President Donald Trump’s eruption of executive orders includes a diktat titled “PROTECTING THE UNITED STATES FROM FOREIGN TERRORISTS AND OTHER NATIONAL SECURITY AND PUBLIC SAFETY THREATS.”
The purported idea is to toughen visa requirements, thus keeping out — or kicking out — “aliens who intend to commit terrorist attacks, threaten our national security, espouse hateful ideology, or otherwise exploit the immigration laws for malevolent purposes.”
The decree is yet another example of Trump pandering to his nativist base. It also reflects his longstanding xenophobia, and might be paving the way for a new Muslim ban.
“This directive lays the groundwork for another discriminatory policy that targets individuals from predominantly Muslim and Arab countries – essentially replicating the notorious 2017 Muslim Ban,” said the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “The government now has wider latitude to use ideological exclusion to deny visa requests and remove individuals who are already legally in the United States.”
According to the committee, whose motto is “Totally Arab, Fully American,” Trump’s order “goes a step further than its 2017 predecessor by adding language that opens the door to ideological exclusion by allowing the government to deny visas or entry based on perceived political opinions, religious beliefs, or cultural backgrounds.”
The order calls on authorities to “evaluate the adequacy of programs designed to ensure the proper assimilation of lawful immigrants into the United States, and recommend any additional measures to be taken that promote a unified American identity.” Those last four words should trigger alarm bells among those of us who treasure our multicultural, pluralistic democracy.
“Unified American identity” reminded me of University of Illinois historian Peter Fritzsche’s op-ed in Forward last summer. He pointed out that Adolf Hitler called for a “unified Reich” of non-Jewish “Aryan Germans,” who he said were the “true” Germans. Of course, “True” Germans were loyal Nazis – not communists, socialists, secular or sectarian liberals, trade unionists, anti-Nazi journalists, or even conservatives who rejected Hitler.
No sooner did Hitler take power in 1933 than he started tossing the opponents he didn’t have murdered into concentration camps. The Holocaust — the systematic murder of six million European Jews — followed.
From the start, Jews topped Hitler’s hate list. He described them as “parasitic vermin” who should be eradicated. “All great cultures of the past perished only because the original creative race died out from blood poisoning,” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf.
Trump denied that he had read Mein Kampf or was familiar with the history of Nazi Germany. But when he was on the campaign trail last year, the new president said undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” His hate list looked a lot like Hitler’s: “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” Trump said in a stump speech.
(Of course, Trump hasn’t read much history. Marxists and fascists were sworn enemies at opposite ends of the political spectrum.)
“Calling people ‘vermin’ was used effectively by Hitler and Mussolini to dehumanize people and encourage their followers to engage in violence,” New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat warned in an email to The Washington Post. “Trump is also using projection: note that he mentions all kinds of authoritarians — ‘communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left’ — to set himself up as the deliverer of freedom. Mussolini promised freedom to his people too and then declared dictatorship.”
Fritzsche wrote that “there’s a clear parallel” between Trump’s rhetoric and “the rhetoric that fueled the Nazis’ rise. They billed themselves as speaking for the Germans who felt they had been stabbed in the back during World War I by domestic criminals, including Marxists, profiteers, and Jews. Their vision was at once optimistic and conspiratorial; once the swamp was drained, new glories would emerge.”
If confronted about it, Trump would swear “Unified American Identity” had no connection with the Third Reich. But the phrase invites comparison to ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!
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