Two weeks ago, I wrote a column asking: In politics, who really are our neighbors? I meant for the piece to play on that perennial impulse, the command to love thy neighbor as yourself. Now I ask: Who are our strangers?
This week, we watched President Trump sign an executive order barring citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries and barring Syrian refugees. We witnessed the chaos, intended or not, that erupted in law enforcement agencies.
I have few words to describe the tragic toll that the hastily implemented travel and refugee ban have wreaked and will wreak. I cannot calculate how this move against legal, thoroughly vetted U.S. students, residents and refugees will escalate tension with Iran or affect the strategic goals of our troops in Iraq.
But from an international relations position, the travel ban is destabilizing. From a human rights perspective, it’s grave. And from a national identity perspective, it’s a crossroads.
There’s no need to create new theories to understand this; the old ones will do quite nicely. The Muslim ban executive action is an example of a heavy-handed, blunt instrument of government authority enacted on a legal minority population of U.S. residents. In a way it’s almost like the government overreach that the right wing has denounced for so long.
This ban is the “heavy hand” of government taken shape, separating families and disrupting the legal process. Supporters and opponents alike can recognize that it reneges on the solid promise of legal entry that a U.S. visa or green card provide.
Where is actionable conservative outrage over these policies? Yes, some conservative thinkers are sounding the alarm bells, and some members of Congress have rejected it. But unlike the many people who have taken to the street this week, the main Republican base has yet to demonstrate against the ban, even though it constitutes a major overreach.
Our democratic history is filled with tragic stories of groups being excluded — those that have been shamefully deemed beyond the majority’s scope of empathy, that have been excluded from all the same rights that the majority advocates for themselves.
On the international stage, this was long the Soviets; this translated into a paranoia of communists at home. Before that, a historical shame was fear of Japanese-Americans that translated into internment camps filled with U.S. citizens. These are some of the deepest scars on our moral history — moments when Americans chose to hate other Americans as they do not hate themselves or those who might look more like them. Some who often complained that the arm of government was too long cheered on the seizure of liberties from those with whom they would not empathize.
