Thoughts on Immigration, Racial Violence, the 2018 Elections, and the National Debt

     On November 2^nd, 2018, I attended a round-table political discussion at the Highland Park Recreation Center in Highland Park, Illinois. Ralph Bernstein moderated the event, and e-mailed his questions to attendees prior to the event. Below are my responses to the questions I cared to answer.



Question #1

     President Donald Trump says he wants to order the end of the constitutional right to citizenship for babies of non-citizens and unauthorized immigrants born in the United States. The 14^th Amendment provides that anyone born in the U.S. is a citizen. Can a president, by executive order, change a provision of the constitution? What about changing the First Amendment regarding the press? Are such orders constitutional? If so, what does that do to the presidency, make the president “all powerful?” He has also said he wants to change the 22^nd Amendment to allow a term for the president to be 16 years.

Answer #1

     Amending the 14^th, or 1^st, amendment to the Constitution, cannot be done by the president. That is the executive-branch equivalent of “legislating from the bench”; legislation is Congress's job. Executive orders only allow the president to make minor recommendations as to how the law should be enforced, not to dictate what the law is. Amending an amendment requires the approval of majorities of Congress and 3/4 of the states to approve.

     If your goal is to stop aristocrats' and diplomats' children from becoming American citizens and having too many privileges, then you should be looking at the Emoluments Clause, not birthright citizenship. I'm worried that if Trump goes after birthright citizenship, the next thing he'll do is make it easier for the U.S. government to recognize titles and honors from foreign governments. As well as continuing to do business with governments after you've formed a political campaign; continuing down this route will likely result in a “post-game” rationalization of the legality of what the Trump campaign may have done in coordination with Russians.

     The current birthright citizenship controversy has nothing to do with keeping our country safe, and it has everything to do with cementing Trump's control and giving him dictatorial powers, which will eventually result in any and all citizens (even those born here to citizen parents) being deported, for any cause the president wishes.

Question #2

     When the president uses the word that he is “a nationalist,” what does he mean? Some say it’s a “dog whistle” about” white supremacy” others say it’s just a patriotic expression. Is it better to be a “nationalist” as the president says, or is “globalism” a better way to think? Your thoughts?

Answer #2

     I believe that Trump uses the term “nationalism” for several reasons: primarily to evoke patriotism, and to promote the idea of “American exceptionalism”. Trump wants you to think he believes all nations should put their own interests first (over other nations), but I think he's only referring to the nations he likes; specifically, the white-majority ones. Many worry – rightfully, I think - that “globalist” is being used as racist code for “Jew”.

     It's not wrong to be patriotic, or to put your country's needs before the needs of other countries. But Trump's brand of nationalism takes a perfectly good principle – from an economic school of thought called mercantilism – which says “each country should sell what it makes best”, and he adds an unnecessary social element to it. He attaches the idea that human beings are mere “products” of their home countries, and if you look at his “Mexican rapists” comment, he promotes the idea that these people's governments are deliberately sending everyone who's coming, and sending their worst. Which makes them look like tools, with no free will of their own. This is not only dehumanizing to foreigners, it also disparages America because it denies that an immigrant would have any reason of their own to come here, like freedom or opportunity (which we barely even have anymore).

     Globalism and nationalism, each, have good and bad things about them. I encourage you to look up the term “alter-globalization”. Rather than being simply anti-globalist, alter-globalization favors free travel, free exchange, and integration of economies across the globe; but without endorsing global governance, imperialism, centralization, command-and-control economics, or government-directed so-called “free” trade.

     Real free trade is possible, and if Trump wants zero tariffs, then he should eliminate them, instead of trying to bully, mock, intimidate, confuse, and humiliate foreign leaders into lowering theirs first.

Question #3

     There are thousands of persons who are in Mexico walking to the U.S. border. The president has said he will deploy 5,200 active-duty troops to the border, in what officials of his administration described as a necessary national security measure. Is the deployment necessary or not? Can the military prevent these persons from crossing the border? What about a claim for amnesty by any of such persons? What would be done in this event?

