Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 06:10 pm
It is fascinating that conservatives of all stripes never fail to blame all of the nation’s woes on anything or anyone except Republicans who are responsible for the lion’s share of problems Americans experience. If it is not the Democrats, it is the African American President, non-Christians, liberals, women, socialists, gays, birth control, science and even public education. Throughout the nation’s history, though, it has been a uniquely American characteristic to blame all the country’s problems on immigrants.
It hardly mattered if it was Italian, Polish, Catholic, Irish, or any number of Slavic people settling in America, many of them undocumented, there was always a new group to single out for discrimination and extraordinarily harsh treatment; today it is immigrants of color. It is just the way that a significant number of citizens in an exceptional nation naturally act. For over a decade at least, many politicians, even Republicans like John McCain and George W. Bush, advocated for comprehensive immigration reform to calm the conservative outrage that people of color want to experience what it is like to live and raise families in a friendly nation like America. But now since Republicans have officially become anti-immigration and anti-Latino, their big ideas for comprehensive immigration reform include shredding the Constitution, deploying armed vigilantes on the Southern border, and the two latest abominations; using weaponized drones to bomb Hispanics and enslaving immigrants as property of the state and compelling them to perform hard labor; a violation of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
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Despite the substantial nativist and bigoted segment of the population that detests the idea of their “white America” being populated with people of color, no matter what color, even Donald Trump believed that targeting Hispanic immigrants was “maniacal and mean-spirited” just three years ago.
During the 2012 presidential campaign, Trump lashed out at Willard Romney’s idea of immigration reform centered on a “crazy self-deportation policy“ for non-European immigrants. Donald Trump said, “He (Willard) has a crazy policy of self-deportation which was maniacal. It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote. He lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.”
Of course now that he understands the barbaric and evil nature of the Republican base, and just how bigoted they are against people of color, Trump says his immigration reform policy will be a multi-faceted approach including shredding the Constitution, declaring war on Mexico, closing down trade (an embargo) with America’s third largest trade partner, confiscating all wages earned by immigrants, force Mexico to pay for and build an American-side defensive border wall, and demand that Mexicans pay war reparations due to defeat at the hands of America. However, as “maniacal, crazy, and mean-spirited” as Trump’s 2015 “immigration reform plan” seems, it falls short of calling in America’s military leaders to bomb Mexicans with weaponized drones, or enslaving them and making them “property of the state.”
The idea of using weaponized drone attacks on Mexican immigrants is not new, but it is relatively novel coming from a Republican candidate for president in a party that claimed it was seeking to garner support from Hispanics. Republican Ben Carson was in Arizona (where else) to confer with a well-regarded and devout anti-immigrant activist, Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu. Carson said he was very open to using weaponized drone attacks on Hispanic immigrants along the Southern border; a typical Republican idea of comprehensive immigration reform. Carson said, “You can entertain all kinds of things. We have excellent military leaders and we need to employ their expertise because this is a war we are fighting. That’s the bottom line.”
As harsh an idea, or immigration reform plan, as using the United States military and weaponized drone attacks to bomb people coming to what Republican demigod Ronald Reagan foolishly claimed was a “shining city on a hill,” it is not quite as biblically barbaric as reinstating legalized slavery enforced by the state. That brutal plan was courtesy of an Iowa radio host and “influential conservative kingmaker,” Jan Mickelson. Mickelson’s comprehensive immigration reform plan entailed making undocumented immigrants “property of the state” and when his unconstitutional immigration plan was questioned, he asked; “what’s wrong with slavery?” The 13th Amendment is what’s wrong with slavery and yet Mickelson actually used the 13th Amendment to justify enslaving Latino immigrants into state-mandated “compelled labor.”
On Monday Mickelson revealed his brutal plan to “drive undocumented immigrants out of Iowa” by making them “property of the state” and “forcing them into compelled labor” building fortified border walls for not getting out of America. Mickelson denied the need for rounding up immigrants and putting them in detention centers, or deporting them back to their home country; especially when they can just as easily be legally enslaved. He said “anyone who is in the state who cannot demonstrate their legal status to the satisfaction of the local and state authorities will become property of the State of Iowa. So if you are here without our permission, and we find that you’re still here after we’ve given you the deadline to leave, then you become property of the State of Iowa and we start using compelled labor. The people would therefore be owned by the state and become an asset of the state and we start inventing jobs for them like building a wall. We will compel your labor. You show up without an invitation, you get to be an asset. You get to be a construction worker. Cool!” For the record, Mickelson’s ancestors showed up without an invitation like every other immigrant no matter what nation they emigrated from, but they were not enslaved because there is a Constitutional Amendment banning slavery.
Apparently, the idea of shredding the Constitution, at least the 13th and 14th Amendments, as part of a Republican-endorsed immigration reform plan is every bit as appealing to bigots as using weaponized drones to bomb Hispanic people attempting to emigrate to America. It is important to note, and remind Americans, that this anti-Hispanic, anti-immigrant crusade did not start with Donald Trump. In fact three years ago he held a contrary position to the one he holds today, but he is taking advantage of what recognizes is the endemic hatred for immigrants of color by a growing number of hateful conservative voters.
Despite their own diagnosis after the 2012 general election that Republicans have to reach out to Hispanics to survive, they have abandoned that idea and, as Ben Carson intimated; declared war on immigrants. But that is nothing new; Republicans declare war as a matter of course and likely never understand why a leading Mexico City newspaper criticized “a certain segment of America as being structurally violent.” There is no better example of Republican structural violence than calling for drones to bomb Hispanic immigrants or make them slaves and property of the state.
Audio engineer and instructor for SAE. Writes op/ed commentary supporting Secular Humanist causes, and exposing suppression of women, the poor, and minorities. An advocate for freedom of religion and particularly, freedom of NO religion.
Born in the South, raised in the Mid-West and California for a well-rounded view of America; it doesn’t look good.
Former minister, lifelong musician, Mahayana Zen-Buddhist.
