Whither America?

It will be interesting to see whether Trumpian America's approach to immigrants will be more like Nazi Germany's genocides or more like pre-Civil-War America's abuse of Fugitive Slaves, or some creative blend of the two models:

"Can a nation committed to human equality treat human beings like chattel? “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Abraham Lincoln famously said in 1858, “I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I expect it to cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”

The federal government is now committed to treating immigrants almost precisely as the antebellum South treated slaves. They are to have fewer rights than others; to their jailers, they are not even truly “persons”; they need not receive due process, or indeed any process, before being detained indefinitely or even deported to countries they have never seen. And under the Trump executive order on birthright citizenship, this subordinate status is to be permanent and hereditary—passed down, the way slave status was, from parent to child. 

Truly, this house cannot stand. These conflicts will recur. They will grow more, not less, corrosive to a free, democratic republic. Americans—red or blue—are not accustomed to heel-clicking compliance to the orders of some jack-in-office with a Sharpie."