Anti-democracy of anti-immigrant extremism

For another week of contrasts, two issues – The New York Times article about exploitation of child labor and the criticism generated by President Joe Biden’s asylum restriction announcement is a sad reminder of the failure of the political class to enact comprehensive immigration reform.

Instead, the Republicans, who now control the House of Representatives, prefer to spend time in hearings that only promote conspiracy theories of white nationalists who live a separate reality with anachronistic ideas that no longer fit the United States of today.

In that sense, the imminence of the next presidential election in 2024 has forced Republicans to pick up the pace, resorting to their proven anti-immigrant and racist strategy to gain a foothold among their base, whether or not their political venom means they don’t want to solve the problem but prefer to continue. use it for political purposes.

But on the other hand, Democrats still fail to overcome the evil they repeat every time they face difficult immigration issues: they tend to give in to Republican pressure, believing they can silence their criticism when, in fact, these Republican attacks increase. In other words, on the asylum issue, rather than fear Republican attacks on the expected increase in Section 42 border crossings, the administration and Democratic lawmakers should demonstrate that this country is capable of handling this situation because it has the resources. and the ability to do so.

But instead, they choose to further restrict the shelter; and although the White House wants to justify its actions, it is becoming increasingly difficult to defend its positions. They remember how Bill Clinton in the 1990s made into law measures that applied even to documented immigrants; or Barack Obama ramping up deportations to try to win “Republican support” for comprehensive immigration reform, which, of course, never happened.

So, rather than keep trying to please the Republican Party, which will never act in good faith on immigration, Democrats should listen to the grievances of those who supported them, election after election, no matter the circumstances. We are referring to those great migratory forces that maintain the strength of the country economically and demographically and who always live in hope of a settlement of their migratory situation, but whose vulnerability makes them wait for promises on the one hand, and anti-immigrant attacks on the other. In whom, then, should one seek refuge?

Every time Republicans in the House of Representatives call hearings to address the situation on the border, they do so by providing a platform for people who support white nationalist conspiracy theories that only repeat lies, such as that immigrants are responsible for the fentanyl crisis. it has been proven that this is not the case.

According to him KATO Institute86% of those convicted of fentanyl trafficking in 2021 were US citizens, ten times higher than the number of convicted undocumented immigrants. Similarly, 90% of fentanyl seizures occur at legal entry points or inspection centers in the interior of the country, and not on illegal immigrant crossing routes.

This data, however, does not stop Republicans from continuing to link immigrants to the fentanyl crisis. And that makes his strategy of advancing at all costs in search of a return to the White House even more perverse.

But it goes even further because white nativists, once confined to the fringes of the Republican Party, now figure prominently in the collective discourse and are invited to testify in congressional hearings legitimizing the lies they repeat. The problem is that these voices are echoed by white domestic terrorists carrying out massacres in areas with a high concentration of minorities, such as El Paso in 2019 or Buffalo in 2022.

In fact, many of Trump’s deniers continue to repeat the blatant lies that Donald Trump was “stolen” in the 2020 election. These are the same people who justified the January 6, 2021 coup attempt and justify the violence as election campaign. strategy, without understanding and not accepting the details of democracy, especially as the most complete that exists on the planet today. In other words, they are anti-democratic agents because only if they lose an election do they claim that fraud has taken place; but if they win, then the system seems to work.

To this we add the obscurantism that these characters are promoting and which has already become the norm on the platforms of politicians such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his approval of a ban on books that detail the history of this nation from its most catastrophic chapters such as slavery and discrimination. . Or his new series of proposals to turn Florida into a hell for undocumented migrants, one of the most harmful and offensive ideas of which is to sentence mothers to 15 years in prison who take their children without documents to school. Really repulsive.

So it’s not surprising that in a state like Florida that has taken in refugees fleeing dictatorship, violence, and persecution, the same people support politicians like DeSantis who are promoting the very thing they were fleeing from in the first place. But that is a topic for another section.

However, we can foresee that characters like DeSantis are looking to add political glamor to the darkest and most extremist segments not just of Florida but of the entire country by ominously politicizing the immigration issue, blaming the illegals for everything. vices when he himself knows how important they are for the economy of his own state and nation.