My mother is an immigrant.
She left Ireland when she was 17. That’s what the young Irish did in the late 1950s.
There were no jobs. And there was no opportunity. Forget college: There was no free secondary education until the late 1960s. Having finished the equivalent of eighth grade, the only way she could extend her schooling was repeating eighth grade.
So she went to America. She was a poor teenager from rural Ireland who had to learn to live in a city.
That’s hard enough. But it would have been still more difficult if she had to learn English; or couldn’t get legal status (pre-1965 immigration restrictions made it easy for the Irish to get green cards), or had to put her physical safety at risk to come here.
That was the story an immigrant from the Mexican state of Chiapas told me in 2011 as I covered HB 56, Alabama’s brutal attempt to criminalize the lives of those without legal status. To support his family and educate his daughter, he made the deadly journey across the desert. He worked in Alabama, without legal status, facing the wrath of our lawmakers.
Could he come to the United States the way my mother did? Not really. Legal costs and visa waiting times made that impractical.
“I’m poor,” he told me through a translator. “Only rich people can come here the legal way.”
It’s easy to dream about stories like these stirring the compassion of Alabamians. An honest immigration debate would focus on building a system that doesn’t force people to risk their lives to come to America.
But then the state’s senior senator opens his mouth, and reality returns.
“Now some of these people are good, but most of them are garbage,” Tommy Tuberville said on Fox Business last week while speaking about recent immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. “They come from jails and prisons in other countries.”
Tuberville’s office later said he supports legal immigration but went on to claim that “many” undocumented immigrants are “drug traffickers, terrorists, murderers, rapists, and gang members.”
It’s foolish to expect anything other than hateful nonsense from Tuberville. This is a man who claimed Democrats support reparations for the descendants of enslaved people because “they think the people that do the crime are owed that.” And who struggled to say something critical about white nationalism.
It’s pointless to remind him that the vast majority of immigrants are not, in fact, criminals. And that undocumented immigrants have far lower rates of crime than native-born Americans.
Or to note that his party is currently led by a convicted felon. Or that a jury found the Republican standard-bearer liable for sexually abusing a woman.
The Republican conception of immigration, shaped by Trump and his sycophants, is irrational. It views a group of poor and vulnerable people as monsters. It sifts through endless immigrant stories — some heroic, many ordinary — to find the handful who have committed crimes. These, it insists, reflect the thoughts, actions and attitudes of millions of people from dozens of countries.
As if Thomas Crooks stood in for every native-born white man in this country.
But this false and reductive portrait is the foundation of most Republican immigration rhetoric. It’s impenetrable, too. You can’t argue with people who call other human beings “garbage.”
But you should see where this is leading.
Go back to the Republican National Convention earlier this month. You’ll see lots of people waving signs saying “Mass Deportation Now!”
They’re smiling, either indifferent to or delighted by the violence and oppression that the forced removal of tens of millions of people would require.
And make no mistake. This would rank with the worst atrocities in American history.
A purposefully irrational plan
Trump has gone on record saying he would use the military to round people up. He would build camps to detain them before deportation hearings. And even before the U.S. Supreme Court signaled they would meekly defer to Trump should he get a second term, he planned to use a 1798 law to send people out of the country without due process.
Critics have tended to focus on the cost or the impracticality of the scheme. They have noted it would strain the court system. They point out that deporting tens of millions of people would be an economic disaster.
All that is true. But it’s also irrelevant.
Because this plan is irrational. It is meant to hurt. No data point will stop a thug from beating up on people. No price tag or legal point will give pause to a bully gleefully shoving men and women onto a deportation bus. Cruelty justifies itself.
Do you think this is all inconsequential rhetoric? Well, one of Trump’s loudest supporters — our senior senator — calls “most” immigrants “garbage” and criminals.
That dehumanization is a critical first step to subjecting people to state terror.
And remember who would be targeted.
It’s people coming to America to help their families or find opportunities denied them at home. Like that Alabamian from Chiapas. Like my mother when she was 17. Poor people without access to cable news outlets.
So we face two futures. One involves men and women becoming part of our nation and living their lives in peace. The other involves violent expulsions, deportation camps and the destruction of the rule of law.
One of these threatens all of us. It’s the one Tuberville seems eager to create, on a foundation of dehumanizing language.
This column was originally published in Alabama Reflector, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
