Earlier this week some of the shining stars of the right in Congress, including Louie Gohmert and Ted Cruz, all gathered for a press conference to denounce President Obama for something he, yet again, has not actually done. In this case they were talking about the president unilaterally changing immigration policy to allow Central American refugees, who are predominantly children, to join the
DREAMers in the
DACA program—Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Implemented by the president in 2012, DACA is currently available only to children who had been under age 16 when their parents brought them into the U.S. without a visa
prior to 2007.
Various congresspersons at the press conference declared that DACA should be defunded because these children are not "DREAMers"—that is, people who aspire to reach the American Dream—but rather "thieves" of that dream.
“All across America there are young children, just like we were, that had dreams […] there are kids, there are adults with dreams,” Gohmert explained. “And adults have lost jobs right and left, including in our military.”
The tea party-backed Republican pointed out that the unemployment rate for African-Americans is nearly double the national average.
“Those people have dreams,” he said. “What about their dreams? You can’t achieve your dreams when you have a president of the United States that’s being lawless, and when you have a southern border that’s subjecting the United States to the kind of lawlessness that we see down there.”So if we're to follow this logic pretzel to its obvious conclusion, it seems that Gohmert believes the high African American unemployment rate is a sudden, brand-new and shocking phenomenon.
And that, somehow, it's President Obama's fault.
He apparently also believes this influx of refugees would suddenly and magically reverse itself if only we would tell children who are fleeing kidnapping, murder and drug violence in Central America that we have "No More Room at the American Inn" for them. That preserving the American Dream for those already in America requires denying it for those coming to America in desperation to escape the drug wars.
Please read the remainder below the fold.
It requires ignoring Gohmert and Cruz's deliberately mistaken understanding that it's Obama's DACA policy instead of drug cartel-fueled violence that is driving the rise in child refugees at our border. And ignoring the upside-down idea that these children aren't attempting to escape the cartels, but are instead working for them ...
“It’s time to stop helping the drug cartels and hurting the dreams of African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans—for Heaven sakes—all Americans,” he declared. “Enough lawlessness, Mr. President, let’s look at American dreams, and seeing them come true.”
Such statements are especially troubling since some refugee children who were just like those the GOP insists be deported immediately—which would violate a 2008 immigration law passed and signed by George W. Bush—have been
murdered upon returning to their home country.
The other aspect of this that I find fascinating is the idea the American Dream is being stolen by these children and not by the people already in America who collapsed our economy in 2008 and really did put millions of Americans out of work and out of their homes.
Hasn't the American Dream for millions already been stolen by Wall Street manipulation of the mortgage industry? Particularly for African-Americans who were targeted by that industry for unstable sub-prime loans even when their credit rating qualified them for the regular prime rate?
Pricing discrimination—illegally charging minority customers more for loans and other services than similarly qualified whites are charged—is a longstanding problem. It grew to outrageous proportions during the bubble years. Studies by consumer advocates found that large numbers of minority borrowers who were eligible for affordable, traditional loans were routinely steered toward ruinously priced subprime loans that they would never be able to repay.
It's not like such practices were entirely new:
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 ended government redlining and segregation, allowing black families to accumulate wealth through homeownership. For subprime lenders, this was quickly seen as a prime opportunity: a largely low-income community struggling with stagnant wages and a rising cost of living, whom they could persuade to use their homes like an ATM. As far back as 1993, African Americans were five to eight times more likely to hold subprime loans than whites. Even homeowners in high-income black communities were twice as likely to have subprime loans as homeowners in low-income white communities. And these loans were typically cash-out refinances (loans for more than the home is worth, so the borrower can pocket the surplus cash) and lines of credit for homeowners with substantial equity—attempts by the lenders to get at the meager wealth created by black families, and expropriate it.
This is a decades-old problem. One that the lending industry continues to fight to correct by lobbying against fair lending requirements and efforts by the Obama administration to provide oversight and accountability.
In 2010, the Obama Justice Department created a much-needed fair-lending unit. Those officials have worked with the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and bank regulators to ensure that credible complaints against consumer lenders reach the Justice Department in a timely fashion. The system seems to be working. Last year, the department received 49 referrals from federal regulators who suspected “a pattern and practice of discrimination.” The fair-lending unit has resolved eight cases through settlements and is still fighting one case in court. It has decided to sue a half dozen other lenders.
Even before you can get to the stage where you've cobbled together a nest egg that you can use to purchase your first home, or to put your children through college so that they can supposedly "compete" for a job in the global market with textile workers from Bangladesh ... you have to get a job and earn a living. And, as we see from
this chart provided by the Economic Policy Institute, the ability to actually do that is becoming harder and harder every year.
Workers’ share of corporate income was trending downward for at least a decade before the recession hit, and it only rebounded in 2008 because corporate profits were hit by the financial crisis, falling faster than wages for several months.
Workers aren’t earning less because they’re slacking off—just the opposite. Their productivity increased 8 percent between 2007 and 2012 while their wages actually fell, a trend that has been going on since at least 1979. And they’ve been speeding up since the recession, increasing their productivity last summer at the fastest pace since 2009.
Rather than addressing Lending Issues, the minimum wage and growing income gap, tax policies that benefit people who are the least in need, the out of control student loan system, or any of the issues that could make the American Dream not just something that only happens when your eyes are closed, but instead a living reality, the GOP brings us nothing be Fear, Loathing and Resentment—of children.
Stoking this kind of fear and resentment is a particularly ugly political tactic. Yet it is fairly common. Attempting to argue that these children are somehow a greater threat to the American Dream than the predatory lending practices of the mortgage industry is laughable. Just as it is just plain, flat-out nuts to proclaim that the African American unemployment rate—which has been far higher than the white rate for as long as the statistic has been recorded—is the result of every job that Kwame applied for being already taken by 15-year-old Javier or 16-year-old Louisa.
There's this statue, standing somewhere in a harbor with this poem inscribed on its plaque. It goes in part...
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
I can't see how these children, who are fleeing drug cartels that American foreign policy in Central America helped foster, don't fit within that description. I can't see that we have an American Dream so small that we can't include those who are the most desperate, the most in need, the most "wretched refuse" of all.
And I can't see how we can expect for anyone to enjoy the American Dream when so many of those who are already inside America are systematically having their dreams denied and stolen as a matter of industrial policy. The Dream denied for some is a Dream shattered for all.