Yo French people. Can you demand the statue of liberty back? We clearly aren’t living up to the terms.

You’d think his wives and anchor babies should be included in the blatant racism.

This is simply a refinement of the precarity in which all Americans live.

I find it ironic that the conservative worldview so often discounts ideas like evolution, while also, for the last 50 years, worked to introduce evolutionary factors to bring about homo economicus, in which being alive and executing currency-based transactions are functionally identical. They would like people to conflate capital with other fundamental laws of space and time. They have been largely sucessful, as the common wisdom seems to now basically be: if you don’t earn, you die.

It’s the real answer behind questions like why don’t we have universal healthcare? or Why are labor unions aggressively compromised and suppressed? or How come I can’t afford groceries, fuel, energy, or a decent place to live?

It is well within our nation’s capability to remedy these problems, but that would take away levers of control and result in a society with too much freedom, where the incumbent cultures, industries and decision makers’ iron grasp on influence and security would be a lot weaker. Such a disaster could not possibly be allowed to happen.

If you have a US passport, certain niceties are still observed, certain rules about how little your employer is allowed to get away with paying you, or what your bank can and cannot do with your money while it sits in their vault. You have some tools to slightly improve your comfort, just enough for most people to count themselves lucky when they see the consequences for failure on street corners with cardboard signs every day.

If you become sufficiently troublesome to be noticed by the elite, those citizen’s priveleges magically evaporate and you’re subject to many of the same indignities as someone who doesn’t have a US passport. In either case, the wrong kind of horrible person in charge can drive somebody into a corner very quickly by simply withdrawing their capability to exist in the economic layer of our culture.

It’s like giving somebody cyanide. They can no longer absorb oxygen, except the oxygen in this case is currency. Again, money=life, so our unfortunate subject can quickly be deprived the capability to meaningfully get food, medicine, shelter, transportation, or information. Thus, they cease to exist, and the real Americans can get on with pretending Pax Americana is still a viable strategy.