Not so very long ago – within the span of many Americans’ lifetimes – crossing the southern border wasn’t that big of a deal. People from Mexico and points south would make their way into the U.S. for seasonal work mostly, do the jobs Americans tend not to want to do, then make their way back. Most of them wouldn’t stay very long because they had families back in Mexico, so they might travel back and forth as their work allowed, bringing their meager earnings back with them. There was an explicit guest worker program during World War II, but otherwise it was kind of an informal, administrative matter for many years.
Gradually, though, immigration across the southern border became more heavily policed. The option to harass migrant workers and other visitors was always available to law enforcement, but in more recent decades it became a matter of policy. As PBS journalist John Carlos Frey details in his new book, Blood and Sand, the crackdown really began in earnest during the Clinton Administration, reflected most shockingly in Clinton’s second State of the Union, which included a section on undocumented immigrants that might have been ripped from Trump’s current playbook. There were a couple of things going on in those days. Implementation of NAFTA was decimating rural agriculture in Mexico, pitting small farmers against U.S. agribusiness conglomerates. But most importantly, politicians were re-discovering the efficacy of targeting brown people. Clinton and the Republican Congress funded the construction of walls in major border cities, forcing migrants into the harsh desert and mountain terrain that straddles the border between populated areas.
Similar to Trump’s policies now, Clinton’s approach was formulated specifically to discourage people from even attempting to cross into the U.S. The result was a spike in migrant deaths as families and individuals continued to be driven north by need and in search of safety and sustenance. That policy set the template that we have operated under ever since, though Bush, Obama, and now into Trump. Of course, Trump has ratcheted up the pressure, making it impossible to adjudicate asylum claims, incarcerating immigrants regardless of their personal histories, treating all crossers like murderers, rapists, gang members, etc., holding terrified people – even children and infants – in squalid, dehumanizing conditions under the hateful eye of bigoted officers.
We have to take the administration at their word that they’re doing this to discourage migrants fleeing the remnants of the countries we worked so hard to destroy in past decades. That makes Trump and his crew terrorists, plain and simple – they are deliberately terrorizing people for political ends, and the longer we tolerate it the more complicit we are in these crimes against humanity.
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That said, it’s hard to deny that Trump takes a certain special joy in his work, promoting the basest forms of ignorance, painting refugees as criminals, rapists, etc. The furor around the immigrant caravans from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador ranks among the most despicable initiatives thus far in his putrid presidency, right alongside family separations. This is, of course, a contrived “crisis” intended to gin up the Republican’s racist base in time for the mid-term elections as well as set the stage for clashes at the southern border. They did this by prohibiting asylum seekers from applying for asylum anywhere other than at designated points of entry. This violates the relevant statute (
As Bruce Cumings and others have pointed out for many years, the South Korean military is essentially under the command of U.S. generals. That is, in the event of a war, South Korean commanders would take orders directly from our military. Add to that the fact that the U.S., South Korea, and North Korea have technically been in a state of war since 1950, and you have a sense of how this works. Think about it – what does it say about South Korea’s sovereignty that they are not in control of their military? Recall, too, that the country was under the rule of generals and assorted dictators into the 1980s, all backed by the U.S. So when a president threatens the sanctity of “military exercises”, essentially admitting that they are, in fact, war games and, as such, “provocative,” as Trump accurately described them, national security reporters and consultants on every network start spinning like crazy.