Trump Canã¢â‚¬â„¢t Make America White Again
Op-Ed Contributor
Trump Wants to Make America White Again
The White House is assertively working to make America white again, and Democrats are too afraid to speak that truth. The aggressive pace of deportations of immigrants of color, the elimination of the DACA program protecting immigrant children and the proposals propounded by the anti-immigration voices in the administration will all have the undeniable effect of slowing the rapid racial diversification of the United States population. Despite this sweeping attempt at racial social engineering, few voices in progressive and Democratic circles are responding with the kinds of outrage that one would expect.
The pro-white preferences of Donald Trump and his administration, especially when it comes to immigration, are legion. From the day he opened his presidential campaign in 2015 by demonizing Mexicans to the enthusiasm generated by the calls for building a wall along the Mexican border to aggressively ramping up deportations of immigrants of color to eliminating DACA to vulgarly denigrating African nations and Haiti, this administration has been quite clear about its preference for white people.
It should be no surprise, then, that the immigration policies championed by the White House would all have the effect of reducing the number of people of color coming into the country. A recent study by The Washington Post found that the administration's proposals to curtail legal immigration by limiting family reunification would slightly delay the date when whites become a minority. "By greatly slashing the number of Hispanic and black African immigrants entering America, this proposal would reshape the future United States," the economist Michael Clemens said.
"Decades ahead," he added, "many fewer of us would be nonwhite or have nonwhite people in our families."
The administration's focus is not random. Nor is it illogical, if one's goal is to maximize the influence of white people. Since the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, the chromatic composition of the country's population has undergone a fundamental transformation. People of color used to make up 12 percent of the United States population in 1965, and that percentage has more than tripled over the past several decades to the point where nonwhite people are nearly 39 percent of the residents of the United States (it is no accident that the country's first African-American president was elected when he was elected). Mr. Trump's team understands that the specific laws it seeks to eliminate have played a significant role in that demographic revolution.
As distasteful as many people find unapologetic advocacy for public policies that favor white people, the truth of the matter is that immigration laws have been among the longest-standing and most strongly defended cornerstones of our government. The very first immigration law passed, the Naturalization Act of 1790, declared that to become a citizen, one had to be a "free white person." That demarcation was the explicit law of the land for the next 162 years, until 1952. There are 20th-century Supreme Court cases explicitly holding that Asian immigrants could not become United States citizens because they were not white. Even after 1952, the practical effect of immigration policy continued to promote white people above others through mechanisms such as the Asia Pacific Triangle, which restricted immigration from Asian countries.
Most people would probably like to believe that the era of widespread public support for white supremacist policies is over, but you wouldn't know it from the timidity and rhetorical reticence of progressive and Democratic leaders. When they had the leverage to demand a vote on protections for the Dreamers, Democrats surrendered that influence because they feared the electoral consequences of being seen as fighting for the rights of immigrants. The assessment was that white voters in swing states would retaliate against Democratic candidates, imperiling the prospects for taking back Congress.
Setting aside the morality of the matter, these Democratic electoral calculations are flawed in two fundamental respects. First, they underestimate the capacity of white people to rise above racism and stand for justice and equality. Mr. Trump's presidential campaign was a very thinly veiled appeal to racial anxiety and grievances of white people in America. Study after study has confirmed that racial anxiety, sometimes described as cultural discomfort, was the motivating factor among many of Mr. Trump's supporters. And yet the fact that Mr. Trump still needed to speak mostly in code shows that there are limits to the effect of explicit racial appeals. In the 2017 elections in Virginia and Alabama, the increase in support among white voters for Ralph Northam for governor and Doug Jones's Senate candidacy affirmed that racial pandering also alienates whites.
The second Democratic miscalculation is that they overlook the political potential and power of the swelling ranks of nonwhite voters in America. Democrats need to win two Republican-held seats to flip control of the United States Senate, and based on the 2016 election results, the two most likely pickups are in Arizona and Nevada. In both of those states, Latino voters hold the balance of power. Hillary Clinton lost Arizona by about 91,000 votes, and there were more than 600,000 Latinos who were eligible to vote but didn't cast ballots in 2016. Democrats won Nevada in the last three presidential elections, so the primary task is bringing those voters back to the polls for the midterm elections. The protective cushion in Nevada can come from the pool of 150,000 eligible, nonvoting Latinos; the incumbent Republican won his last election by less than 12,000 votes.
To inspire enthusiasm among the voters they need, however, Democrats should be publicly fighting the good fight in the corridors of Congress and simultaneously shouting from rooftops their solidarity with the growing sectors of the population. Instead, too many are so afraid of alarming conservative white voters that they are creeping around in private whispering protestations of loyalty and love that may one distant day be realized in public.
The big-picture reality of this moment is that Mr. Trump is too late. His attempts to make America whiter are doomed to fail because the demographic revolution is now irreversible. The driving force of the browning of America is no longer immigration but birth and death rates. A majority of babies being born are of color, and a majority of people dying are white. Whites are already a minority of all children under age 5, so if all immigration ceased tomorrow, the country is still inexorably on a path to a new multiracial reality.
Perhaps understanding the math of the matter can inspire Democrats to carry themselves with courage and the confidence that resisting Mr. Trump's pro-white public policies is not only morally right but also squarely places them on the right side of history.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/opinion/trump-wants-to-make-america-white-again.html
0 Response to "Trump Canã¢â‚¬â„¢t Make America White Again"
Post a Comment