CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

America Creates the Displacement It Then Punishes

Republican immigration policy turns people fleeing a global order shaped in part by U.S. power into culprits—and then asks them to bear the costs of a disorder they did not create.

When the Supreme Court on June 25 cleared the way for the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for more than 350,000 Haitians and roughly 6,100 Syrians, it treated the matter as a question of executive authority. Yet the same government warns Americans not to travel to Haiti or Syria because of kidnapping, violence, terrorism, armed conflict, and collapsed security. It can acknowledge danger when those at risk carry U.S. passports, then allow the protection shielding Haitian and Syrian families who have built lives in the United States to be withdrawn, leaving many vulnerable to removal into that danger.

That is not a technical inconsistency. It reveals the governing logic of the Republican immigration agenda. America helps produce or deepen instability abroad, then criminalizes, detains, and expels many of the people who flee its consequences. The border is where this contradiction becomes visible, but it is not where it begins.

No honest argument should claim that the United States causes every migrant’s journey. Haiti’s crisis has Haitian causes. Syria’s catastrophe has Syrian, regional, and international causes. Corrupt elites, armed groups, authoritarian governments, and local political failure matter. But those facts do not absolve Washington. A country that exercises military power, uses sanctions and financial leverage, and helped build a carbon-intensive global economy cannot pretend that displacement begins only when someone reaches the Rio Grande.

The Republican story begins too late. It sees the migrant in a detention cell, at a checkpoint, or before an immigration judge. It does not see the family calculating whether its children can survive another year; the worker pushed out by economic collapse; or the community uprooted by violence, climate shocks,........

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