Trump Has Laid Bare Our Abject Cruelty to Migrants

By Sonali KolhatkarNovember 30, 2018 "Information Clearing House" -   The Trump administration’s use of tear gas at the U.S. border with Mexico over the weekend has rightfully generated outrage. Just as the photo of a 2-year-old Honduran girl crying at the border this summer became a symbol for Donald Trump’s family separation policy, a photo of a terrified mother dragging her screaming twin daughters away from tear gas fired by the U.S. Border Patrol last weekend embodies the latest Trumpian act of cruelty toward desperate refugees. Maria Lila Meza Castro and her five children had made the long and arduous journey from Honduras to the U.S. border with the refugee caravan only to find herself shut out by Trump’s troops and fleeing toxic fumes.
But where many of us see desperate refugees, Trump and his backers see invading hordes. The optics of the violence inflicted on people across the border has had a different effect, depending upon one’s politics. Liberal-minded Americans felt horror and rage at seeing parents and their children choke from the tear gas, while rabid nativists like Fox News’ Tomi Lahren reveled in the severity of Trump’s actions. Lahren tweeted, “Watching the USA FINALLY defend our borders was the HIGHLIGHT of my Thanksgiving weekend.”
The media attention at the border is part of Trump’s plan to highlight to his base just how well he is protecting the U.S. from an invasion of brown people determined to enter the nation. His goal is to dehumanize and demonize.

But thanks to his repeated focus on the border, we are now seeing in graphic detail the dynamics of our immigration enforcement machinery through the camera lenses of journalists and the social media feeds of activists. The photographer who captured the images of Castro and her children running away from tear-gas fumes would likely not have been present at the scene had Trump simply ignored the refugee crisis on his Twitter feed and at his political rallies. Most of us are not aware that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency has routinely used tear gas at the U.S.-Mexico border, including under President Barack Obama. CBP responded to Newsweek’s request for information with details about how “its personnel have been using tear gas, or 2-chlorobenzylidene malononitrile (CS), since 2010, deploying the substance a total of 126 times since fiscal year 2012.” The rate of tear-gas use has spiked under Trump, however. CBP also told the media outlet that it “routinely uses” pepper spray. Trump’s strategy to focus on the refugees as a midterm election campaign issue has backfired and inadvertently exposed the federal government’s cruelty toward immigrants.

Trump has tried hard to spin the weekend incident in his favor. On three occasions on Monday alone, the president dug in his heels about news from the border. During a rally in Mississippi for Republican Senate candidate Cindy Hyde-Smith, Trump read a statement that said, “We will not tolerate any form of assault or attack upon our border agents … or any attempt to destroy federal property … or bring chaos and violence to American soil.” Later, speaking to reporters, Trump defended the use of tear gas, saying that Border Patrol forces “were being rushed by some very tough people,” repeating the claim that agents were acting in self-defense against violent invaders. At a roundtable the same day, Trump went as far as accusing people of being “grabbers,” saying people “grab a child because they think they’re going to have a certain status.” The claim is so ludicrous that had it come out of the mouth of any other president before Trump, it would have caused tremendous controversy.
Whether Trump’s base is buying his spin is arguable. After the president hammered on the “migrant caravan” issue for weeks before the midterm elections, going as far as deploying thousands of military troops and barbed wire along the border, Democrats won a large number of seats in the House and flipped an embarrassingly large number of red seats to blue. It might be that the anti-immigrant fearmongering has hit a wall.
Unfortunately, the Democratic Party is doing its usual job of casting itself as Republican-lite on immigration. Instead of distancing himself from Trump’s widely denounced cruelty, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has decided his party will indeed support the president’s xenophobic plan for a border wall—just not to the extent Trump wants. Rather than the $5 billion in funding that Trump is demanding, Schumer has offered to support a $1.6 billion appropriation—not exactly the type of bold thinking demanded by a blue-wave mandate. Schumer appears to be channeling the same sort of centrist appeasement of right-wing values that makes his party so unpopular.
Perhaps the Democratic leader was taking the advice of New York Times opinion writer Thomas Friedman, who penned a sanctimonious screedcalling on Democrats “to be the adults” and assure the public “that they’re committed to securing our borders.” Friedman also flippantly referred to undocumented immigrants by  using the favored right-wing slur of “illegals.” Conservative outlets loved his proposal to build a “high wall with a big gate.”
Schumer and Friedman’s thinking reflects what former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said to The Guardian a week ago when she suggested that in order for European leaders to curb the right-wing populist wave across their continent, they must show that they are “not going to be able to continue to provide refuge and support.” She added, “I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration, because that is what lit the flame.” Nesrine Malik, a columnist for the paper, responded to the interview, saying aptly, “[T]he former presidential candidate illustrated how a certain brand of centrist politician has no rebuke or response to the far right other than to mimic their tactics.”
Politicians are presenting the public with a set of opposing ideas that they say characterizes the current debate on immigration: “open borders” versus “zero tolerance.” But that is a red herring. It does not address the fact that Central Americans who are fleeing violence in countries like Honduras (which the U.S. has had a hand in destabilizing) are seeking asylum. Asylum seekers have clear and tangible rights under both U.S. and international law. The Trump administration’s year-long effort to change existing asylum laws is a testament to this hard fact. Trump and his colleagues are trying to change the rules of the game because as the rules currently stand, refugees have a right to make a case for asylum within the U.S. (not Mexico).
The thousands of human beings currently camped out in Tijuana in desperate conditions, at the end of a long and arduous journey, are real people. Period. Their humanity should be the starting point of our conversations about immigration and asylum. As this journalist writing for Teen Vogue has done in her profile of seven young people traveling in the caravan, we need to see the faces and hear the stories of migrants’ lives before taking the word of our political leaders. Our responses need to be couched in compassion for our fellow human beings, rather than in political calculations based on the presumed intentions of a racist voting bloc.

