Is Deportation Facist?

Is Deportation Fascist?

Rich Lowry for National Review

As Freud never said, sometimes a plan to deport illegal immigrants is just a plan to deport illegal immigrants.

Trump’s rhetoric about mass deportations, which has been more extravagant and pungent than usual, has catalyzed more denunciations of the former president as an incipient fascist.

We are supposed to believe that it is a page from the classic fascist playbook for a politician to watch a country get flooded with illegal aliens, permitted into the country in defiance of the laws by a pliant administration, and then to seek, after winning a democratic election, to return some of these illegal immigrants to their home countries.

We’ve seen it so many times before!

According to Timothy Snyder, the Yale University academic who’s an expert on fascism and therefore sees everything as an expression of fascism, the dynamic of the unfounded allegations of migrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, is absolutely clear.

Snyder doesn’t see a careless amplification of social-media memes about the allegedly endangered pets in Springfield, followed by a famously ill-disciplined Trump spouting off about them at the debate, and then a backfilling effort by the campaign and its allies to try to justify the charge.

No, that would be entirely too banal.

Snyder believes that “Trump and Vance are intelligent and talented politicians, and their actions make sense within their political theory,” involving, in Snyder’s terms, fantasy, impotence, and — what else? — fascism.

Let’s cede “fantasy,” or, more accurately, the lack of sufficient due diligence regarding constituent reports. If dishonesty or fact-free assertions about immigration are a sign of creeping fascism, though, the Biden-Harris administration is guilty of taking much larger steps toward a dystopian future by denying that there was a crisis at the border and allegedly working to hideelements of the crisis from the public and the press.

But, of course, this game only works one way.

Snyder then makes a truly bizarre charge. He insists that in the Springfield controversy, which he boils down to a cat’s being innocently lost in the basement and then discovered, “Vance is revealing to us his theory of federal power.” According to the professor, “Here it is: the power of the federal government is to be used to find a cat which is not in fact lost. That’s it. Nothing more. That is what the average citizen can expect from a Trump-Vance regime.”

“Project 2025,” he continues, “expels the civil servants who know what to do, nothing works anymore except for oligarchs and pals of the president, and the rest of us get Schrödinger’s Cat.”

This mistakes Vance for a limited-government purist who believes that the government that governs least governs best, when the Ohio senator is really a populist inclined to believe that the government has an important role in checking corporate power, promoting family formation, and advancing U.S. manufacturing, among other things.

“If there were some actual problem in Ohio,” Snyder continues, “he could propose to address it with legislation. But he cannot and will not do so, not only because there is no actual problem, but because he must personify impotent government.”

This is doubly wrong. Not only is there a problem in Springfield, Ohio — a massive influx of Haitian migrants has strained the city and its services in various ways — Vance wants to address the issue by changing policy at the federal level to enhance border and interior enforcement.

All this is warm-up before Snyder gets to his main point.

“In the Trump-Vance political theory,” he writes, “government acts not in the normal way, by laws, but as an instrument of the fury of the people. There is no legal basis, or indeed any basis at all, to call for the Haitian population of Springfield, Ohio to be deported. The people in question are here legally, as Trump and Vance know, and did nothing, as Trump and Vance also know.”

Again, if we are concerned with laws and their enforcement, the root problem is that the Biden administration, for the lion’s share of its time in office, has shown contempt for the former and no interest in the latter.

That aside, there is absolutely a legal basis to call for the deportation of many Haitian migrants. Some of them are here illegally, while others are benefiting from temporary status exempting them from immigration laws via executive fiat. A new administration is under no obligation to keep doing the same.

It is certainly true that the overwhelming majority of Haitians are indeed doing nothing wrong. This situation is not their fault. But the arrival of large numbers of new immigrants from a very poor society to a small city in a short period of time is bound to create new burdens on health care, education, and housing, and so it has in Springfield.

Snyder is not done. “In fascism,” he explains, “the government becomes the will of the people, or rather the race, as embodied in a single person. A fantasy of evil done by others is deliberately invoked to create a sense of us and them. Government exercises power by taking revenge on groups, for example by deporting them (the first large-scale action of Hitler’s SS, by the way, was deporting immigrants).”

There you have it — the SS were apparently a bunch of immigration restrictionists gone bad.

This a lot of heavy breathing that ignores that removal is what is supposed to happen to illegal immigrants under U.S. laws that have been duly passed by Congress and on the books for a very long time. In a complete reversal of norms, Snyder is taking the refusal to enforce our laws as the standard and accepting the importation of millions of illegal newcomers as a new status quo that has to be accepted, or the U.S. will become 1930s Germany.

Snyder continues, “Such a mass deportation would be complicated and bloody, would require collaboration from citizens, and would set Americans against one another. We see a foretaste of this in Springfield, Ohio, with all the bomb threats.”

If you wanted to work the warning-of-fascism genre in reverse, you could say this is what lawless left-wing bullies always do — threaten bloodshed if we enforce our laws and use hoax bomb threats emanating from a foreign power to create an atmosphere of fear around any policy ideas that they oppose.

That’d be completely unfair to Snyder, of course, but he doesn’t show any such consideration to the people he disagrees with.

He’s not the only one to make these sorts of accusations. “Donald Trump took his promise of the largest mass deportations in U.S. history to horrific new heights,” the New Republic declared the other day, “when he promised to begin a policy called ‘remigration.’” Trump had written on Truth Social that he would “return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration).” According to the New Republic, the purpose of “re-migration” is “making America a white nation.”

Mother Jones issued a similar admonition: “‘Remigration,’ as a 2019 article about the rise of extreme anti-immigrant language in Europe from the Associated Press explains, is the ‘chilling notion of returning immigrants to their native lands in what amounts to a soft-style ethnic cleansing.’ The word stands in for a policy that entails the forced repatriation or mass expulsion of non–ethnically European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of citizenship.”

What’s the evidence for this? It is true that the term “remigration” is used by right-wing figures in Europe, but the word is indistinguishable from “repatriation,” a term that everyone accepts and that means returning people to their home countries. There is no evidence whatsoever that Trump is planning to ethnically cleanse the United States or try to deport citizens (which, obviously, he can’t do).

In his offending post, Trump refers to, as quoted above, illegal migrants. The rest of the post speaks of putting a stop to end runs around our immigration system (as well as suspending refugee resettlement). Trump pledged to “stop all migrant flights, end all illegal entries, terminate the Kamala phone app for smuggling illegals (CBP One App), [and] revoke deportation immunity.”

Again, these are either new policies, or practices that have been drastically scaled up by the Biden-Harris administration, to bring in the country people who have no right to be here. It can’t be that stopping or reversing them is white nationalism, but this line of argument is characteristic of how the Left debates — it stakes out new ground in a policy area and then, when conservatives contest it and seek to reestablish the old, fairly recent status quo, they are accused of being monsters and haters.

Deportation is deportation, and it’s a legitimate tool for getting a handle on illegal immigration into the United States.