Xenophobia

There’s nothing new about xenophobia. It’s been a part of the human existence since people lived in caves and feared those living outside their communities as much as they feared the beasts of the fields and the forests. The fear of strangers is an inherent characteristic of the human species which can be mitigated by attaining a greater familiarity with strangers or it can be elevated by warnings about the dangers posed by them. The greater the number of strangers that enter our midst the easier it is to elevate our sense of danger they represent.

  Religion has historically been a principal force keeping xenophobia alive, with religious leaders declaring that theirs is the only true religion and exhorting their followers to smite non-believers. Political leaders have also long sought to weaponize xenophobia to achieve their political or territorial goals. For example, Vladimir Putin labeled the Ukrainians as “Nazis” in an effort engender hostility against them and thereby garner support for his attempt to take control of their country.

  Despite the progress of our species in understanding the world and living in multiracial and multicultural communities, xenophobia remains a powerful force. This is true in the United States notwithstanding the fact that our country for almost 200 years has been a melting pot of races and cultures. Some will remember when “Help Wanted” signs in this country bore the caveat that “Irish Need Not Apply.” Just as often, similar exclusionary language was employed with respect to Italians, Chinese, Japanese, Blacks and Jews. To be sure, there have been periods, such as during World War II, when our hates and fears of others among us were suppressed to allow us to confront a challenge from without.

  A contributing factor to our current level of xenophobia is our system of government, a form of democracy dominated by two political parties. Sadly, hate and fear of those supporting the other principal political party has become an important force in American politics which is now frequently described as “tribal politics.” This has become particularly true of the Republican Party. As more fully described in “Partisan Politics” the Republican party has chosen to promote an economic agenda which is heavily skewed in favor of those at the top of the income and wealth scales. Because the party’s economic agenda works to the detriment of the vast majority of Americans, it is particularly important for Republican politicians to find ways to motivate their supporters to vote. Thus, Republican politicians have been placing increasing reliance upon promoting “culture wars” in which they seek to promote the notion that there is something evil and/or dangerous about their political opponents and the people they are seeking to help. This practice was greatly accelerated when Donald Trump entered the political arena.

  Long before Trump began his campaign to run for president, his racist tendencies were clearly visible. In the 1990s he was a strong voice in condemning “the Central Park Five,” a group of black and Latino teenagers wrongly accused of attacking a white female jogger in Central Park.  When Barack Obama ran for President in 2008, Trump spearheaded the “Birther” movement, questioning the place of Barack Obama’s birth and his eligibility to run for president. This too was an unabashed effort to motivate anti-black sentiment. Similarly, when Trump officially began his campaign to become the Republican nominee for president, he did so by proclaiming that our country was now being overrun with murderers, rapists and drug dealers being sent across our southern border by Mexico. He promised that he would put an end to this “carnage” by building “a great wall.“

  This, of course, was total nonsense, but it made an appealing story to those working class Americans whose fortunes were being depleted by technological advances and globalization. Yes, there was a new parade of individuals seeking asylum at our southern border, but they weren’t murderers, rapists and drug dealers. They weren’t even Mexicans. Nor were they being sent by their governments. They were desperate individuals from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala who were being chased out of their homelands by crime and drought and were seeking better lives for themselves and their children in a country long hailed as a land of opportunity.

  Trump’s targeting of Mexicans was not simply a case of mistaken identity. In all likelihood it was a calculated and disingenuous ploy to arouse the hates and fears that many Americans harbored for Mexicans who for years had represented the largest number of illegal aliens in this country. More importantly, Mexico was taking jobs away from Americans as NAFTA was making it more economical for U.S. manufacturers to produce their products in Mexico. Trump further excited his supporters by claiming that he would make Mexico pay for his wall. Were this not enough, to the further delight of his supporters, he would punish those flocking to our country by putting them in crowded cages and separating adult asylum-seekers from their children.

  Trump’s efforts to fan the flames of xenophobia did not stop there. After he was elected he indirectly attacked another frequent target of xenophobia when he characterized as “very fine people” those who chanted “Jews will not replace us” while participating in 2017 “Unite the Right” rally held in Charlottesville.  Conversely, he characterized those marching in protest against the murder of George Floyd, a black man, as “thugs” and “angry mobs” and exhorted the nation’s governors to crack down on them using force and police dogs to disburse them. He even ordered the U.S. Army to break up a peaceful protest taking place across the street from the White House in Lafayette Park. More recently, in his 2020 re-election campaign he warned that if Biden were elected factories would be closed, oil fracking would be banned, taxes would be quadrupled, police departments defunded, guns confiscated, and suburbs destroyed. While none of this was likely to happen, you have to give him credit; he certainly had learned how to fire up a crowd by arousing hates and fears.

