Kevin Drum: Shouldn’t the cages for kids be more comfortable?
Kevin Drum, a political columnist for Mother Jones, wrote in a blog post (6/26/19) last month that he did not understand why workers do not want their employer to work with the government agencies carrying out President Donald Trump’s brutal immigration policies, particularly Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). When workers at home goods website Wayfair staged a walkout because their company was supplying bunk beds and mattresses for a child detention camp in Texas, Drum could not fathom their insubordination.
“This is a genuine question, not snark,” Drum wrote. He continued:
They want Wayfair to stop sales to ICE or CBP or any other agency involved with keeping kids in cages…. But isn’t our whole complaint that these kids are being treated badly? Shouldn’t we want companies to sell the government toothpaste and soap and beds and so forth? What am I missing here?
What Drum is missing, and in a just slightly better world could have realized with moment of thinking, is that there is no reason whatsoever for children to be detained. The dismal conditions are part of the cruelty, but the existence of a place to sleep in a prison certainly does not negate the evil of its condition. Even detainees at Guantánamo Bay get beds.
Kevin Drum (Mother Jones, 7/12/19) worries that under Elizabeth Warren’s immigration plan, “no one will ever be deported.”
This month, Drum further revealed his disdain for immigrants in a piece, “Are Democrats Now the Party of Open Borders?” (7/12/19), criticizing Massachusetts senator and Democratic presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren’s border plan. Once again, he asked, “Am I missing something here?” And then:
Does Warren’s plan explicitly make it vanishingly unlikely that anyone crossing our border will ever be caught and sent back?
At In These Times (3/21/19), immigration attorney and Current Affairs editor Brianna Rennix explained that the right uses the idea of open borders as a rhetorical tool:
In recent months, Trump and other Republicans have begun to wield “open borders” as a cudgel against Democrats, despite the fact that few (if any) Democrats advocate it. The Right is well aware that for most of the public, “open borders” triggers a xenophobic fear of invasion.
She argued:
Immigration restrictions have devastating human consequences that significantly overshadow the few, highly questionable benefits, and that we should aim to do away with as much of our immigration enforcement system as possible and in no way expand it.
Much of Drum’s writing about immigration is focused on a concern about stopping so-called “illegal immigration,” a cruel, fascistic expression. He wrote of Warren’s plan:
There’s nothing about either a wall or a “virtual wall.” There’s nothing about E-Verify. There’s nothing about “smarter” or “more efficient” enforcement. No one will ever be deported—except, presumably, for serious felons, though Warren doesn’t even say that explicitly. Expedited removal will be ended.
Just like there should be no need for beds in child prisons because there should be no child prisons, there is no need for a wall or criminalizing migration. In a cruel and violent world, full of exponentially increasing climate change, natural disasters, food shortages and wars, people cross borders in search of a place where they have a sliver of a chance to survive. That determination for life should be celebrated, not criminalized. Drum has an attitude toward immigrants that is xenophobic and deeply embarrassing for Mother Jones.
Last year, Drum (5/24/18) explained that he viewed his position on immigration as toward the middle, although in fact it sounds like Trump’s rhetoric of “go back where you came from”:
I just want people to know that there’s a fairly reasonable way to apply for legal entrance, but if you’re in the country illegally you’ll eventually end up back where you came from. That’s all.
Legal entry happens through an extremely arduous bureaucratic system designed to take as much time as possible. It isn’t reasonable. People cannot return to where they came from due to a whole array of safety risks, including but not limited to violence stoked by the US, nor should they have to.
Since Drum is so fond of rhetorical questions, allow me to now ask: Why does Drum feel the need to expel people who are in the US? Does he fear a smarter blogger out there somewhere will take his job? Does he not realize how many criminals and rapists are American citizens?
Former child refugee Mary Harris “Mother” Jones
The legacy of Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, the radical labor organizer who famously said to “pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living,” has long been let down by the magazine named for her, but Drum’s latest columns are a substantial deterioration. Jones was herself a child refugee. She fled famine in Cork, Ireland, for Toronto, Canada, with her family in the 1840s.
Jones organized for the rights of child workers in 1903. According to her autobiography, she traveled to Pennsylvania, where 75,000 textile workers were on strike, 10,000 of whom were children. She led a group of children to march from Philadelphia to New York City to end child labor.
In her autobiography, she describes speaking about children who had been injured at work to a crowd in Philadelphia:
I put the little boys with their fingers off and hands crushed and maimed on a platform. I held up their mutilated hands and showed them to the crowd and made the statement that Philadelphia’s mansions were built on the broken bones, the quivering hearts and drooping heads of these children. That their little lives went out to make wealth for others. That neither state or city officials paid any attention to these wrongs.
