Undocumented immigrants are our friends, our coworkers, our classmates, our neighbors. They run and operate businesses that not only keep communities thriving, but have revitalized entire cities that were at one time facing economic decimation due to an aging population. Nearly 6 million U.S. citizen children—tomorrow’s leaders, professionals, doctors, teachers, and innovators—have at least one undocumented immigrant parent. “Immigrants, with their hopes and energies,” Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple’s Steve Jobs, wrote last year, “should be seen not as threats but as blessings.”
But threats is what Donald Trump has made undocumented immigrants out to be. The fact is that because Trump’s mass deportation force tears at the very nucleus of our nation—families and communities—it tears at us all, no matter our legal status. And as a new editorial from the Salt Lake Tribune states, Trump doesn’t just pose a threat to immigrant families, as many of us already know: he also poses a threat to our very way of life.
It's how dictators operate.
Pick a relatively small, politically powerless group of people and portray them as objects of fear and derision. Then swoop in with the power of the state to arrest members of that disfavored group and reap the political benefits of protecting the state from the threat that you invented.
This is why the current administration's move to arrest and deport more people who are in the United States without proper documentation, but who have committed no other crime, is so troubling and so counter to what America should stand for.
Whether by design or default, this is a policy of divide and conquer, one that re-enforces irrational fears of The Other among many citizens while pushing members of immigrant communities further into a parallel world where contact with all government services — including legitimate law enforcement — comes to be feared and shunned.
This does not make anyone safer. It makes us all less safe, less able to move freely and do our business without looking over our shoulder.
from Daily Kos http://ift.tt/2rdXTMm
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