The racist executive order signed by Donald Trump on January 27, 2017 to bar all refugees for 120 days, indefinitely bar Syrian refugees, and bar immigrants from Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Syria for ninety days, despite not a single act of terror ever being committed on US soil by an immigrant from any one of those countries specified in the executive order, has sparked outrage and resistance from those engaged in numerous protests in several American cities. The curious omission of Saudi Arabia from the list, the country of origin of fifteen of the nineteen high jackers participating in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, can be explained not only by America’s dependency on Saudi oil supplies-and the Saudi recycling of petrodollars through US capital and bond markets-but on vested Trump business interests in that country. The fact that Saudi Arabia has long been known as a key financial source for Jihadist groups all over the world doesn’t deter the current US administration from acting against this leading Persian Gulf state. Furthermore, Trump’s calls to ban Muslims during the presidential campaign itself was denounced as both unconstitutional and unAmerican by many prominent Republicans including current Vice President Mike Pence.
So what is the motive behind the ban. It certainly isn’t security which most experts believe plays into the hands of ISIS and other terrorists’ by assisting their recruitment efforts based on the perception that the US is the enemy of all Muslims based purely on their religious beliefs. Many argue effectively that existing vetting procedures for refugees, so rigorous that it often takes up to two full years to be cleared for admission to the US, have in fact prevented terrorism by people from the countries named in the executive order. It is fairly clear that the “temporary” ban in the executive order is the first step on the long road to reducing and eliminating as much non-European immigration to the US as possible. One need only examine the contents of Trumps campaign speech on immigration, extensively lauded by white supremacists such as David Duke and Richard Spenser, in order to understand the real motives of the recent immigration ban.
Before the 1965 immigration act, the core immigration law upon which US policy was based was the 1924 National Origins Immigration Act which based immigration on one’s country of origin. All during the roughly four decades that this law governed US immigration policy, country of origin quotas largely determined who was allowed to immigrate to the US. During this time about three quarters of the quotas were assigned to just three countries; Germany, the UK and Ireland with over 86% assigned to countries of northern and western Europe where immigration rates to the US was lower than in southern and eastern Europe. Between 1882 and 1924, roughly thirty million immigrants entered the US, about one million a year, in one of the biggest, most concentrated and most formative immigration waves in US history. The 1924 Act reduced these annual averages to a mere 165,000 total maximum allowed in by law. The idea was to reduce immigration from places like Russia and Italy, sources of immigrants which US nativists believed were bringing in “alien ideas” such as socialism and anarcho-syndicalism that supposedly threatened US political stability. Actual immigration had been in decline when the NOIA was passed in 1924 but political hysteria had grown. As a result, the law left quotas assigned to western Europe largely underfilled as immigration from eastern Europe, the need for which grew in the 1930s and ‘40s due to Nazi genocide, was thwarted by the racist quota system.
Democratic presidents like Harry Truman (who vetoed the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act which kept the old quota system while making exemptions for highly demanded skilled labor) and Lyndon Johnson, who opposed country based immigration quotas as discriminatory and racist, led the fight against the 1924 Act. In 1965, The Immigration and Naturalization Act was passed by Congress which effectively phased out the old law based on country of origin quotas. The Hart-Cellar Act, as it was called, emphasized family ties and employment in policy making exempting from visa limits spouses, parents and children under the age of eighteen of U.S. citizens. Refugees were assigned a small quota which was replaced by the 1980 Refugee Act. LBJ signed the 1965 Act in the spirit of the new Civil Rights era as he denounced the unAmerican and prejudicial nature of the Act which it now succeeded. It introduced a western hemispheric cap on annual immigration as well as a cap on total immigration in any given year exempting those with immediate family in the US.
There is no question that the 1965 Act increased US immigration. According to the Pew Center, of the 131 million people added to the US population between 1965 and 2015, about 72 million or well over half the population increase is due to immigration that is, over half the population increase during that time was immigrants, their children or grandchildren. What troubles white supremacists like Steve Bannon is not so much immigration per se, but non-white immigration. The Pew Center’s extensive report goes on to note that
Immigration has had only a modest impact on the nation’s age structure, but a striking one on its racial and ethnic makeup. Without immigration since 1965, the U.S. today would have a median age of 41, not 38. The nation would be 75% white instead of 62%. Hispanics would be 8% of the population, not 18%. And Asians would be less than 1% of Americans, instead of 6%.
White nationalists such as Bannon and his followers, ceaselessly complain about the Hart-Cellar Act. They blame it for the shift in the racial composition of US demography. Many obstreperously sound the alarm that this somehow amounts to “white genocide” perpetrated by the usual nefarious elements. This racist hysteria was notable in the much lauded speech on immigration by Trump. Trump’s speech was filled with hate and lies. The claim that “illegal immigration costs the country $113 per year” was culled from a report by the racist, anti-immigrant group Federal for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and is utterly bogus. FAIR makes empirically flawed and baseless assumptions to dramatically inflate their estimates. For example, health care, education and incarceration costs are based on unwarranted assumptions about costs born by these agencies. Politifact notes that it includes medical care costs not funded by government, education costs not used for immigrants alone and incarceration costs based on undetermined number of illegal immigrant inmates. The $113 billion estimate is so wildly inflated that even conservative think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, question it; they’ve estimated the cost at about $85 billion. GAO and Congressional Budget Office estimates are much lower since they subtract the various sales, income and other taxes paid by illegal immigrants. The 2007 CBO report, which assumes IRS claims that at least six million or more than half of all unauthorized immigrants pay federal, state and payroll taxes through their Individual Tax Identification Numbers (as well as other taxes like sales and excise taxes) estimate the net cost as far lower. The report also noted that these workers don’t receive Social Security benefits. The CBO report, which is ten years old, noted that estimate attempts for net aggregate costs to all levels of government combined are nearly impossible to accurately make but that those that don’t include fiscal and other contributions by undocumented immigrants are likely to be wildly inflated.