During a presentation at Coney Island, Jones put children in cages to dramatize their working conditions. She later described daily life for child mill workers in Cottondale, Alabama:
At 5:30 in the morning, long lines of little grey children came out of the early dawn into the factory, into the maddening noise, into the lint-filled rooms…. At the lunch half-hour, children would fall to sleep over their lunch of cornbread and fat pork. They would lie on the bare floor and sleep. Sleep was their recreation, their release, as play is to the free children. The boss would come along and shake them awake…. I often went home with the little ones after the day’s work was done or the night shift went off duty. They were too tired to eat. With their clothes on, they dropped on the bed…to sleep, to sleep…the one happiness these children know.
Mother Jones worked to stop cruelty toward children. Kevin Drum, Mother Jones writer, criticizes workers who protest the practice of child detention. In the factories, and in the concentration camps, children deserve to experience more from life than only suffering and a place to sleep.
You can send a message to Mother Jones at backtalk@motherjones.com (or via Twitter @MotherJones). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
The Mother of all hypocrisy
Of course Drum’s comment about the Wayfair workers is off the mark, but his larger point is spot on. Trump has made this election a referendum on illegal immigration. The Democrats seem to have adopted a policy that verges on open borders. If they maintain that stance I suspect Trump will be reelected by wider margins. There is a solution to this that allows Democrats to defend and protect immigrants in this country while at the same time offering a short and long term solution that I believe would resonate with the American people. But so far they have not. The values FAIR expresses are laudable but you would need to explain how one can win with the open borders (or nearly so) position.
It’s not FAIR’s job to win elections – it’s to point out hypocrisy and bullshit in the media. Which this piece does admirably.
ANY response to the frame that the right-wing has applied to immigration as “Open Borders” (a big lie) will validate their erroneous claim.
“The Democrats seem to have adopted a policy that verges on open borders”. Not from MY point of view. Why do you think that?
When one buys into frame of the lies and fears of one’s opponents, one will most often lose…
The BEST response is policies and solutions that help EVERYONE, including improving conditions in those countries asylum seekers are fleeing from and whose socioeconomic systems have been so severely warped by USAmerican economic and military interventions in this hemisphere.
the concentration camps for children are bad and the practice should end
it’s not more important for joe biden to be elected president. it’s less important
“In recent months, Trump and other Republicans have begun to wield “open borders” as a cudgel against Democrats, despite the fact that few (if any) Democrats advocate it. “
Thanks. That needed to be pointed out to the commenter.
And you should say what your brilliant solution to a very difficult problem is. You claim possessing the solution to the crisis. But not what the solution itself is.
MoJo has been perhaps the most obvious total lack of irony of our Yuppie Liberal “creative class” betters, well before David Brock, Mark Penn and the Atlantic Council stop down of all dissent, whistleblowing competent journalism on the lefty blog-aggregators. MoJo swept actual life-long Keynesian Democrats from their comments threads, great journalists from their pages and most consensus working-class reality from their upscale reader’s consideration. Granted; Alternet, Kos, Crooks & Liars, Wonkette jumped on K Street’s Correct The Record clown car and PropRNot & RussiaRussiaRussia™ had yet to seriously eat all the “alternative” blogosphere. But besmirching Mother Jones IS pretty nasty? Thany you for posting this?
This comment seems incoherent in syntax and meaning. Perhaps this impression is an artifact of autocorrect errors and stream of consciousness dictation. I rather favor a perverse bot algorithm as an explanation.
This article quotes Drum writing, “But isn’t our whole complaint that these kids are being treated badly?” The article then states, “What Drum is missing, and in a just slightly better world could have realized with moment of thinking, is that there is no reason whatsoever for children to be detained.” Isn’t that the point Drum made, explicitly, in the quoted passage? I’m not defending Drum’s larger ideological position, but this seems like fairly petty and obtuse criticism that gets mired pretty quickly in “Beautiful Soul” posturing. As Alenka Zupancic explains, “(Moral) outrage is a particularly unproductive affect, yet it is one that offers considerable libidinal satisfaction. By ‘unproductive’ I mean this: it gives us the satisfaction of feeling morally superior, the feeling that we are in the right and others are in the wrong. Now for this to work, things must not really change. We are much less interested in changing things than in proving, again and again, that we are in the right, or on the right side, the side of the good. Hegel invented a great name for this position: the ‘beautiful soul.’ A ‘beautiful soul’ sees evil and baseness all around it but fails to see to what extent it participates in the perpetuation of that same order of things. The point of course is not that the world isn’t really evil, the point is that we are part of this evil world.” “Too Much of Not Enough” (LARB 3/9/18).
