US President Donald Trump reacted to the shooting of two National Guard personnel in Washington with the announcement that his administration would suspend immigration from ‘Third World countries permanently, and would review the status of immigrants already in the country, potentially reversing green-card status and naturalizations. Apart from being the typical geriatric piece of logic that one has come to expect from Mr Trump, there are a number of historical resonances that arise, which are also troubling.
The first reminder is of the Reichstag Fire of 1933, a month after the Nazis took power in Germany, which was supposed to have been committed by a Dutch Communist, and which allowed the persecution of all opponents of the regime. It seems that Mr Trump is not content with his initial measures, in which the immigration authorities have been arresting and deporting immigrants without valid visas. It is indirectly as a result of that police that the National Guard had a presence in Washington DC, where the shooting took place. Mr Trump has already been compared to the Nazis, and his reaction has been almost as if he merely sought an excuse to deepen the crackdown on immigrants. This streak of xenophobia is also not new to the USA, with the ‘Yellow Peril’ scare against Chinese labourers at the turn of the 20th century, and the internment of Japanese-origin citizens in World War II prominent. Then there is the case of Aimal Kansi, who in 1983 shot dead two CIA employees, then fled back to his native Pakistan. He was later captured and executed in 2002. The Washington assailant, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was an Afghan who had worked with the USA in Afghanistan, and who had been resettled in the USA. The official version is that he was mentally disturbed.
Pakistan’s reaction has been measured. As the Foreign Office spokesman pointed out during Friday’s briefing, the USA was a signatory of the 1951 Convention on Refugees, which obliged it to give asylum to those who sought it. Mr Trump’s target seems mainly to be Hispano-Americans, and even the refugees he welcomes, like a handful of South African whites, are not having a good time. Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of what Mr Trump seems to be doing is not so just closing the route to citizenship, as reversing it, especially for those who are a ;public charge, a security risk, or non-compatible with Western civilization. The last seems problematic because it is so vague, and might be used against opponents of the regime.
