The Immigrant Factor
In this newsletter, I have primarily focused on the crises in Ukraine, the Middle East and China for reasons with which my readers will be very familiar. With this continuing focus in mind, I have also given consideration to the possibility that Trump will take the US out of the conflict in Ukraine (a popular but not a universal perception, by the way), especially in the light of recent comments both by Trump and by Vance.
Trump’s view of Ukraine may have been influenced by the heavy involvement of Biden and his family in the illegal coup d’etat of 2014, and with subsequent post-coup administrations. Trump doubtless regrets his involvement with Zelenskiy in 2019 when, as Reuters explains, “Trump's dealings with Zelenskiy became the subject of his first impeachment as president by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2019. He was accused of pressing Zelenskiy to help smear Joe Biden in return for aid, but was acquitted by the Senate in 2020.”
Trump has on many occasions expressed skepticism about NATO, and has advocated for the assumption by European members of NATO of more financial responsibility for its maintenance. This does not mean, nor does it probably mean, that Trump will take the US out of NATO.
Although Trump seems to align with that wing of the neocon cabal that thinks that the US needs to get out of Ukraine in order to prepare more single-mindedly on China, it is also not impossible that on China, as on many things, Trump will, at the end of the day, prove more transactional than confrontational.
But I have warned that he and Vance have demonstrated an element of fanaticism in their support for Israel and for its current genocide of Palestinians, as well as a visceral (unreasonable) dislike of Iran, perhaps Israel’s most important long-term competitor with Israel for dominance in the Middle East (and yes, we should look for a time thst lies beyond the Israeli role as US stooge for the manipulation of Middle East politics). The Trump-Vance hawkish hostility to Iran may just be offered, but only just, as theatre with a view to distracting public attention for their more dovish positions on Ukraine, particularly and, perhaps, China.
On the domestic front, the issue of illegal immigration ranks high in the list of a Trump Administration agenda. The horrific pestilence of the separation of border-crossing immigrants from their children in 2018 is an odor that remains strong in the nostrils of many decent Americans. Predictions of how Trump might roll out his policies on immigration are plentiful, some of them apocalyptic visions of a fascist hell wreaked vengeafully against as many as 11 million people, terrible even to contemplate, replete with cruel detention centers, federal military working alongside immigration police to screen out and humiliate the disdained and unwanted (in a replay of Isabel Wilkerson’s narrative of the construction of underclasses), divisons and even civil war between pro-immigration and anti-immigration states and cities. It is not difficult to imagine how the creation of a machinery for such an immense and gruesome task would draw into its magnet many other groups (Trump is certainly no friend to Communists and Marxists, nor to any that are party to an ideology he does not share) and degrade the fabric of civil society.
In short, immigrants can serve a role for the Trump Administration similar manner that of the Jews for pre World War II Germany: to punish scapegoats and to frighten civil society into shameful submission, suppress dissent and justify the expansion and hardening of military, law enforcement, and judicial institutions. Above all the deliberate creation of persecuted minorities serves to distract public attention from social and economic inequalities, and to divert public anger that might otherwise be directed towards their elite masters.
Such a policy might be domestic in the first instance but would like exercise severe international repercussions, for example pertaining to how expelled immigrants are absorbed or abused by the countries that must receive them, willingly or otherwise; or how US immigration polices might inform or be used to justify anti-immigrant measures in Europe; or how these might contribute to an excess of nationalism to the detriment of open-mindedness and genuinely liberal values.
I advise linking to this article from Reuters, which I suspect provides a somewhat more reassuring but hardly sanguine assessment of what we can expect: Reuters on Immigration.