Once More, With Feeling

A picture of the L. A. protests that I came across online, uncredited. If I find the credits, I'll update this.

Okay, I'll bite: What makes people expect that photographs of masked protesters standing on burning, grafitti-covered, Waymo taxis while waving Mexican flags in California is going to make people in Texas, Kansas or West Virginia support allowing people who entered (or stayed in) the country illegally to remain? I get that a riot is the last refuge of the unheard, but I'm not at all convinced that this is the sort of thing that one wants to be shouting at people.

Because I don't know about you, but I don't get "Hey, I love this country and want to remain here," from protesting with the flag of another country.

To be sure, I'm dubious about the utility of protests in general. When the support is there to effect change via normal processes, people don't need to go around marching, chanting and waving signs, let alone setting things on fire. And while I can see some point to the civil disobedience side of things, being arrested and dragged off for setting cars on fire doesn't exactly get people to re-think the laws they live under.

The problem here isn't Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It's United States immigration law. And that's not something that the Los Angeles City Council or the California legislature could change on their own, even if they were inclined to do so. That's something that has to happen at the national level. Even the decision to effectively look the other way and allow people to go about their business "under the radar," as it were, is made from Washington D. C., not Los Angeles or Sacramento.

And right now, Washington D. C. is run by Donald Trump and the Trump-aligned members of Congress; people who have every incentive to come down on the protests like the proverbial ton of bricks, It's no skin from any of their noses if inserting the National Guard into this situation makes everything go pear-shaped; it's not like they're in dire need of the Los Angelino vote. And so in this sense, the protestors are performing for the wrong audience; the Los Angelinos who are sympathetic to them aren't in a position to change policy on a national level.

And that's where voters in Texas, Kansas, West Virginia et cetera come into the picture, because they are the people whose minds needs to be changed, if policy is going to change. President Trump is sending ICE into New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and so on specifically so he can show those voters that he cares about them (by ejecting from the country people those voters see as a threat to themselves) whole disrupting the urban "élites" that they so dislike. After all, it's understood that Red America has its share of migrant labor that's in the country illegally.

I understand that I'm basically making a case for "respectability politics." I don't contest the charge.  But for me, respectability is what supplicants have; and the migrants are, when its all said and done, supplicants. At a minimum, many of them are asking that the laws pertaining to immigration to the United States not be enforced; at most, they asking for them to be changed. And I said "asking" rather than "demanding;" immigrants to crossed the border for economic opportunities not available to them at home have no standing to claim a right to stay. And if the United States needed the migrants more than the migrants needed the United States, they could simply leave and wait for the Administration to come with a way to regularize them.

Something tells me that what's at work here is a poor grasp of history. The self-serving story that the United States tells itself is that Martin Luther King Jr. and the other Civil Rights leaders simply took to the streets, and while there were some bad actors in government who responded with abuse, the rightness of their cause showed everyone that they should get what they want, and it was all hunky-dory from there. But that wasn't how it worked back then. And it isn't going to be how it works now.