Answer #3

     I support amnesty for all migrants of whom there is no reasonable suspicion of having committed a corpus delicti crime against real persons who can claim victimization, or against their justly acquired property (please note that I did not say "legally" or "legitimately acquired property").
     The notion that non-citizen undocumented immigrants and the children of foreign nationals have less rights (or no rights at all) while in the United States - predicated on the 14th Amendment's clause reading "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" - implies that immigrants are not subject to American laws either, which would imply that they cannot be legally deported. This argument against birthright citizenship is self-defeating; anyone on U.S. soil, including at an embassy, can, and of right ought to be able to, apply for U.S. citizenship. Foreign nationals may even be entitled to taxpayer-funded legal representation, so it would not even be accurate to say that their legal rights are fewer or lesser than those of U.S. citizens (at least not in a legal, technical sense; this is not to say that immigrants' legal rights are never ignored, quite the contrary).
     The deployment of troops at the border to stop the migrant caravan from entering is unnecessary. Additionally, the use of military officers to enforce domestic policy is martial law, and the use of federal officers to enforce domestic policy is unconstitutional.

     The Posse Comitatus Act reads in part, “it shall not be lawful to employ any part of the Army of the United States, as a posse comitatus, or otherwise, for the purpose of executing the laws, except in such cases and under such circumstances as such employment of said force may be expressly authorized by the Constitution or by act of Congress...”.

     Subsequent modifications of that law have resulted in the designation of terrorist groups as people whom the president has some authority to dispatch federal troops to act against. That is why it is being claimed that members of al-Qaeda are present in the caravan. Not only is there no evidence of this, the influx of Honduran immigrants can be attributed to the C.I.A.'s recent backing of a coup there; this is just more of “America's chickens coming home to roost”, we only have ourselves to blame for this. If we don't want foreigners to come here, then we should stop bombing their countries, rigging their elections, and sabotaging their economies. Sure, it's possible, maybe even likely, that George Soros is funding the caravan. But people all around the world, who don't want the people in the caravan to die on their way here, are sending help too.

     We already have I.C.E. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), which has only existed since 2003. America did without I.C.E. for 227 years, we can do it again, and deportations can still be carried out even if I.C.E. ceased to exist.

     I.C.E. is unconstitutional; the last thing we want to do is do is impose martial law on top of it, which is not only unnecessary and unconstitutional, it would also be a serious human rights violation, that could accelerate with curfews for adults, travel restrictions, conscripting young people into the military, relocation to settlements “for our own safety”, forced labor, or much much worse.

     If you support shooting people who cross the border, you are asking for an international incident, for a war to start, for martial law, and for a race war, as well as for the reputation, credibility, and moral authority of the United States government and its citizens to be ruined forever.

     If you want to go after al-Qaeda, don't go after the migrant caravan. Go after the people who founded al-Qaeda. And I'm not talking about Osama bin Laden, I'm talking about Carter, Reagan, and the Bushes. Jimmy Carter, who started this thoughtless involvement in Afghanistan, and agreed to find mujahideen ("freedom fighters") against the Soviets. Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, who continued it. Bush's son George W., who founded the oil company Arbusto 88 with Salem bin Laden, the brother of Osama.

     After 9/11, rumors surfaced that numerous members of the bin Laden family, and other Saudi nationals, had been secretly airlifted out of the country for their own protection. This appears to have been denied by the National Commission on Terror Attacks, Snopes.com, and Osama bin Laden's brother Yeslam, but in truth, the only things they denied were the suggestions that the U.S. government helped, and that it happened before U.S. airspace re-opened. Yeslam bin Laden told Matt Lauer that it was the Saudi government, not the American government, that helped his family fly out of the United States; and that it occurred after airspace was re-opened, not before.

