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In Defense of the Immigration Ban (First Draft)

Columbus
My (totally not genocidal) homeboy Columbus.

Due to HCS's public email listservs, Satire V has obtained a first draft of the op-ed "In Defense of the Immigration Ban." 

 

In Defense of Something That Will Never Affect Me 

I have yet to visit Puerto Rico, but I would like to go sometime. (I have the money to do so, by the way ;) Let me now mention that I am friends with the little people, the brown people, so I can't be racist or bigoted. I mention Puerto Rico so I can brag about some ancestor on the Santa Maria which I somehow think lends me intellectual legitimacy, as if Columbus wasn’t a genocidal idiot. That crew had no idea they were even fucking in North America.

Now, several centuries later, there is no some mistaking the promise and opportunity that these United States offers to white, cis, straight, affluent, Christian men. The act of journeying from poverty or oppression to seize something better is kinda cute tbh. Again, I have Middle Eastern and immigrant “friends,” so I can’t be racist. The (officially unconstitutional) immigration ban sucks for them lol. But I personally don’t really give a shit.

The crux of our (my) identity is freedom (for me) (see also slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and oppression)—freedom of religion (for white Christians), speech (especially hate speech), expression (dance, music, morally oblivious and intellectually sloppy think pieces), and ambition (???); freedom that hinges on us blindly trusting the government not to fuck it up for us. We subscribe to a “bipartisan” brand of “liberalism” rooted in the belief that all (white) people men, equally created, inherently hold rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness through their honest labor (or daddy’s inheritance) (unless they’re poor). We have shed (mostly other nation’s) blood for these values, and we have sacrificed so that other nations could taste a giant American pie made of whoop-ass. My dad, my uncle, and many family friends have responded to the call to unwittingly help our government provide advanced weaponry to the Mujahideen in the 70s to serve our own interests, thus arming the future Taliban, prop up a Shah in Iran who actively oppressed democracy, invade Iraq and Afghanistan on false or flimsy pretenses to topple regimes we claimed were “undemocratic” or “a threat” and then occupy them for a decade, attempting to bulldoze them into nations all but subservient to American interests. And to get that sweet, sweet oil. I am under the impression that most people in the region think we’re the bee’s knees. But somehow, shockingly, some people do not like us.

In scorn of our ideals of freedom and justice (for white men) stand the radicalized, ostensibly religious but obliviously political, remains of our imperialistic rampage through the Middle East—and the vast majority of Muslims who oppose them and condemn their extremism people who are also ISIS. I cannot accept those who call for a second Holocaust, encourage the abuse of women, or treat with great violence those who do not adopt the same beliefs, which is why I support a President whose supporters do all of those things, never mind the shitlord himself. I’m now going to be bewilderingly vague and condemn “bystanders who fail to condemn these practices” (like me, I guess?), implying that either all Muslims are at fault, or anyone in the U.S. who disagrees with the (officially unconstitutional) ban is ignorant and arrogant. Frustratingly, literally none of these people seek entry among the innocent, which really kinda fucks up my whole point. But hypothetically, they could sneak in amongst refugees, and I think it’s best to address all potential hypotheticals. For example, hypothetically, I am an entitled, self-centered fucktrumpet. Besides, brown people scare me and I don’t want them to have what I what we have. Can you imagine if we let in a group of violent religious foreigners set on destroying the native population?*

* Who weren’t white.

Many argue that the (officially unconstitutional) ban callously labels entire populations as radical, as I just did in that last paragraph using utterly nonsensical moral equivalence. I would like to ignore that and instead pivot to claiming it is installed chiefly to allow the administration time to hone a more racist fascist thorough vetting process than the incredibly thorough one we already have, without violating the constitution (again). It references the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act (H.R.158, linking to the actual bill because fuck you), passed by Congress in 2015—quietly slipped into an omnibus spending bill and passed with hardly any coverage—under President Obama. In summary, the Act prevents people from Certain Countries from visiting the U.S. without a visa, but does not prevent anyone from entering the country should they go through a normal visa process. Nations under special scrutiny are those known to be full of scary brown people and not give us oil. That sounds reasonable, right? Good, remember that when I desperately try to argue that the (officially unconstitutional) ban is the basically same thing.

Contrary to common accusations, President Trump's policies are totally not at all against Muslims (ignore the entire paragraph about Radical Islam and its Danger from earlier), as 87 percent of the world's Muslims, dwelling in countries like Indonesia, Egypt, India, Saudi Arabia, and other countries where Trump holds business interests, remain unaffected by the ban. Complete coincidence, the whole thing, honestly. It’s not like he promised to ban Muslims from the country during his campaign, over and over. Anyway, the seven nations that have been put under the ban were first listed as “countries of concern” in a 2016 law passed under President Obama's administration. (Yes, I DID say this already, but it’s honestly the only thing I have so I’m milking it for all it’s worth.) Notably, the law of 2016 in principle (haha principles) carries much more weight than any (literally unconstitutional) executive order, which stands only insofar as it is supported by law (which it summarily is not). With the nations under the current ban, Lord Dampnut has merely radically altered a small legal procedure change into an outright barring of people from entering this country based on where they’re coming from (and if they support him) and regardless of whether they’ve already been through our thorough vetting process or have a legal visa. All of which is completely unconstitutional, and has never worked out poorly before. In fact, two of my classmates at Harvard Medical School were barred from entering! But fuck them, right?

My purpose in writing this is entirely to spark pointless controversy, because I fucking thrive off it and it’s not like I have anything worthwhile to say. Also, to remind us all of who we are (or who we should be, i.e. white men), what we (I) foundationally believe in (white supremacy) and the difficult task we face in balancing ‘giving a shit about anyone but ourselves’ with ‘living in fear of the hate we engender by our own actions.’ There is no pleasure in signing or carrying out an order to halt immigration from these seven countries, just the smug satisfaction of legally codified superiority. President Trump has wrestled with the ramifications of tighter borders, especially for his wife (and future wife). His executive order is not heartless—bigoted and Islamaphobic, yes, heartless, nah—but was crafted in an impulsive effort of xenophobia as we look to instate firmer measures of security to coddle our (my) fragile white masculinity, so that I never have to face the fact that I am too committed to my fetish for arbitrarily playing devil's advocate to acknowledge that my poorly formed and lazily argued opinions support violent white nationalism.

 

Kevin K. Kullen ’18, the former secretary of the Harvard Republican Club, feels the need to insert his shit opinion wherever it’s not wanted in the form of prose that sound like a 9th grader who just discovered a thesaurus. He is the worst kind of section kid. The “views” “expressed” in this article are strictly those of the author.

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