The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agency in the United States is tasked with apprehending people who are in the country illegally and deporting them. Under Donald J Trump, ICE has gone into overdrive in trying to boot out people who either entered the USA illegally or entered legally but overstayed their visas.
ICE go around in quasi-military uniforms and vehicles and with military-grade weapons. They are usually looking for people who have no history of violence. The only crime these people have committed is crossing an imaginary line in the sand. They sought to create a better life for themselves.
ICE shot dead two unarmed people in Minneapolis. Both were American citizens. The ICE officers are now under investigation. ICE is supposed to be protecting Americans and not killing them.
There are accusations that ICE uses excessive force. It has used tear gas in urban areas and rammed cars. ICE bursts into houses and workplaces. So much for ‘a man’s home is his castle.’
Some American citizens have been arrested by ICE on suspicion of not being American. Some legal immigrants have been arrested on suspicion of being in the country illegally.
ICE has tried to scare people who have filmed them. Some demonstrators tried to block ICE and disrupt their activities. If ICE is seen coming, some people tip off illegal immigrants.
So far, Donald Trump is not backing down. He says ICE has been too mild. But when one of his own is arrested, it is ‘Nazi’ according to him. Trump is in no position to be sanctimonious about law enforcement. He is a felon with 34 convictions. He pardoned several criminals for violent offences committed in the 6 January 2021 riots.
If ICE goes much further, Trump will back down. Remember TACO – Trump always chickens out. He has chickened out over handing himself into the police; over government shutdowns, over Iran, etc….
Any crime committed by an illegal immigrant is hugely hyped. He or she should not have been here. If he or she had not been let in or had been deported, the crime would not have been committed. Over 30 000 Americans are murdered every year. 99% of these are committed by Americans. Yet it is the tiny minority that are committed by illegal immigrants – as opposed to legal ones – that the xenophobes choose to focus on.
There is a growing anti-ICE movement. There are demonstrations in several cities. ICE is a Federal Government agency. State police forces and county sheriff’s departments can choose to assist ICE raids. But in states governed by the Democratic Party, the state police forces and county sheriff’s departments are refusing to cooperate.
People who move to the USA illegally end up working in jobs that few Americans would do and are often paid below the minimum wage. They wash cars; they pick fruit; they mow lawns,s and they work in construction. They are sectors where they can be paid cash in hand, and they can be employed informally. No qualifications are needed, and little English is required either. In fact, they are fairly important for the US economy. Some Americans are worried that if all illegal immigrants suddenly leave the country, the country will not function.
In the last 25 years, immigration to the US has been overwhelmingly from Latin America and particularly Mexico. 20% of Americans are Latinos (i.e. from Spanish-speaking families). Mexicans who come to the US often say, ‘We did not move across the border; the border moved across us'. They note that until 1848, several states of the USA were part of Mexico: New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, California and Utah. That is why these states have many Spanish-language toponyms. Nevada means ‘snowy’ in Spanish, for instance.
Latinos (also called Hispanics) tend to be brown people. They are often descended from Amerindians – i.e. the people who were on the American Continent before the Europeans came. Some Latinos have European ancestry, too, especially Spanish. The Spanish are usually swarthier than the average white. Some Latinos have African stock too. There is said to be a colour prejudice element to ICE raids.
The states along the Mexican Border have a plurality of Hispanic people. In some cities and counties, Hispanics (i.e. Latinos) are a clear majority. An illegal immigrant from a Hispanic background can easily blend in and live even if he or she only speaks Spanish. The community will be very sympathetic. Most people there will have illegal immigrant friends or family.
Europeans hardly ever move to the USA anymore. Life in most European countries – even the poorer Eastern European ones – is better than in the USA. In the 1990s, Romanians, for example, often wanted to move to the United States as it was seen as the Land of Opportunity, and Romania was a middle-income country. But since joining the European Union, Romanians have an easy opportunity to move to affluent Western European countries without the need to seek a visa. They shift to Italy, France, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Spain and so on.
There is not much illegal immigration from Africa. This would require people to get to the USA on a student visa, tourist visa or business visa first and then overstay or else to get to either Canada or Mexico and cross the border illegally. There is illegal immigration from Asia into the US. It is from the less affluent Asian countries such as the Philippines, Uzbekistan, Mongolia and Vietnam.
The US is fixated with its southern border. Trump vowed in 2015 to build a border wall, and Mexico would pay for it. Not one brick has been built, and Mexico has not paid a Peso for it. The Canadian Border is longer and much easier to cross. The Mexican Border is mostly inhospitable desert or else the Rio Grande River.
When Trump became president for a second time a year ago, he vowed to deport millions of illegal aliens. He promised to be brutal. Indeed, in his first term those who crossed the border illegally were dealt with harshly. Parents were deliberately separated from their children. Sometimes the parents had no idea where their children were held. The children were sometimes put in cages. The inhumane treatment of illegal immigrants was so shocking that it drew public rebukes from many Christian leaders as being immoral. Even a Republican former First Lady, Laura Bush, publicly denounced it as un-Christian.
Illegal immigration has been an issue in US Politics for a century. Then the Republican Party embraced it. Their regressive capitalist policies offer little to the working class. But by harping on about the evils of illegal immigration, they resonate with working-class voters who might otherwise be attracted to the social justice message of the Democratic Party. The Democrats realised they needed to play catch-up. Record numbers of people were deported under President Barack Obama. Yet the Obama Administration also initiated the Dreamers Program: Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. If someone was carried across the border by her parents as an infant and had lived in the USA for decades and was American in all but the narrowest legal sense, should she not be forgiven? The Dreamers Program was about delaying deportation. But the delay could be by a year or a decade or a few decades, and in the end, the person would stay for his or her whole life. But the Democrats did not formally commit to letting such a person stay forever. That would seem too soft.
Some illegal immigrants have been in the US for decades. They are married to Americans and have American children. Their only language is English, and they have not been to their original countries since their infancy. These people are embedded in their communities, and they are valued by their friends. Many Americans say such people should be shown compassion.
For over 20 years, there have been sanctuary cities. These are cities where the local authorities refuse to collaborate with the Federal Government in deporting illegal immigrants. ICE finds it difficult to locate these people.
A recent opinion poll shows that over 60% of Americans believe that ICE has gone too far. Only 30% disagree. Unsurprisingly, those who disagree are overwhelmingly Republican voters.
There are plenty of Republicans who denounce all immigration, legal as well as illegal. Ann Coulter is the Republican Party’s foulest Islamophobe and racist. She says her British ancestors were not immigrants to the USA – they were settlers. Immigrant and settler are synonyms.
Immigration is a lightning rod issue for the Republican Party. They can divert attention from inflation, the cost of living, low wages, the deficit, climate change, corporate welfare, lack of affordable healthcare and the extortionate cost of tertiary education. People are misdirected to look at immigration as the explicative of all society’s ills. Immigrants, both legal and illegal,l are scapegoated. The word Immigrant is used as though it were the foulest insult. Immigrants are used as part of the Republicans’ favourite trick to say that the problem is that the POOREST people have far too much money!
The Republican Party opposes all measures that would benefit most Americans. Publicly funded healthcare, publicly funded higher education, clean energy, a living wage, gun control, billionaires paying a fair amount of tax, etc., the Republican Party is adamantine in being against all of this. The genius of the Republicans is to get poor Americans to vote for their own impoverishment.
Rational Americans look back to the English who established Jamestown, Virginia, as the first English town in America in 1607. They had no visas. They did not seek permission from the government of the local Native American tribe to enter. These English immigrants were illegal. President John F Kennedy published a book titled ‘A Nation of Immigrants.’