     If what bin Laden's brother said is the truth, then the Bushes would have been in prime positions to help (if they wanted to). Either way, the bin Ladens are among the wealthiest non-royals in Saudi Arabia, so their ability to use their political influence to enlist America's help conspiring to assist the Saudi government, and keep U.S.-Saudi ties strong, should not be underestimated. Especially now, after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and the revelations about the Saudi regime's brutal treatment of women and homosexuals (among others).

Question #4

     What role of the President’s warnings about the caravan of migrants headed toward the U.S. border from Central America played in inspiring the virulent anti-Semite who killed 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue and injured 4? Or was this person going to do violence without the migrants coming here because of his hatred toward Jews?

Answer #4

     I believe that the shooter might not have chosen that particular target (the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) if fewer immigrants were coming to America. Immigration and Judaism seemed to be two motivations for the attack, but there might be additional motivations, and we don't know whether there was any particular thing that was a “last straw” or a final trigger for him, so that's why I think it would be unwise to point to just one or two primary motivations.

     If what I have read about the shooter is true, then one of his motivations was his belief that Donald Trump has been compromised in his attempts to revive American nationalism, fight “globalism”, and reduce immigration. It seems likely that the shooter would agree with the statement that “liberal Democratic Jewish politicians are behind a push for more immigration to the U.S.”, and that they are responsible for compromising Trump. It would make sense if that line of logic led him to select for his target a Jewish group that supported immigrants and refugees.

     Many of the people who think that way, consider Jewish people non-white, or as potentially disloyal to America; and many feel that immigrants – Jews and Hispanics included – are part of a virus-like “infestation” that puts our public health and our values at risk. These notions are parts of a mindset that suspects Jewish people of trying to divide all nations of the world against each other, make dissimilar people live together, and compromise the genetic purity of distinct nations through encouraging inter-breeding and increases in the number of mixed-race people. Of course, this is textbook Nazi propaganda, and I don't mean to rationalize it; I only mean to explain how Nazi sympathizers think.

     I believe that the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter chose the target he did, because he believed that the organization was – in some way, however directly or indirectly - providing material assistance (or at least ideological support) for “the enemy”. That is to say, for “the enemy”, as the shooter defines it. Generally, that means foreign-born people, including the migrant caravan (which the shooter likely believes is harboring terrorists). But as I've explained, there's no evidence for that; it's propagandist fear-mongering from the Trump Administration, intended to allow the president to dispatch federal troops to enforce domestic immigration law on the grounds that al-Qaeda might be lurking around every corner, even behind every immigrant.

     We shouldn't assume that the shooter could have been dissuaded from doing what he did, if only there were fewer immigrants coming into the U.S., or if fewer Jewish-Americans supported allowing more people in. If fewer Jewish people approved of immigration, then sure, we might see less anti-Jewish violence from right-wingers, but we might also see more anti-Jewish violence, just coming from different people. That's because leftists, and anti-racists, might see Jewish people strongly criticizing immigration, and conclude from that, that the sentiment is motivated by racism, or perhaps even by a belief in Jewish supremacy. If they conclude the latter, then it is likely that they will come to associate the Jewish religion with racism, violence, or both, and assume that all Jewish people are violent or racist. Coupled with the shooter's belief that H.I.A.S. (the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society)'s assistance of the migrant caravan constitutes material assistance to terrorists, it would be understandable if the shooter felt under attack; by al-Qaeda, with the cover of Hondurans, funding from wealthy Jewish liberals, and housing and employment assistance from H.I.A.S.. (a refugee assistance network of synagogues, in which Tree of Life participates).

     I say this not to rationalize racists' line of logic, but in order to point out the worst things that left-wingers and right-wingers could be thinking about the Jewish people. If you want to defeat your enemy, you have to understand him. If your enemy tells you directly to your face why he hates you and why he attacked you, then you can disagree with the truth of those ideas, but to flat-out ignore them is to carelessly assume that your enemy is irrational. People can be full of hate, and hold opinions about people which are wholly unreasonable, but still make rational decisions in the battlefield. Don't underestimate your enemy by assuming that he is simply crazy, or by assuming that racism is his sole motivation. His reasons may seem backwards, and his logic may seem tortured and convoluted, but admitting that your enemy makes rational decisions in no way obligates you to accept or rationalize everything he says and does. It helps you avoid underestimating the horrors and deception he's capable of.

