Tom Washington: Giving chief executive unmatched power to deal with marginalized groups has been done only disastrous results

To The Daily Sun,

Throughout his political career, Donald Trump has assailed immigrants and attributed a broad range of societal problems to their presence in the country. Those problems include increased housing costs, inflation, crime, expensive and under-performing healthcare, the debt, and the inadequacy of the social safety net.

Trump has promised that if he is given more power, he will deal with the immigrants and, accordingly, improve or outright fix most problems in society. Under that premise, he has gone after both legal and undocumented immigrants alike, often by calling them terrorists or gang members without providing evidence or due process. Rather than deport undocumented immigrants, Trump instead uses taxpayer money to imprison them in a foreign prison that is the embodiment of an Eighth Amendment violation and a prison from which no one has ever been released.

Scapegoating a marginalized group as the cause of society’s problems is an old playbook that we have seen before. Giving the chief executive unmatched power to “deal with” the marginalized group has been done before, with only disastrous results to show for it.

It is not poor migrants who have eroded the working class for decades. It is people like Donald Trump and his country club friends who have used their money to make government work for them at the expense of the rest of us. The rich want us fighting among ourselves so they can continue to wage a one-sided class war against us. It is time that we stop dancing to their tune and unite around our shared interests. They want us looking at immigrants so we don’t look at the wealthy elite while they pick our pockets and corrupt our government.

Tom Washington

Laconia