Does Diversity Really Unite Us? Citizenship and Immigration: A View from the Extreme Right

Whether diversity really unites us shouldn't even be the question.  Diversity is a fact of life and always has been.

If you can stomach it, check out this piece by retired Cal State San Bernardino professor, Dr. Edward J. Erler, as he is widely cited online for his disturbing views cloaked with an air of legitimacy given him as a member of the academy.

It's important to know and recognize what pseudo-scientific propaganda by the extreme right looks like so that we can know the ideas and ideologies that they use to justify what truly troubles them.  Among these, diversity is king.

Despite voluminous scholarship in this area, Dr. Erler fails to cite in this tortured screed a single scholar or research study—yet writes as if he were an expert.  Accordingly, his piece is ahistorical, power-evasive, and white supremacist—and involves binary thinking, meaning whites versus "the other," who by definition, are non-white, much less his equal.

Atrociously, in support of Trump's indefensible, abjectly immoral, zero-tolerance immigration policy that resulted in 2 1/2 thousand children or so getting separated from their parents, he spreads the lie that this "had been a policy of the Obama and Bush administrations (see my related earlier post on this)."  Nor is he kind in this piece to George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan for being much too amenable to immigrants and immigration.

He argues that immigration policy should not at all be compassionate and thereby justifies separating children from parents and imprisoning them.  It's unfortunate that a scholar like this has had a platform for such racist thought and teaching for many years at the university.  

So that college students—and indeed, all of us—can know the enemy from within, I do think it's good to know the ideas that cycle, get recycled, and their origins  These are the extreme ethnocentrists and hate mongers that masquerade as scholars.  

As handmaidens to the extreme right wing politics that are responsible for so much harm and suffering in our country right now, do take note how individuals like Dr. Erler conceal their political ideologies and narrow-mindedness with high-sounding rhetoric and artifice.  

-Angela Valenzuela

#FamiliesBelongTogether
#FreeTheChildren

Does Diversity Really Unite Us? Citizenship and Immigration

by Edward J. Erler. The following is adapted from a speech delivered on April 11, 2018, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Colorado Springs.

President Trump’s zero-tolerance policy for illegal border crossers has provoked a hysterical reaction from Democrats, establishment Republicans, the progressive-liberal media, Hollywood radicals, and the deep state. What particularly motivated the ire of these Trump-haters was the fact that the zero-tolerance policy would require the separation of parents and children at the border. The hysteria was, of course, completely insincere and fabricated, given that the policy of separating children and parents was nothing new—it had been a policy of the Obama and Bush administrations as well. Furthermore, where is the compassion for the thousands of American children who are separated from their parents every year as a result of arrests and convictions for nonviolent crimes? Many of those arrested are single mothers whose infants become wards of the government until their mothers complete their sentences. No hysteria or effusive compassion is elicited by these separations, confirming that the object of the hysteria surrounding illegal border crossers is to force open borders on the nation under the guise of compassion for children.

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