Can't Find the Words

It is becoming increasingly hard to write anything as the current administration continues (and accelerates?) its destructive ways. It's unusual for a day to go by without a barrage of outrages that, in a more typical time period, would have warranted its own post, then a chance to breathe for a while, and then something else would happen. But in just the past couple of days, we've had:

• The announcement that people serving our country overseas, whether in the military, foreign service, or other ways, will have to apply for citizenship for their children born overseas. You know, like John McCain, who was born Panama because his father was in the military. The administration has been unclear on how this policy will roll out exactly and I'm still not sure on the details, but I suspect in the end it will allow the white people serving the government to get by completely or easily and the people of color to jump through major hoops or be excluded from citizenship altogether.
• The announcement that people whose immigration status has been stayed so they can receive live-saving medical treatments will all be deported in about a month. This story crystallizes in the case of Maria Bueso, who was invited to the U.S. as a 7-year-old to participate in a trial treatment of her rare genetic disorder that kills everyone who has it by age 20. Because she was part of the trial, doctors have found a treatment for the condition, and she continues to be treated with the IV medication weekly, but it's not available in her home country, Guatemala. Her family pays for the treatments. Now 24, she has graduated from college, where she was a student leader and disability activist. Her doctors say this is a death sentence. There are only a thousand applicants for the health deferment each year, so we're not talking about a flood of people. The rule also eliminates other flexibilities that have allowed widowed green-card-holders to stay in the U.S. when their citizen spouse has died, or crime victims who have helped police with investigations. More examples are in this New York Times story.
• The announcement that the administration wants to detain children and families indefinitely, in complete violation of the Flores ruling. And to fund it by taking already-appropriated money willy-nilly from other budgets.
• The news that Mulligan told aides to break the law to get the wall built, such as seizing land from its owners, and that he would pardon them if they were charged with crimes.
• The fact that Mulligan's half-hearted nod toward gun-law changes after the El Paso and Dayton mass killings appears to have been quashed by a call from the NRA.
• The announcement that the administration wants to start DNA-testing every undocumented immigrant in government custody to build a database, a practice that has previously been declared illegal. Remember, crossing the border without documentation is a misdemeanor, not a felony.
• The EPA roll-back of methane limits, which the major natural gas producers don't even want to have happen and which will save almost no money even for the small gas producers who favor it. On my local newspaper's page covering this story, there's a large sidebar giving "a look at other climate-related rollbacks" that have already happened: freezing vehicle fuel-efficiency standards, eliminating the Clean Power Plan, promoting drilling on public lands, helping off-shore drillers, weakening the Endangered Species Act, and of course leaving the Paris climate agreement. And that's not mentioning the rafts of smaller regulatory decisions that have been made that we aren't hearing about, of course. Methane has up to 30 times (30 times!) more greenhouse effect than CO2, though its effects last for "only" about 10 years, unlike C02, which lasts for more than 100 years. 
• And I know I'm forgetting another bunch of things because I couldn't make myself think about any of this yesterday and now it has gone down the news hole.

All of this is in the context of the Brazilian rainforest being burned, the northern tundra still burning, and a couple of hurricanes bearing down in the Atlantic. All of these immigration restrictions (and the drownings of refugees in the Mediterranean as well) are related to the climate crisis and fear of the future it brings.

An old Gary Larson cartoon comes to mind:


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Well... one thing to add to all of the anti-immigrant stuff: Jennifer Mendelsohn, creator of #ResistanceGeneaology, has finished her research on Ken Cuccinelli's family roots and found that, like almost of us descended from immigrants, his forebears were not the perfect immigrants Cuccinelli insists upon today. The part of his family that ended up doing the best after arriving wasn't speaking English after they'd been in-country for four years, for instance. Others were stamped "Special Inquiry" at Ellis Island with LPC after their names (which stood for Likely Public Charge... ironically). His LPC great-grandmother birthed eight kids and, like manypeople, she and her family had their home foreclosed upon in the Great Depression. They came out of it, though, as families do over time. Which is the story of immigration, and why Cuccinelli's brand of pulling up the ladder behind him irks me so much. Mendelsohn ends with this:

...about twenty years after Ken Cuccinelli’s family arrived from Italy and began their ascent up the ladder of the American dream..., Congress enacted the infamous Johnson-Reed Act, which set up quotas specifically designed to keep out people just like them. The number of Italians arriving in America dropped from 200,000 a year in the first decade of the twentieth century to under 4,000.

As Cuccinelli’s own career makes clear, the critics were dead wrong about the potential contributions of humble immigrants like his ancestors. And so is he.