To the editor:
According to Aristide Zolberg’s well-regarded history of American immigration policy, “A Nation by Design,” arguments about who we should let into the United States are fundamentally about what kind of country we want to be.
It is now very clear what the Trump administration thinks. On one side, we have people with permanent legal residency arrested because of past protest activity; graduate students grabbed off the street and their visas cancelled without their knowledge because of unremarkable contributions to a student newspaper; a longtime resident with no criminal record disappeared into a Salvadoran torture camp without a hearing; hundreds of thousands from Venezuela and Haiti facing the cancellation of humanitarian parole, forced to return to deadly chaos in their countries of origin; and an asylum process that is essentially defunct. On the other, we have Trump publicly offering asylum to white South African landowners (few are taking it), while Elon Musk and his young “staff” (including eugenics fan Marko Elez and Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old who goes by “Big Balls”) work up a “Gold Card” visa process that will streamline the process for rich foreigners and, it appears, avoid the pesky job-creation requirements of the current EB-5 visa.
I guess it is time to change the inscription on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your shady, your rich, your pampered oligarchs yearning to avoid prosecution…” Emma Lazarus is turning in her grave. What a disgrace to this country.
Jim Mahon
Williamstown
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