Question #5

     What has happened to the children who were separated from their parents? Are they still held in these “cages”? Will they be released to the custody of their parents, or what?

Answer #5

     I have heard rumors that some of the children separated from their parents have been essentially sold by the government to adoption agencies. This concerns me, since I have heard horror stories about emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of children; not only in the hands of adoption agencies, but in the hands of I.C.E. themselves. Not to mention police, soldiers, for-profit prisons, and teen boot camps.

     Some of you may have seen the pictures of Obama's and Trump's Homeland Security secretaries walking around in the I.C.E. detention facilities; “family detention centers”, they call them. One picture of the facilities showed a sign that said “males aged 16-18”. So they're separating people by gender, and by age, taking parents away from children, and immigrants are having their religious jewelry taken away. These facts should ring serious alarm bells for anyone paying attention to history and the times they're living in.

     If those facts don't, by themselves, evoke memories of what happened to Holocaust victims, then I implore you to look up “the Bath Riots”. Back in the 1930s, immigrants on their way into El Paso (from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico) were sprayed with harsh de-lousing chemicals, because American authorities thought they had typhus. This continued years after the typhus epidemic went away. One of those chemicals was Zyklon-B, which the Nazis used to poison Jewish people (and other minorities and political dissidents).

     People don't belong in cages. Children should not be taken from their parents without clear and present danger (that somebody else hasn't manufactured in order to whip people into a frenzy), and they certainly shouldn't be sold as commodities by government agencies. Selling human beings doesn't suddenly become “not slavery” just because it's the government who's doing it (instead of a “private” slave master).

     We must stop calling refugee encampments “tent cities”, stop calling forced internment facilities “family detention centers”. We are looking at literal military prisons, like the one at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, except they're in Texas; on American soil, within the contiguous 48 states. And they're being used to indefinitely detain people who ought to have their rights respected; their rights to legal representation, and to apply for citizenship. The existence of embassies does not prove that legal immigration is an easy and realistic solution everywhere; foreign governments are collapsing, and with them, their legitimacy, and thus, people become stateless. As far as I am aware, there is no Anarcho-American embassy at which stateless people can become American citizens (at least not yet).

     I want to say that “the inevitable result of this will be martial law”, but it would be difficult for me to argue that martial law has not already been in effect for 17, or 40, or 100, or 150, or even 230 years (respectively, since the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, or since REX84, or since World War I began, or since the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1871, or since the imposition of the Constitution in 1789; however you want to measure it).

Question #6

     How will Congress – the Senate and the House – be formed as a result of the midterms? Any guesses? Who will be the leaders?

Answer #6

     I anticipate that the Democrats will retake the House with a noticeable majority, and that they will retake the Senate by a noticeable (but smaller) majority. Given Nancy Pelosi's promise that the Democrats will not pursue impeachment of Donald Trump (as she did with Bush when the Democrats regained the House in 2006), I expect that Nancy Pelosi will encounter a few difficulties convincing her cohorts to give her her old Speaker position back. But I also suspect that dirty tricks will be played, and that all opposition to her from within the party will be easily silenced.

     Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will win her election, and emerge as the new conscience of the progressive and farthest-left-leaning Democrats; or else she will be defeated amidst numerous accusations of dirty tricks on the part of her opponent Joe Crowley. Crowley, for those who don't know, is one of the Democratic congressmen thought most likely to become Speaker of the House, in the event that Democrats retake the House. Maxine Waters becoming Speaker of the House would be political suicide for Democrats, but I wouldn't put it past them, and I would understand their rationale for it.

