That Dog Whistle You Hear is Trump's Immigration Policy

When your president is a pathological liar and a racist, there is no shortage of things to write about.  Where to begin when talking about our nation's separation and incarceration of immigrant children?

First, let's talk about what dog-whistle politics are, to wit:

Dog-whistle politics is political messaging employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has an additional, different, or more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup. The phrase is often used as a pejorative due to a perception of deceptive intent in the speaker thought to be making use of such messaging. The analogy is to a dog whistle, whose ultrasonic whistling sound is heard by dogs but inaudible to humans.


I disagree with the phrase "perception of deceptive intent."  There IS deceptive intent in dog whistle politics.

Second, let me get some things off my chest.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen -- ye of the name that isn't even really "American" in the Trumpian sense of the word -- before you make the specious claim that forcibly separating children from their parents isn't child abuse, let's separate children from YOUR family from their parents, put them in a room with videos, meals, etc., and see how well they do.  You can watch on closed circuit TV, which is more than what you've offered the parents of these immigrant children.

President Trump, you wouldn't know the truth if it took the form of a porn star's silicone tit and happily slapped you in the face.  You blaming the Democrats for your child separation kidnapping policy is a lie.  And don't think we don't hear the dog whistle in your immigration policy when you say "the United States will not be a migrant camp and will not be a refugee holding facility."  Dude, the United States started out as a migrant camp.  The migrants were called pilgrims.   They founded this country on the principles of white supremacy, rape and genocide of indigenous people, enslavement of black people, and theft of land.  The difference now is that the migrants coming in are not the color you prefer, since you clearly prefer Scandinavian (read: white) immigrants.  That dog whistle in your immigration policy is getting louder and louder.

Chief of Staff John Kelly, you're just Beelzebub, plain and simple.  You were the architect of the Muslim ban, you supported child separation as an immigration deterrent.  I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.

RepubliKlans, your party will be held responsible by the majority of voters, who did not vote for Trump, for this and all his other egregious, racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic acts.  Unless your last name was Bush, McCain, Corker, Kasich, Flake, or Collins, you pretty much co-signed the President's entire agenda or stood silently and watched evil rule.  You will pay, and history will mark where you stood.  That means YOU, Chris "Sell Out and Suck It" Christie, Rudy "Emily Latella" Giuliani, and Mitt "I Can Be Bought With A Cabinet Post" Romney.  Don't act like you didn't hear Trump's dog whistles early in his campaign.

Now for some immigration truths AND some American truths.

President Trump has been gunning for brown people from south of the border since Day 1 of his campaign, calling them rapists and murderers, maligning Judge Curiale for being of Mexican descent, saying we were going to make our sovereign neighbors to the south pay for a border wall like some white bully nation, and now telling Japan's President Abe he'd ship 25 million Mexicans to Japan and he [Abe] would be out of office really soon.  I hear that dog whistle . . . .

America's immigration problem isn't a border problem -- it's a policy problem.  If we were really serious about our immigration laws and policies, we'd track people who come in legally and make sure they leave when their visas expire.  We don't.  Forty percent of illegal immigrants came here legally and illegally overstayed their visas.  We don't know where the fuck they are.  But if they had the money and resources to get a visa, they're probably the kind of illegal immigrants Trump wants (read: white or Asian), not poor brown people trying to get to a land that was once inhabited by their indigenous ancestors before whites first arrived on these shores with their slave cargo.  I hear that dog whistle . . .

And, as a Californian, I call out the height of hypocritical racist dog whistle politics in the Golden State that is our Central Valley -- which is disproportionately agricultural and dependent on the labor of undocumented brown workers from south of the border -- whose residents voted overwhelming for Trump.  WTF?  I guess they will need to have crops rot in the field until they realize how stupid their vote was.  I hear their dog whistle, too . . . .

If you think President Trump's immigration policies toward brown people from south of the border is solely about immigration, you are politically deaf to the RepublKlans' dog whistle immigration politics.  When they talk about merit-based immigration, that's a dog whistle.  When they talk about ending so-called "chain migration," that's a dog whistle.  When they talk about ending the visa lottery system because it lets in people from so-called "shithole countries," that's a dog whistle.  We've been here before, America, with the Chinese Exclusion Act, which unabashedly excluded Chinese from immigrating to American from 1882 to 1943, one of the only immigration laws with the express purpose of excluding an entire race of people.  They didn't even have to do a dog whistle back then.  They used a bull horn.  Now they can't.

Oh, and don't forget the dog whistle of all Trump immigration dog whistles -- the Muslim bans, also aimed at brown and black people who aren't Christian or primarily white.

America, if we are silent, we are complicit.  Is this who we really are -- a nation that separates children from their parents because their point of entry was on our southern border instead of our northern border?

History will mark where we stood, America.  Those dog whistles will reverberate long into the future.