Immigration: Obama vs. Trump
It’s finally happening: earnest pushback from some of “my” readers on a couple of issues I have occasionally addressed.
The latest exchange was last Friday’s post on the case of the Minneapolis boy in the bunny hat. I used it as an example of Trump-era savagery, and the way it rhymes with nazi strategies of persecution.
The particulars had to do with an infamous episode in which a nazi soldier trying to flush Jews from hiding used Yiddish to reassure them that danger had passed. The boy in the bunny hat served similarly as a lure to drive his mother crazy and retrieve his father. In both cases, the bait was effective. The Jews were killed and the father was captured.
I’m sure that my reader felt some of my outrage. She read to the end and bothered to think things through. But she then pointedly asked that I defend my judgments: Trump and his minions may occasional act badly, but other people do exactly the same. Wasn’t Obama bad on immigration?
The truth is that he has a lot to atone for, as I hope I’ve said often enough to matter. At the outset of his presidency, he failed to reckon with Abu Ghraib, and let the water-boarders of the Bush years go unpunished. During the fateful stirrings of authoritarianism under Trump. he seemed to assume that it would take care of itself. What we needed was a righteous Democratic standard bearer. Instead we got decorous silence.
His primal sin, however, was immigration. There is a solid consensus that he was mad for deportation, with more souls to his “credit” than Trump and Miller. There is a chance that the current Administration will exceed him, but Obama and Co. set a high bar for exile.
In his defense, he seemed mindful of hierarchies and gradations. The Obama years may not have been distinguished by mercy, but he genuinely focused on persons with criminal careers. Not every exile was a murderer or a rapist, but that was the general theme of his program. He was also responsible for DACA deferments. The end of the Dreamer story has not yet been written, but there is at lease a chance that Dreamers will live normal-ish lives.
But if my reader believes that Trump is not alone, she is absolutely right on the subject of immigration. American history is an infernal pendulum. It swings from mercy to nativism and then (please God) back again. Obama was not the most generous president, but I hope our next Administration does a much better job.