“The United States is now an occupied country. But November 5, 2024 will be liberation day in America.” At a rally in Atlanta, Donald Trump spoke in his usual apocalyptic and tribal tone about the issue that will be the key to the closing of the campaign, more important than the economy or housing: immigration. The narrative is that all of the country’s problems have their origins in the porous Biden-Harris border, from high home prices and low wages to overcrowded hospitals and schools. The border wall is the panacea in any speech, adding the human factor that Trump finds it more fun to lie about immigrants than to talk about tariffs. Trump’s main adviser on this issue, Stephen Miller, famous for using obscure regulatory loopholes to restrict immigration during Trump’s first term, has announced that, if the former president is re-elected, the government will deport a million people a year. The expense and legal, bureaucratic and human complexity of this measure is reminiscent of the “innovative” solutions of Giorgia Meloni in Italy. It does not seem to be a question of money, since Italy was able to mobilize a warship and an army of soldiers and officials to transport 16 people who are already back on Italian soil. Nor are imaginative solutions offered based on real data, demographic studies or alternatives and benefits of migration in both receiving and sending countries. It is a simple problem of racism and failure of rights.
Internment camps, walls and mass deportations. They are the three classic pillars of the anti-immigration discourse that has permeated middle- and working-class Americans and Europeans and will condition the November elections, as they have done in European Union countries. In a speech delivered on October 11 in Aurora, Colorado, one of the cities that Trump has chosen to embody his toxic fables on immigration, the Republican candidate expressed his desire to use the Alien Enemies Act, enacted in 1798 and used by Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt to imprison entire families of immigrants of Italian, German and mainly Japanese origin in internment camps during World War II. This law would allow mass deportations of people from countries that have invaded or are at war with the United States, or that have carried out “predatory incursions” into the country and could affect legal and illegal immigrants.
#freedom #dies #border
