What’s Different Now About Views of ICE?
Thinking about the intellectual foundations of contemporary immigration policy.
In an interchange on my post about arresting the spouses of American citizens who had arrived at their legally required green card interviews, long-time commenter and one-time OTB contributor, Bill Jempty, asked in terms of view on ICE, “What’s different now?” Bill posited that “ICE’s actions are being reported by the previously apathetic media.”*
Now, I am in agreement that ICE’s behavior in the past did not always receive adequate scrutiny. For example, I have thought about the fact that the conditions at detention facilities used in Louisiana and elsewhere by ICE predate the Trump administration and that our lack of attention to those facilities has been a national blind spot. I can’t recall if I have written that thought down here at the site (I know I have mentioned it in personal conversation with both Kingdaddy and Michael Bailey). There is much to criticize about American immigration policies that have nothing to do with Trump.
Still, I think that a lot has changed under this administration, and several thoughts came to mind this morning in regards to Bill’s question as I was working in the yard. There are manifest ways to answer the question that would take multiple posts, but apropos of my linked post above, a key change has been a distinct anti-foreigner, white nationalist, and, indeed, neo-Hitlerian ideology within the administration at the highest levels.
A clear example of this came from the Deputy White House Chief of Staff (the person responsible for insisting on quotas from ICE agents) just a few days ago.
Here is Miller on Twitter, berating the WSJ editorial board for suggesting that America owes people who help us in foreign wars after those wars are over, as well as making what would have once been a universally accepted idea in at least polite American politics that collective blame shouldn’t be a thing.
Note that Miller is not just saying specific immigrants are a problem, but that their “descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” In other words, there is something inherent to specific people groups that leads to bad outcomes. This is about as racist as it gets, and I call it “neo-Hitlerian” because it directly replicates Hitler’s views on race from Mein Kampf. It is the notion that some people groups are inherently good, while other people groups are inherently bad.
I noted Miller’s foray into this line of thinking in my post about Miller’s speech at the Kirk memorial: Echoes of Mein Kampf.
To quote that post:
Hitler wrote the following:*
All the human culture, all the results of are, science, and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan.
[…]
If we were to divide mankind into three groups, the founders of culture, the bearers of culture, the destroyers of culture, only the Aryan would be representative of the first group…He provides the mightiest building stones and plans for all human progress… (315).
Hitler puts “Asiatics” in the category of culture-bearers, but firmly places Europeans and Americans (of the white, US variety), i.e., Western civilization, in the category of “Aryan peoples” (315).
And, of course, Jews, whom he calls “The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan” (318), belong to the culture-destroying group. He states that “the Jew possesses no culture-creating force of any sort” (319). He also notes “Negroes” as part of the problem and how Jews brought them to the Rhineland with “the clear aim of ruining the hated white race” (322). *** Elsewhere, he also rails against Gypsies and homosexuals, but I don’t think those specifics are in the excerpt I am quoting from.
The footnotes and further explanation are in the post, which is a fairly lengthy one. But make no mistakes, the tweet above cleaves directly into this line of thinking: white Americans are good not because they adhere to American ideals, they a good and adhere to American ideals because they are white. Therefore, for people like Miller, nonwhites and their descendants can’t be good or adhere to American ideals.
I also noted in another post, Some Disturbing Puzzle Pieces, the linkages of all of this to ICE:
If one rejects the notion that we are a creedal nation (i.e., one based on ideas rather than ethnicity and bloodline), then one has to pick another basis, hence the reference to “ancestors.” Once one starts down this road, we will find ourselves talking about people groups (race/ethnicity) and “culture” rather than creedal statements like “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…,” “e plubibus unum,” and “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” among others.
[…]
Note that the gutting of USAID resulted in spending cuts of around $60 billion. And with this consequence, as per NPR: Study: 14 million lives could be lost due to Trump aid cuts.
It is a plain ideological choice to determine that saving lives globally is not worth spending these dollars, but spending far more than that amount on arresting middle-aged women, gardeners, and day laborers.
They can tell us that they are just rounding up violent criminals and enhancing public safety, and many Americans will believe them. But what they are plainly doing is applying a specific ideological framework to immigrants (with exceptions made to those of a certain hue) and in an attempt to redefine what a “real” American is. I would note, too, that removing Temporary Protected Status from hundreds of thousands of persons is just a means to make it easier to round them up and send them to places like Alligator Alcatraz via the security apparatus that Congress just funded.
