America first

The world was misled not only by the American pollsters but also by the fiction that the world has come to regard as a fact — the American values. The most cherished of these so-called values for Americans is said to be equality, egalitarianism along with openness and honesty.There is, however, no mention of bigotry, racism, misogyny, intolerance, profanity and religious discrimination in this long list of self-proclaimed American values. That is why perhaps the world thought the US voters would reject the man who had made liberal use of these negatives while campaigning for the US presidency. He had turned the campaign into a dirty mud-slinging match. And he is said to have indulged liberally in misstatements.

On an analytical note, Trump’s victory demonstrates that the worldwide economic consensus (Washington Consensus) of the past several decades that prosperity is only advanced by globalisation has been rejected by those it left behind. This has given rise to enormous uncertainties about how countries around the world would adjust to an increasingly closed global economy, if Trump were to actually carried out the threats he has held out during the campaign. For example, the Mexican peso took a serious tumble immediately following Trump’s victory because Mexico’s economy is excessively reliant on its trade relations with the United States.

Trump blames China, Mexico and many other such countries for the United States’ woes and, as president, plans to curtail trade that is a major source of these countries’ economies. His aggressive rhetoric against China on the campaign trail has been well publicised the world over. He has hinted that he would slap heavy duties on imports from China so as to promote domestic manufacturing which went abroad looking for cheap labour and economically priced utilities.

It is not only the white Americans that have been left behind by globalisation; many developing countries like Pakistan have also been adversely affected by the breaking down of barriers against free flow of finances across borders and import liberalisation dictated by WTO regulations. However, some of these countries have made good part of their associated losses by the opening up of the rich markets of the US, Europe, Australia and Canada for manpower imports thanks to their liberal immigration policies.

Donald Trump has threatened to tighten his country’s laws governing immigration ostensibly to make it impossible for outsiders to ‘steal’ jobs from local whites. In the case of Mexico he has talked of building a wall on the border and sending the bill to Mexico City. He has also threatened to monitor American Muslims while at the same time to strictly sift the new Muslim arrivals.

Trump condemns the global elite for promoting “open borders,” which supposedly allow immigrants to take jobs away from US workers and drive down their living standards. Trump has been quite specific about which groups pose the greatest danger. He has accused Mexicans of bringing crime, drugs, and rape to America and Muslim immigrants of favouring attacks by people that believe only in jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life — a stark truth that the Obama administration has supposedly ignored.

While it will take some time for Trump to redesign the global business model to shift it from the one dictated by globalisation to the one that would be based on the principle of ‘America first’, his proposed plans on immigration and Muslims need to be taken seriously and urgently because the American history is replete with such restrictions.

For most of US history, ‘Americans’ meant only citizens of European heritage. In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act — the first law in US history to bar members of a specific nationality from entering the country. In 1915, Ku Klux Klan which used terror to try to stop black men and women from exercising their newly won freedom launched the second iteration of the group. It was, however, smashed in due course of time like the one launched in the late 19th century. During World War II the federal government had forced relocation of some 112,000 Japanese Americans, most of whom were U.S. citizens. Their primary motivation echoes the threat that Trump sees coming from Muslim nations today.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 12^th, 2016.

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