The Witness Chronicles, 11/2/24
The reality behind immigration as a political tool
Fact: Illegal And Non-citizen Immigrants Can’t Vote. And Why Would They?
If I’m here illegally am I really going to take that risk?
When half the country is watching every electoral action, why would any illegal person risk getting caught and why? It defies logic, though logic was thrown away years ago by at least one side in this election. But even if you want to think otherwise, logic exists for a reason and this logic is sound.
The Trump/Vance campaign can only win by defying logic and stoking fears of the other, which basically includes anyone who looks or sounds different and must therefore be the enemy. Their obsession with immigrants strikes a chord with those who want to believe the world is not a fair place and that everything is someone else’s fault.
And no, most immigrants are far from being criminals and mentally ill people, as Trump constantly complains. It takes a lot of determination and courage to leave your country in search of a better life or to escape persecution. It’s an almost unimaginable risk and not one you would test by voting illegally.
The reality about many immigrants, and Trump knows this well as the owner of businesses that employ immigrants, is that recent immigrants are often doing the jobs most Americans don’t want. Maintaining golf courses and landscape work. Picking crops under backbreaking conditions. Cleaning hotel rooms. Working in hot kitchens preparing food they could never afford to eat. The list goes on and on.
Trump is fond of throwing around words he does not know the meaning of, doing things like calling opponents fascists and Marxists in the same sentence when the two things are polar opposites. He doesn’t know the reality of what immigration is and the real problems behind it. It’s just provocative speech designed to stir up his most fanatical followers.
Illegal immigration is a very real problem. No administration in years, from either party, has gotten anywhere in resolving it. Most didn’t even try. But this past year a near political miracle occurred. A conservative Senator sponsored a bipartisan bill designed to finally do something about the issue. It easily passed the Senate and would have passed in the House.
The bill funded the hiring of thousands more border guards and asylum judges and would have begun the tough process of fixing the southern border. Trump, who has made it his central issue, delivered an ultimatum to the Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson: kill the bill so I can run on the issue. And he did.
In hindsight that was a clumsy choice because it gave the Democrats an opening to defend their actions on an issue easily blamed on them, and to place the blame for inaction directly on Trump. It might be one of those blunders that tips this very close election. There are many of them on both sides.
Whatever happens on Tuesday, historians are going to have a field day trying to sort out this past year and draw conclusions from what they find. That is if historians are still allowed to pursue whatever truths can be found in history. The right is fond of rewriting history to suit their own wishful thinking. We saw that in Florida as the history of slavery in the Deep South was literally whitewashed from the curriculum in public schools by Governor DeSantis last year.
As I write this, I realize that every time I think through an issue like immigration, the reality circles back to the reality that if Donald Trump is elected we will never know the truth about anything for the foreseeable future.
The simple truth of immigration as a political issue is that it is one that comes up in every election. The only difference is who the evil others are. Irish Micks? Italian spics and wops? Germans, Chinese and Japanese? And now anyone coming from south of here and speaking another language with a different colored skin.
There’s nothing new or original about any of the hatred that spews out of Trump’s mouth. It’s from a playbook as old as the hills, the blame game. And it’s as unAmerican as can be imagined in a country that was born because people took the initiative and were responsible for their actions. And most of them were immigrants. Risk takers might be a better word.
Risk takers understand the costs of risk. Someone who has managed to get to a better place because they took risks is not going to throw it all away by voting illegally, or for that matter, committing crimes, not in the majority of the immigrant population.
Yes, there are bad people in every population. That’s a given. But criminals generally are out to get something. What exactly would an illegal have to gain from trying to vote, a few dollars from a politician? I don’t think so.
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The GOP has ALWAYS bound their followers together by finding a group to scapegoat:
Nixon’s Southern Strategy, “welfare queens,” Reagan’s speech about states rights in Philadelphia, Missouri, Willie Horton, African Americans, gays and lesbians, Jews, unwed mothers and now transgender people.
They gin up all this hatred and then pick your pocket with the other hand.
The biggest distribution of wealth in history has been in the past 40-something years as the lower and middle classes have had their pockets picked by the one percenters.
That makes total sense. I’ve been wondering for a long time why an illegal immigrant would want to draw any attention to himself or herself. I’m also wondering how they would actually register to vote when you have to prove citizenship. I guess there may be a few who squeak through somehow, but I don’t know how.