This morning Heidi Groover wrote that Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal interviewed immigrants detained at the federal prison in SeaTac—it's near the last southern station on Link, Angle Lake Station—and was told that Trump's "zero-tolerance," which last week caused mass psychic damage with the images, sounds, and stories of caged children, would not "deter other immigrants from coming to the United States." But why? Why are these people so dogged? Is that what they do all day where ever they come from? Dream of entering the US illegally? This, sadly, is how many Americans see the immigrants—it's in their bones to break the law. But the detained people at SeaTac, those crossing the border now, and those leaving their homes, families, country yesterday, did so out of desperation.
This fact is hard for many Americans to appreciate or grasp. The decision to leave and cross a border on foot illegally is very hard to make. Humans, for the most part, want to live and die where they were born. We are a sentimental animal. Crossing a border into the unknown demands a lot of courage. And if you are incapable of sensing the amount of love that's needed for a father or mother to travel across whole countries with their child, then you have never been in a situation where your love has been tested in any significant way.
But why all of this noise about immigrants and zero-tolerance anyway? Why do you have to hear it day in and day out? Because the GOP, which is now owned by Trump, perennially suffers from a poverty of real crises. The left, of course, is rich in this regard. There's lots of gun violence, lots of domestic violence, lots of underfunded schools, lots of homeless people, lots of racism, lots of police brutality, and the climate is changing. There is no need to manufacture these crises. They are doing very well on their own.
The GOP is paid big not to put actual crises on blast. But they still need something to fix, some problem to solve, some crisis to run to. The last Republican president blew trillions of public dollars on a war against a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. The current one has sent the National Guard to the border to basically stand around, and he can't stop pressing for a wall that Mexico will not pay for, and he has thrown thousands of brown children into cages. The idealism that's needed for a white American to believe that immigration is a crisis is pure enough to instantly transport them to Saturn for a drive on its glittering rings.
Lastly, for Trump and his believers, there are already too many brown people in the US. This feeling has been expressed in Trump's tweets and speeches. He wants immigrants from places like Norway. For him, the present racial demographic shift in the US is a crisis. Whites are, true, now a minority "at every age from zero to nine." And the white population started declining the year Trump was elected. But this is not a crisis like domestic violence or the melting ice in the poles. This is the crisis of an abstract belief system—a belief in whiteness. For many, this can never be a crisis.
