By: Miguel Tinker Salas* and Luis Duno Gottberg**

Dehumanizing the other is a step prior to the violation of their human rights. The transformation of the immigrant experience into an abstract statistic, into a criminal act, into an excuse to manipulate or settle foreign and extemporaneous political conflicts, are forms of that erasure of the human that entails violence. This is the current case of the migrant population, which has become a wild card in political struggles within the territory of the United States.

Recent events highlight a systemic practice in which immigrants unknowingly become instruments of propaganda and harassment by Republican Party leaders. This operation is meticulously orchestrated and financed, turning a vulnerable population into deeply cynical chess pieces.

Last June, for example, a plane from New Mexico landed in Sacramento, in order to set off a dehumanizing choreography. Indeed, a bus had even been hired to transport the newly arrived passengers to the office of the diocese of the city, where the driver abandoned them immediately after they got off the bus. Neither the passengers nor those in charge of the diocese knew what was happening. Kidnapped under deception, there they were abandoned to their fate, as if they were disposable beings. This is the sad reality faced by immigrants in the United States, whose humanity is denied.

Interviewed by the press, these immigrants, the vast majority Venezuelans, said they had been recruited in Texas and transferred to New Mexico, and then boarded on a plane that would take them to Sacramento. The person who recruited the immigrants assumed false identities, posing as a Florida government official and, on another occasion, as a former U.S. military intelligence agent. A perverse theater (manipulating those fleeing precariousness and violence) and also a criminal one (usurping the identity of public officials) blur the ordeal of men, women and children, with the sole purpose of harassing the internal enemy in US electoral contests.

Maria, a Venezuelan who walked more than 4,500 kilometers to reach the United States, said that in El Paso they had been promised work and legal advice to regularize their immigration status when they arrived in Sacramento. History repeated itself a week later, when a bus from Texas flew 42 immigrants to Los Angeles. This group had requested asylum and ended up being transferred under deception to where their presence would simply be an instrument of siege within a political game totally alien to this migrant population. In both cases, had it not been for the compassion of community groups, these people would have ended up on the streets of the city.

The perverse practice of manipulating immigrants in this way began in 2022, when Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor and current presidential candidate, used state funds to recruit immigrants in San Antonio, Texas, mostly Venezuelans, to send them to Martha’s Vineyard, an upscale community and tourist site in Massachusetts. The 2022 Florida state budget allocated $12 million to respond to the covid emergency and DeSantis made these funds available to facilitate the removal of undocumented immigrants, sending them to a part of the country governed by his political adversaries.

After Massachusetts, New York became the next destination to which immigrants were sent. According to the mayor of New York, more than 60,000 immigrants have arrived from Florida and Texas. The purpose of these operations is to collapse public services in these cities and thus provoke an anti-immigrant reaction among Americans. Read again: deceitfully abducting tens of thousands of vulnerable people, and then transferring them to territories governed by a political opponent, in order to collapse public services.

The actions in New York, Sacramento and Los Angeles are the latest chapter in a malevolent policy promoted and funded by Republican Governors Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida. Both are depicted as leaders of a culture war that aims to rescue the supposed traditional values of the United States. Their actions are a logical extension of former President Donald Trump’s slogan to Make America Great Again. But what values do these actions embody? What greatness is the dehumanization of others for the purpose of political gain and destruction of an adversary?

The opportunistic and cruel instrumentalization of immigrants goes beyond the harassment of Democratic enclaves. The phenomenon is part of a broader cultural struggle that is presented, deceptively, as a “conflict of values.” DeSantis often says, for example, that Florida is where “progressive values come to die.”

Deploying an ultra-conservative populist rhetoric that challenges a sector of the electorate by defending the so-called “traditional family”, with the supposed protection of children, marriage and religious principles, the uses of the migrant population are part of a political war that seeks to reverse political rights acquired since the 1960s by people of color, trade unions, women, retirees, the LBGTI community, workers and immigrants themselves.

Here is inserted a strategy of international repercussions, which warns about the alleged existence of a Mexican conspiracy to flood the US with fentanyl, in order to destroy Anglo-Saxon youth. These conservatives even dare to promote military action and even intervention in Mexican territory, to wipe out organized crime.

The discourse on the protection of the family and the protection of national health clashes with the reality of an avalanche of legislation to cut funding in education, prohibit teaching against racism, repeal women’s reproductive rights and weaken the basic rights of access to health care and fair retirement. However, all this ends up invisible by the panic generated by a political war that convinces many Americans of the existence of a conspiracy to corrupt the national body and replace them with “people of color.” Thus, immigrants become subjects who not only seek asylum and protection, but are actually part of an invasion that would transform American culture and society into something unrecognizable and threatening.

It is easy to dismiss these incidents as isolated or simple extreme demonstrations, ahead of the next presidential campaign. However, it should be remembered that, with a similar speech, Trump won the presidency in 2016 and that, in 2020, he obtained more than 70 million votes. How much should this hate speech permeate the population? Consider that, even though he is indicted and facing criminal charges, polls show that Trump has risen in popularity and dominates among Republican candidates vying for the presidential nomination.

The sad reality is that Democrats offer few alternatives and that some answers mimic the actions of conservative politicians. Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, has begun deporting immigrants to Texas and Florida. President Joe Biden has implemented an immigration policy that is little different from Trump’s. Indeed, the number of people denied asylum has skyrocketed in recent months.

Although Biden canceled Title 42, implemented by Trump, he still maintains the measure that if an immigrant does not apply for asylum in any country he passed through on his way north, he immediately loses the right to apply in the United States. As a result, the number of people rejected has skyrocketed significantly. If previously 83 percent of the petitions were approved, in the last month only 46 percent have been approved.

Biden continues to attempt a truly unusual strategy, which incorporates other nations in a process of “externalizing the border.” Thus, it has reached agreements with Panama and Colombia so that, under the so-called Operation Shield, they increase their military presence in the Darien Gap. The operation includes U.S. funds and advisers for the deployment of these operations in which the limits of the North American nation are projected to the south.

Although immigrants are the scapegoats of the present crisis, what is happening here cannot be reduced to a culture war. Rather, it is about the instrumentalization of a vulnerable (or violated) people within a national political conflict that will define the fate of those seeking asylum, but also the relationship with Latin America and, even, the nature of the democratic institution itself within the US.

* @mtinkersalas. Latin American Studies, Pomona College

** http://www.luisdunogottberg.com/ Department of Classica and ModernLiterature and Culture, Rice University

Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada, Thursday, July 20, 2023, https://www.jornada.com.mx/notas/2023/07/20/politica/la-deshumanizacion-del-inmigrante-y-guerra-politica-en-eu/ and Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee