Portside

Millions are threatened by famine, as Riyadh prepares an assault on the country’s key port.

President Donald Trump is actively considering opening a new front in his war on immigrants through another hastily drafted and vaguely worded executive order. This is the latest piece of his damaging agenda to dehumanize immigrants. It willfully ignores the reality that immigrants are not only valued members of American families and communities but also tremendous contributors to the nation's economy and prosperity.

Though President Obama rejected the “Global War on Terror” label in favor of the anodyne “overseas contingency operations,” the conflict remains global, and it remains a war. No one even claims that the bombs we’re dropping over Syria are “smart.” And no one except the grieving families even try to count those they kill.

Victor Grossman reports from Berlin on causes of the spate of violence striking Germany and across Europe. We need not look too far to find possible causes of such hatred or, frequently, of distorted despair. I think of what so many have gone through. War-torn home towns, shootings, explosions and bombings in their native Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, a terrifying flight to get away, to find some haven, where they can escape and perhaps even realize their hopes and wishes.

The U.S. Supreme Court has voted 4-4 in one of the most consequential immigration cases in recent history, United States v. Texas. The High Court's failure to fall one way or another in the case leaves in place a lower court decision that blocks the Obama administration's deferred action immigration initiatives known as DAPA and the expansion of DACA from being implemented. An Atlanta coalition of local community organizations have launched an ICE Free Zones campaign.

The entire discourse on refugees and migrants is suffused with racism. When Americans and Europeans live overseas, they are called expatriates – not migrants. It is the darker bodies who are migrants and refugees.

Half the voters in one of the richest and most successful countries in the world, one with one of the highest standards of living and one of the best social welfare systems-universal health insurance and a strong safety net - have turned against the parties that have brought them those benefits - and done so in favor of a far right wing party with Nazi party roots that has built its success on promoting fear of immigrants and possible future economic decline....

Events in Germany are truly alarming - with the Alternative for Germany (AfD) moving up into third place and both the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) slipping. This is connected with the immigrant wave but laden with too many nasty memories - and there is rightward shifts in France, Poland, Slovakia, Denmark and Sweden.

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Milwaukee's Turners -- founded by German refugees fleeing political repression and economic hard time in the late 1840's -- issued a statement denouncing racism and xenophobia in calls to exclude Muslim refugees from Wisconsin and called upon all Wisconsinites, including the vast majority of us who are of immigrant stock, to support humane and safe admission of our proportional share of refugees from Syria and other nations.