EGN NEWS DESK
In at occasions exhaustive element, Blitzer chronicles the coverage sausage manufacturing unit in Washington, D.C., contrasting figures like Cecilia Muñoz, a former activist who reluctantly joins the Obama administration, with Trump’s most influential adviser on immigration, Stephen Miller, who “embraced the position of archvillain.”
Yet whilst Blitzer dramatizes these partisan battles and the results they’ve for folks’s lives — similar to when, in 1998, Muñoz and different organizers lobbied for “175,000 immigrant kids” to have their meals stamps restored — he exposes the deep continuities between Democratic and Republican administrations. The most ironclad is the fixation on the “deterrence” of unauthorized immigrants with more and more harsh penalties, expressed by methods with names like Consequence Delivery System, “prevention by means of deterrence” and the Criminal Consequence Initiative.
It stands to purpose that the extra determined the folks migrating, the harsher the deterrence that have to be inflicted. In apply, this boils all the way down to growing the hazard they face crossing the border illegally, the probability of detention if caught, and the issue of dwelling their lives afterward with out being deported. Some administer these insurance policies reluctantly, others with zeal.
Whereas beneath President Barack Obama, a proposal by immigration officers to separate mother and father from kids — a “painful” however “not deadly” deterrent — was dismissed as “inhumane,” the Trump administration, in its eagerness, fumbled the chaotic separation of 1000’s earlier than a nationwide outcry pressured a retreat. Blitzer quotes a autopsy convened by Miller: “We must be smarter if we wish to implement one thing on this scale once more.”
American coverage debates are sometimes notable for his or her parochialism, and so it’s maybe unsurprising that Blitzer makes solely passing point out of the experiences of the European Union, the place debates over asylum seekers, experiments with “humane” deterrence and eruptions of anti-immigrant populism predate the United States’. Australia’s island prisons for refugees, or South America’s comparatively tolerant and beneficiant methods, go unmentioned.