Sonali Kolhatkar is a columnist for Truthdig. She also is the founder, host and executive producer of "Rising Up With Sonali," a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV

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Until the Rich World Thinks 'One World,' Migration Will Intensify

By Slavoj Žižek
October 29, 2018 "Information Clearing House" -  The "rich" world urgently needs to address the reasons behind mass migration, rather than its symptoms. And understand we live in one world.

Migration is, once again, headline news. Columns of migrants from Honduras are approaching the US border through Mexico; African migrants broke through barriers and entered the small Spanish exclave on the northern tip of Africa; Middle East migrants are trying to enter Croatia.

Although the numbers are comparatively small, they do signal a basic geopolitical fact.
In his World Interior of Capital, the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk demonstrates how, thanks to globalization, the capitalist system came to determine all conditions of life.
The first sign of this development was the Crystal Palace in London, the site of the first world exhibition in 1851. Its structure rendered palpable the exclusivity of globalization as the construction and expansion of a world interior whose boundaries are invisible, yet virtually insurmountable from without, and which is now inhabited the by one and a half billion winners of globalization.

However, three times this number are left standing outside the door. Consequently, "the world interior of capital is not an agora or a trade fair beneath the open sky, but rather a hothouse that has drawn inwards everything that was once on the outside."

Two orbits

This interior, built on capitalist excesses, determines everything: "The primary fact of the Modern Age was not that the earth goes around the sun, but that money goes around the earth." After the process that transformed the world into the globe, "social life could only take place in an expanded interior, a domestically and artificially climatized inner space."
What Sloterdijk correctly pointed out is that capitalist globalization does not stand only for openness & conquest, but also for a self-enclosed globe separating the inside from its outside.
The two aspects are inseparable: capitalism's global reach is grounded in the way it introduces a radical class division across the entire globe, separating those protected by the sphere from those outside its cover. The flow of refugees is a momentary reminder of the violent world outside our Cupola, a world which, for us, insiders, appears mostly on TV reports about distant violent countries, not as part of our reality but encroaching on it.

History lessons

Thus, our ethical-political duty is not just to become aware of the reality outside our Cupola, but to fully assume our co-responsibility for the horrors outside our Cupola. The hypocrisy of the reactions to the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi provides a nice example of how this Cupola works. In a broader sense, he was one of us, well located within the Cupola, so we are shocked and outraged.
But our care is ridiculously displaced care: the true scandal that the Istanbul murder caused a much greater scandal than Yemen where Saudi Arabia is destroying an entire country. In (probably) ordering the murder, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) forgot the lesson of Stalin: if you kill one person, you are a criminal; if you kill thousands, you are a hero. So MBS should have gone on killing thousands in Yemen.
So, back to our Leninist question: what is to be done? The first and (sadly) predominant reaction is the one of protective self-enclosure: the world out there is in a mess, let's protect ourselves by all kinds of walls.
A New World Order is emerging in which the only alternative to the "clash of civilizations" remains the peaceful coexistence of civilizations (or of "ways of life," a more popular term today): forced marriages and homophobia (or the idea that a woman going alone to a public place calls for rape) are OK, just that they are limited to another country which is otherwise fully included in the world market.
The sad truth that sustains this new "tolerance" is that today's global capitalism can no longer afford a positive vision of emancipated humanity, even as an ideological dream.

One vision

Fukuyamaist liberal-democratic universalism failed because of its own immanent limitations and inconsistencies, and populism is the symptom of this failure, its Huntington's disease. But the solution is not populist nationalism, Rightist or Leftist. Instead, the only cure is a new universalism – it is demanded by the problems humanity is confronting today, from ecological threats to refugee crises.
The second reaction is global capitalism with a human face personified in socially-responsible corporate figures like Bill Gates and George Soros. Even in its extreme form – "open up our borders to the refugees, treat them like one of us."
Yet, the problem with this solution is that it only provides what in medicine is called a symptomatic treatment – a therapy of a disease leaves the basic global situation intact; it only affects its symptoms, not its cause.
Such a treatment is aimed at reducing the signs and symptoms for the comfort and well-being of the patient – but, in our case, this is obviously not enough since the solution is obviously not that all wretched of the world will move into the safety of the Cupola. We need to move from the humanitarian focus on the wretched of the Earth to the wretched Earth itself.
The third reaction is therefore to gather the courage and envisage a radical change which imposes itself when we fully assume the consequences of the fact that we live in ONE world. Is such a change a utopia? No, the true utopia is that we can survive without such a revolution.

Slavoj Žižek is a cultural philosopher. He’s a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London.

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