So, amidst all of the brou-ha-ha about the latest Executive Order, an English friend of mine who has lived in the USA for 27 years is now assessing whether he wants to continue to live here.
The message of this EO to me is very clear. Anybody not born in the USA is at risk at any point of being declared an undesirable. They are already refusing to allow legal permanent residents back into the USA since the signing of this EO. (Whether that was even a correct interpretation of the EO is unclear, since the EO was apparently not reviewed by any of the enforcement bodies before the President signed it, which, if true, is about as good an example of professional negligence as you can get).
As a rule, people don’t stay around where they are not wanted. Right now, my conclusion is that this is not the country I moved to in 1998. I am starting to seriously consider moving back to Europe, sooner rather than later.
America had an opportunity to decide what sort of a country it wanted to be when it grows up. So far the message I am receiving is that it wants to be a country governed by repressive, regressive, nationalist and nativist people who think that the outside world is some malign place that they can either shut off or control, while somehow making the country great again.
Those of us who grew up in Europe and studied History recognize that philosophy very very well. It led directly to World War II.
If you are sitting there shaking your head at what I am reading thinking “nah, that could never possibly happen here”, you need to snap out of your complacency, and fast. One of the interesting questions that Germans were asked after World War II was whether they had any inkling that Adolf Hitler was going to lead Germany into a world war. Nearly all of them said that this possibility had never occurred to them, that they simply wanted a leader who would Sort The Mess Out. The idea that Sorting The Mess Out involved dehumanization, demonization and extermination of minorities, the invasion of multiple countries, and the destruction of much of Germany in a war, was not something that they could even have imagined.
But, with hindsight, when the surviving Nazi leaders were interrogated, it was clear from their sometimes-bland post hoc justifications of their actions that they saw power as a means to an end, and any means could be justified either before or after the event as part of the end objective of making Germany Great Again. Also revealed in the German leader interrogations was the extent to which George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” would be a reflective field workbook for nativist authoritarians and demagogues everywhere.
Folks, if you are not taking what is happening very very seriously, you are suffering from exactly the sort of complacency that a lot of people in Europe suffered from in the run-up to World War II.
What I am telling you is that I have no intention of being around to witness the end results of the current path that the central government of the USA is currently walking down.
