The Cruelty is the Point
For those of you with young children, you might want to have them cover their ears for the duration of this post.
Fuck Donald Trump and the fucking spineless cowards that enable him.
Don't worry, there's more where that came from.
As some of you might have seen, the toddler-in-chief announced expanded restrictions for immigrants here on work visas on Monday, extending an existing order to last until the end of the year. From CBS News:
...The order, which is slated to last until the end of the year, will suspend H-1B visas for those in specialized fields like the technology sector and most H-2B visas for non-agricultural seasonal workers. The other programs that will be restricted are: cultural exchange J-1 visas for au pairs and other short-term workers; visas for spouses of H-1B and H-2B holders; and L visas for companies to relocate employees to the U.S...My profanity-laced tirade today has to do with the fact that I'm currently dating an amazing person here on a J-1 visa and I'm seeing firsthand the devastating consequences that this fuckery has on a person in their everyday life. Specifically in the science field where 80% of post-doctoral researchers are here on a J-1 or H-1B visa, this new directive is like a giant kick in the nuts to the entire scientific community. Not only does it affect the recruitment of new, talented, international scientists but it places a massive burden for those already here in the country who now have to try and figure out if it's even worth staying here or if they will even be allowed to leave the United States to visit their families back home. This order, created under the false premise of needing to reform the work program to create jobs during the pandemic, is a clear slap in the face to anyone who has the audacity to be born outside the United States.
...Mr. Trump also announced Monday an extension of another set of visa restrictions he issued in April, also in response to the economic downturn caused by the pandemic. Along with pausing the diversity green card lottery, the April proclamation suspended certain visas for foreigners seeking to move to the U.S. permanently through petitions from their family members or prospective employers...
...In addition to the proclamation, the senior administration official said Mr. Drumpf instructed him and other advisers to implement major changes to the H-1B program, which currently has an annual cap of 85,000 visas that are awarded through a lottery system. The official said the administration will move to scrap the lottery and replace it with a system in which the applicants with the highest salary offers receive the allotted visas.
But that is this administration's MO. The grandson of an illegal German immigrant and someone whose wife somehow earned an Einstein visa, Donald Trump has made no secret his feelings of foreigners. From the Muslim ban to shithole African countries to his efforts to end DACA, Donald Trump's white supremacist views could not be more obvious. After all, this is someone who slept with a book of Hitler's speeches by his bedside and who stressed that there were "many fine people on all sides" of the Charlottesville neo-Nazi rally in 2017. Sure, Stephen Miller may be the face of these policies, but we have an entire Republican Party that refuses to speak up at times and moments like these. It's been 48 hours and not even a single furrowed eyebrow from Susan Collins at this point. It's almost as if they actually agree with the principles behind the policies.
And these policies are absolute shit. Fucking garbage. They help nobody. They don't save American jobs. If Americans could fill these jobs, then we wouldn't have 80 out of every 100 positions unfilled. The truth is that foreign countries like India, China, Japan, Brazil, and South Korea have scientists that are a better fit for the work needed in this country. Principal investigators scour research conferences to recruit foreign talent because science is inherently collaborative in nature. It's not uncommon to have research labs here in the United States with 5,6, 10 different nationalities working together in scientific harmony. They say the universal language is math and it is through math applied to science that a diverse team can come together and work on some of the world's most pressing problems. I can guarantee that whichever American lab eventually works to produce a COVID-19 vaccine will have a significant population of foreign-born scientists on the team that will end up saving countless lives.
It may be hard to imagine the following scenario after watching Fox News all day, but if you actually look outside Trump's lily-white inner circle, you're able to realize that there are tens of thousands of brilliant scientists who left their home to come to work in the United States. You can see that these scientists want to work and set down roots in this country. That they will not only help lead to scientific breakthroughs but that they will eventually become citizens and have American citizen children. That they will go on to purchase homes and pay taxes and coach little league. That they will vote and become informed participants in our democracy. And that they will live next door to us as our neighbors and our friends.
That is what scares Donald Trump. It scares the shit out of him. It scares the shit out of him because he is a sad, weak, pathetic little man. America first means America last. It means turning our backs on hundreds of thousands of Muslims or Africans or scientists. It means admitting that being white might not automatically make you the master race you so claim to be. By refusing to admit and retain the world's most talented scientists, Donald Trump can claim that he's doing America a solid. But we all know what he's really doing is throwing red meat to his base, a base that believes that white Americans are superior in every way. Meanwhile, those tens of thousands of talented scientists are reevaluating their options and are looking for a new home that doesn't treat its scientists like permanent second-class citizens. At the end of the day, Donald Trump isn't making America great again. He's making countries like Canada great for the very first time.
And someone like Justin Trudeau couldn't be happier.