Death to America?

[TOC: all blog posts]

This week, Iranians were in the streets demonstrating again. These crowds weren’t protesting the current regime but celebrating the 47th year of the Iranian revolution, when the Shah was deposed and a religious Supreme Leader ascended to political dominance. The loyalists chanted the old phrase “Death to America!”

This chant may not be a wish for the physical death of us Americans, but I suspect it is for some Iranians—if they are like us. Americans, after all, have tended to vilify countries and their citizens to the extent that we are willing to blow them out of the water on unsubstantiated suspicions that they are involved in supplying our demand for illegal substances.

Our slogan might be more like “Death to the foreigners!” We claim that they are ruining us. We root them out of our midst. We put them in holding tanks, sometimes failing to provide critical health care, until we can dispose of them. Sometimes they die in our “care.”

Some of our foreigners have been good neighbors. And their neighbors appreciate them enough to contest their seizure. Some of these neighbors have been killed for protesting. Our regime says loudly, “They were internal terrorists!” The Iranian regime says much the same (in Farsi) about anti-regime protesters in Tehran.

It turns out that our undocumented immigrants are not a threat and not a financial drain. Anyone who knows some of them could have told you this, and the statistics bear it out. They have lower crime rates than the rest of our populace. They pay far more in taxes and by boosting our economy than they cost us in accommodating them.

Many immigrants serve in health care, helping to keep us alive and well. So keeping them out is detrimental to our health. We senior citizens make up 19% of the U.S. population, but account for 40% of health care costs. Old age has its effect, and I am now at higher risk than I was as a young buck. I’d kinda like to have someone to take care of me if I need it.

One economist calculates, based on a study of immigration and health care, that deporting a million immigrants a year (Stephen Miller’s goal) will result in an additional 15,000 deaths per year. So, while Iranians chant “Death to America,” our own administration is actually delivering death to Americans.

Foreign

When we heard on Wednesday, March 11, that the president was consulting with Stephen Miller prior to his national address, I wondered why. We soon found out.

In the address he blamed foreigners for our problems. In the first sentence the president pointed out that the virus originated in China. He then referred to it as "a foreign virus." He then boasted about restricting travel to the US from China, which, despite his assertions to the contrary, was in keeping with the advice of his advisers (and, by the way, seems to have been a good move).

By the middle of the speech we learned that he was suspending travel from Europe. This action was taken without advice from his experts, other than Miller apparently, and without informing the affected countries, most of whom have been important allies. As with many of his policies, the primary purpose seems to capitalize on an innate fear of others and propose that, if it weren't for THOSE people, we would be safe.

This is nothing new. In 2014, Trump was sewing panic about Ebola. He proposed a travel ban then too, in spite of nearly all health experts advising against it. If he had gotten his way, many would not have been able to go to Liberia, Sierra Leone, or Guinea to help with the crisis. Or, to be more specific, we would have been banned from returning to our families. Fortunately, the administration at that time heeded expert advice.

Of course, in the current crisis, when experts were saying we need to take it very seriously, our president was saying that his China travel ban was a cure-all and there was nothing to worry about. "Do not panic!" is good advice. But the hypocrisy of such advice from someone who did everything in his ability to get people to panic a few years earlier is a hard pill to swallow.

Now, instead of apologizing for disbanding the epidemic teams in the NSC and DHS and for initially downplaying COVID-19, Trump has characteristically chosen to deflect blame to other countries. And of course he couldn't resist comparing our response to that of European countries, concluding that we are much better than they are. This is false, senseless, and divisive, but it is precisely what we have come to expect.

There is an exception to the European travel stoppage. Travelers from the UK are still welcome.* Why? Well, the only answer seems to be that, because Boris Johnson is almost as xenophobic as Trump and has withdrawn from that European Union, no harm can come from his country. Of course, people from the EU can travel to the UK and then to the US, just as travelers from China used connecting flights to get to the US. But the UK exception is in line with Miller's strategy: let's emphasize that this is not about safety from the virus; this is about safety from foreigners who don't share our prejudices.

As it turns out, Miller's ever-toxic advice may have backfired. On Thursday, the stock market stopped dropping only when it was automatically halted because it plunged too far too fast. One can only hope that Wormtongue will lose some of his influence. But I won't hold my breath.

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*March 14: Today the UK and Ireland were added to the list of countries from which travel is restricted. This may in part be due to the UK's controversial strategy of encouraging infection among its lower-risk members of the population.