Also, this article takes (left) populism as inherently good, which is a debatable (and non-neutral) political position. For instance, rather than quote Brianna Rennix from In These Times, we could look at Angela Nagel’s article “The Left Case against Open Borders” (American Affairs, Vol II, No. 4, Winter 2018). Or there is this: “Refugees mostly don’t want to live in Europe [or the USA]; they want a decent life back at home. Instead of working to achieve that, Western powers treat the problem as a ‘humanitarian crisis’ whose two extremes are hospitality and the fear of losing our way of life. They thereby create a pseudo-‘cultural’ conflict between refugees and local working class populations, engaging them in a false conflict which transforms a political and economic struggle into one of the ‘clash of civilisations’. ” “Today’s anti-fascist movement will do nothing to get rid of right-wing populism – it’s just panicky posturing” (Independent, 12/2017)
or we could ignore crytpo-fash scumbags like nagle, frost, and anna khachiyan
Not sure who frost or anna khachiyan are, but Angela Nagle is no “cryto-fash” (I assume you mean crypto-fascist), she is on the political left. My point in citing these other thinkers is that LaChance’s article (like much content on FAIR) adopts a (left) populist political stance and presents it as if it is politically neutral, which it is not. It’s a “tu quoque” criticism. The people I cite are criticizing populism from the left. When you associate the left with the political right you are essentially deploying “horseshoe theory” that equates the political left and right. This is a line of argument developed by people like Ernst Nolte long ago. The problem is that, philosophically, that position ends up endorsing fascism in a way — see “The Two Totalitarianisms” (London Review of Books, 3/17/05) (“It is here that one has to make a choice. The ‘pure’ liberal attitude towards Leftist and Rightist ‘totalitarianism’ – that they are both bad, based on the intolerance of political and other differences, the rejection of democratic and humanist values etc – is a priori false. It is necessary to take sides and proclaim Fascism fundamentally ‘worse’ than Communism. The alternative, the notion that it is even possible to compare rationally the two totalitarianisms, tends to produce the conclusion – explicit or implicit – that Fascism was the lesser evil, an understandable reaction to the Communist threat.”). So the “tu quoque” criticism applies to your reply as well.
While I agree about the detention of these innocent children, I was disturbed by the passing comment on the Guantanamo captives receiving beds.
Any fair minded person, who reads the transcripts from the captives’ annual status reviews, will quickly conclude that many of the captives were completely innocent civilian bystanders, not terrorists, not even combatants who qualified for Geneva Convention POW status. Almost all the rest of the 780 men and boys, while combatants, should have qualified for POW status.
Only a handful of these men ever ended up being charged before the scandalous Military Commission system, not due to a lack of evidence, but because very few of the men ever had a meaningful association with terrorism.
Off point, but valid in its context.
Sent this letter to MJ Backtalk: I wonder how Drum reconciles his opinions about immigration and Article 13 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights:(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
I too wondered at the conundrum of the Wayfair protest. Drum makes a point, but there’s a larger point that’s more relevant.
Corporations that feed into the detention industry (for that is what it is) need to be reprimanded. It’s one thing for volunteers to offer these materials to alleviate the unconscionable detention conditions. It’s quite another for a company to profit from the same materials, for it becomes complicity.
This needs to be made very clear in media coverage to avoid right wing spin.
In the past, most illegal immigration was from job seekers (which greatly increased after NAFTA), and could have been stopped far more cost effectively and humanely by finding and fining firms that use their labor. That was not done because if it had been those firms would’ve banded together and cost the politicians responsible their seats. The recent influx has however been due to people seeking asylum rather than jobs, due partly to climate change but even more to the disastrous neoliberal regimes we’ve been installing and propping up in Central America for decades. The only humane way to stem that flow is with a Marshall Plan for Central America, which by this late date has become a moral obligation. That won’t happen as long as the Democratic party and its apologists, like Friedman and Drum, continue marching to the drum (pun intended) of neoliberal economics, and insists we did “the people” of Central America a favor rather than the ruling classes, both theirs and ours.
It seems that Mother Jones has become a right-of-center neoliberal corporatist and a crotchety old lady.
“Legal entry happens through an extremely arduous bureaucratic system designed to take as much time as possible.” Actually, most aliens who seek legal entry have no legal avenue whatsoever to achieve it. The “arduous bureaucratic system designed to take as much time as possible” simply is closed to them.
John Wheat Gibson
Immigration lawyer
Guys like Drum are always willing to help with the brickwork at Auschwitz.