Tag Archives: Francis Fukuyama

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On the Cusp of Chaos: Trump’s Deportation Purge

“The American people have given Donald Trump ultimate power,” says Paul Glastris, editor in chief of the Washington Monthly, “They’re going to get the Trump agenda, good and hard.”

America’s “immigration crisis” is a “massive invasion” spreading “misery, crime, poverty, disease and destruction to communities all across our land” and the nation’s cities are being “flooded” by the “greatest invasion in history” of undesirables from “every corner of the earth, not just from South America, but from Africa, Asia, Middle East,” Donald Trump bellowed at the Republican National Convention in July 2024. “They’re coming from prisons. They’re coming from jails. They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. We have to stop the invasion into our country that’s killing hundreds of thousands of people a year.”

Did you miss Trump describing migrants as “vermin” who would “poison the blood of the country”? How about when he said in 2023 that some South American countries were deliberately emptying their “insane asylums” and “mental institutions” to send the patients to the United States as migrants.

You likely didn’t miss Trump’s solution? “Carry out the largest deportation operation in American history” the Republican platform said in “one of a series of bold promises that we will swiftly implement” Trump promised.  Huddled masses, yearning to breathe free? Not in Trump country. Deport ’em all.

Easier said than done.

First, let’s talk about numbers.

In 2021, when Joe Biden took office, the figures thrown around for the number of undocumented/illegal/unauthorized/ (whatever word you choose) immigrants in the United States varied by a million or so. The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) put the number at 11.2 million. The Center for Migration Studies said there were approximately 10.3 million.

Curiously, much of the media coverage of the immigration situation today continues to use the 11 million figure, despite the upsurge in border crossings. That may be a sign of lazy reporting, purposefully misleading numbers for ideological reasons, different collections methods or confusion over how to count migrants.

Trump’s numbers have been all over the map. In March 2024, he said 15 million migrants had crossed into the United States border over just the past two years. In August, he said 10 million had come across the border since Biden took office. In later election rallies, he cited a 20 million crossings figure during Biden’s tenure as president. .And in his one televised debate with Kamala Harris he claimed 21 million migrants were crossing the border every single month.

One number often used to track migrants is “encounters” with migrants, including people who tried to cross into the US illegally and people who tried to enter legally but were deemed inadmissible.  According to the Border Patrol, since Biden became president in January 2021, there have been more than 10 million encounters, about 8 million of those at the southwest land border with Mexico, up from 2.4 million encounters during the Trump administration. The number is not, however, a reliable count of people who stay in the US. Some are sent back and some are counted multiple times from multiple attempts to cross the border. The encounters number also, obviously, do not count those who manage to slip across the border and escape undetected.

Compounding the numbers problem, the Wall Street Journal reports that Trump wants to “revoke deportation protections from millions of immigrants, including tens of thousands of Afghans evacuated after the fall of Kabul and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians allowed in after the Russian invasion.”

Whatever the accurate number, it’s one hell of a lot of people, about equal to the entire population of Georgia.

How exactly does Trump plan to deport them all?

Is he going to demand that the military, the FBI, the Border Patrol, local police, the whole shebang of law enforcement, round them up and put them in detention centers?

On Nov. 18, The New York Times reported Trump had confirmed that he intended to declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military in some form to assist in his plans for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.

The Times said Trump used his social media platform, Truth Social, to respond to a post made earlier in November by Tom Fitton, who runs the conservative group Judicial Watch, and who wrote that Mr. Trump’s administration would “declare a national emergency and will use military assets” to address illegal immigration “through a mass deportation program.” At around 4 a.m. on the 18th, Mr. Trump reposted Mr. Fitton’s post with the comment, “TRUE!!!”

Trump’s top immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, told the Times earlier in 2024 said that military funds would be used to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for immigrants as their cases progressed and they waited to be flown to other countries. The Homeland Security Department would run the facilities, Miller said.

Is he going to commandeer railroad lines, planes and riverboats to ferry them to the Mexican border?

How’s Trump going to pay for this massive deportation program? The American Immigration Council, an admittedly pro- immigrant group, says the cost of deporting 13 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally could cost $968 billion over a little more than a decade.

Then there are the courts. Do Trump’ and his henchmen expect the American Civil Liberties Union and immigrant advocacy groups to forego court battles if Trump again tests the bounds of his legal authority. The ACLU’s website already promises, “Starting on day one, we’re ready to fight for our civil liberties and civil rights in the courts, in Congress, and in our communities. We did it during his first term – filing 434 legal actions against Trump while he was in office – and we’ll do it again.”

