“The United States is now an occupied country. But November 5, 2024 will be Liberation Day in America. » At a rally in Atlanta, Donald Trump spoke in his usual apocalyptic and tribal tone about the issue that will be the key to closing the campaign, more important than the economy or housing: immigration. The story is that all of the country’s problems are rooted in the porous Biden-Harris border, from high housing prices and low wages to overcrowded hospitals and schools. The border wall is the panacea in any speech, to which is added the human factor: Trump finds it more amusing to lie about immigrants than to talk about tariffs. Trump’s top adviser on the issue, Stephen Miller, famous for using obscure regulatory loopholes to restrict immigration during Trump’s first term, announced that if the former president were re-elected, the government would deport a million people per year. The cost and legal, bureaucratic and human complexity of this measure are reminiscent of the “innovative” solutions of Giorgia Meloni in Italy. It doesn’t appear to be a question of money, since Italy was able to mobilize a warship and an army of soldiers and civil servants to transport 16 people already back on Italian soil. Nor are there any imaginative solutions based on real data, demographic studies or alternatives and benefits of migration in host and origin countries. This is a simple problem of racism and failure of rights.
Internment camps, walls and mass deportations. These are the three classic pillars of the anti-immigration discourse which permeates the American and European middle and working classes and which will condition the November elections, as was the case in the countries of the European Union. In an October 11 speech in Aurora, Colorado, one of the cities Trump has chosen to embody his toxic immigration fables, the Republican candidate expressed his willingness to use the Alien Enemies Act, which was signed into law in 1798 and used by Democratic President Franklin. D. Roosevelt to imprison entire families of immigrants of Italian, German and mainly Japanese origin in internment camps during World War II. This law would allow mass expulsions of people from countries that have invaded or are at war with the United States, or that have made “predatory incursions” into the country and could affect legal and illegal immigrants.
