Immigration through the Ages: What if They Become Too Numerous?

Editors' Note: Once again, our publication today wears reversed rules, this time  in memory of the great Gilbert Gottfried, who died at 67 last week after a long illness. He was known for being brilliant, funny, and fearless, not to mention crass, crude, and tasteless.  So whenever the Spy is too crass, crude, and tasteless for you, just think of it as an homage to this genius.

By Immigration Editor Emma Goldman
with Isabel Archer in London

We read a ripping yarn this week that struck a familiar note. In this story, a small group of economic migrants head into a richer stronger neighboring country.  They become successful and even influential.  But then the country changed leaders, and found one who wanted to make their country great again.

He persuaded his subjects that these plucky immigrants were in fact a threat:

A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph.  And he said to his people, "Look, the Israelite people are much too numerous for us.  Let us deal shrewdly with them, so that they may not increase; otherwise in the event of war they may join our enemies in fighting against us and gain ascendancy over the country.

Or, as this anti-immigrant hate speech is known today, the Great Replacement Theory.  Let's let Media Matters explains this toxic stew of fear and bigotry:

(c) Media Matters for America

While Tucker Carlson has been flirting with white nationalism for years, 2021 was the year he went full-tilt and repeatedly said the quiet part aloud, explicitly referencing the white supremacist “great replacement” conspiracy theory – and earning praise from infamous former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. And Carlson’s status as the most-watched Fox prime-time star seemingly encouraged his fellow hosts to follow suit; Laura Ingraham warned her viewers that Democrats “will import new voters to offset and eventually replace all you old people.”

Carlson has long pushed white supremacist talking points with full corporate support from Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch. In the process, he has gained praise from white nationalists, while the Anti-Defamation League has repeatedly called for his firing. White nationalism is now a pillar of Fox’s prime-time platform, and the Murdochs are willing to fund and defend their hosts’ hatred....

By repeatedly launching nativist attacks with warnings of an “invasion of your neighborhood” and migrants “coming to our backyard,” Fox News’ goal here is clear: to scare its audience into buying the fantasy of “white genocide.”  

Let's see how political leaders on both sides of the drink are responding to this supposed invasion of your backyard, ranging from the questionable to the hypocritical to the ridiculous (yes, we're going to Texas):

First we take you to our nation's capital, where the Biden Administration is doing clean up on Aisle 42.  The Administration at long last is moving to repeal what has been commonly referred to as “Title 42.”  As we have told any number of attractive single women in bars and clubs over the years to absolutely no good effect, Title 42 is the title of the United States Code in which laws relating to Public Health are collected.  Many volumes away rests Title 8, which covers immigration.

Republicans warn that caravans could come back

So what is “Title 42” in the immigration context anyway?  A thousand years ago in America, when the government was in the hands of a corrupt Russian-owned bigot who was personally responsible for transmission of any number of communicable diseases, said corrupt bigot perverted public health laws to ban immigrants on the grounds that they might transmit COVID-19.  This was about the same time he was advocating horse dewormer and bleach enemas to control the pandemic.

As a result, a million people died, and thousands of others pooped their pants in Wal-Mart after ingesting ivermectin.  And thousands of immigrants, including those entitled to seek asylum under U.S. and international law were turned away in violation of their rights on the basis of Title 42.  (Of course, any immigrant presenting with a real communicable disease was perforce inadmissible and in any event could be confined until no longer contagious.)

Meanwhile, at the southern border,

The American Civil Liberties Union sued the Biden administration, and a federal judge ruled that the government couldn’t send entire families back home under this edict, limiting its impact mostly to single adults trying to cross the border. In March, a federal court said the Biden administration could keep using Title 42 but couldn’t send people back to countries where they would face persecution, “citing ‘stomach-churning evidence’ that the U.S. government has delivered people to places where they face rape, torture and even death,” report The Washington Post’s Maria Sacchetti and Nick Miroff. 

To remedy this outrage, the Biden Administration is proposing to drop the illegal use of Title 42 and restore the status quo prevailing up to 2020.  This simple act of decency is causing conniptions:

Making it easier for migrants to cross the border is not a popular move on Capitol Hill. Senate Republicans blocked covid funding last week, to try to tack on a vote about keeping Title 42. Now some Senate Democrats up for re-election this year have joined them in expressing concern about the policy.

“The Biden administration was wrong to set an end date for Title 42 without a comprehensive plan in place,” Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), who faces a difficult race for his seat this fall, said in a statement. He and several other Democrats introduced a bipartisan bill to delay ending Title 42 restrictions.

“I think this is the wrong time, and I haven’t seen a plan that gives me comfort,” Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), perhaps the most vulnerable Senate Democrat right now, told reporters.