  The caravan of asylum seekers that Trump railed against to start his presidential campaign has not diminished. In fact, it has even increased as Columbians and Venezuelans have  begun to join the long overland trek to our southern border. They were not discouraged by Trump’s many efforts to block their entry into our country and to harass those who safely made it here. In short, his efforts had little or no impact in curbing the flow of migrants as economic conditions in Central and South American became more dire as a result of climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic.  

  By contrast, President Biden has tried to slow the flow of asylum-seekers coming to our southern border by trying to improve economic conditions in those Central and South American counties whose citizens feel impelled to embark on the dangerous journey northward. At the same time, he has sought to reverse the impact of Trump’s heinous family separation policy and relaxed Trump’s requirement that asylum seekers stay in Mexico pending consideration of their asylum application. He has also sought to speed the processing of their asylum applications. These efforts have led to accusations by Republicans that Biden is trying to encourage immigrants to come to this country.

  With the mid-term elections less than two months away and the job markets remaining strong, Republican politicians have been exploring ways to bolster their chances to regain control of both houses of the Congress. While inflation is an issue that adversely impacts virtually all Americans, there are signs that it is slowly being brought under control by the Federal Reserve’s steady increases in interest rates. Perhaps equally important, inflation is not unique to America as every developed country is currently experiencing high inflation which has been exacerbated by supply chain problems caused by the Covid pandemic and rising energy prices resulting from the war in Ukraine.

  This has prompted three Republican governors to focus public attention on the large numbers of immigrants seeking asylum in this country. This effort has been led by Texas’ governor, Gregg Abbott. Immigration has long been a hot political issue in Texas as illegal immigrants making their way across the Texas-Mexican border have proven to be a nuisance to Texans living along the border. Immigrants have cut ranchers’ fences and raided their food stocks. Both Abbott and his predecessor, Rick Perry, have responded by devoting increasing amounts of their state’s expenditures to border security (from $110 million in 2007 to $3 billion in the state’s current budget). What is particularly telling is that these expenditures tend to be concentrated in election years.

  In a further effort to capitalize on the anti-immigrant sentiment in his state, Governor Abbott caused a major problem this summer by requiring the inspection of all trucks coming across the Mexican border. This was ostensibly intended to stop the flow of drugs and immigrants being smuggled into his state. While these searches yielded little, in the nine days during which they were carried out they disrupted commerce causing $9 billion in lost commerce and $4.2 billion in lost revenues in his state.

  Abbott has recently turned to less costly efforts (approximately $12 million) to demonstrate his opposition the influx of immigrants. He, along with Arizona’s governor, Doug Ducey, have begun bussing immigrants awaiting a hearing on their immigration status. To date, 8,000 have been transported to Washington, D.C., 2,500 to New York City  and, 500 to Chicago. It is no accident that many of those transported to Washington have been dropped off near Vice President Harris’ home. These efforts have been taken to demonstrate that “sanctuary cities” in the north are no more receptive to immigrants than those in southern border states. The political motivation behind these efforts is evidenced by the fact that when Eric Adams, New York City’s mayor, requested that the delivery of immigrants to his city be coordinated with him, Governor Abbott’s office declined to respond.

  Another sample of Texas’ hospitality toward immigrants can be found on the website of Refugee Services of Texas, a non-profit organization offering assistance to persons coming to this country. The website explains how the organization welcomes, settles, serves and mentors refugees. While this sounds down-right friendly, it’s betrayed by the fine print at the top of the website. It reveals that the organization only provides services to refugees certified by the U.N.’s High Commissioner on Refugees who must wait in their home countries until their applications have been approved by UNHCR. The catch is that “the average wait time is between 10 and 26 years.”

  While Governor Abbott has tried to bring attention to his state’s immigrant problems, it is also instructive to note that he has not petitioned the U.S. Congress for additional resources to accommodate uninvited migrants awaiting action on their asylum applications. That would hardly serve to motivate his supporters. Indeed, Republican voters seem to only be energized by efforts to punish those seeking to enter our country and would not likely be encouraged to vote by efforts to actually help asylum-seekers. As Jennifer Rubin has suggested, Republican politicians, following Trump’s lead, now seem to treat a display of cruelty toward immigrants and minorities as a “badge of honor.”

  Not willing to allow another GOP presidential-hopeful dominate the immigration issue, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, last week tried his hand at showing that he could be even more callous in his treatment of aliens. The fact that his state (a) does not share a border with Mexico and (b) does not have a significant problem with unwanted asylum-seekers didn’t deter him. He would simply import some from Texas. Drawing on a $12 million slush fund he had asked his legislature to create, he chartered two planes at a reported cost of $1.6 million (or roughly $32,000 per passenger) to carry out his plan. The planes flew to San Antonio where his team found 50 Venezuelan immigrants who had been congregating outside an immigrant assistance center. These immigrants, after crossing the border, had immediately turned themselves in to the Border Patrol agents and were awaiting for their asylum applications to be processed. To entice them onto the planes DeSantis’ team told them that they would be flown to Massachusetts where they would receive a variety of benefits as well as expedited treatment in securing work permits.

