The caregiver tending to me spoke with a familiar accent and sought to ascertain my worldly knowledge when I asked where he was from. The answer: “Haile Selassie.” In short, he was an Ethiopian emigrant seeking the American dream.
Donald Trump directs vitriol toward immigrants from East Africa, but I find the one I have met splendid folk. I am reminded that Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia, spoke before the League of Nations after Italy used poison gas in invading his country.
Benito Mussolini, meet Donald Trump. Il Duce was a jut-jawed narcissist, who invites comparisons with our 47th president. The two guys share a cruelty. Neither show(ed) respect for any law. Trump aide Stephen Miller puts it succinctly: Might makes right.
How does this affect us? Because emigres from places like Kenya and Ethiopia do our society’s grunt work, getting demonized and stigmatized while performing vital tasks. A priest from Kenya is part of the pastoral team at St. James Cathedral. Immigrants are also bulwarks of the agricultural industry that is the state’s most important economic engine.
Immigration and Custom Enforcement, ICE agents, the thugs doing Trump’s bidding, have invaded places of worship. They recently conducted a “brutal and violent detention,” in words of Catholic Bishop Joseph Tyson, outside a Home Hardware store in Yakima. A Shoreline man has been arrested in front of his son.
Bishop Tyson ministers to a largely Latino flock in his Central Washington diocese, but spoke to the condition of the nation in a homily for the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. “We live a social sickness,” he preached. “We live in a diseased social climate where migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers are subjected to dehumanizing and racially charged epithets from the highest elected officials of our nation.”
Nativism is an historic American disease. It manifested itself in the 1830s with the Know Nothing movement, which responded to immigration with a famous four words: “No Irish need apply.” A near century later, the Ku Klux Klan virtually took over Indiana, as compellingly chronicled in Timothy Egan’s recent book, A Fever in the Heartland. The Kluxers included pillars of their communities, until a sex scandal caused support to vanish.
Another century has passed, with another demagogue and his MAGA movement. The nativist disease has reached the White House, and it has seen masked ICE men in unmarked vans seizing adults in front of children, busting into homes and murdering two persons in Minneapolis. It is amazing, chilling for this to happen in America.
We are fortunate, however, to be a center of resistance. Protests Friday ranged from high school students in Auburn to demonstrations outside the Federal Building in downtown Seattle. Attorney General Nick Brown has challenged or joined in some 50 legal challenges to the MAGA man. Gov. Bob Ferguson has asked legislators to strip ICE agents of their masks and stay away from schools and churches.
We face a wider challenge, in Bishop Tyson’s words “to rehumanize our social order, to rehumanize migrants, refugees and asylum seekers and to see the humanity even in the many fine men who serve in law enforcement.” Trump, a profoundly corrupt man, should not be permitted to corrupt the country.
This state should take the lead with sweeping resistence if ICE targets us. We can show Trump and his supporting cast what America looks like and what America is made of.
This story also appears in The Cascadia Advocate.
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