Open Borders for Oligarchs
Despite all the chatter and fear mongering about “open borders,” our borders aren’t actually open to people trying to immigrate to the United States. For decades, there’s been an entire governmental agency charged with controlling who enters the U.S., for how long, and for what purpose. As is so often the case with Donald Trump, his talk of the perils of “open borders” is a distraction from what’s actually happening. What’s actually happening is that Donald Trump has been opening our borders ever-wider for oligarchs.
I actually get the fear of undocumented immigrants that grips so much of the country. It would be horrific if hordes of migrants were crossing our southern border to take our jobs, commit terrible crimes, and illegally vote in our elections. Of course, the narrative about hordes of marauding immigrants is false, but if you get your information from Fox News and other media outlets even less tethered to reality than Fox, then it isn’s surprising if you think the stories of pillaging undocumented immigrants are true. Americans concerned about “losing our country” to immigrants from Latin America are wrong on the facts, but they’re not wrong to believe that America should be governed by Americans and for Americans.
As always with Donald Trump, his drama about the perils of “open borders” and immigrants is nothing but a distraction from what’s actually happening. While Republicans focus on the Trump-created “emergency on our southern border,” our borders have actually been flung open for foreign oligarchs to wield political power in the United States.
Trump’s declaration that he wouldn’t necessarily report offers of foreign campaign assistance to the FBI is just the latest evidence that Trump doesn’t actually believe in a world with borders and citizens who control their own affairs. Trump doesn’t believe in an America governed by Americans for the sake of Americans. If he did, foreign interference in our elections would be anathema to him. Donald Trump doesn’t believe in America as a nation with citizens and borders; Donald Trump’s actions reveal that he believes in a world where rich and powerful men control poor people by playing them off against one another.
For all the talk about the importance of border enforcement to national sovereignty, it’s hard to square a sincere concern that an undocumented immigrant might violate America’s political integrity by voting with a tolerance for Russian meddling in an American election. Both acts violate our laws. Both acts undermine the principle that America’s government should be chosen by American citizens. A consistent application of an America First ideology that demands extreme measures to reduce the already slim risk of non-citizens voting should produce spitting rage at the realization that a foreign dictator directly interfered with a U.S. election. Of course, Trump and the rest of the America First crew aren’t furious with Russian, which makes it clear that the America Firsters are prioritizing something other than an American government by and for Americans.
Had Trump and his campaign believed America’s sovereignty was sacrosanct, they would have immediately reported Russia’s 2016 overtures of assistance to American law enforcement. That the Trump campaign didn’t report the Russian overtures to American law enforcement reveals that the Trump campaign wasn’t concerned about America’s sovereignty vis-a-vis Vladimir Putin, an oligarch with an empire that fuses organized crime with transnational corporations and the Russian government. That Trump is now entertaining the possibility of accepting foreign assistance in the 2020 election reveals that the 2016 Russian assault on American sovereignty didn’t succeed due to Trump’s naiveté. Trump’s acts and words reveal what he and his Republican allies truly believe when it comes to America’s sovereignty. In the view of Trump and his Republican enablers, it appears that oligarchs like Putin are citizens of the world, and the rest of us are subjects at best or serfs at worst.
While Putin is Trump’s favorite oligarch, he isn’t the only foreign billionaire that this president treats better than American citizens. A literal prince from a country that is still governed by a monarchy ordered the torture and murder of a legal American immigrant without suffering repercussions (not that it would have been okay for the Saudi’s to have tortured and murdered an undocumented immigrant, but it kind of puts the lie to those who insist that it’s the legal status of immigrants that matters when they don’t bother to stand up for the rights of people who came to this country “the right way”). Trump is proudly exchanging love letters with a foreign dictator who’s the latest in a family business of looting the wealth of his country. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Transportation is being run for the benefit of a family of Chinese shipping magnates. And unsavory foreign governments seem to be renting rooms at Trump Hotels to kick money to the President. This list could go on and on, with the common theme of all these (ignored) scandals being that in the Donald Trump Administration and the modern Republican Party wealth matters more than citizenship, and ordinary Americans matter less than international oligarchs.
This is what Open Borders for Oligarchs looks like. Money, influence, and power sloshes across international boundaries to enable oligarchs to accumulate ever greater power, while ordinary people just become poorer. This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon, but Donald Trump and congressional Republicans have accelerated the opening of our borders for oligarchs to the detriment of our nation. Thanks to Trump’s Open Borders for Oligarchs policy, America is just a place on a map. Our citizens have less influence over the affairs of our own nation than international billionaires do. If Trump and his cohort truly wanted to put America first as they claim, citizens like you and I would need to matter more to the White House than Vladimir Putin.
