Is there a world with no Democrats or Republicans? A world with no left-wing or right-wing zealots? Can we create a world of peace, with no war or no bloodshed"?
Neil deGrasse Tyson, Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives of Civilization
Yet despite the incantations of politicians who promise to restore the integrity of borders and the nation-state, migration is an increasingly global phenomenon, and migrants from Asia and Africa make up a growing share of those apprehended at the border; like climate change, the rich world's migration crisis cannot be properly understood at the national scale. Instead, it raises fundamental questions about what it means to be an ethical citizen.
Mattieu Aikins, "A New Book Reckons with the Border Crisis, in All Its Complexity"
Breast-feeding babies of migrant parents were separated at the US-Mexican border while Honduran, El Salvadoran, Mexican, Haitian parents are put aboard buses or flown back to horrendous living conditions they temporarily escaped. Under the Trump administration, we watched those anguished parents, pleading, and witnessed children, babies, placed in immigration detention camps, crying and crying for days.
Two years ago, the US Supreme Court struck down Roe. In the 1950s and early 1960s, I remember being introduced to white women, in white dresses, in white kitchens. Fast forward to the display of white men saluting images of Hitler while others wearing the familiar red MAGA caps appearing behind the figure of their fearless leader at rallies similar to the ones the Nazis held in Germany. This is a white, Christian country, they shout. And so it seems that the wombs of white women matter. Reminiscent of the days during slavery when Black women's wombs mattered.
The Trump's administration concocted a scheme to deter people from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, and Mexico from residing in the US as voting citizens. Few on the left will say it out loud, but the right has a plan. The Right always has had a plan. It has an image of a white America. It believes in that image. It's like a religion; it's congregation of Christian nationalists are willing to die for this image. Certainly, they are willing to spend millions. Or their last five dollars! The Right has an image of a white America and folks from the wrong countries just don't fit in to that radical scheme of change.
A former administrator of Homeland Security personnel warned New Yorker writer Jonathan Blitzer in 2017, of the Right's fear of the pollution of a dream. He didn't say as much. He didn't have to. It was understood when he did say that "'unless you send a message,'" they "'will keep coming.'" And by they , he means people not classified as white!
Fine people are Guatemalans who pick strawberries. Forever! And never think of freedom from exploitative labor. Mexicans as farmer hands. Also forever. But the children of these people represent a future that is a nightmare for the American dream. Evangelical Christian Nationalists are looking to the future when their leadership determines the worth of a woman carrying a fetus. And it would seem that agrarian workers' children, like those of Palestinian children, are worth much.
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