I’ve written quite a lot over the years about the prospect of Texas finally turning blue. Recently, the Republicans in the Lone Star State have begun to feel the wave lapping against their feet and panic has set in. In August, I noted that both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders were polling ahead of Trump there, and that local conservatives were freaking the fuck out.
So, that’s the context in which I view Governor Abbott’s decision not to accept any more refugees. It’s a reflection of the modern Republican Party’s full embrace of white nationalism in response to a threat to the conservative movement’s continuing political viability as the Republican Party’s driving ideology. Nowhere does the urgency of “no-more-non-white-people” seem more compelling than in Texas:
Texas will reject the resettlement of new refugees, its governor said Friday, becoming the first state to publicly do so since a Trump administration executive order granted such unprecedented veto power…
…In September, after slashing the annual national refugee cap to a historic low, Trump also gave states and localities sweeping authority to block refugee admissions by requiring their governments to consent in writing before people are allowed to arrive. So far, 42 states have agreed to accept refugees, according to a tracker maintained by the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.
Texas is the first state to refuse them.
This isn’t entirely rational. Texas has accepted more than its share of refugees over the years, but the numbers are still quite low and hardly significant in any electoral sense. With Trump dropping the national number of annual refugees to 18,000 in 2020, Texas was probably only going to resettle several hundred people at the most, and it will be awhile before refugees can obtain citizenship and vote.
But the white conservatives in Texas are beginning to lose power, starting in the suburbs, and they know that non-whites are generally unsympathetic to their ideology. They also know that it’s more than state and local power they’re about to lose. When Texas goes blue, the Electoral College map becomes a nightmare for the GOP. So, they’re absolutely losing their shit and their racism has gone to eleven.
This ban on refugees is a reflection of this. So far, Texas is the only state to take Trump up on his offer to reject refugees, and it’s really not a surprise that they made the jump.
Businesses that are relocating there, businesses whose CEOs or founders are immigrants, should threaten Texas and humiliate them the way that Indiana was humiliated by Marc Benioff. What Texas is doing is an outrage.
Money talks some say.
Makes total sense since Texas is the bullseye for the coming Republican electoral implosion. I don’t know if it will arrive in 2020, 2024, 2028 or later — but it’s coming. And when it does, it’s hard to see how the Republican party in its present guise of monolithic tribalism and xenophobic rage continues to hold power at the national level. At that point, the national Republicans should become much like the remnant of the GOP that lingers zombie-like in California. First they lose any shot at the presidency. The Senate and House may remain in play for a while.
During the decade I lived in the Oklahoma panhandle, I spent a lot of time in the Texas panhandle. The communities that thrive are often ones that are heavily Latinx (meat packing plants brought a lot of Mexican and Guatamalan immigrants in the late 1990s and onward. At some point kids who still live there will start voting. Not sure when the tipping point is, but it will come. The old-timers in the region know it. They also know that the communities that tried to “keep it white” in the region are imploding. The 2010 census was quite telling. I expect the same from the 2020 census. Any time I travel through there, the places I thought would turn to ghost towns are doing so.
A symbolic decision made to encourage the morale (and determination) of terrible people. Sort of like Josef Goebbels’ declaration of “Total War” in 1944. But (white) Texans have always been delighted to smear shit all over their faces.
As you say, if Texas were ever to vote for a Dem candidate for statewide office, that would signal the death throes of the “conservative” movement, and it would be up to the rightwing federal courts to enforce the “conservative” vision of (failed) democracy. But something that cannot happen will not be allowed to happen, and thus Texas will also be the first state to take up National Trumpalism’s invitation to have openly rigged elections–which the far-right federal courts handling Texas matters will condone. Texas and Iran may look very similar in a few years….