There is much 45 seems not to understand about immigration, particularly coming across the southern border. No wonder; schooled by Fox News, he hasn’t been able to familiarize himself with the current immigration laws he wants to transform. Further, surrounded by sycophants who can’t say no, he has no counters to his megalomania. Trump’s world is uniquely myopic, spun from the threads of his imagination, his gi-normous ego, propaganda from conservative disinformation factories and hemmed in by his own prejudices. It seems he believes his own oft repeated lies.

Trump’s tirade aimed at Kristen Nielsen, Homeland Security head, for not shutting down the border aptly illustrates the point. What does shutting down a border mean? Is the CelebrityPresident’s wall a Berlin Wall where people are shot coming into the country rather than trying to escape?

Clearly, 45’s objective is zero immigration of black and brown people from across the globe; they are just not the kind of people Trump and his cronies want to associate with. And while the RealityTVPresident is busily breaking international treaties and withdrawing from traditional US obligations, he has not yet negated our international obligations to extend asylum to those seeking refuge from persecution. A funny thing happened on the way through the administration’s rhetoric; asylum seekers were transformed into illegals as easily as immigrants were transformed into rapists and drug dealers. Immigrants coming as part of the annual caravan from Central America so recently made infamous by Fox and Friends plan to enter at border crossings and surrender to border agents, requesting asylum from threats in their native countries; primarily gangs and drug dealers in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. They are literally running for their lives.

Taking advantage of the hateful rhetoric rippling through the Trump cheerleading mediasphere, Jeff Sessions over at the Department of Justice announced stepped up exclusionary efforts by essentially creating his own legislation. He has discovered that while a Senator, he could only propose anti-immigrant legislation as he did long before Trump seized power. Now from the Justice Department, he has only to declare an action is the law of the land, even when it isn’t. There, the little leprechaun is a far more powerful creator of an all white America, at least until the courts try to beat him back. Still, implementation is the key in this game; courts cannot enforce their rulings without the long arm of the law held tightly in Sessions’ own hands. Thus Jefferson Beauregard has decreed that immigrants entering the US, and by this he means those seeking asylum, will be imprisoned and more importantly, children will be separated from parents or parent, as many asylum seekers are vulnerable women with their children. They have broken no laws; why should they be imprisoned?

The DOJ has begun appointing a whole slew of new immigration judges and moved some closer to the border. They have streamlined the hiring process for judges and added a new electronic filing system to facilitate video teleconferencing that allow cases to be heard from around the country, not just the specific jurisdiction of one court. To date, only 76 asylum petitions have been granted this year. The judges are under orders to put these cases on a rapid assembly line. The vast majority of petitioners in immigration courts have no attorney; that includes children of all ages even toddlers who have no court appointed guardian or even an adult accompanying them. The judge asks a couple of questions, answered with the kind of little exposition elementary school aged children can muster and five minutes later the judge rejects the petition and the child is on their own on the other side of the border.

Sessions hopes that word will spread of parent-child separations as part of an intimidation campaign to discourage further asylum seekers and immigration. As an added bonus, his expansion of detention centers is a boon for his prison corporation friends as well as a barrier to representation for immigrants seeking adjudication of claims. His rapid-fire approach is designed to process and deport as many individuals as possible before any challenge makes its way through the federal court system to SCOTUS. They’re anticipating, fingers crossed, that the court will already be transformed by the appointment of another conservative jurist to support the wealth based racist agenda of the conservative right.

In a related action, Sessions announced that he was ending the practice of “administrative closure” of immigration cases where cases are removed from a judge’s docket and the decision about deportation is delayed. Sessions is moving to open up what he sees as roadblocks in his deportation assembly line. These over 215,000 cases closed between October 2011 and September 2017 would create a massive overload in already crowded immigration courts if reopened, so the logistics remain to be worked out. But Sessions has said that DHS could request specific cases to be placed on court calendars allowing them to target specific individuals. The Attorney General is steadily chipping away at Constitutional guarantees of due process. He sees no contradiction in the nation’s highest justice official denying due process to immigrants; he steadfastly believes that that is white privilege to which immigrants (and people with brown and black skin) are not entitled. It’s the natural ruminations of a white supremacist.