  Just to make sure that his efforts got proper attention, DeSantis arranged for a Fox News video crew to accompany the immigrants on their travels and to film them as they disembarked from their planes onto an empty tarmac on Martha’s Vineyard. Although the immigrants had been promised they would be warmly welcomed, Governor DeSantis had somehow neglected to inform local officials that their new guests would be arriving. He did, however, remember to put out a statement, reminiscent of earlier statements by Governor Abbott, that the absence of a welcoming party demonstrated that the residents of Massachusetts care little for the plight of those seeking refuge in this country. As it turned out, once the immigrants were discovered, they were indeed warmly received by the residents of Martha’s Vineyard who gave them food and clothing before transferring them to a refugee housing center on Cape Cod. Thus, in reality, DeSantis may have unintentionally helped these desperate individuals which appears to be the last thing he wanted to do.

  Because immigration is not a hot political issue in Florida this political stunt was never likely to help DeSantis in his effort to be re-elected as Florida’s governor. Moreover, Charlie Crist, DeSantis’ opponent in the forthcoming gubernatorial election, is capitalizing on this fiasco pointing out that DeSantis used taxpayer money to fund this blatantly political undertaking which revealed that DeSantis is more concerned with positioning himself for a presidential run than addressing problems within the State of Florida. It’s not just that DeSantis used taxpayer monies to fund what appears to be a campaign expenditure, but the funds were appropriated to transfer illegal aliens out of the state. The individuals involved, however, were neither in the state nor were they illegally in this country.

  The bad press that this effort has generated may be the least of Governor DeSantis’ problems. It is blatantly apparent from the literature provided to them that the Venezuelan asylum-seekers were fraudulently induced to leave Texas. Three of them have started a class action seeking civil damages against DeSantis. In addition, roughly a dozen of them are demanding that criminal action be taken against DeSantis and the Sheriff of Bexar County Texas is now contemplating doing just that. Unfortunately for DeSantis, he has already publicly claimed credit for having masterminded the abduction of these individuals. His defense seems to be that these poor and hungry souls voluntarily embarked on this trip and signed releases for which they each received a $10 gift certificate redeemable at a near-by MacDonald’s restaurant. At this point DeSantis is probably pondering “What would Donald, the Artful Dodger, do to extricate himself from this mess?”

  One has to wonder what is it about immigrants that causes Republicans to be so antipathetic toward them. Our nation was largely built by immigrants. As explained in “America’s Descent From Greatness,” population size is a major factor in determining the magnitude of a country’s economic strength and America’s GDP growth throughout the 19th century, during which it had few restrictions on immigration, was in no small measure fueled by its expanding population. This also explains why China is likely to soon replace the United States as having the world’s largest economy.

  To be sure the individuals showing up at our southern border are mostly uneducated and their skills tend to be limited to gardening and harvesting agricultural products. These jobs have long been unattractive to those born in this country and traditionally have been performed by migrant workers . Therefore, it’s unlikely that asylum-seekers from Central and South America will displace any Americans who are currently employed. This reality is underscored by the fact that the United States currently has a worker shortage with approximately 3 million unemployed workers and 11 million job openings. Most of those openings are in restaurants and hotels where the wages are low and the work is underappreciated (for lack of a better term). Therefore, welcoming those immigrants camped on our southern border would be a boon to our nation’s economy. Moreover, it has been proven over and over again that those who overcome a multitude of obstacles to come to our country tend to be hardworking and have a high propensity for upward mobility.

The problem seems to be that Republican politicians are fearful that those seeking asylum in our country, like many other recent arrivals, would vote for Democratic politicians. This fear was amply demonstrated in 2010 when a comprehensive immigration reform bill (providing the nation’s 11 million illegal aliens with a path to citizenship) was blocked in the U.S. House of Representatives. Speaker Boehner engineered the bill’s defeat simply because a majority of House Republican members opposed it. Since then, Republican politicians have sought to demonize foreign nationals seeking to live in this country (particularly those with black and brown skin). They do this by asserting that they are “murderers, rapist and drug dealers” (a phrase you may have heard before) and represent a threat to our nation. Unfortunately, there are no reliable data comparing the  crime rate among illegal aliens to the crime rate among those born in this country.

Yes, xenophobia is increasing in the United States because it is being cultivated here.