Of course, no matter what Trump wants to do, not all countries will be willing to accept the return of their citizens. Trump faced that problem in his first term.

In a 2016 speech in Phoenix, Trump said, “There are at least 23 countries that refuse to take their people back after they’ve been ordered to leave the United States, including large numbers of violent criminals. They won’t take them back. So we say, ‘Okay, we’ll keep them.’ “Not going to happen with me, not going to happen with me.”

Not so fast, Mr. Trump. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) defines any country that fails to cooperate with the U.S. immigration removal process as “recalcitrant”. According to ICE, “Uncooperative countries significantly exacerbate the challenges presented to ICE by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Zadvydas v. Davis, 533 U.S. 678 (2001). In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that: With narrow exceptions, noncitizens with final orders of removal — including noncitizens determined to pose threats to the community or considered flight risks — may not be detained by ICE beyond a presumptively reasonable period of six months if there is no “significant likelihood of removal in the reasonably foreseeable future”.

The Trump administration may also encounter enforcement resistance from so-called “sanctuary” jurisdictions across the country, which include: Alameda, Berkeley, Fremont, Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco (county and city), San Mateo County, Santa Ana, Santa Clara County, and Watsonville in California; Boulder and Denver in Colorado; King County, Seattle, and Walla Walla County in Washington; Portland in Oregon; and even Washington, D.C. The Los Angeles City Council has already voted to prohibit city resources from being used for federal immigration enforcement.

“Americans are being squeezed out of the labor force and their jobs are taken,” Trump said at the Republican Convention. “By the way, you know who’s taking the jobs, the jobs that are created? One hundred and seven percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens.” But not all employers will likely be cooperative in immigrant sweeps. The Pew Research Center estimated that unauthorized immigrants represented about 4.8% of the U.S. workforce in 2022.  About two-thirds of U.S. crop-farm workers are foreign-born, for example, and 42% aren’t legally authorized to work in the country,  About two-thirds of U.S. crop-farm workers are foreign-born, and 42% aren’t legally authorized to work in the country, according to a Labor Department report.

“Implementing Trump’s (deportation) plan would be a logistical nightmare and social tragedy, with consequences reverberating beyond the deportees and into the lives of over 20 million people living in mixed-status households, including 5.5 million U.S.-born children suddenly missing one or both parents,” the Center asserts.

Then, no matter how individuals voted, there’s the question of how Americans across the board are going to respond to Trump’s draconian deportation program once it hits their neighborhood. I expect there will be a backlash. I couldn’t put it better than Yascha Benjamin Mounk, Associate Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. In a post-election podcast conversation with American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, Mounk said:

“When you have very lax policies and high levels of illegal immigration, people say, “clamp down, we want to close the border,” and the moment you start doing the things you actually need to do to clamp down, they start to say, “well, hang on a second, I didn’t want this kid to die. I didn’t want those kids to be separated from their parents. I didn’t want this particular member of the community, who’s been here for 25 years and who seems like a very good and reasonable person, to suddenly be taken and sent back to where they came from.” And so I think even on that issue, which was a winning issue of Trump’s and which he clearly has a popular mandate…he may quite quickly lose public support, nevertheless.”

Well put.

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The Oregon Department of Education’s Ever-Expanding List of Maligned Minorities

A just-released Education Update sent out by Colt Gill, the Director of the Oregon Department of Education, notes that his department and the Oregon Health Authority have created a toolkit centering on safety, health and belonging as schools transition to face covering optional policies.

In his determination to cover all his bases, he says the goal of the toolkit is to create safe, supportive, welcoming schools, particularly for “students who experience disability and those who are Black, Indigenous, Latina/o/x/e, People of Color, Tribal members, and/or are members of the LGBTQ2SIA+ community.”

Good grief! 

Gill clearly sees the K-12 education universe as nothing more than an assemblage of distinct and maligned minorities. This is the kind of identity politics that foments perilous division of our state and our country. Rather than emphasizing common values and interest, Gill’s identity politics stresses differences and creates a feeling of ‘zero-sum’ competition between groups. 

In a Medium article, Benjamin Morawek posited that there are two types of identity politics.

“The first kind is what I call inclusive identity politics and it is synonymous with the term “common-humanity identity politics” used by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their book, The Coddling of the American Mind. This kind of identity politics, they explain, mobilizes identity “in ways that emphasize an overarching common humanity while making the case that some fellow human beings are denied dignity and rights because they belong to a particular group. This is the identity politics of the civil rights movement and a shining example of its use is Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.”

