Section:GDN 1J PaGe:11 Edition Date:190827 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 26/8/2019 15:27 cYanmaGentaYellowbl
Tuesday 27 August 2019 The Guardian •
11
“Sometime in the next 15 years, ” Ehrlich predicted,
“the end will come. ” This was in 1970.
None of this actually happened, of course – and India,
Ehrlich’s nightmare country, is actually reaping the
demographic dividend of a workforce with a median
age of 27. But there’s something about brown and black
people reproducing that has always horrifi ed western
thinkers and leaders. Winston Churchill, in 1945, opined
that Hindus are “protected by their mere pullulation
[rapid breeding] from the doom that is their due”.
We are seeing a new red scare, except this time the
enemy isn’t communists; it’s immigrants. The US
Immigration Enforcement and Border Patrol raids,
grabbing mothers on the streets and hustling them into
government vans in front of their screaming daughters,
are reminiscent of the Palmer Raids in 1919 and 1920,
when hundreds of suspected leftists who were foreign,
or looked or sounded foreign, were rounded up and
deported. Obama was better in his language than
Trump, but not much better in his policies. He was
called the “deporter in chief ” by immigrant advocates
because of his record of forcibly removing 3 million
people without proper papers – a far higher number
than Bill Clinton or George W Bush had removed.
Obama expended little serious political capital to make
life easier for the undocumented during his eight years
in offi ce, pleading political gridlock under a Tea Party-
controlled Congress, although he did sign executive
orders protecting the Dreamers in his second term.
What are whites so afraid of? In a 2018 column, the
paleoconservative commentator Pat Buchanan pointed
out the political ramifi cations of today’s immigration:
“In US presidential elections, persons of colour whose
roots are in Asia, Africa and Latin America vote 4 -1
Democratic, and against the candidates favored by
American’s [sic] vanishing white majority. ” Then he
painted a picture of the looming apocalypse: “Mass
immigration means an America in 2050 with no core
majority, made up of minorities of every race, colour,
religion and culture on earth, a continent-wide replica
of the wonderful diversity we see today in the UN
General Assembly. ”
Today, these jeremiads against migrants are given
vent full-throated on Fox News. The Fox anchors claim
they are not anti-immigrant; they just want immigrants
to come lawfully. The commentator Tomi Lahren often
tweets imprecations at immigrants: “We are indeed a
nation of immigrants. We are also a nation of laws.
Respect our laws and we welcome you. If not, bye. ”
An amateur genealogist named Jennifer Mendelsohn
dug up a 1917 court case featuring Lahren’s great-great-
grandfather, a Russian immigrant named Constantin
Dietrich. He was indicted on two counts of “ wilfully,
unlawfully, and knowingly ” lying about a natural isation
proceeding and forging a natural isation document “with
a knife or steel eraser or other instrument unknown to
the Grand Jurors ”. He had failed to fi le his application in
time, so he forged it to make it appear that it had been
executed two years earlier.
“Migrant memoirs and other documents are full of
examples of people who lied, ” points out Hasia Diner,
a professor of American Jewish history at New York
University. “They lied about their ages, they lied about
their occupations. The word went through immigrant
ships and stations and ports of embarkation, to say that
one had a particular skill. People lied to leave Europe,
because they could be liable for military conscription. ”
The most notorious immigrant hater in the Trump
administration is his adviser Stephen Miller, who grew
up Jewish in California. Miller’s great-grandparents Wolf
and Bessie Glotzer were refugees fl eeing the pogroms in
Belorussia. They came over in 1903, without hindrance
of extreme vetting or even an interview with the
American embassy, with $8 in their pockets.
“For Miller to say his family came to America ‘legally ’
is simply a ruse, ” the Jewish Journal point ed out.
“There was no illegal immigration at the turn of the
century, because all non-Asian immigration was
essentially legal until the 1920s. Then, as now, angry
voices fought to keep these immigrants out. They
organ ised the Immigration Restriction League, focused
on shutting the ports to swarthy Italians and Jews.
“The fl oodgates are open,” wrote one anti-immigrant
newspaper editor as the eastern European Jews docked
in New York. ‘The horde of $9.60 steerage slime is being
siphoned upon us from Continental mud tanks. ’ Such
sentiments led to the Immigration Quota Act of 1924 –
which eff ectively shut the door to Jewish immigration
on the eve of the Holocaust. ”
As the article notes : “When an American Jew turns
on immigrants, there is a whiff of head-scratching
hypocrisy, if not something more clinical. It is taking
the side of people who, in a historical blink of the eye,
would have met your own great-grandparents at the
docks with stones and spitballs. ”
Miller’s own uncle, David Glosser, posted a Facebook
note: “My nephew and I must both refl ect long and hard
on one awful truth. If in the early 20th century the
USA had built a wall against poor desperate ignorant
immigrants of a diff erent religion, like the Glossers, all of
us would have gone up the crematoria chimneys with the
other 6 million kinsmen whom we can never know.’Fear of migrants earns politicians votes. Fear of
migrants sells. Fox ratings have never been higher.
