RAISE me up…
Early in February 2017, the administration of Donald Trump introduced the Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment (RAISE) Act.
Americans of every political hue love their acronyms…
This was one of Trump’s earliest efforts to begin the “re-whitification” of the USA, by clamping-down on what is known as “chain migration”.
This is when members of a family attempt to join other members who have already successfully entered the USA.
A typical instance of this might be a male Syrian refugee who has successfully applied for asylum, and hopes to be joined by his family, who had been awaiting word back home regarding the likelihood of success if they, too, were to undertake the same hazardous journey.
The RAISE Act was intended to make such chain migration much more difficult, not least through instructing immigration officials to favor English-speaking applicants with money, education, and a high skill level.
While many would suspect that this act was explicitly designed to encourage the immigration of “white” people from places like the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa (not to mention Scandinavia and Germany where most inhabitants have a superb grasp of English), we can of course not prove such a motivation.
Considering that the modern GOP is largely comprised of habitual gaslighters, there is no point in putting the question to them and expecting an honest answer, either.
What this writer is more interested in, is the statement put out at the time by the co-sponsors of the RAISE Act, senators David Perdue and Tom Cotton of Georgia and Arkansas, respectively.
In this statement, we find the following passage:
The majority of [chain] immigrants are “either low-skilled or unskilled” and “threaten to create a near permanent underclass for whom the American Dream is just out of reach.”
I hope my gentle readers will read the foregoing passage more than once, in order to gain a full appreciation of what is being said here.
The GOP and GOP-adjacent types (like Libertarians) never cease in telling us that the USA, above all other places on earth, is the land of rugged individualism. A place where anyone from any background with enough “gumption” and “get-up-and-go” can succeed.
Yet here we are being told straight-up that a lack of skills (aka education) might just consign a person to membership in “a near permanent underclass for whom the American Dream is just out of reach”.
But, but, bootstraps. What about bootstraps?
Are the GOP actually openly suggesting that a certain amount of money and education might be necessary for lifting people out of poverty?
How are these then the very same people who made Betsy DeVos secretary of education in 2017?
A woman utterly dedicated to funnelling taxpayer dollars away from public education and into private schools?
To this point the Perdues and Cottons of this world might well reply “Hell, yeah. Go Betsy! The US taxpayer doesn’t owe anybody a full, decent education. The taxes we give to private schools are just a little top-up, a tiny reward for all that private sector bootstrapping. Make the American underclasses and penniless immigrants do unskilled sub-minimum wage work as long as it takes to pay for their own damn education. Bootstraps, dammit!“.
But wait. Didn’t they just say that unskilled workers are trapped in “a near permanent underclass for whom the American Dream is just out of reach”?
Yes, they did. And maybe, for once in their life, these GOP senators are speaking the truth.
It IS rather hard, if not damn nigh impossible, to become a full-time plumber’s apprentice or attend college while working double shifts at Walmart and McDonald’s…
*****
Donald Trump‘s running mate, J. D. Vance, is of course the shining “exemplar”, who claims to have led the way in showing how to escape trans-generational poverty.
His “super-bootstrapping” secret? A taxpayer-funded government education hand-out. Which he got by joining the US Marines (a group also taxpayer funded, lest we forget).
Vance still hasn’t realised (or maybe he has?) that he’s a little pawn in a game being played by billionaires.
Betsy DeVos, by the way, is the daughter of a billionaire industrialist. Over the course of thirteen years, her brother Erik Prince received over 2 billion! in government security contracts as the founder of Blackwater, a private military contractor involved in massacres in Iraq and more recent arms trafficking violations.
J. D. Vance spent his own “war” in Iraq as a writer, presumably working-out and flexing his authorly muscles for his early Magnum opus, the execrable and fake Hillbilly “memoir” which would propel him into the public consciousness (and into a senate seat).
The money splashed on Vance by Libertarian technocracy “bros” like Peter Thiel would make anyone with a moderately functioning brain suspect that Vance had been being groomed for office over many, many years, and his “Hillbilly” schtick was just part of a much larger ground plan being laid by anti-democratic forces in the USA.
But let’s set all of this aside for now, and make one thing 100% clear.
The party of Trump, Vance, Perdue, and Cotton knows the truth. In the middle of trying to justify anti-poor and racist immigration policy, they were forced to accidentally speak this truth.
Trangenerational poverty is real.
They said so themselves.
The “American Dream” can remain forever “just out of reach” for many people.
They said so themselves.
It is lack of skills and a decent education which are most likely to consign people to inescapable poverty.
They said so themselves.
In their efforts to portray “certain” immigrants as dwellers on the nightmare fringe of The American Dream, in their efforts to portray “certain” immigrants as members of an unwelcome, permanent underclass, they inadvertently admitted to the real reasons for DOMESTIC poverty.
African-American poverty. Latino poverty. Appalachian poverty.
Black, Brown, and White poverty.
Use their own words against them.
Our transgenerationally poor brothers and sisters come in all colors, and are <almost> all equally despised by the ultra-wealthy.
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