John Kelly added his brush strokes to 45’s anti-immigrant canvas by denying the humanity of the women and children seeking asylum when he, in an interview, informed bleeding hearts that separating children from their parents in a foreign land where they don’t speak or understand the language isn’t so bad. The children will be taken care of in foster homes or “elsewhere”. The foster care system is, of course, renowned for its generosity of spirit, not tales of sexual assaults, abuse, neglect and negligence. The children’s futures are uncertain; how long will they be here, when will they be reunited with their parent(s) and what country will become their home? It is the kind of childhood trauma that can scar children for the rest of their lives, destroying their potential to contribute to the well-being of any country.

“not more than 4th or 5th grade education, they don’t speak English, they’re from rural areas”

But according to the honorable General Kelly, grandson of Irish and Italian immigrants, this wave of newcomers are just not the type of people who can assimilate into the US; they don’t have more than a 4th or 5th grade education, they don’t speak English and they’re from rural areas. Kelly, now part of the country’s elite, is echoing the same remarks that were said about his grandfather’s compatriots. . . and look how well they’ve done. One of his grandfathers was an unskilled illiterate non-English speaking cart driver and his grandmother sold fruit from a cart. Could the difference in expectation lie in the color of their skin? Kelly isn’t old enough to remember when the Irish were considered another race, scum of the British Isles, and definitely not white. They weren’t included in the white race until WASPs needed political allies to counter large waves of olive-skinned peoples from the Mediterranean, like Italians, and Eastern Europeans (both now folded into the white race as well). This is yet another example that Kelly’s education was more military strategy, than the true march of American history or even his own family history.

Kirsten, as Homeland Secretary, is doing her bit in the whitification of the American landscape through the corollary initiative to expel immigrants who have been here for decades under the Temporary Protected Status program, which offered refuge with green cards to those fleeing natural disasters, providing the ability to work here. To date, Homeland has ended protected status for 50,000 Haitians, 57,000 Hondurans, 2500 Nicaraguans, and El Salvadorans for a total of 300,000 people, not including their American children. The consequences go far beyond the mournful separation of children born here from expelled parents in the TPS program and the loss to employers of current long standing workers. The return of massive numbers of Haitians who will need housing and jobs will only serve to spread misery in a country that has recovered only minimally from the earthquake in 2010. All of the Central American countries have governments that will have difficulty responding to such a large influx of returnees which could easily destabilize them.

One group, Cuban immigrants, have continued to be favored by an asylum policy that accepts any Cuban who makes it to shore and remain safe from immigrant purges. Could it be they are generally conservatives who integrate well into the GOP fold and they identify as white, as many others consider them to be? They vote and the party panders to that voting block in Florida. They need no visas, no passports, no identification documents. They step on land and are immediately eligible for government benefits and green cards. All the things that the GOP  wants to deny everyone else. Outside of their party fidelity, there is no reason for such special treatment. While Cuba remains a dictatorship with human rights violations, it is not unlike many allies ruled by dictators so admired by Trump himself. Conditions there are far superior to those in many other Caribbean, Central and South American countries.

The bottom line is that the assault under the CelebrityPresident’s administration on innocent individuals seeking their very survival is both inequitable and despicable. The president who has dismissed concern for human rights on the international level is bringing that same disregard home. Some individuals who were denied asylum have already been deported home to then be murdered; the fate of others remains unknown.

Guided by the North Star of intense partisanship, the Republican Party has consistently focused on short term retention of power. It would seem they have no long range vision for the country other than the establishment of a cozy oligarchy. But there may be some Koch supported intellectuals who are connecting the dots to craft a new economic future. Because immigration has been the main factor increasing the workforce for several decades, deportations and immigration restrictions are trimming the labor force, opening up more jobs for the dispossessed. In addition, lots of Baby Boomers are leaving the labor market as well, although many are working to a later age because of inadequate retirement savings. Already, unemployment has fallen below 4% (where it stood at the start of the administration) and employers are reaching out to hitherto undesirables like former prisoners and even forgiving positive marijuana tests or foregoing drug testing together. One unexplained quirk is that tightening of the labor market has not led to significant increases in wages, which according to classical economic theory, it should.