     If Democrats retake the senate, then Dianne Feinstein, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Dick Durbin, Tammy Baldwin, Russ Feingold, and Bernie Sanders will comprise the core of the most respected members of Democratic Party leadership (which finally seems to have begun to loose itself from the grip of Hillary Clinton, neoliberalism, the New Democratic Coalition, and the corrupt Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee).

     Hopefully the Democrats will see that what will have made them successful in the 2018 midterm elections, is their recent embrace of the staunchly left-leaning ideas which are necessary to fully distance themselves from what Trump and his loyalists want. Hopefully soon the Democrats will admit, and not forget, that distancing themselves from progressivism, socialism, and leftism has not worked out. If they continue to do so, then they will keep losing elections.

     Giving up hope in places like West Virginia, the Midwest, and the Great Plains states, just sends the message that the party does not care about Democrats stuck in red states, even if they could be flipped to blue with just a little effort. But these states are not thought of as battleground states, by most popular media, in the same way that states like Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina are.

Question #7

     The treasury has announced that there will be an increase in the national debt for this year of approximately $1.2 trillion. How is this explained, when Trump in his campaign promised a substantial decrease?

Answer #7

     Trump can get away with having a $1.6 trillion deficit if he wanted, because he'll always be able to say that Obama's highest was $1.7. We should not underestimate Trump's ability to point to someone who's behaving worse than he is, and use that to make himself look good and moral by comparison (even if what they're doing is more or less equally terrible).

     Trump knows that giving the upper class bigger tax cuts than the ones he gave to ordinary working people, was only going to help the already well established entrenched business interests, which often buy and control our government. He calls them “The Swamp” to his voters, but he seems to think that the only path to economic growth – the only way to increase jobs - involves stealing your taxpayer money, and spending it on his cronies; in the form of bigger tax breaks, undeserved tax credits, stock buybacks, loans, intellectual property protections, trade promotions, subsidies, and even bailouts.

     Trump is illiterate constitutionally, economically, historically, and morally. He is an opportunist, and a narcissist, who has no regard for other people's needs. He seems to have no guiding political principle other than “make the trains run on time” and “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”. He cares much more about increasing his own wealth than he does about helping struggling people who are in need and can't afford to buy stocks. Trump has no respect for free markets or economic opportunity; and no desire for lower prices, or even an idea of how to bring prices down to something his cronies' indentured servants (the people) can afford.

     Everyone is focusing on how much we are spending, and what we're spending it on; but way fewer people are talking about where we get our revenue sources from: what we're taxing, why we're taxing it, and whether the people being taxed, (first) can afford it, and (second) did anything wrong in the first place to deserve that “tax” (or, as we Libertarians call it, “theft”).

     Taxing away all the rewards of making improvements to your own home, doesn't help people. Confiscating people's earned income doesn't help them. Confiscating the un-earned income, and ill-gotten profits, of businessmen who balance their books on the backs of taxpayers and government contracts instead of by selling a better product, will help ordinary working people.

     Paying-off the national debt is a lot easier than we think it is. If we want to pay-off $20 trillion dollars, we could pay-off $1 trillion a year for 20 years. If we start now, America can be debt-free by the end of 2038. All we have to do in order to make that happen, is take-in $1 trillion more each year than the amount we spend. As long as we do that, and total federal government revenue stays above $1 trillion a year (it's currently at $4 trillion), then we can have any size government we want, and still balance the budget.

     Nothing is impossible, as long as we don't start-out trying to solve it under the assumption that it's unsolvable. This is a simple mathematical equation, yet many of us have apparently lost the ability to think simply about our problems. Trump's inability to significantly reduce spending, is compounded by his refusal to lower taxes on those who need tax breaks most, and his refusal to tackle either the military-industrial complex, or “The Swamp” of corporate political donors. That's because he's willing to look the other way whenever battling America's demons is too risky for him or it doesn't boost his bottom line.

Originally Written and Published on November 2nd, 2018

Expanded on November 2nd, 2018