Much of the rest of Trump’s speech is lies, including an alleged plan by Hillary Clinton to bring hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees into the US, was completely false. Trump’s speech echoed the bigotry of white supremacists of yore such as Madison Grant who wanted to ban non-white immigration to the US in the 1920s. When Trump says that we must not allow in those who don’t accept our values and way of life, he is not only stigmatizing millions of loyal, law abiding and productive non-European immigrants, he is echoing the racist agenda of those like Grant and his current followers. One analysis compares Grant’s statements nearly a century ago with Trump’s speech.
Grant: Our institutions are Anglo-Saxon and can only be maintained by Anglo-Saxons and by other Nordic peoples in sympathy with our culture.
Trump: We also have to be honest about the fact that not everyone who seeks to join our country will be able to successfully assimilate. Sometimes it’s just not going to work out. It’s our right, as a sovereign nation, to chose immigrants that we think are the likeliest to thrive and flourish and love us.
Both Grant and Trump spoke of non-white immigrants as a threat and a menace. It is very clear that this has nothing to do with legitimate concerns about crime or security but with pure racism. Trump harped on the few individual US citizens killed by illegal immigrants while failing to note that numerous reports have shown that they are less likely to commit crimes than other demographics. Many reports have confirmed this fact including some in the conservative Wall Street Journal. Here's one from the NYT which states; “Analysis of Census date from 1980 to 2010 show that among men ages 18 to 49, immigrants were one-half to one-fifth as likely to be incarcerated as those born in the United States. Across all ages and sexes, about 7 percent of the nation’s population are noncitizens, while figures from the Justice Department show that about 5 percent of inmates in state and federal prisons are noncitizens.” Trump, like nativists before him, are concerned with this idea of the “right people.” He clearly blames the supposed existence of too many of the “wrong types” of immigrants for many of the nation’s ills. He asserted, “Another reform involves new screening tests for all applicants that include, and this is so important, especially if you get the right people. And we will get the right people. An ideological certification to make sure that those we are admitting to our country share our values and love our people...” After painting Mexicans and people from Muslim countries its clear that he wants only European immigration despite the fact that criminals are just as likely to come from places like Russia (such as Russian Crime Syndicate operatives). The nativist hysteria whipped up by Trump’s immigration speech unsurprisingly got well known applause from many KKK and neo-Nazi elements.
Its fairly obvious that the ban will harm our ability to fight terrorism, not promote it. Experts have already pointed out that not only is erroneously conflating all Muslim with those that commit terrorism counter productive in that it helps ISIS recruiters, it hampers current US operations that involve US operatives and local agents in the seven countries working to gather intelligence and fight terrorism. One former CIA operative, Patrick Skinner has stated;
We’ve got military, intelligence, and diplomatic personnel on the ground right now in Syria, Libya, and Iraq who are working side by side with the people, embedded in combat, and training and advising. At no time in the US’s history have we depended more on local—and I mean local—partnerships for counterterrorism. We need people in Al Bab, Syria; we depend on people in a certain part of eastern Mosul, Iraq; in Cert, Libya. At the exact moment we need them most, we’re telling these people, ‘Get screwed.’’”
Another former CIA official cited in the same source, Robert Richer, pointed out that the ban “...could undermine future efforts to recruit spies and collect vital information about terrorists and their plans.”
But security isn’t the real goal of the ban. Feeding the racist frenzy of large numbers of frightened and insecure middle class voters is the clear objective. Political manipulation is made easy by inflaming racial animosity. Its an old technique with a long and sordid history. An opinion piece in the LA Times describes other motivations of racists to reverse the effects of the 1965 immigration act. “One pundit, writing in 2008, called Hart-Celler the “most important piece of legislation that no one's ever heard of” because it created the diverse electorate that put Barack Obama in the White House.” So writes Jane Hong of the political effects unanticipated by the original authors of the bill. The most dangerous part of the 1965 Act for racists is the part that says; "no person shall receive any preference or priority or be discriminated against in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of the person's race, sex, nationality, place of birth or place of residence." The act not only allows the Democratic Party a clear electoral advantage through increased diversity-an advantage the far right desperately wants to thwart-but disallows a future racist distopia sought by right wing fanatics like Bannon and his followers who see angry white voters as key to their reactionary political agenda. This is likely the real reason for the ban, to begin a role back on the immigration act that ended the chance for a white supremacist society. It is this Muslim ban that not only threatens its most obvious targets but our entire democracy's future.