Exploiting Pandemic, Trump Admin Weighs Banning Immigration Indefinitely
truthout.org/articles/exploiting-pandemic-trump-admin-weighs-banning-immigration-indefinitely/
Earlier this week, the Trump administration started hinting that the president’s “temporary” ban on immigration, rushed into effect in late April as a part of the pandemic response, was about to be extended indefinitely.
With the country entirely preoccupied by the public health and economic catastrophes, and with protest all but impossible given the dangers of congregating in large crowds, Trump’s team has, apparently, decided to seize the moment and lock down the country in a way that even the most restrictive, nativist policies of the 1920s and the quota era in immigration never did.
The rationale will apparently be a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) declaration that immigration poses a public health risk during the pandemic — despite the fact that fully one third of the world’s cases now are within the U.S.; that an immigrant is far more likely to contract COVID-19 once he or she arrives in the country than to bring the disease into the country themselves. And once such a declaration is made, Trump will, if the reports are correct, then ban all immigration until such time as the CDC head declares the public health crisis over — a formula that will, in effect, give Trump unlimited power to shut the U.S. off from the rest of the world for so long as he remains in the White House.
It is an extraordinary power grab, the true emergence of rule by diktat rather than by legislation. In one fell swoop, while our attention is elsewhere, this action threatens to turn the U.S. into a closed society that not only shuns economic immigrants, that not only blocks family unification, but that also no longer pays even lip service to the notions of asylum and of refugee resettlement — ideas that are utterly central to the rules-based international system.
Now, it’s not as if we haven’t had fair warning that such vile policies were in the offing. After all, from his first day in office, from that ghastly “American carnage” inauguration speech that ushered in the Trump era in all its shattering, coarse brutalism, in all its racism and institutionalized cruelty, Trump has been steadily ratcheting up the anti-immigrant rhetoric. When the history books are written, Trump’s years in office will be seen as a Black Book of anti-immigrant atrocities, from the Muslim travel ban to family separation, from the imprisoning of children to the parading of unaccompanied toddlers before immigration judges, from the wanton assault on Temporary Protected Status and on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, to the decision to start deporting asylum seekers back to supposedly safe third countries — such as Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala — that have some of the highest murder rates in the world.
And that was all pre-pandemic. In the last few months, with the COVID-19 crisis spiraling out of control, Trump’s team seems to have hit on a strategy of relentless bashing-the-foreigner in lieu of a coherent and effective strategy to tame the pandemic stateside and to stanch the economic bleed that has come about from shelter-in-place measures intended to slow the disease’s spread.