The Only Way out for Undocumented Californians
The United States’ Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is making it known that there is no place that they won’t go to snatch undocumented people or those people with less than perfect status to deport them. They are making good on those threats in and out of California. In some respects, the acceleration of deportations is not as radical of an increase as immigrant supporters would have you believe since the election of President Trump. People who know why Barack Obama was called the Deporter in Chief understand this. The difference is the discretion used to either retain or deport aliens by the executive branch. Comparison of the two presidents’ deportation regimes lays bare the dysfunction and capriciousness in the United States immigration laws and systems.
Federal tax schemes that punish blue states aren’t the only way that right-wing ideologues want to damage California. The destructive and callous nature of the U.S’ immigration system isn’t just glaring apostasy by the right-wing theocrats that make a sector of Donald Trump’s base, it terrorizes and traumatizes children who are subjected to the duress of this process. These effects will be lifelong as was the intent of those who crafted and implemented Trump’s deportation policy. Knowledge of the sloth and indifference towards human rights that the United States has heaped on immigration detention centers and courts only adds to harm done to the families of the detained.
The privations that the Trump Administration seeks to subject all of the United States’ undocumented residents will be felt greatest in California. The New York Times found that most Dreamers live in the Los Angeles metroplex. They also found that most came when they would be when they would have entered school in the first grade. Dreamers, wherever they came from and wherever they call home, are kids who know how to recite The Pledge of Allegiance by heart. Think about that the next time you read, hear or see some super patriot gush about this ritual that they believe was handed down to them as an obligation of some sort by Thomas Jefferson or God Almighty. Still, Trump’s base foams at the mouth when discussing ejecting Dreamers when they aren’t privately salivating at the thought of getting away with inflicting intense cruelty; particularly so when they can stand in the right because a statute says so.
The liberal shibboleth states that if right-wing extremists want to deport any person of color, that liberals will not. In the most rudimentary terms, liberal ideology is conflated with being a policy supported by the Democratic party. Analysis of this shows that Democrats don’t see that as a path to victory in many races for elected offices; an example of that was buried in a recent edition of the New York Times:
Many Democrats fear that extensive investments and political posturing made on behalf of immigrants will be regarded as of little value to a large swath of independent voters whose support Democrats need to increase their representation in Congress.
An opinion poll touted by the Trump Administration supports that analysis. If this varies with the intentions of most Californians, it puts California in a conflict with the rest of the United States. Those United States demonstrate little concern, if any, for hundreds of thousands if not over a million Californians. Currently, in the 115th session of the U.S. Congress, the Democrats are caving in and pandering to those fickle voters who don’t share our concern about our neighbors. This is proven by every Democrat who votes to allow another continuing resolution to pass. As always, Democrats will boast about delivering half loaves if not crumbs of mediocre legislation when they do provide it. Patchwork legislation like The Simpson-Mazzoli Act of 1986 now seems to be the gold standard; not enforcible laws that allow human beings to migrate as is their endowed nature.
We Californians are alone in recognizing the nature of all of our neighbors and their merits, we understand how they are assets to our state, we know that they struggle with onerous and unjust laws imposed by an indifferent federal government here – the same tyrannies that they came to avoid. If California is to grow and keep it’s nature as it sees best to determine it, California will keep its immigrants, embrace and empower its immigrants, in defiance of the United States’ government or it’s political duopoly.