In October 2018, a “migrant caravan” bound for the United States set out on foot from Honduras. The group was comprised of refuge seekers of all ages fleeing contexts of acute violence and poverty – a regional reality shaped by decades of punitive foreign policy machinations by none other than the US itself.
Then-president Donald Trump, never one to pass up an opportunity for overzealous xenophobic spectacle, took to Twitter to broadcast a “National Emergy” [sic], warning that “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in” with the caravan. In preparation for the pedestrian assault on the country, Trump ordered 5,200 active-duty US military troops to be deployed to the southern border along with helicopters, heaps of razor wire, and other “emergy” equipment.
Obviously, the US lived to tell the tale – although the same cannot be said for the thousands of refuge seekers who have died over the years while attempting to reach perceived safety in the country. Now, as Trump gears up for his second round as commander in chief of the nation, we’re in for another round of the anti-migrant “emergy”, as well, which the president-elect has taken the liberty of preemptively declaring.
After campaigning on a pledge to perpetrate the “largest deportation operation” in US history, Trump in November confirmed he was “prepared” to declare a national emergency and to utilise the US military to expel millions of undocumented immigrants from the country. The deployment of the armed forces in this particular task naturally leaves no room for doubt that this is, well, war – never mind Trump’s marketed image as a leader who is somehow antiwar.
Not that the US war on asylum seekers is anything new. Nor, of course, is it a war that is waged solely by Trumpites and members of the Republican party. Outgoing US President Joe Biden, for his part, did a fine job on the battlefield, overseeing more than 142,000 deportations in fiscal year 2023 alone. Then there was that decision by the Biden administration to waive a whole bunch of federal laws and regulations in order to expand Trump’s beloved border wall, in contravention of Biden’s own promises.
Rather than do all the dirty work himself, Biden increasingly enlisted the help of the Mexican government, already an established collaborator in making life hell for the US-bound have-nots of the world. And the more the US forced Mexico to crack down on migration, the more existentially perilous it became for people on the move – and the more profitable for extortion-addicted Mexican authorities and organised crime outfits alike.
After all, “border security” is big business on both sides of the border. And on the US side, it’s an entirely bipartisan affair that only becomes more transparently nefariously bonkers when Trump is at the helm; recall, for example, the man’s reported vision in 2019 of a US-Mexico frontier that included a “water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators” and a wall with “spikes on top that could pierce human flesh”. And while the alligators have yet to pan out, it seems that dying in a fire in a Mexican migrant detention centre or succumbing to dehydration and heatstroke in the desert is probably horrifyingly painful enough.
Meanwhile, the Trumpian fantasy according to which Biden recklessly presided over a free-for-all open-border policy will now only provide additional fuel for Trump’s renewed war effort on the southern border. Like Trump, Biden imposed his own de facto asylum bans that violated both US and international law – and, as Trump launches the second instalment of his quest to “make American great again”, you can bet the human right to asylum is going to come under progressively deranged fire.
And yet National Emergy 2.0 is not just a war on refuge seekers. Paradoxically, it’s also a war on the US itself, which cannot exist in its current form without the assistance of mass undocumented labour – the very folks Trump is threatening with the “largest deportation operation” in US history.
As per a report by the US Chamber of Commerce, the United States is suffering from a pronounced labour shortage: “If every unemployed person in the country found a job, we would still have millions of open jobs.” In May 2024, a CNBC analysis found that “immigrant workers are helping boost the US labor market,” making up a record 18.6 percent of the workforce in 2023.
The analysis continued: “As Americans age out of the labor force and birth rates remain low, economists and the Federal Reserve are touting the importance of immigrant workers for overall future economic growth.”
But why should Trump think about future, um, “emergies” when he can focus instead on propagating such preposterous falsehoods as that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating pets?
To be sure, there are plenty of things in America that objectively qualify as a national emergency, among them the regularity of school shootings and other deadly gun violence. Institutionalised racism also comes to mind, as does the homelessness epidemic and a predatory healthcare industry that is lethal in its own right.
But the whole point of a “National Emergy” is to distract from actual problems by replacing reason with paranoid absurdity. And as Trump rallies the troops for the impending surge in his favourite war, it’s only logical that logic, too, will be a casualty.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.