Empowering masked agents who target ethnic groups using fear as a tactic so that they can be sent to camps with diminished or absent due process–what does that sound like to you, dear reader?
So, while you will get no argument from me that there are plenty of things in our past to criticize about border and immigration policy generally, and ICE specifically, some things have, in fact, changed of late, and it is not just reporting. And having a clearly fascist person with neo-Hitlerian views about race and culture directing those policies is definitely one of them.
*Based on some of our interactions, I recognize that it is possible that Bill will interpret this post as somehow “at” him as opposed to a sincere response to a question, and as such, I almost didn’t write it. But I honestly think that we need to be constantly reminded about the political reality of people like Stephen Miller.
First, yes, ICE under this administration is different. It has a much larger budget, a very aggressive directive coming from the top, and quotas that are challenging to fill with their original “only deporting the criminals” stance, so they are throwing so broad a net they are regularly scooping up citizens, including a fair number of Native Americans who are pretty much the most original Americans possible.
My second comment is from a PR perspective as to why we are seeing more media focus…it’s because the scale, strategy, AND tactics used by ICE have all changed. There are way more people being affected. This isn’t to say this WASN’T a problem before, but just as the dose makes the poison, the target volume commands the media attention.
Very much on point and correct. I would quibble with your subhead,
You describe what Miller is doing, and what Hitler believed, as ideological, which is correct as oppose to intellectual. Any effort to explain the intellectual basis for Trump/Millerism would be sanewashing.
Re Hitler’s views of Asiatics, IIRC at various times Japanese allies were referred to as “non-aryan aryans” and as the “aryans of Asia.” There were people with intellectual credentials in the Third Reich trying to write a coherent Nazi ideology, and rewriting as overtaken by events.
@gVOR10: The guy who shot up the Buffalo supermarket a few years ago expressed admiration for Asians in his manifesto. At the same time, he didn’t believe Asians belonged in America. That’s one aspect of the original Nazis’ ideology that has been retained by its modern followers (unlike, say, the original Nazis’ hatred of Slavs, something that would put a damper on the movement in Russia). I think part of the reason has to do with the use of the Bell Curve argument, which places Asians and Ashkenazi Jews (which Bell Curve coauthor Richard Hernstein was) above whites. Neo-Nazis typically depict Jews as smart but evil (that’s more or less the gist of Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique series), but they sometimes show openness in theory to accepting Asians, as long as those Asians don’t tread on the White States of America.
More than anything, this is what is different about this administration’s ICE versus previous ones – it is the redefinition of terms of polite society. The once universally accepted idea in American politics that collective blame shouldn’t be a thing is now the “great lie of mass migration.” (It is important to note that Miller will never spell out the “conditions and terrors” of an immigrant’s homeland or define the American ideals the immigrants are incapable of, because specificity brings the bigotry into plain view.)
Stephen Miller’s wife, Katie Miller, appeared on a panel on CNN last week and took great public affront from her husband being called a racist and white-supremacist on a podcast. For these two and their ilk, it is not enough for them to get away with racist, fascist, evil behavior in their words and deeds. No. It must be granted that what they do and say is not racist, not fascist, not evil. They don’t even want to concede some ground by claiming what they think and do are lesser evils necessary for the greater good.
Nope. They must be found to be on the side of the good, while everyone else who opposes them is corrupt and evil. It is polite American civics turned on its head.
This is a good follow-up post. I agree that this is an important consideration:
As you’ve also noted, scale matters. There’s a point where “more of the same” stops being the same.
When systems expand past a certain threshold, you don’t just get more of yesterday’s problems, you get something else entirely.
It makes earlier alarms — to the extent they were sounded at all — look oddly impotent.
@Mimai:
Indeed, and the reason there’s so much more of the same is because that’s what this administration wants, unlike previous administrations. It’s not just some bad apples lower in the chain; the bad apples are running things now.
There’ also the matter of not allowing Congressional oversight of detention facilities, of using excessive force against protesters, of charging anyone who as much as touches an ICE agent with felony assault, and all the other fascist terror tactics deployed since Biden left the White House last January.
@gVOR10:
I disagree. I think that all ideologies have an intellectual basis, even if those ideologies are flawed, wrong, and even evil.
@Kathy: The list is very, very long.