 “… the second kind of identity politics, exclusive identity politics, calls for the value of marginalized groups based on the very identity that makes them different,” Morawek wrote.  As Oberlin College professor Sonia Kruks said in Retrieving Experience, “The demand is not for inclusion within the fold of ‘universal humankind’ … nor is it for respect ‘in spite of’ one’s differences. Rather, what is demanded is respect for oneself as different.”

One problem with Gill’s identify politics is that it leads to even more minority designations. “Once identity politics gains momentum, it inevitably subdivides, giving rise to ever-proliferating group identities demanding recognition,” says Amy Chua in Political Tribes.

Gill’s reference to “the LGBTQ2SIA+ community” illustrates this point. 

The Oregon Department of Education says this  “…means a term that encompasses multiple gender identities and sexual orientations including Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Two-Spirit, Intersex, and Asexual. The plus sign (“+”) recognizes that there are myriad ways to describe gender identities and sexual orientations.”

“Originally LGB, variants over the years have ranged from GLBT to LGBTI to LGBTQQIAAP as preferred terminology shifted and identity groups quarreled about who should be included and who come first,” Chua wrote. 

“How can we come together on anything big…when we keep slicing ourselves into smaller factions?”, wrote Carlos Lozada in The Washington Post. “Down this road lies, ultimately, state breakdown and failure,” warns Stanford University political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, in Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment.

At some point, the left is going to tie itself up in knots trying to categorize everybody. In the meantime, the country will slowly break down into warring factions and we will all pay the price.

More to read

Teaching Race in Kindergarten: Oregon’s new standards for social science exchange colorblindness for racialism. This is not progress.

Oregon’s New Ethnic Studies Standards: Identity Politics Run Amok

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Want to see where identity politics is taking us?

Tucked into the massive year-end deal President Trump finally signed to fund the government and coronavirus relief are provisions to fund a National Museum of the American Latino and an American Women’s History Museum as part of the Smithsonian Institution. They will supplement more than 19 museums, galleries, gardens, and a zoo the Smithsonian Institution already operates.

At some point, I guess, every sliver of the American population is going to get its own Smithsonian museum. 

At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama declared, “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” Not so much now. 

Now we are more a fragmented America that has shifted away from inclusion to exclusion and the proliferation of group identities. Maybe the members of each segmented group feel better about themselves, but it’s at the expense of national cohesion and productive discourse and too often leads to multiple categories of aggrieved, mutually antagonistic people. 

Look at how identity fixation has already led to unwarranted minor and extreme accusations of cultural appropriation and the obscene cancelling of people caught in the spotlight.

“Democratic societies are fracturing into segments based on ever-narrower identities, threatening the possibility of deliberation and collective action by society as a whole,” wrote Francis Fukuyama, a prominent American writer and political theorist. “This is a road that leads only to state breakdown and, ultimately, failure.”

After we build American Latino and Women’s museums, are we going to be pressured to build separate museums honoring the contributions of German, Polish, Irish, French, Scottish, Puerto Rican, Dutch, Swedish, Chinese, Russian, Filipino, and Norwegian Americans? How about the contributions of men, the disabled or other yet-to-be-contrived categories of people?

There are already 11 Smithsonian Institution museums and galleries at the National Mall in Washington D.C., so finding space for two more on the mall will be hard. Finding room for 15 more will be impossible.

But arguing against more identity museums will be hard in the current climate, partly because politicians see advantage in pandering to special interests.. 

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) tried to kill funding for the new American Latino and Women’s museums. “The last thing we need is to further divide an already divided nation with an array of segregated, separate-but-equal museums for hyphenated identity groups,”” he said. “At this moment in the history of our diverse nation, we need our federal government and the Smithsonian Institution itself to pull us closer together and not further apart.”

His objection was met with withering criticism by other members from both sides of the aisle.

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) responded with high dudgeon, calling Lee’s objections to the Latino museum  “outrageous,” and saying Lee “…stands in the way of the hopes and dreams and aspirations of seeing Americans of Latino descent having their dreams fulfilled and being recognized.” 

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) slammed Lee for trying to block a women’s museum “in a year where we’re celebrating the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage.” 

Members also cited the conclusion of a congressional commission formed to study the potential for an American museum of women’s history that, “America needs and deserves a physical national museum dedicated to showcasing the historical experiences and impact of women in this country.”

In the end, funding for both museums came through. Expected to stand on or near the National Mall, the proposed museums will be the first to join the Smithsonian since the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in September 2016.  

But will they really be cause for celebration?