There may be something about the configuration of a primarily service economy with a substantial number of part time and contracted workers that defies traditional economic expectation. While many jobs being vacated are low wage jobs that whites lost interest in a long time ago, automation and increases in productivity can be anticipated to eliminate lots of them. Think robot mediated chicken processing or automated vegetable and fruit picking, not yet in the pipeline, but it could be. There’s already a robot that makes pizzas. In the interim, more people will transition into service jobs and the gig economy as mini entrepreneurs. As manufacturing has become increasingly automated, some manufacturing is venturing into 3D printing with new cheaper materials and fewer laborers. And then there are looming driverless vehicles, that can transform trucking, mass transit and individual transportation. What will become of the hundreds of thousands of truck drivers?

The newly released report that the US birth rate fell significantly more last year than in previous years highlights another aspect of a shrinking labor force. Some conservative Republicans have been aware of this. To their mind, the wrong people are having babies, leading to the prediction that whites, outnumbered by brown and black people, will be a minority in the US by 2050. Paul Ryan, for one, commented that the new tax codes’ deductions and tax credits were structured particularly to encourage the growth of families with children. We would have to infer that this is aimed at middle class white families, not poorer families of color. Currently, Hispanics have the highest fecundity, meaning reproductive rates, in the country.

The conservative Christians are doing their bit as well, in efforts to alter federal policies toward contraception, sex education and abortion services. HHS has eliminated funding for sex education and contraceptive counseling programs and peppered official government websites with misinformation about the use of specific contraceptive methods and abortion, in every case contrary to the best scientific evidence. The websites have elevated the religious belief that “life begins at conception”, first advanced as political fiction to coalesce a conservative movement of “Christian values” against abortion, into a false proposition without scientific merit.

The most recent move from the forced childbirth (so called anti-abortion) movement is an announcement that Title X funded programs would lose funding if providers discussed the option of abortion or referred women to abortion services. They have reached right down into the provider-patient relationship to stifle legitimate discussion of medical issues about what is after all, a recognized legal medical procedure like cardiac bypass or hip replacement. In this, it is no different from the administration’s overall campaign to advance false narratives and misinformation into every facet of our lives. These nattering nabobs of negativity have seized not only our bedrooms, but now our doctor’s offices with their bizarre religious rituals. What happened to separation of church and state?

The end result will be an increase in the number of unintended and teen pregnancies, both at an all time low and an increase the number of cases of sexually transmitted diseases, now already on the rise. In a cruel twist of fate, it will be those with limited access to health care, often people of color, who will be having these babies, in the long run, worsening the racial demographic shift. Of course, there is the unintended benefit of increasing the number of children with drug addicted mothers as the opioid epidemic rages without effective redress. These are women who are likely to engage in unprotected sex for drugs and less likely to use long-acting contraceptives that work on autopilot without conscious effort from women too high to care.

One other aspect to downsizing the workforce is the resulting loss of taxation to support Social Security; fewer workers contributing and more workers withdrawing is an untenable recipe for bust. Certainly, the stalwart Scrooges of the Republican Party have this well in hand; first transfer a bonanza to the wealthy through gi-normous tax cuts that create a gi-normous federal deficit which argues for severe cuts in benefits and safety net programs. First, it’s work restrictions on Medicaid and SNAP, with Social Security just around the midterm elections corner. Privatization schemes will abound, forcing retirees to watch part of their benefits melt away into a dizzying array of schemes presented in complex language designed to confuse rather than enlighten. That doesn’t include the chunks taken up with fees profiting the financial institutions involved. Clearly those agents demonstrated their lack of concern for consumers while minimally restrained by past regulatory oversight; the sky would seem to be the limit when any semblance of regulation is stripped away.

Thus, with a 50% decrease in sanctioned immigration, expanded deportation, refusal to  grant asylum, zero immigration across the southern border, low US birth rates, automation, increased productivity and a retiring Baby Boomer population, the economy of the future can continue to maintain the facade of full employment while groups sloughed into the fringes muddle along as best they can. All the while, the billionaire titans of industry guffaw at their growing “good fortune”. Wow what a fantastic idea!!