a Wall Street Journal opinion columnist, a Conservative, and an enemy of DEI and affirmative action. Riley’s book “Let Them In: the Case of Open Borders” is all the more remarkable for this background and his affiliation with the Capitalist journal of record.
In his 2009 book, which still stands up today, Riley offers numerous arguments for welcoming America’s immigrants, legal and otherwise, rather than demonizing them as an undigestible lump in the belly of the beast. He reminds readers that even the late, practically sainted Republican president Ronald Reagan thought we ought to have open borders, free trade, and diversity. Yes, you read that correctly. Here’s Riley:
“In 1952, when the United States was still under the thumb of highly restrictive immigration quotas enacted in the 1920s, Reagan gave a speech endorsing open borders. In his view, America was ‘the promised land’ for people from ‘any place in the world.’ Reagan said ‘any person with the courage, with the desire to tear up their roots, to strive for freedom, to attempt and dare to live in a strange land and foreign place, to travel halfway across the world was welcome here.’
In a 1977 radio address, Reagan discussed what he called ‘the illegal alien fuss. Are great numbers of our unemployed really victims of the illegal alien invasion, or are those illegal tourists actually doing work our own people won’t do? One thing is certain in this hungry world: No regulation or law should be allowed if it results in crops rotting in the fields for lack of harvesters.’
The next time you tune into Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Hugh Hewitt, and Dennis Prager [recall Riley wrote this in 2009], contrast their take on immigration with Reagan’s. Reagan understood that immigrants are coming here to work, not live on the dole. He also grasped that natives and immigrants don’t compete with one another for jobs in a zero-sum labor market and that our policy makers would do better to focus less on protecting U.S. workers from immigrant competition and more on expanding the economic pie.
In his November 1979 speech announcing his candidacy for president, Reagan called for free labor flows throughout North America. Reagan knew that immigration, like free trade, which he also supported, benefits everyone in the long run.
Later in the campaign, in December 1979, Reagan responded to criticism from conservative columnist Holmes Alexander. ‘Please believe me when I tell you the idea of a North American accord has been mine for many, many years,’ said the future president. And conservatives calling today for a wall along the entire United States-Mexico border should know that Reagan was not a big fan of that prospect. ‘Some months before I declared,’ he continued in his response to Alexander, ‘I asked for a meeting and crossed the border to meet with the president of Mexico…… I went, as I said in my announcement address, to ask him his ideas how we could make the border something other than a locale for a nine-foot fence.’
At the end of his presidency, Reagan was still invoking Winthrop. ‘I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it,’ he remarked in his 1989 farewell address to the nation. ‘But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.’”
Riley gives us a quick tour of the sordid history of xenophobia in the United States. He makes special mention of the Tanton network, which spawned a number of hate groups including the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which influenced many now working in the Trump Administration and also local law enforcement officials now tripping over themselves to sign up to help the Führer Make America White Again.
One of Riley’s points — made in 2009 but even more valid today — is that today’s Republicans are racist zealots with a white supremacist agenda. And under Trump they have jumped from zealotry to criminality, sedition, and are well on their way to fascism.
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If the current president has such unchecked power that his State Department can rule that a person about to take a citizenship exam is now a criminal, or effectively criminalize eleven million people by diktat, or enlist a vast army of racist sheriffs and police chiefs in his ethnic cleansing project, the next president (assuming we have elections again) can and must use similar powers to reverse this damage and ensure it can never happen again.
The next president must begin by dismantling the vast federal Police State, starting with ICE, and issue amnesties for everyone in the country, preparing a path to citizenship for people already here. All offshore prisons and black sites, including Guantanamo, must be shut down.
Only by changing the status of undocumented people will we eliminate the constant exploitation of their status as a political wedge. Take away the ability of the Far Right to declare them “illegals” or characterize them as “criminals and rapists” and you take much of the air out of the xenophobic grievances that animate these racists.
Without such a distraction, maybe we could finally get back to the job of making America a place for everyone, not merely a playground for billionaires and white supremacists.