Local opinion: Is America for white people only?

“America is for Americans and Americans only.”

So said Stephen Miller, the racist, xenophobic presidential aide, at a 2024 hate-filled campaign rally in the center of the immigrant universe, New York City. His comment set the tone for the president’s escalating obsession with immigrants of color.

Can Miller’s declaration withstand the test of a few questions?

• Why wasn’t the president’s white mother, a Scottish immigrant, deported as a non-American? She was a lawbreaker, stating for the 1940 census she was a U.S. citizen. But she wasn’t until 1942, Scotland’s newspaper The National reported. Falsifying information on a U.S. Census form is a crime.
• Should Miller’s white great-grandparents, immigrants who fled czarist Russia’s pogroms, have been deported as non-Americans? They likely did not “show me your papers” at Ellis Island, among millions of white Europeans welcomed without question in the early 1900s.
• Why wasn’t the president’s white wife, an immigrant from Slovenia, deported as a non-American? She broke the law before she was married to the president, taking U.S. modeling jobs in 1996. Her visa at the time forbade her from working, The Associated Press reported.
• Why wasn’t the president’s ex-friend, a white South African billionaire who fled his homeland to avoid military service, deported as a non-American? He was here on a student visa and went to work instead of school, violating immigration law, CNN reported.
• Should the 98.4% of us who are descended from immigrants after the year 1492 be deported, leaving the land to the descendants of the roughly 10 million people who were here before the 15th century?

What’s the point of these questions, you ask? That this land, before it was and since it has been the United States, was, is and always will be multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic, despite the current racist leadership’s efforts to make it white only.

Pre-Columbian inhabitants — non-white people who were multicultural and multiethnic — thrived for millennia before this was America. They lived and governed by natural law, respecting the land and the elements, putting community above self and compassionately, with tragic naiveté, welcoming white people who arrived from afar.

Leaders of the dominant white culture, having long ago conquered the original inhabitants, their descendants and other non-white people, now want to rid U.S. society of as many people of color as possible via mass deportations. To them, America is for white people and white people only.

Furthering that idea, the white-immigrant-descendant president has dispatched troops to quell what he called “rebellion.” He aims to suppress people who are calling him out for his overt racism in deporting immigrants of color.

Today’s scenario is the opposite of 60 years ago, when President Lyndon Johnson sent troops to segregated Alabama to enforce civil rights laws on behalf of Black people, acknowledging the country’s diversity and its original declaration that all people are created equal.

We ask the president, paraphrasing others: Have you no shame? Have you no compassion? Have you no Judeo-Christian morals?

The answers are all yes: This president, a white descendant of immigrants, is shameless, non-compassionate and amoral.