Why immigrants should support Trump

An invading and war-waging president is worse for immigrants in US than a bad-mouthing war averse one

Statistically speaking, driving is more dangerous than flying. Yet, fear overtakes the human mind when they board a plane rather than when they take a car ride. The main reason is the optics. A crashing plane is a scary sight and dominates headlines. Car wrecks happen a lot more frequently but how often do they make the headlines?

President Trump’s story isn’t much different. One of the first things that comes to mind instantly about Trump is that he is the president who hates immigrants, especially Muslims. I do not doubt it. Yet, this is a perfect case of words versus actions. The general understanding is that actions speak louder than words, but in many situations especially politics, words actually speak louder than actions.

Had it not been the case, then immigrants and Muslims would have loathed presidents such as Reagan, Clinton, Bush, and Obama a lot more for their anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim actions. President Reagan intensified the indoctrination of Muslims around the world by injecting hatred in them. Extreme religious fervour labeled as Jihad was taught by the CIA using textbooks printed by the University of Nebraska, creating killing machines called Mujahideen. Yet, Reagan is not known as an anti-Muslim guy.

President Bush Jr invaded two major defenseless Muslim lands, killing scores of innocent Muslims. His father had supported a revolt against Saddam inside Iraq during the latter’s invasion of Kuwait. When Saddam went to slaughter those Iraqi dissidents, Bush Sr looked the other way. President Clinton imposed crippling sanctions over Iraq, which caused the deaths of about half a million children. He bombed the only pharmaceutical factory in Sudan arguing that it was manufacturing VX nerve agents and the factory had ties to Al Qaeda. All of that was later found to be completely false. Clinton ordered the 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia killing hundreds of innocent civilians. He signed laws in 1996 that took the harshest elements of the criminal justice system such as mass incarceration, discriminatory policing, zero tolerance and injected them into the immigration system.

Talking about those laws, Clinton said what sounds more like a tweet from Trump: “It strengthens the rule of law by cracking down on illegal immigration at the border, in the workplace, and in the criminal justice system — without punishing those living in the US legally.” The one common style of most presidents has been to block the incoming refugees from a nation where the junta or a strongman is a US puppet. If, however, that isn’t the case, then incoming refugees are embraced by Washington whose stories are published and aired to shame that government. This is an unchanging correlation.

The global assassination campaign using armed drones became the signature murder weapon of president Obama. In Yemen, Pakistan, and elsewhere scores of innocent men, women, and children sometimes as young as two years old were killed with drone strikes. How many of us have heard about him being anti-Muslim?

Trump sure has bad mouthed Muslims and immigrants. He always talked about building the wall along the Mexican border. He put several Muslim majority countries on a travel ban. But even that ban was not solely banning Muslims. Words aside, how many Muslim lands or any land, has he invaded?

The hatred towards immigrants, especially Muslims, increases when a foreign terrorist group attacks America. Xenophobia, racist, and hatred go through the roof during such times. Those terrorist attacks are mostly in retaliation against America’s global aggression. If foreign lands are not invaded and drone assassinations of innocent civilians are no more the norm, there would be no acts of terrorism and hence no hatred for immigrants. In a nutshell, an invading and war-waging president is worse for immigrants in America than a bad-mouthing war averse one.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 8^th, 2020.

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