EDITORIAL: The new wretched of the Earth

By Armando Garcia

Undoubtedly, the immigration policy of President Donald J. Trump is one of the worst that the United States has had in recent years, due to the separation of families trying to seek refuge at the U.S. border with Mexico.

Most have arrived getting in line, knocking on the door at the U.S. Port of Entry and virtually the Custom and Border Enforcement authorities have told them that there is no space, or that they do not qualify for asylum, or simply retract them, making the border towns their living quarters for many people without a place to stay or live. The most unfortunate, they are arrested, they snatch their children placing them in what now are classified as concentration camps, while parents are prosecuted for accusing them of committing a crime, which is trying to enter the United States illegally.

Faced with this reality, difficult to make up, the administration of President Trump has the country experiencing a historical setback, this being a real threat to the world. The president has maintained, since the beginning of his government, a divide and conquer policy. Since everything he says he declares as true, even if it is false or badly grounded, and his insistence is so much that immigrants are a threat to the country, that a large part of the population ends up believing it.

At this rate, the thousands of immigrants of the XXI Century, who arrive at the border of the United States with Mexico, consider them the new condemned or wretched of the earth, relating it to what was published in 1961 by the Algerian writer Frantz Fanon. His book The Wretched of the Earth is referring to all those who execute orders blindly to the detriment of thousands of affected. Thus, the condemned of the earth implies the ontological meaning of "not being" or "being absolutely nobody in this world"; This concept is developed by Fanon in another book published in 1952 entitled Black Skin, White Masks, which is the negation of the negation of the black skinned person under a colonialist system. In short, colonization is the systematic negation of the other, a furious decision to deprive the other of all attributes of humanity.

If we land that concept to the 21st Century and the border between Mexico and the United States and literally took the words of President Donald J. Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions about how they express themselves of the Central American and Mexican immigrant who is arriving massively to the southern border, there is practically a historical similarity, since the expressions of the white-skinned, Anglo-Saxon majority, cursing the dark-skinned or brown-skinned immigrant, to the point that even John Kelly, the chief of staff of the White House, has labeled them as having no assimilation capacity to life in the American society.

And the last straw, Trump threatens to stop helping the countries where the immigrants come from, of course referring to Latin America, since the countries where migrants come from white skin, for him those are the good ones and those with dark or brown skin, they are the bad guys, the terrorists, the rapists, the looters, the criminals. The Trump Campaign to Make America Great again, now is now turning to make America White Again.

History repeats itself, one can see the images of thousands of children, in centers with cages, which are rather, concentration camps, compared only with those built by Hitler in the Second World War or in the United States, against the Japanese Americans. Or more recently, in the state of Arizona, when former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, had detained immigrants in inhumane places suffering under very high temperatures. Arpaio, is one of those pardoned by Trump.

Trump says that immigrants are infesting the United States. It is considering the workers who have contributed to the wealth of this nation, and of those future generations ready to build America, many of them are now arrested and prosecuted, virtually because the President consider them a pest.

Trump is acting openly as a racist, xenophobic, aiming to exterminate and eradicate all those of dark skin who try to step on American soil. Trump is the worst threat to American democracy. Directly runs a policy of ethnic cleansing in the country.

The country is divided over immigration issues; however, the reason is taking strength when articles appear in the most influential media in the country, attacking with force what the president is doing against the migrant population inside and outside the country. What has impacted is a recording where the voices and cries of children are heard asking to return to their parents, and they have no idea why their parents are not with them.

What bothers, apart from the racist statements of President Trump, are the almost zero or not enough reactions of the leaders of the nations where the in migrants who in recent days are arriving in large numbers at the border. History tells us that these masses of dispossessed, pariahs, proletarians, working people are an escape valve to the countries of the Americas, whose governments cannot, or do not want, or for lack of resources or mechanisms to protect and provide what is necessary to all those people who flee from the misery or violence that prevails in their countries.

The hunger when it squeezes a lot does not warn or ask who owns or where the food is, simply the necessity makes look for it, wherever the bread of every day is, for the welfare of all his/her family.