The following is excerpted from “Shirley Temple’s Strange Loot” by Matt Weinstock, which appeared in The New Yorker on April 8, 2013:
“Of course, Hollywood has been trying to forcibly reincarnate (Shirley) Temple for sixty years. … In 1956, even ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ joined the fleet of retroactive Temple vehicles: the film presented a sugary, Americanized vision of Frank, and the director George Stevens wrote that he’d hoped to cast a Shirley Temple type. I recently mentioned this blasphemous bit of dream casting to a friend, who said that he’d always pictured Shirley as the adorable Nazi youth who points to the attic and yells, ‘They’re in there, Mister Hitler!’”
In the rare moments that I think about Shirley Temple, I always think of this darkly hilarious line from Matt Weinstock’s article about Temple’s legacy and her 1988 autobiography. It is increasingly popping into my head when I think about America.
According to The Guardian (among countless other news sources), last week, Texas land commissioner Dawn Buckingham wrote a letter to President-elect Donald Trump stating that her office “is fully prepared to enter into an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration, and Customs Enforcement (ICE), or the U.S. Border Patrol, to allow a facility to be built for the processing, detention, and coordination of the largest deportation of violent criminals in America’s history.”
The facility in question would be built on 1,402 acres of land, offered freely to the federal government, positioned in the Rio Grande Valley on the U.S.-Mexico Border.
Against the backdrop of this generous offer, Trump has appointed former ICE Director Tom Homan as his “border czar.” Homan has promised to carry out “the biggest deportation this country has ever seen.” When questioned on “60 Minutes” about policies he had overseen which had previously led to migrant families being separated, he offered a solution: “Families can be deported together.”
And against the backdrop of THAT, Trump has publicly stated that during his second term, he’s hoping to pull off his long-held dream of ending birthright citizenship. If a case involving 14th Amendment protections of birthright citizenship comes before the Supreme Court, they’ll likely side with Trump’s perspective; after all, it hasn’t been that long since the Supreme Court decided that the 14th Amendment didn’t protect a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy.
I don’t want to seem reactionary, but we’re talking about building a concentration camp for migrants, right?
Of course, it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve built concentration camps in this country; there were the internment camps built by the U.S. Government during World War II to house Japanese people living in the U.S. For a long time, it seemed like we all generally agreed that was one of the most shameful moments in our nation’s recent history. While our nation wasn’t mass executing the citizens that were forced into these camps, nearly 2,000 American citizens of Japanese descent died from tuberculosis and other medical issues while in the camps, so America can’t exactly pat itself on the back.
“But wait!” someone says. “This land being donated in Texas is not for a concentration camp! It’s for a deportation facility! It’s simply a place where undocumented immigrants can be briefly held before being deported!”
When Adolf Hitler created the first concentration camp at Dachau shortly after being appointed Chancellor in 1933, the purpose was to imprison and intimidate perceived enemies of the party. By 1939, the camps were used to house Jews that had been rounded up for mass deportation. By 1941, it had become clear that mass deportation was not a feasible solution, and that’s when the mass executions started.
The problem with the way that we understand history is that when you’re looking at a situation that took place decades in the past, it’s easy to see the big shocking moments but it’s difficult to see the hundreds of small, almost imperceptible steps that led to those moments. Hitler didn’t start a genocide on day one; it took him almost a decade to work up to that point. You can’t convince ordinary people to commit atrocities overnight. You have to work up to the atrocities, one small act at a time, until the atrocities become business as usual.
There’s another problem we face, and I hear it a lot from people who think I’m overreacting to current events. There is a sense, I believe, that because our nation has survived so many difficult moments, it is destined to survive every difficult moment that comes its way. And maybe it is. But if I met someone who had managed to survive five devastating car accidents with barely a scratch, I would conclude that they’re lucky, not that they’re immortal.
If the federal government does indeed build a mass deportation facility on the Texas-Mexico border — a stretch of land known as “Mexico” up until about 200 years ago — I can all but guarantee that it won’t be solely used to harbor violent criminals. The powers that be will go after law-abiding, tax-paying undocumented immigrants with equal fervor.
To be fair, that’s exactly what a whole lot of people voted for. But whatever temporary joy they get will likely be overshadowed when food prices begin to skyrocket. Nearly three-quarters of farm laborers in the U.S. are migrants. It’s hard enough for fast food restaurants to find employees willing to work for the pitiful wages they’re offering, but slinging burgers for minimum wage is a far sight better than picking tomatoes in the summer heat for 50 cents per bucket. Finding replacement labor will cost farmers a comparative fortune, and that price hike will be passed along to the consumers.
At least this situation won’t cause the food we import to increase in price. The new tariffs will be the cause of that.
No matter how this all ends, at least we can agree on one thing: three dollars is just too much to ask for a dozen eggs.
