Cathy Young @ the bulwark
Just two weeks after Donald Trump took office, the administration revoked temporary protected status for some 350,000 refugees from Venezuela. Starting April 7, they will lose their work permits and be subject to deportation. And Trump’s proposed new travel ban would completely bar citizens of Venezuela from entering the United States.
This cruel situation has at least two darkly ironic dimensions. One is that the Venezuelan migrants are fleeing precisely the kind of far-left, socialist, anti-American dictatorship that American conservatives in particular have always seen as the enemy. The Trump administration itself has singled it out as a hostile and criminal regime. (Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently named Venezuela one of the “enemies of humanity.”) Many of the refugees who are losing their protected status—and probably some who have just been deported on a flimsy basis—have good reason to fear reprisals if they return to Venezuela. Yet the administration has pressured the country’s Marxist tyrant, Nicolás Maduro, to take them back.
No less ironic is the fact that the Venezuelan-American community, like many other immigrant groups coming from socialist or communist regimes (such as Cuba or the Soviet Union), skews heavily Republican. Last year, as many as 70 percent of Venezuelan American voters backed Trump. Many of those voters now feel cheated and betrayed.
The Trump administration’s callous treatment of Venezuelan migrants is a stark contrast to the welcome readily extended to refugees from communist regimes in the 1970s and later, under both Republican and Democratic administrations. (My own family came here in 1980 under such an admissions program for Soviet refugees.) These communities, too, had their organized criminal elements (the Russian mob in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach was notorious). But America was able to handle these challenges without treating criminal gangs like an invading foreign army or targeting entire communities for suspicion. The result was that millions of people were able to escape oppression, and the United States gained thriving immigrant communities—ones that, as it happens, also became fairly solid Republican constituencies….
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