It's About Keeping Black and Brown People Out. That's All It Is.

They don’t want brown and Black people in this country. That’s at the base of all of this. That’s what’s animating all of this. My former political party is now driven by a philosophy. It is animated by a desire to keep brown and Black people out of this country.

Look at the reaction to yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling blocking Donald Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship. Look at how Republicans and the right went just batshit-crazy ballistic with that ruling. The Supreme Court told Trump, “No!” The Supreme Court told Trump that birthright citizenship is the law of the land, and it’s been the law of the land for 158 years. They told Trump it’s gonna stay the law of the land. That’s all the Supreme Court did yesterday was say, “Yep, it’s still the law of the land.”

But my God, when you watch and when you listen to the reaction yesterday from the right, it’s like, oh my God, America will never be the same. We will never come back. We’ll never recover from this. And I’m thinking to myself, nothing changed yesterday. The Supreme Court simply upheld almost 160 years of what has been the law of the land. Nothing changed!

So why did the right yesterday scream, “America’s done! America will never be the same! Oh my God, we’ve got to amend the Constitution! We need to write another law! We need to ban pregnant tourists from coming into this country!” I mean, on and on and on it went, all day and night. This reaction to a Supreme Court ruling that simply said, “Yep, it’s been the law of the land for 160 years, and it’s still gonna be the law of the land.”

Nothing changed, yet the right says that now America will never be the same, America is done. The difference? The difference is the types of immigrants coming into this country. Today they are brown and Black immigrants. They are immigrants from Guatemala, from Nicaragua, from Central and South America and Mexico. And they are immigrants coming from the Middle East. These immigrants, these brown and Black people, are who the right and my former party want to keep out of this country. Because my former political party fundamentally does not believe THESE immigrants, THESE immigrants of the past 10 to 15 to 20 to 30 years can ever be Americans, can ever truly assimilate and be true Americans.

Sadly, what a familiar refrain in American history. That’s always been the case though, right? With every new class of immigrant over the years, through every century, it’s always been, “Oh, they’re not gonna become American, they won’t assimilate.” The Jews, the Irish, the Italians, the Asians—they’ve generally been met by a group of Americans who said, “We don’t want them here. They’re dirty. They will not assimilate. They don’t look like us, they are not like us, they are not one of us.” But how wrong these fearmongers have been historically.

The difference now is that an entire political party has been overtaken by this bigotry and xenophobia. But nothing has changed. Right? America’s been this way for 160 years. Birthright citizenship has been here for 160 years. The only difference to explain the reaction from the right yesterday is this: it’s these people, it’s these immigrants who we gotta keep out. These brown and Black immigrants who are gonna come here and have babies—we gotta keep them out.

And the right’s reaction to yesterday’s ruling is consistent with the two Supreme Court rulings of last week, backing the Trump Administration’s attempt to end, to slam the door, on the asylum process. Because who’s knocking on our door to claim asylum? Brown and Black people. The Supreme Court last week effectively ended the asylum process, ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which is what the Trump Administration wanted.

There are approximately 350,000 Haitians in this country with TPS status, who’ve been in this country for years, who if they went back to Haiti tomorrow, they’d be utterly unsafe in Haiti. That was the whole point of the law, and they shouldn’t be forced to go back until they can go back. But most have become contributing members of American society, these 350,000 Haitian immigrants. And yet the Trump Administration wants them gone in a nanosecond, these brown and Black immigrants.

It’s what’s behind what Trump has been doing every day on the streets of America for the past six months, with his masked federal thugs. They’ve been going after and terrorizing brown and Black immigrants, brown and Black citizens, brown and Black people who are here legally as well. Look, my former political party is a full-on, out-of-the-closet, bigoted, xenophobic, anti-immigrant party. This whole notion that they only oppose illegal immigration is bullshit. What Republicans oppose is all immigration.

If my former political party had its way it would, quite literally, build a wall around this entire country….tomorrow. The doors would be shut, and no one would be allowed in. They don’t want to increase legal immigration. They want to decrease illegal immigration and legal immigration. And it’s all driven by the fact that most of these immigrants are brown and Black. The right wants to keep them out and believes we have to get back to where this country was: a white Christian nation.

White Christian nationalism is the most animating force in my former political party today, and it is so wrong, so un-American, so the antithesis of that shining city on a hill. Ronald Reagan, one of my political heroes, said in the ‘80s that if we close the door on these new immigrants, America will be lost. Our preeminence in the world will be lost if we close the door on new immigrants—even THESE new immigrants. And that’s exactly what my former political party has been doing and will continue to try to do. It’s disgusting, and it’s un-American.

Be brave,

This Week on The Social Contract

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• Wednesday with Sophia A. Nelson, Author of Redefining Freedom: Thoughts on Bridging the Divies and Renewing America’s Promise at 250 (click if you missed it)

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INTERVIEWS & QUOTES FROM THE PAST WEEK:

• MAGA Gov Touts ‘Unbelievable’ Turnout as Fox News Live Shot Shows Near-Empty Trump Fair —RawStory

• The Great American State Fair Achieved the Dubious (but Hilarious) Distinction of Having More People on Stage Than in the ‘Crowd’ —The Poke

• Former Trump Supporter Breaks Ranks: GOP Colleagues Trapped Defending the Indefensible —AlterNet

• Will the Mamdani Effect Make 2028 the Year of the Left-Wing President? —The Guardian

• How Long Can This ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ Presidency Go On? —Salon

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