Henry Giroux, an American-Canadian theorist of critical pedagogy and cultural critic, has examined the recent treatment of immigrants in America and equates it with extreme nationalism. Let’s not ignore the fact that extreme nationalism is also a characteristic of fascism. In his publications and lectures, Giroux has drawn a parallel between neoliberal capitalism and fascism to explain the suppression of freedom, anti-democratic sentiments, and the swelling of racism.
Giroux has addressed the rise of “neoliberal fascism” under Trump and focused on the incarceration of immigrant children under the former president’s administration, and has documented the way that Trump mobilized “fascist passions” to set up immigration detention camps that involved the separation of children from their parents.
These “passions” are still alive and well.
This past week, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, Texas Governor Gregg Abbott, and Arizona Governor Doug Ducey colluded in sending migrants to Democratic cities, including flying two planeloads of migrants from San Antonio Texas to Martha’s Vineyard. These people were dumped unceremoniously in these cities with nowhere to go. In the case of Martha’s Vineyard, the sunshine state governor gave no notice of the move either to Massachusetts state officials, local authorities, or any charity which might have offered help to the migrants. The unsuspecting passengers included numerous children, including a three-year-old in need of medical attention.
Most of the 50 migrants were Venezuelan refugees who had made the long trek of more than 1,000 miles, through Central America and Mexico, before they applied for asylum at the US-Mexico border. All of those individuals had been processed by US immigration authorities and given appointments for hearings on their asylum claims. Contrary to the claims of many Republicans and Trump supporters, none of these people were “illegal aliens.”
Texas and Arizona had sent at least 295 buses holding 13,000 migrants to New York, D.C., and Chicago, all cities with Democratic mayors.
These are examples of the effective kidnapping and human trafficking of human beings. However, this was not just a political stunt, it was the illicit removal of a specific cultural and ethnic group from GOP-led states. These groups were deceived into boarding those planes and buses and promised that they would have jobs and places to live where they arrived.
No matter how you slice it, these are examples of “ethnic cleansing,” or perhaps “ethnic cleansing-lite?”
The term “ethnic cleansing” first emerged in the1990s, after Serbia set out to “cleanse“ Bosnian territory by systematically removing all Bosnian Muslims after the collapse of Tito’s Yugoslavia, and is defined as the attempt to get rid of (through deportation, displacement or even mass killing) members of an unwanted ethnic group in order to establish an ethnically homogenous geographic area.
Such “cleansing” is nothing new in human history. During the Middle Ages, religious cleansing targeted Jews. For example, In Spain, which had a large population of Jews and of Muslims, Jews both were expelled, and those who remained were forced to convert to Christianity (though all Muslim converts were expelled in the early 17th century). In our own nation, native groups were forced to resettle on reservations; when the Homestead Act of 1862 opened up most of the remaining lands to white settlers (those nations who resisted were exterminated or imprisoned). During World War I, the Turkish Empire deported its entire Armenian population from the northeastern frontier, massacred them, and the Imperial Russian army removed some 800,000 Germans and Jews from its western borderlands. Other examples abound, such as the persecution and extermination of Muslim groups in China and Asia, the extermination of Jews during World War II, and the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia against ethnic Tigrayans.
This latest exploit perpetrated by the three GOP governors should be a reminder that the GOP’s policies continue to appeal to the basest impulses of right-wing extremist voters.
We must recognize the signs and symptoms of nationalism, and how one of its manifestations is the targeting of certain cultural and ethnic groups. Some may argue that migrants do not constitute an ethnic group, but I beg to differ. An ethnic group is defined as a “group of people who share a similar culture (beliefs, values, and behaviors), language, religion, ancestry, or other characteristic that is often handed down from one generation to the next.”
Our nation is a nation of immigrants, and the targeting of Central and South American migrants smacks of ethnic cleansing that is a cornerstone of fascism.