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surajpatelnyc on Instagram: "If you’re older than 25, you’re older than ICE.And that’s precisely why refusing to abolish it is actually the extreme position.For…"
If you’re older than 25, you’re older than ICE.And that’s precisely why refusing to abolish it is actually the extreme position.For most of American history, we did not have immigration enforcement as we know it today. From roughly 1800 to 1924, the United States operated with what was effectively an open-border system. There were no visas, no green cards, no deportation force. If you arrived, you were generally allowed to stay — and in time, you became American.Then came a familiar chain of events.A global Spanish Flu pandemic swept the world in 1918. Supply chains were snarled. Inflation surged. Economic anxiety spread. And political leaders, facing fear and instability, went looking for someone to blame.Inflation rises. Housing tightens. Supply chains strain. And once more, immigrants are blamed for economic forces they did not cause. Fear hardens into grievance. Scarcity becomes political currency. And the instinctive response is to close off rather than invest forward.The scapegoat was immigrants. Isolationism surged and America elected the most scandal-plagued president in its history — well, until now. So, in 1924, Congress passed the Immigration Act — effectively shutting down immigration through national-origin quotas designed explicitly to preserve the country’s existing ethnic makeup. In fact, so awful was this law that the drafters wrote its racism into the Congressional Record: “The purpose of this act is to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity.” It’s radical, it’s disgusting, and frankly it’s Stephen Miller and Donald Trump’s explicit position. They consider it an intellectual underpinning but really, it’s just simply racist. After 1924, legal immigration collapsed almost overnight. Paired with tariffs and protectionism, those policies did not protect American workers. They deepened and prolonged the Great Depression, destabilized democracies abroad, and helped create the political conditions that ultimately led to World War II.If that story feels eerily familiar, it should. And we are living through the same dumb mistakes again. Closed borders did not save the economy. They helped break it.[cont. in comments]
![Not unrelatedly, I am noticing that a lot of--oftentimes even well-intentioned--people are spending time trying to delineate exactly which historical referent best captures what's going on now, as if we have to pick only one. There is the now well-circulated meme that says: no, ICE isn't the Gestapo, it's actually American--it's slave catchers. But this is a kind of odd distinction: the Nazis were themselves influenced by the Americans (if you're curious read the excellent book by James Whitman, _Hitler's American Model_). Nazis came here and studied American legal systems and statutes ... and remarkably a group of "liberal" Nazis decided that they couldn't make German laws as *extreme* as American ones (and this "liberal" group in fact won the day; German laws weren't as extreme as many of ours). Equally, Nazi jurists and theorists like Carl Schmitt were deeply influenced by American notions of manifest destiny. So the Nazi and American contexts were already fused. The idea of foreign/domestic is already quite complex in this context. (And this is before we even speak of the many actual Nazis that existed here and the many people who materially supported Hitler and the regime).
We can complicate this picture more by noting that Nazism itself, even apart from these American influences, wasn't something that sprouted up out of thin air: it, too, had a(n experimental) history. Many of its barbaric practices and aims were developed and tested on colonial and imperial victims (as I have written elsewhere: there is a direct line from Shark Island concentration camp [called frequently simply "Death Island" where the Germans committed genocide against the Herero and Nama people] to the entire Nazi camp system). Thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire drew our attention to this already in the middle of the last century.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ybkylffhwhn2an2ic2lxh76k/bafkreifucubotcz54scclzmnpxlnv6x5olf2zb6ow5xufzdyqbflhuzcn4)