ICE Abuse (Ac tress from from Northern Exposure – Umitilla) – ICE stops Native American actress Elaine Miles in Redmond (WA) Called her Tribal ID fake. “Gabe Galanda, a Native American civil rights attorney, refers to what Miles experienced as “racialized profiling.” I know who this lawyer is (Grande Ronde of Oregon) and he’s represented tribal members being disenrolled (I see as tribal corruption in some tribes, like Nooksak a few years back).
Stand-by for some Treaty Rights complications (like arresting ICE – likely won’t go that far). I’m hearing rumblings of discontent regarding cross-border tribes – Jay Treaty of 1794 (US-Canada there is even a special H Work Visa for Cross- Border First Nation members.
BTW in WA most of the Tribal Police are certified law enforcement by the State so they CAN arrest non-tribal members (change from 25+ years ago).
Very complicated, and I simplified.
“You aren’t just imported individuals. You are importing societies.” -Stephen Miller
It’s called a melting pot. When my dad came over from Italy, he brought with him a lot of Italian culture that Americans love. When my grandparents on my mom’s side came from Scotland and Germany, they brought with them a lot of culture that Americans love. This is America. Always has been, always will be.
@HelloWorld:
“The great mass of aliens passing through Rotterdam at the present time are Russian Poles or Polish Jews of the usual ghetto type…. They are filthy, un-American and often dangerous in their habits.” — 1924 Congressional report
If memory serves I think nearly every ethnic/racial group of immigrants has been looked down upon since 1800. However, many of those groups were white so once the American melting pot did its work they were accepted. However, the groups coming now are identifiably different ie their color. Available evidence suggests they are acclimating to the US just as fast as other groups and are adopting our culture. From CHAT-GPT when I asked if immigrants were assimilating more slowly….
“No, immigrants are assimilating in the US at similar or faster rates than in the past. Research using historical census records and modern birth certificates indicates that immigrants today shift toward more native-sounding names for their children at a similar pace to past generations, and they learn English faster than their predecessors. Furthermore, studies show that immigrants and their descendants are integrating well, with subsequent generations becoming more like the native-born population. ”
What has happened, IMHO, is that we have had rapid cultural changes in many areas. Being a woman is more acceptable, we treat gay people much better and being trans makes you a pariah in only half of the country rather than all of it. The job base changed a lot and fairly quickly so that the Rust Belt lost jobs and population growth slowed. Being white, and especially male, lost a lot of its advantages. Who knew “girls” could be professionals? All of this needs a scapegoat and immigrants provide that outlet. Note that people like Vance admit that they are lying about stuff like Haitians eating cats but it’s OK if it advances the cause ie MAWA.
As an aside, I feel sorry for Jews. They were hated when they arrived in large numbers and it took a long time to be accepted. It wasn’t that long ago they couldn’t join a lot fo country clubs, etc. Now they are becoming targets of hatred again on the right which has always had a group of Jew Haters. On the left, there is a lot fo unhappiness about Israel’s actions and I do think a lot of Arab-Americans, knowing there is not much welcome in the GOP, have joined the Dems but a lot of them really dont like Jews.
Steve
@steve222: While I haven’t read it, there’s a book from the 1990s called How the Irish Became White.
I think one of the inaccuracies in the movie Gangs of New York is that it shows the Irish immigrants teaming up with black people against the nativists. In reality, the Irish were pretty racist themselves, and in general, for European immigrant groups in our country, hating on blacks was part of their rite of passage into the white mainstream.
Of course Jews have always been in their own category when it comes to bigotry, though there is another book by a different author called How Jews Became White Folks.
The linguist Geoff Nunberg had an interesting quote from an early-20th-century immigration reformer classifying all the following groups as non-Caucasian: “Tartars, Finns, Hungarians, Jews, Turks, Syrians, Persians, Hindus, Mexicans, Zulus, Hottentots [and] Kafirs.”
It’s also worth pointing out (and I think this often gets overlooked) that the main thing driving the rise of the KKK in the early 20th century (as opposed to the Reconstruction Era one) wasn’t civil rights for black people but the mass migration of the turn of the century, which was primarily from Eastern and Southern Europe, where most of the immigrants were Catholic or Jewish. One formative event that helped launch this incarnation of the Klan was the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish man.
@steve222:
More to the point, they were eventually accepted as white.
Italians were not considered “white” during the initial wave of migration, nor were Eastern Europeans, IIRC.
White is very much an evolving construct.
@Kylopod:
One of my grandfathers came to America in 1921 by way of Rotterdam.
WW1 was over, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was gone, there was no work to be had, so he left the old country for America.