MOBILE, AL — Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and his Trumpist compatriots are still waging a battle against immigrants down at the southern border —claiming that brown-skinned migrants pose an imminent threat, insisting on building a wall and busing migrants to the nation’s capital. Unfortunately, such stunts will cheer Abbott’s xenophobic base, which rallied to the…
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Having grown up in the Deep South under the cruel lash of Jim Crow, I was jolted back to my childhood by the images of dark-skinned Haitians driven back by mounted Border Patrol agents — terrified black people helpless before light-skinned men on horseback. I remember the television footage of Selma’s Bloody Sunday, when white…
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Last week, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted massive raids on chicken processing plants in the state of Mississippi, detaining nearly 700 immigrant workers, many of whom entered the country illegally years ago. The raids, which spanned seven cities and targeted work sites owned by five different companies, were, ICE bragged, the largest single-state…
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You don’t have to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement or “decriminalize” illegal entry into the United States to humanize border patrol. You don’t have to close all the detention centers into which migrants are now cramped and stacked as if, yes, they are in concentration camps (though that would help). You don’t have to give…
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For years now, ultra-conservative politician Patrick Buchanan has been at the leading edge of the hysteria over the prospect of imminent and decisive demographic change — a hysteria that currently grips a sizeable portion of the American population. In a lengthy 2012 screed titled, “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?,” Buchanan predicted…
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