Playing Politics With American Lives

Ghanian immigrant Emmanuel Mensah died saving
four people from a fire in the Bronx in December

Yesterday 23-year-old Private First Class Emmanuel Mensah, a legal permanent resident from the west African nation of Ghana, was laid to rest after a funeral at Our Lady of Mount Caramel Catholic Church in Belmont, NY.

Mensah was a decorated member of the Army National Guard who died on the night of December 28th after repeatedly going back into a raging fire in a Bronx building to save four people.

Started by a child playing with a gas stove, it was the deadliest New York fire in 25 years, a blaze that eventually killed 13 people.

Mensah, who was visiting relatives on the first floor of the building when the fire broke out, could have easily saved himself.

But he went back into the burning building three separate times to rescue others, and eventually collapsed and died of smoke inhalation on the fourth floor of the building while trying to save a fifth person.

He was posthumously awarded the New York State Medal of Valor and the Soldier's Medal - the U.S. Army's highest honor awarded for bravery in non-combat. 

As Rich Shapiro reported for the NY Daily News on Saturday, during his eulogy Cardinal Timothy Dolan observed: 

"In the selfless valor, the instinctive willingness to sacrifice and give his all, Emmanuel was God with us, reminding us of the most noble calling of the human person, to give ourselves in sacrifice and love to others." 

Mensah's courage stands in stark contrast to the Trump administration's almost ceaseless attempts to vilify immigrants to the United States, legal or undocumented, who happen to be people of color, Hispanic or Muslims.

Young immigrants rallying for DACA

Trump's strange near-obsession with trying to unravel the achievements of the Obama administration, regardless of the impact on the American people, the economy, the environment or the nation's reputation overseas, is well documented.

But his poorly-thought out decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy last fall was a misguided and reactionary move to eliminate a fragile but logical temporary fix to the larger immigration issue - one that wasn't perfect, but it worked.

By taking a wrecking ball to DACA, Trump sought to fire up his primary base of support, working class white people who'd been left dismayed and marginalized by an increasingly globalized economy.

Angry people left on the fringes of a shrinking middle-class devastated by a brutal combination of the Great Recession, the mortgage housing crisis, stagnant wages and a decades-long trend of U.S. corporations shifting manufacturing jobs (and the huge range of jobs and small businesses that supported that manufacturing) to overseas countries to take advantage of cheaper labor, favorable tax loopholes and more lax labor laws.

Think about those large numbers of understandably frustrated working class whites who came out in droves in 2015 and 2016 during the presidential campaign to collectively vent their pent up anger at Trump rallies.

People who spent their hard-earned money on Trump's red "Make America Great Again" hats, and cheered as they bought into Trump's con-game that all their problems could be conveniently laid at the feet of legal and undocumented immigrants.

Was it easier for Trump supporters to vent their
fury against immigrants instead of bankers?

You never saw really saw those red-state Trump supporters coming out in the streets to protest the Wall Street con artists, greedy bankers, insurance giants and corrupt rating agencies that conspired to reap trillions of dollars in profits after systematically slicing people's mortgages up into risky financial products before crashing the economy.

Do you recall seeing crowds of Trump supporters marching in the streets or outside the offices of AIG, Goldman-Sachs, Bank of America or Chase?


In fact, Fox News, the primary news source for those Trump's supporters, like other major media outlets, tended to dismiss and even mock the grassroots Occupy Wall Street protests that broke out in 2011 - and as Brian Stelter observed in a 11/20/11 New York Times article, mainstream media analysis as a whole tended to ignore the deeper substantive issues behind the movement.

But five years later, those same Trump supporters were quick to agree when "Mr. Art of the Deal" insisted that immigrants were to blame for all their woes and that building a big-ass wall along the southern border with Mexico would make everything better.

Fast forward to September, 2017.

With his oft-repeated campaign promise that Mexico would pay for the wall now exposed as one of his many lies, and the Republican-controlled Congress nowhere near green-lighting funding to build it, an increasingly frustrated Trump turned his notoriously short attention span to lower hanging fruit on the political tree.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announcing that
DACA is being rescinded in September, 2017  

In an example of poorly-thought out political strategy colored by overt ethnic and racial bias, the Trump administration thought that by rescinding DACA, he could take a swipe at Obama and reassure his impatient base that he was taking aim at hard-working immigrants.

And also absolve himself of any responsibility for the gargantuan bureaucratic mess he made by simply shifting the blame for it onto Congress.

Trump had Attorney General Jeff Sessions announce it on 9/5/17.

So think about that, Trump revokes DACA under the justification that Obama creating it was an overreach of executive authority.

