Last Saturday, President Trump famously celebrated his 80th birthday with a mega-million-dollar UFC cage match extravaganza at the White House. (The woefully underfunded National Park Service, with an assist from ScottsMiracle-Gro, now must restore the ruined South Lawn.)
This coming Saturday, according to documents reported by the New York Times, Trump was planning to celebrate World Refugee Day, and this, too, in a most outrageously Trumpian way: by feting resettled white South Africans at the White House.
Whether the event comes off or not, the fact that Trump would even consider marking the occasion of the 26th annual World Refugee Day by trumpeting the fact that he, as president of the storied land of immigrants, has ushered in an overtly racist refugee policy — to the extent he allows any refugees at all — well, that tells you all you need to know about the shameless normalization of racism under Trump.
And no, the president still hasn’t apologized for UFC heavyweight champ Josh Hokit’s slur against Michelle Obama, just as he earlier refused to apologize for posting a video depicting both Obamas as apes. This is, after all, the man who early in his real estate career settled what was one of the largest-ever anti-discrimination lawsuits, brought by the oh-so-woke Republican Nixon and Ford administrations, which alleged the Trump family had a documented practice of rejecting Black applicants as renters.
A half-century later, Trump’s refugee policy is much the same. In a nutshell, only white Afrikaners need apply.
When it comes to people fleeing war, famine, natural disasters, and political or religious persecution, Trump has completed a virtual wall even as the actual wall on the United States’ southern border remains under construction. On taking office last year, he ordered a stop to refugees from every country in the world, except South Africa, dashing the American dreams of displaced people who’d been vetted for years and awaited admission.
In this 250th year of American independence, his refugee policy is just another Trump betrayal of the ideals that gave rise to the nation and have helped populate it for two centuries.
Contrast Trump’s attitude with that of the man who would become the first president. Yes, George Washington enslaved people (he freed them in his will), but at the end of the Revolutionary War, he wrote rapturously of the future United States his soldiers had made possible, “establishing an asylum for the poor and oppressed of all nations and religions.”
Or come forward two centuries to a more recent president and a Republican icon, Ronald Reagan. On the eve of leaving office in January 1989, in what he offered as his “final thought,” Reagan at length praised newcomers as America’s secret sauce: “Other countries may seek to compete with us; but in one vital area, as a beacon of freedom and opportunity that draws the people of the world, no country on Earth comes close. This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness.”
“If we ever closed the door to new Americans,” Reagan concluded, “our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
He was right. On Monday, the president who in fact has closed the door, and is presiding over the corrosion of America’s global leadership, wrote on his social media account: “Sadly, if you import people from Third World Countries, you quickly become a Third World Country — And there’s not a thing you can do about it. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Clearly (again) Trump doesn’t know his history. Black Africans literally were imported by force, and America has relied on poor immigrants since before it was a country: desperate Northern Europeans in the colonial era, Eastern and Southern Europeans to inhabit and develop the Midwest and the West, Chinese to lay the western railroads, Latinos to build the Southwest and many others who helped make America great. One economic study after another attests to the gains that immigrants, including refugees, make possible, contrary to Trump’s demagoguery that they’re nothing but threats, vermin and leeches “poisoning the blood” of the nation.
Of course, the arguments for admitting refugees in particular are based on moral as much as, or more than, economic grounds.
Yet at a time when the number of global refugees is historically high, in October Trump capped admissions to just 7,500 for this fiscal year to next October — down from 125,000 in President Biden’s final year — and intended for all to be white South Africans. Their cases get handled within months, not years. Last month, Trump more than doubled the cap to 17,500, but again, only for 10,000 more white South Africans. The president repeatedly has falsely alleged that the South African government is guilty of genocide of white farmers.
Of roughly 6,000 refugees admitted before June to the United States in this fiscal year, all were from South Africa except for three people from Afghanistan.
And that factoid underscores another grotesquery of Trump’s refugee policy: the betrayal of thousands of Afghans who risked their lives for a generation to aid the U.S. military during the long war in Afghanistan. Despite intensive vetting and advocacy on their behalf by veterans groups, Afghans languish in squalid foreign camps or live in fear of the Taliban in their country. This year, obscenely, the Trump administration has negotiated with impoverished, unsafe third countries, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to send Afghans there instead of allowing them into the United States as promised.
Last week, according to reports, several Afghans were among about two dozen refugees to be deported to the Central African Republic, a nation so dangerous that the State Department advises “do not travel … for any reason.”
That sentence, like most above it, is the sort I never thought I’d write about my country or, more specifically, its president. This Saturday, World Refugee Day, give a thought to those still in line, harboring their American dream. Contact your member of Congress. Contribute to a resettlement group. Fly the flag.
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The post In the land of immigrants, Trump’s refugee policy is overt racism appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
