There has been a lot of apocalyptic carrying on about how many migrants were waiting to cross into the United States when “Title 42,” the bureaucratically named Trump-era policy of barring desperate migrants from asking for asylum at the border, expired at 11:59 p.m. on May 11. The excuse for turning away asylum seekers, which is illegal under international law, was the public health emergency of the COVID-19 pandemic—the same pandemic that Trump insisted wasn’t happening, or was a plot by his political enemies to make him look bad, or could be treated by swallowing horse pills and bleach, or was all the fault of Chinese people, so please go and lynch some like my Klansman father would have, true-blue Americans! The Trump-Thomas Supreme Court Junta forced the Biden administration to keep this crime against humanity going until less than 48 hours ago, at the time this is being written.
And a good thing it did, too, if you believed the alarmist headlines, not just from Fox News (e.g., “Border residents express ‘hopelessness’ as migrants pour into Texas”) but from non-fascist, “mainstream” media (e.g., Time Magazine, “Why the U.S. May Be Days Away From a Border Crisis,” May 8; “Border cities brace for migrant surge ahead of Title 42’s end,” NBC News, May 10). Curious then, wasn’t it, that there was no overwhelming stampede at the border yesterday, which was actually quiet compared to recent days. This is not, of course, to deny that there is a big problem for U.S. cities exhausting their resources trying to help exhausted men, women, and children who stumble into this country with nothing but the clothes they stand up in, so desperate are they to flee the murderous violence and starvation that U.S. policies helped produce in their homelands. But the insinuation that these future slaughterhouse workers, construction workers, house cleaners, and gardeners and their children pose some kind of mortal threat to America is not only false and not only wrong; it is a deliberately created hysteria whose end may be the mass slaughter known as genocide.
Fox News and other fascist propagandists are engaging in what the scholar of genocide Daniel Jonah Goldhagen calls dehumanization of migrants when they use language such as “migrants swarm border ahead of Title 42’s end.” Harmful insects swarm, not human beings, and you call an exterminator for them. The 21st century fascists are also engaging in what Goldhagen terms demonization in trumpeting migrants’ supposed criminality, or calling them invaders. Decades of relentless propaganda along such lines about these people, whom U.S. business has relied on for generations to fill horrible jobs at starvation wages, have been wildly successful, with more than half of all Americans telling pollsters last year that an invasion is under way.
Immigration “restrictionists” can rejoice, but those of them who are not completely bloody-minded might want to reflect that they have written a warrant for genocide, which was enacted in El Paso, where a neo-Nazi type gunned down 23 people in 2019, without stopping to check their papers, and in Brownsville a few days ago, where another restrictionist mowed down eight people with his SUV. We might also add, in addition to individual murders of migrants here and there, the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, whose alleged perpetrator is now on trial for killing 11 Jews on the antisemitic belief that Jews are actually the cause of migrants coming to the U.S.—an elaboration of the racist “great replacement” theory now most closely associated with Tucker Carlson.
I believe these are but the opening shots. Texas and Florida have been busing migrants resident in their states to New York, Chicago, and other Democratic-run locales for a while now, a forced population transfer of a kind that often precedes, or is carried out in conjunction with, genocidal mass murder. Florida Fuhrer Ron DeSantis took time out of his busy schedule of trying to destroy one of the state’s largest tourist attractions the other day to hire three more companies to do this dirty work. It’s a curious fact that although it is relatively easy to come by estimates of how many migrants have been sent to New York City (perhaps 50,000 as of March 2023) or Chicago this way, DeSantis and his rival Fuhrer Greg Abbott are not saying how many migrants they have banished from their states in the press releases they’re issuing boasting about this. Who knows what kind of legal advice they are getting, but Nacht und Nebel (the Nazi German policy of enshrouding the Holocaust in “night and fog”) is a faithful companion of every genocide.
Where is the sense of urgency to stop this onrushing historic catastrophe? All I hear is a thousand blow-dried TV talking heads stealing Tucker Carlson’s thunder by bleating about a nonexistent “crisis on the border.”
Emanuel Goldstein 