The Springer newspapers in Germany, the Berlusconi
papers in Italy and the Sun and Daily Mail in the UK
are fl ourishing, feeding their readers a daily diet
of xenophobia.
But the greatest facilitator of race-hatred against
refugees isn’t a tabloid; it’s Facebook. Researchers at
the University of Warwick recently studied every anti-
refugee attack – 3,335, over two years – in Germany.
They found that among the strongest predictors of the
attacks was whether the attackers are on Facebook.
The social network aids the dissemination of rumours,
such as that all refugees are welfare cheats or rapists;
and, unmediated by gatekeepers or editors, the
rumours spread, and ordinary people are roused
to violence. Wherever Facebook usage rose to one
standard deviation above normal, the researchers
found, attacks on refugees increased by 50%. When
there were internet outages in areas with high
Facebook usage, the attacks dropped signifi cantly.
The conversation about immigrants in America,
too, is approaching incitement to genocide. Not just
restraining or detaining the undocumented, but
murdering them en masse. Virgil Peck, a Kansas
state assemblyman, off ered a solution to America’s
immigration problem in the legislature during a 2011committee meeting on shooting wild hogs from
helicopters: “If shooting these immigrating feral hogs
works, maybe we have found a [solution] to our illegal
immigration problem. ” He later said that he’d been
joking, that he was just speaking like “a south-east
Kansas person ”.
These comments were mirrored in February 2013 by
a conservative radio show host and former US Navy S eal
named Carl Higbie. “What’s so wrong with wanting to
put up a fence and saying: ‘Hey, everybody with a gun,
if you want to go shoot people coming across our border
illegally, you can do it fo’ free ’? ” Higbie said on his radio
show, Sound of Freedom. “And you can do it on your
own, and you’ll be under the command of the, you
know, National Guard unit or a Border Patrol. I think
stick a fence six feet high with signs on it in both English
and Spanish and it says, ‘If you cross this border, this is
the American border, you cross it, we’re going to shoot
you ’ ... You cross my border, I will shoot you in the face.
I will go down there. I’ll volunteer to go down there and
stand on that border for, I don’t know, a week or so at a
time, and that’ll be my civil duty. I’ll volunteer to do it. ”
What happened to this homicidal, hate-fi lled man?
Four years later, Donald Trump appointed him to be
head of external relations for AmeriCorps, the national
volunteer service programme. After the comments
came out in the wider media, he resigned.
In February 2018, the US Citizenship and Immigration
Services (USCIS) removed the phrase “nation of
immigrants ” from its mission statement. It will no
longer secure “America’s promise as a nation of
immigrants ”; it will now merely “administer the
nation’s lawful immigration system ”. This was met
with wide applause from anti-immigrant groups like
F air and Numbers USA. The Peruvian-born then head
of USCIS, Lee Cissna, explained the change: that the
agency now exists “to ensure people who are eligible
for immigration benefi ts receive them, and those who
are not eligible – either because they don’t qualify or
because they attempt to qualify by fraud – don’t receive
them, and those who would do us harm are not granted
immigration benefi ts ”. In other words, a sort of
immigrant monitor, ever on the alert for criminals,
terrorists, rapists, malingerers, deadbeats, cheats.
Even if they are observed more in the breach, these
offi cial catchphrases such as “nation of immigrants ”
mean something: what the country’s ideals are, what it
aspires to. In changing the phrasing, USCIS removed
even that aspirational ideal. It announced in no
uncertain terms its idea of America: a nation of
immigrant-haters.
Two Indian engineers were having beers on the
porch of a bar in Kansas earlier that year. A white navy
veteran came up to them. “Where are you from? ” he
demanded. ‘How did you get into this country?’ Other
people in the bar shooed them off. The questioner
came back with a 9mm gun. “Get out of my country! ”
he yelled, and shot both of them; one of them died. He
was 32 and left a wife he’d been married to for just four
years. She was waiting for her husband to come home
so they could sip chai together in the backyard that
unseasonably warm February evening.
Every year, extremists murder people for their views.
The Anti-Defamation League note d: “A majority of the
2017 murders were committed by rightwing extremists,
primarily white supremacists, as has typically been
the case most years. The white supremacist murders
included several killings linked to the alt-right as that
movement expanded its operations in 2017 from the
internet into the physical world – raising the likely
possibility of more such violent acts in the future. ”
Between 2008 and 2017, white supremacists accounted
for 71% of deaths in terror attacks in the U S.
The researcher Lyman Stone has calculated the
ancestries of all the people charged with terrorism in
America since 2001. More than half – 227 – have “no
foreign citizenship, parentage, or identifi able ancestry
of any kind ”. That is, they’re Americans, in the generic
sense. We have met the enemy, and he is us. •This is an edited extract from This Land Is Our Land
by Suketu Mehta, published by Jonathan Cape and
available at guardianbookshop.co.ukA Donald Trump
rally in Texas
in February
GETTY
Suketu Mehta
is an award-
winning Indian-
born writer who
lives in New YorkRELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws