I’ve been wondering for some time, and with the news of the increase in Latinx voter participation in the 2018 midterms , am even more interested to discuss this issue — the one which will help put the final nail in the coffin of the once Grand Old Party of the now ultra-conservative Republicans.
Are only the stupidest people in the entire universe working for the @GOP these days? This immigrants/immigration issue is the one which boggles my mind. They can see the news of projections of the number of Latinx citizens who will become eligible, and now it appears ‘likely’, voters and will push white voters out of the most populated co-hort in about another 20 years (2041-2046). In Florida alone, Latinx registered voters reached 2.2 million this year, an 8.4% increase over 2016. This is nearly double the increase from the previous midterm election in 2014, when Hispanic voter registration increased 4.6% over 2012.
So why in the world are they spending all of this time and effort to criminalize and stalk the parents and grandparents of the people who will BECOME the Majority Voter sector in our own lifetimes? The GOP is making sure to enrage and engage the children of these people, the children who in 20 to 30 years time will be making most of the political decisions in most of the states.
It’s like the whole damned bunch of them took a special “go fuck yourself” pill round about the time the first black American President (Barack Obama) took Office; as if a black man in the White House was a trigger which set them all off and pointed at Crazytown, USA as their destination.
But this last few years, the endlessly horrific stories about toddlers still in diapers left alone to care for themselves or depend upon older children in the same caged cell to do so — when official rules prohibit any touching of the children by the adults or other interned children? These news reports are causing a whole slew of people to remind the rest of us that our grandparents or great-grandparents did something just like this to the Japanese and Japanese-Americans in internment camps, like Camp Manzanar in California starting in 1942 and ending in 1945. Three long years these people waited to find out that while interned, their businesses and homes were foreclosed on or confiscated. They waited a long damned time for reimbursement:
In 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act to compensate more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent who were incarcerated in internment camps during World War II.
Camp Manzanar. A camp only in the same way the camps in Texas today are a “camp”. This was and places like Tornillo, Texas are today, INTERNMENT CAMPS. Incarceration is the same no matter what they call the prison. YOU CAN NOT LEAVE.By George Takei
-— the Washington Post | November 18, 2016
There is dangerous talk these days by those who have the ear of some at the highest levels of government. Earlier this week, Carl Higbie, an outspoken Trump surrogate and co-chair of Great America PAC, gave an interview with Megyn Kelly of Fox News. They were discussing the notion of a national Muslim registry, a controversial part of the Trump administration’s national security plans, when Higbie dropped a bombshell: “We did it during World War II with Japanese, which, you know, call it what you will,” he said. Was he really citing the Japanese American internment, Kelly wanted to know, as grounds for treating Muslims the same way today? Higbie responded that he wasn’t saying we should return to putting people in camps. But then he added, “There is precedent for it.”
Stop and consider these words. The internment was a dark chapter of American history, in which 120,000 people, including me and my family, lost our homes, our livelihoods, and our freedoms because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. Higbie speaks of the internment in the abstract, as a “precedent” or a policy, ignoring the true human tragedy that occurred.
I was just a child of 5 when we were forced at gunpoint from our home and sent first to live in a horse stable at a local race track, a family of five crammed into a single smelly stall. It was a devastating blow to my parents, who had worked so hard to buy a house and raise a family in Los Angeles. After several weeks, they sent us much farther away, 1,000 miles to the east by rail car, the blinds of our train cars pulled for our own protection, they said. We disembarked in the fetid swamps of Arkansas at the Rohwer Relocation Center. Really, it was a prison: Armed guards looked down upon us from sentry towers; their guns pointed inward at us; searchlights lit pathways at night. We understood. We were not to leave.
THIS is the reality of what the Republican Party and it’s elected members, including the fake president in the Oval Office, are doing to the parents of future American citizens.
Criminalizing their very existence. Insisting that it is necessary or just to snatch otherwise law-abiding (and usually tax-paying) members of American communities out of their homes, at their children’s schools or in hospitals or leaving Court Houses; where they have gone to legally comply with requirements to check in with authorities while awaiting an Immigration Court hearing, sometimes for years.
What kind of feeling about the people who enacted and promulgate these practices do and will these future citizen voters have? Every single person in the United States understands that there are two kinds of Americans today.
Those who support immigration and immigrants and agree that a path to a decent and more secure nation lies in a path to documented residency for everyone; that deportation should be used sparingly and not for every person found in the US without documentation.
Then there is the other side — lock them up, even babies in diapers and then deport them. All alleged eleven million undocumented immigrants in America, they all need to go.
It’s a myopic viewpoint and history will treat these Republican conservatives with the same disgust that today is seen for the interment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. And by history, I mean the election results of the years 2028 and moving forward, which will reward the Republicans in the best way possible. Their just desserts for repressing the vote of people of color and women for decades will come back to them 3-fold; they’ll become a pale shadow of their former self, losing the presidency permanently and the House, too. The Senate and the Supreme Court will hold out longer, but eventually, even there the conservative ideology will be laid low and pass into the history books.
I know, we all know, that the conservatives can see this coming. So why aren’t they changing course and trying to appeal to Latinx permanent residents and asylum seekers, to ensure that the generations which follow will join their Party and uphold their conservative ideals?
Because the course they are on is a dead-end road to hell. But I guess when your choice of Leader is a reality tv idiot with a gold-plated penthouse suite, the glow from all of that gold might blind you to the real world outside those windows on the 58th floor of the (for now) Trump Tower on 5th Avenue in New York City.