President Trump’s obscene insult for Haiti, El Salvador and African nations – that they are “shithole countries” – reported by U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) may have set a new, low standard for how an American head of state discusses another nation. But remove the obscenity and you have a sentiment that has been a primary plank of the Trump campaign and administration. When Trump talks about “protecting our borders,” we never hear about the northern border with Canada, a nation whose population is more than three-quarters white. Trump says he wants to protect America from Mexicans, a group of brown-skinned immigrants he equated with rapists on the campaign trail. His immigration policies – largely crafted by a bloodless, white, 30-something named Stephen Miller – have targeted nations whose people are majority-Muslim and -nonwhite. Miller’s reported steering Trump away from a deal that would reaffirm the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, no one doubts, is based largely on the fact that DACA Americans are not white.
Nearly 63 million people – the overwhelming majority of them white – voted for Trump. One cringes to consider how many of these Americans agree with the sentiment that America should stop admitting immigrants of color, or stop admitting as many. Perhaps they know or sense that the United States is on trend to evolve into a majority-minority country, like it was before Columbus sailed the ocean blue – or long before a 16-year-old barber from Bavaria named Frederick Trump immigrated to the U.S. in 1885, making it possible for his grandson Donald to grow up American and (to the misfortune of this country and its people) successfully run for U.S. president.
The Republican Party’s policies are consistent with a strategy for white people to remain the dominant majority in this country. If immigration and birth trends continue, and the United States remains a democracy, then white people are destined to become another minority in our multi-racial democracy, rather than the uncontested ruling caste they have been since the birth of this nation. So limiting the influx of people of color with new immigration restrictions and infringing on minority voting rights by passing voter photo ID regulations that have the practical impact of disenfranchising racial minorities (as well as some other groups) are sound policies for those white Americans who wish to retain their privilege and power. So is packing the federal bench with like-minded judges and gerrymandering U.S. House districts to dilute minority representation. This joins the inherently conservative bias of the U.S. Senate, where red states with tiny populations like Wyoming (which has roughly half the population of St. Louis County) have equal representation as massively populated blue states like California, with a population of nearly 40 million. We have the generally conservative U.S. Senate to thank for blocking needed progressive reforms of health care, the tax code, the budget – and immigration.
Stephen Miller and his former boss, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, are often called “hardliners” on immigration. This is a misnomer – much like calling Trump a “populist” when his appeal is not to “the people” generally but to white identity. Trump is not a populist, but a white supremacist (as was his father, who was reportedly arrested at a KKK rally in Queens, New York in 1927). Race-baiting has long been part of Trump’s business activities, and he has exploited racial tensions in this country to win the White House. Trump, Sessions and Miller are not hardliners on the immigration issue, they are color-liners. Everyone got that message when Trump wondered out loud why the U.S. is not immigrating people from “countries like Norway,” one of the whitest nations on the face of the earth, rather than Haiti, El Salvador or Nigeria.
“The problem of the twentieth century,” the great W.E.B. Du Bois famously wrote, “is the problem of the color-line.” As the almost unfathomable elevation of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency and everything he has done while in office has made painfully clear, the twenty-first century has the exact same problem.
