The Melting Goes to Pot
“With a lot of these immigrant groups, not only is the first generation unsuccessful. Again, Somalia is a clear example here. You see persistent issues in every subsequent generation. So you see consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.” That’s Stephen Miller, the chief architect of Trump’s immigration policy, citing the children of immigrants as a problem. The data doesn’t support his argument, but even as a child of immigrants, I understand today’s America well enough to know we shouldn’t let ourselves be distracted by facts. This contempt for immigrants (especially black and brown ones), long viewed as a core strength of our nation, is viewed by Miller and his ilk as our greatest threat. And they’re acting on the belief. Miller’s contempt certainly extends to people like Luis Martinez. Like thousands of other undocumented Americans, Martinez has spent decades literally killing himself fighting wildfires for the US government. “Now he’s facing down cancer, debt and the threat of separation from his 11-year-old.” NYT (Gift Article): ‘It’s Just Us’: The Firefighter, His Son and a Treacherous Choice. “In their small, secluded town, nearly everyone was connected to the private companies that the government hired to fight fires. Smoke-related sicknesses were a shared fact of life. So were periodic immigration crackdowns. Lately, the road to Seattle was becoming a corridor for ICE enforcement.” Read both of their stories and decide for yourself, who’s more American? Who has actually done more for this country? Stephen Miller or Luis Martinez.
+ The White House is so certain Americans will love the immigrant round-ups that they’ve turned them into a reality show. WaPo (Gift Article): Inside ICE’s media machine.
+ Of course, the administration doesn’t want you to see all the deportation stories, only the ones where they control the narrative. Hence, Bari Weiss’s state media-esque, last-second decision to pull a 60 Minutes piece about the Venezuelans sent to the CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador. I covered that decision in detail yesterday: On Our Watch: “The iconic opening to 60 Minutes has long represented the countdown to an investigative news story. Now it feels more like a countdown to the demise of TV journalism. Tick … tick … tick…” It turns out that CBS forgot to cancel the broadcast of the piece in the Canadian market. So it’s basically all over the internet at this point. Trump and his enablers can delete a file here or a news segment there, but they can’t delete all of reality, which is what it would take for history to forgive their toxic stain saturating America. Maybe it’s fitting that we close out the NextDraft year in news coverage with an investigative report that we had to bootleg from another country’s broadcast because it was barred from our own airwaves. That sounds familiar. It just doesn’t sound like America.
+ I’ll be off for the holidays and back in 2026. Of course, I may come back sooner if there’s any really shocking news. But, er, what are the chances of that? Have a great holiday season and new year.
