NorthJersey

New Jersey has for decades been proud to embrace its long tradition as a land of immigrants. Our diversity is a strength. Our residents know full well, and often firsthand, how challenging it is for any family or individual to attempt to enter this country and try to establish a new and better life.

That’s all the thousands of people in the so-called caravans moving slowly up from Central America are attempting to do – to seek asylum, and to hope, in this land of the free that there might be a little room for them to make a new home, and perhaps pursue a better and a brighter future.

President Donald Trump, though, is having none of it. In these last days leading up to the midterm elections, Trump is falling back on reliable campaign rhetoric to drive up turnout among his base – by stoking fear and resentment, and making hateful, divisive and racist comments to turn these migrants, most of them impoverished, into an evil, dangerous element that they are not.

He was at it again on Thursday, characterizing these folks as criminals moving en masse toward our borders to wreak mayhem on U.S. citizens. He has described them as “tough people” and “a lot of young men, strong men,” as well as being members of the notorious Salvadoran-based gang, MS-13. Both Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have further claimed, with no evidence, that the caravan includes “Middle Easterners,” as if that were some sort of crime or some flash word for “terrorist.”

All these characterizations have a familiar ring with Trump. When he first declared his candidacy for the presidency in 2015, Trump described migrants coming from Mexico as criminals “and rapists.” He has since missed few opportunities to demonize “the other” and has sought repeatedly to divide our country along ethnic and racial lines.

Sadly, less than a week after an apparent hate-filled attack on a synagogue in Pittsburgh left 11 people dead, our president took hardly a breath before he returned to the inflammatory campaign speak of nativism and hate.

Let us hope good people of America will see this despicable race-baiting tactic for what it is — another shameless attempt by this president to drive a wedge, to once again invoke fear of the unknown to get people to vote Republican. It is a trick that has shown a history of success, popularized perhaps most memorably by the likes of fire-breathing, segregationist Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama, whose own racist language and demagoguery on the stump is mirrored all too well by Trump.

Also, Trump cannot simply declare that the U.S. will not tolerate asylum seekers, or more scarily, suggest that our military might shoot them on spot. The 1965 Immigration and Nationalization Act states that any foreigner who arrives in the U.S. “whether or not at a designated port of arrival” may apply for asylum.

The migrants coming up from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador are people fleeing violence, poverty and insecurity in their homelands. They are no different from generations of New Jerseyans whose own immigrant forefathers came to these shores seeking asylum from similar circumstances.

At the very least, their stories should be heard, and their cases processed. Under no circumstance should they be used as scapegoats to help Trump further his anti-immigrant and anti-“other” agenda. Sadly, Trump's words have nothing to do with border security, and everything to do with politics in its most vile form.

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