Eric Risberg/AP Photo
People wait in line outside an immigration office in San Francisco, in January 2019. The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ruled in favor of the Trump administration's controversial ‘public charge’ rule that restricts legal immigration.
If this were just a normal rotten week—if much of the nation weren’t reeling at Kobe Bryant’s death, if we weren’t submerged in impeachment and the overall degeneracy of the Trump era—then yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling would have people of goodwill screaming in the streets. As it’s not a normal rotten week, the soft bigotry of the Supreme Court’s five right-wingers didn’t even make the front pages.
In case you missed it, the five robed horsemen—Justices Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh—overturned a lower court’s stay on new standards that the Trump administration has put in place for determining whether immigrants applying legally to be admitted to the United States can be let in. Not to put too fine a point on it, the rules are designed to exclude the poor and nonwhite.
Under the new diktats, immigrants may be denied entry if an immigration official estimates that they may at some point make use of Medicaid or food stamps or Section 8 housing. Grounds for exclusion will include inadequate proficiency in English, limited formal education, and an income at or lower than 125 percent of the poverty level.
Such tests will likely exclude most working-class aspiring immigrants from poorer nations. By that metric, most immigrants from Latin America and Africa won’t have much of a chance to gain entry, tilting the immigrant pool to such whiter and middle-class points of origin as Europe. Like the immigration law of 1924, it reflects a desire to keep America more Caucasian and more conservative.
Had such standards been in place before 1924, of course, the United States would have perhaps half the population it has today and would not likely have attained the economic, scientific, cultural, political, and military advantages commonly associated with the American way of life. Nor would we ever have been a nation steeped in the Horatio Alger myth—that the ideal trajectory of an American life begins in poverty and ends in wealth. By accepting Trump’s metrics, the Court ratifies reversing that myth—enter rich and you either stay there or decline.
Some rule. Some Court. Where’s the House Un-American Activities Committee when you need it?
