While the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 ostensibly was to assert a US role to “protect” the countries in the Western Hemisphere from European aggression, it in effect gave tacit suzerainty to the inchoate world power. As we were reminded fifty-five years ago by President John F Kennedy, Guyana is quite inconsequential in the grand order of things, but we can easily catch a cold if the US sneezes in our direction.
We have to be very concerned not only about who might become President of the US but also of the domestic issues that will prove decisive in the upcoming elections, since these can profoundly effect on foreign affairs later.
In our case, during the 1960 US elections, the major issue was the rising Cold War tensions between the USA and the communist USSR. John F Kennedy had been trenchantly accused by his opponent Richard Nixon for being “soft on communism”. This made it unacceptable for him to permit a possible “fellow traveller” taking office in Guyana after 1961, when his Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba to derail the communist regime of Castro, failed ignominiously.
Now that the Republican Convention has officially anointed billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump as their candidate for the upcoming November elections and the Democratic Convention will reciprocate with Hillary Clinton later this week, the key issues that will define the agenda of the next president of the USA are now clear, regardless of who actually wins.
Donald Trump has been successful in defining those issues and he did so by invoking fears in Americans about losing control over their century-long march of progress to become the lone superpower standing.
One fear that has resonated is Trump’s invocation of immigration – legal and illegal – as a major reason for America’s decline in general, and for crime and low wages, in particular. After almost every speaker preceding him at the Convention reiterated this leitmotif of the primary campaign, Trump perorated provocatively, “Nearly 180,000 people with criminal records ordered deported from our country are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens.”
During the campaign, it was clear from the nature of the crowds flocking to his banner that Trump was stoking racial fears about the changing demographics of the American populace. Several studies had shown that by 2050 whites would be only 46.3% of the country’s population.
However, in his speech Trump drew a casual relationship between immigration and the economic travails of the country – but disingenuously cited the effect on minorities. “Decades of record immigration have produced lower wages and higher unemployment for our citizens, especially for African-Americans and Latino workers,” he said.
This attack on immigration undermines one of the enduring narratives that America has constructed of its rise to success: that it is a “nation of immigrants” responding to the message inscribed on its Statue of Liberty. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
The new message articulated by Trump would be to deport 11 million immigrants and build an 1800 mile wall costing US-10B, along the Mexican border. He would force Mexico to pay for the wall by blocking the USB in remittances sent by Mexicans in the US. While Hillary Clinton has up to now supported President Obama’s more traditional stance on immigration that had moved to regularise the illegal immigrants already in the country, she will be forced to modify, if not reverse that position in the coming months. Too many of the traditional Democratic voters have responded to Trump’s demagoguery on immigration.
For Guyana, which only recently was reminded of its high immigration rate to the US – which acts as a safety valve in an economy that is stagnating – and of the US0M in remittances that props up our economy, there should be concerns.