Then he "gives" Congress six months to pass legislation to enact a more permanent fix for one of the most pressing immigration problems that Obama created DACA to address - because Congress had refused to do anything about it for years.

As a reminder of just  how absurd that is, remember that back in June of 2012, after more than ten years of Congress bickering over how to pass legislation that would offer undocumented immigrants a legal pathway to citizenship, President Obama took action.

With a Republican-controlled House of Representatives dominated by a right-wing "Freedom Caucus" that had pledged to oppose anything that he proposed, because well, the president was black, Obama issued an executive order creating DACA.

President Obama announcing the creating of DACA
back in June of 2012

DACA was intended for undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as young children by their parents.

Only those without felonies or serious misdemeanors on their records would be eligible - and as a condition of the program, every two years they would have to have their DACA status renewed.

The only thing DACA does is defer deportation and grant recipients a work permit so they can show up for work (and contribute taxes to the U.S. economy) without fear of being deported.

Despite Republican hysteria over the program, only about 800,000 immigrants were enrolled in DACA as of 2017 - that's 800,000 people out of an approximate total U.S. population of 326,766,748 people.

That's 0.11% of the U.S. population.

Where DACA is concerned, Trump and some of the Republican politicians who currently control the legislative process want to have their political cake and eat it too.

Trump rescinded DACA, then gave the Republican-controlled Congress six months to pass legislation they've been unable or unwilling to pass for almost two decades.

So either Trump is delusional and has no idea how the legislative process actually functions, or he knows it's unlikely Congress can get it's shit together and send a workable bill to the president's desk to be signed into law. 

Obviously it's called "politics" for a reason, but it's getting pretty tiresome watching the Republican-controlled House and Senate ping-pong back and forth over granting the so-called Dreamers a proper pathway to citizenship.

GOP Senators James Lankford (OK) & Tom Cotton
(AK) discussing an immigration bill last Monday

Last week two different versions of bills that would have granted a pathway to citizenship were both voted down in the Senate by margins well below the 60 votes that would have been needed to pass them.

One of the bills would have granted about 1.8 million Dreamers a 10 to 15-year process for citizenship and a staggering $25 billion for Trump's long-coveted wall.

The bills failed to pass the Senate because the White House has signaled that Trump will veto any bill that doesn't contain money to fund his wall.

And by now it's clear that most Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate think such a wall is a total waste of taxpayer money.

Many experts, including researchers and small business owners who live and work along the border areas where the wall would be constructed agree isn't feasible, appropriate for the environment, or needed for a variety of reasons.

Including the simple fact that undocumented migration from Mexico has been shrinking steadily since 2007 according to data from the Pew Research Center.

Left in the middle of all this are millions of undocumented immigrants, of which the Dreamers in the DACA program make up only a small percentage.

Frankly I'm not sure I really like the term "Dreamer" because it comes from the Dream Act which was originally proposed by Congress 17 years ago back in 2001 - calling people Dreamers associates them with Congress' failure to pass comprehensive immigration legislation.

To me, slapping a label on thousands of people who were either born in, or brought here to the United States at an early age by parents who came here as undocumented immigrants, tends to have the effect of making it easier to dehumanize them.

Soldiers carry Pfc. Emmanuel Mensah's casket
after his funeral service in the Bronx on Saturday 

Something that Trump seems to relish and obsess over, like when he made headlines back in December by calling African and South American countries "shitholes" during a meeting at the White House.

Crudely parroting his white supremacist senior adviser Stephen Miller by wondering aloud to shocked Congressional attendees why the U.S. should accept immigrants from those countries.

Immigrants like Pfc. Emmanuel Mensah, who gave his life to save his fellow Americans.

Like it or not, by definition these individuals are Americans, people who live and attend school or work here in the United State - some have even served (or are serving) in the U.S. military.

It's not my job to decide these things, but as an average reasonable-minded American, as far as I'm concerned if you sign up to serve in the military, you're automatically a U.S. citizen.

Maybe the term of service would have to be a little longer than two years in the same sense that graduates of the Naval Academy or West Point must serve a minimum of five years after graduating, but serving Uncle Sam makes you an American in my book - period.

Regardless it's past time Congress stepped up to the plate to pass comprehensive legislation, they've been talking about it for more than twenty years.

Maybe, as some members of Congress have suggested, they need to do this in steps and first pass a clean DACA bill as a first step - there's bipartisan support to make that happen.

However they do it, it's not fair for Trump to hold up DACA legislation because he wants money for his ill-advised pet wall project.

Undocumented immigrants have been a part of the fabric of this nation since it was founded, it's about time Congress start dealing with it like informed adults.

And it's past time that Trump stops playing politics with American lives.