Reporter Amanda Taub’s piece in Monday’s New York Times, “The Power of a Unified ‘No!’: U.S. Asylum Restrictions Hit a Bump,” offered more of the same un-distilled migrant advocacy as last month’s awful Times op-ed, which called for “doxxing” the employees of migrant detention centers.
This time the attempt to cripple immigration enforcement appeared in the print news section, with a story rooting on businesses and unions boycotting border enforcement, and with the same kind of outlandish comparisons to Nazi Germany (click “expand”):
The message of the amicus brief filed with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in late June was simple: Officers tasked with enforcing the Trump administration’s restrictive new asylum policy believe it violates federal law and fundamental American principles.
“We wanted the court to hear our story,” said Michael Knowles, the president of Local 1924 of the American Federation of Government Employees, the union that filed the brief on behalf of asylum officers in the Washington, D.C., area. “This is folks doing the work, saying, ‘This is wrong.’”
The impact of that message may reach far beyond the court.
It is part of a little-noticed shift, in recent weeks, in the public response to the Trump administration’s border crackdown. Institutions and groups that are not normally partisan or political have begun to state publicly that the administration’s policies violate their core values, and to back up those statements with action.
Unions aren’t “normally partisan or political”? Since when? She then added:
A few days before Mr. Knowles’s union filed its brief, for instance, employees at the Boston headquarters of Wayfair, an online furniture retailer, walked off the job in protest of their company’s decision to sell furniture to a detention center for migrant children.
It is too early to say whether more institutions will follow their lead. But, experts say, the history of successful mass movements around the world suggests that if they do, that could have a profound effect on public opinion and policy.
Taub detoured into the anti-apartheid boycott of South African sports teams and Jesse Owens the track star winning Olympic gold in Berlin under Hitler’s nose.
No conservative counterpoints were raised, such as, how is refusing to make beds for migrant children improving their situation? But wait, there's more:
Wayfair and the asylum officers’ union lack that kind of reach. But hearing from “a variety of groups that speak for a broad spectrum of Americans,” Dr. Paluck said, could have a similar effect. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union speak to one community, online businesses like Wayfair to another, and the government employees’ union to yet another.
And if that coalition grows broader or more diverse, its normative power would grow, too.
Enforcing borders is like fighting racist apartheid...and Nazism? She continued (click “expand”):
The walkout by Wayfair employees, though tiny in comparison with the global anti-apartheid boycott, offers a glimpse of how protests might bring similar consequences to Americans who would not otherwise be directly harmed by the border policies.
(....)
“Irrespective of diverging religious opinions we shall fight for the right of our Jewish brothers and sisters to keep the freedom we ourselves value more highly than life,” Lutheran pastors throughout Denmark read aloud from a pastoral letter on Oct. 3, 1943.
The letter, which was signed by every Danish bishop and read aloud in Sunday services, was issued in response to the Nazi occupiers’ orders to round up and deport Danish Jews. Those orders, the bishops were saying in no uncertain terms, were not to be followed. Danes must protect their Jewish neighbors.
The accompanying print edition included a photo under the caption, in part: “Wayfair employees rallying in Boston last month....” The photo inclued a protest sign that read, “End Business With Concentration Camps.”
The same “concentration camps” that people are risking their lives and traveling thousands of miles to enter? The comparison is offensive to the memories of the real victims of the Nazi camps.
A different sign with a similar point was pictured in the online version and featured the handwritten name of the sponsoring group, partially obscured, but which apparently read “Internationalist Group.” They fomented “international socialist revolution, the conquest of power by the working class, led by its Leninist party.” The apparent prominent presence of Communists at the Wayfair protests was not noted in the article.
Taub could not get enough of the Wayfair walkout:
That helps to explain why the Wayfair walkout, in which the employees gathered to protest in Boston’s Copley Square, has drawn more attention than some previous institutional activism....Wayfair employees also began their action with an open letter. But they followed it with a public walkout in a busy city, communicating that this was a strongly held view within the community of Wayfair employees -- and, it turned out, Boston more broadly.
Or at least the dead-end hard left of Boston.