When a moral force as respected as Sen. and Rev. Warnock is uneasy, you know Democrats have got a big problem. Both Senators face tough re-election contests in marginal states. If the Republicans retake the Senate, we've got catastrophes that make Title 42 exclusions look like a flea bite. This is usually where we pronounce what should be done in our most overbearing tones, but here we're pretty stumped. Our friend Nick Machiavelli reminded us that in politics, sometimes necessity triumphs over choice.

Let's move along to rather clearer offenses against decency.  Calling London, Isabel can you hear us?

Isabel Archer reports from London:  Yes, Emma, I can hear you.  This week in London appalling lummox and pride of Eton Boris Johnson tried to distract what's left of the UK from his criminal liability for partying hearty during lockdown and then lying his ass off in the House of Commons by proposing to ship asylum seekers off to the only place he could find worse than Hartlepool: Rwanda.

The reaction was, um:

Gillian Triggs, the assistant high commissioner at the UNHCR, said the proposed arrangement would only accommodate a few hundred people a year, making it extremely expensive as well as illegal and discriminatory.

But government insiders said the expected torrent of legal battles could leave it costing substantially more, with some predicting it could take two years before anyone was flown to Rwanda.

Home Office sources said they were braced for judicial reviews and a wave of immigration tribunals over the lawfulness of attempts to offshore asylum seekers who arrive after travelling across the Channel on small boats.

The ever mendacious Tory leader claimed that this transportation-to-Africa scheme was made possible by Brexit, although in fact had Britain remained in the EU, it could have easily sent asylum seekers back to the first EU country they entered under EU law.

Sir Humphrey Appleby was not amused:

So far the plan is working great, if by working great you mean distracting attention from Boris's criminal record.  Back to you, Emma.

But for sheer buffoonish a**holery, you can't beat Texas and its ludicrously inept and slimy Governor Greg “Hell on Wheels” Abbott, who decided he would score a few political points with immigrant-hating mouth breathers by starting the Great Avocado War of 2022.

Having left Texans helpless during and after the collapse of their state's power grid and again during the raging COVID pandemic, ol' Hell on Wheels decided his only course was to distract Bubba by declaring war...on avocados.

His genius plan: sabotage the international commerce between Mexico and the United States by imposing fake “truck safety” inspections at the border on the transparently ridiculous grounds that he was thus protecting Texas from unauthorized immigrants hiding inside spare tires.  The resulting chaos illegally interfered with interstate commerce and caused $240 million of produce to rot, thus ensuring media-ready shortages and price hikes to be blamed on – Joe Biden.

Bonus: since neither Texas nor any other state has any power over immigration or interstate commerce, it did nothing to address his ostensible concern, which was stirring up even more anti-immigrant hatred and hysteria.

Unfortunately for the Law North of the Rio Grande, his own rich reactionary backers weren't buying in:

Know your enemy!

Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, an advocacy group for human rights in the Americas, said Abbott may have made a political miscalculation with the inspections.

“This seems like it's not working out for him. His base is pro-business and anti-immigrant and he has just antagonized business while giving voluntary free rides to immigrants,” he said, referring to another Abbott order that has provided bus rides to Washington, D.C., to transport asylum-seekers who have been processed and released by federal authorities — if they volunteered to go.

Gov. Lepetomane [Surely, Abbott? – Ed.] tried to cover up his humiliating climb down by touting supposed agreements with Mexican states to do something or another.  But as all Republicans are known for their devotion to strict construction of the Constitution they must know that Art. I, Sec. 10 states: “No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation;..” Abbott's treaties are as useful as, in words even a Texas Republican could understand, tits on a bull.

But Texas, Mexico, and the rest of us should count ourselves lucky at getting off so easily.  Sometimes anti-immigrant hysteria exacts a much higher price.

In Egypt, according to that ripping yarn we told you about, hatred against immigrants led to this: 

Every first born in the land of Egypt shall die, from the first-born of Pharaoh who sits on his throne to the first-born of the slave girl who is behind the millstones; and all the first-born of the cattle. And there shall be a loud cry in all the land of Egypt, such as never been or will ever be again.

And you're upset about a truckload of rotten avocados?

UPDATE: April 18 (Patriots' Day in these parts) - You don't have to take our word for it. Here's the considered judgment of a seasoned immigration lawyer, Ben Orlebke: 

In March 2020, Miller and Vice President Mike Pence successfully pressured then-CDC Director Robert Redfield to issue an order that applied Title 42 exclusively to noncitizens arriving at the border without documentation, expelling them near-instantly. They did so over the strenuous objections of CDC scientists, who reiterated that no public health justification existed for this hamfisted effort by a nativist cretin to weaponize a deadly pandemic against Black and brown migrants, eviscerating a human right codified in federal and international law since World War II.