Biden urged America to stand up for the principle of sovereignty: that no country, without provocation, should invade another. Trump belittled that principle, arguing that America should worry about its own borders instead of pretending that “Ukraine’s borders are sacred.” “The Biden administration has spent months obsessing over how to stop an invasion of a foreign country thousands of miles away,” Trump sneered. “The Biden administration cares more about helping citizens of a distant foreign nation than it does about our own citizens.”This is a common trope of Republican whataboutism: Why is Biden more concerned about a violation of Ukraine's border than he is about violations of our borders?
But it's an odd analogy. Putin is a head of state. He's invading Ukraine with an army. He plans to overthrow the Ukrainian government. In this country, undocument immigrants may be crossing the border, but they don't want to take over. They just want low-paying jobs.
I'm reminded of one of the most successful aspects of right-wing propaganda over the past few decades: persuading at least half of America that the real "elites" aren't corporate CEOs (whose taxes must never be raised because they're "job creators") but, rather, anybody who drives a Prius or shops in Whole Foods or teaches at a university or works in Hollywood. This is now changing somewhat, as right-wingers complain about "woke" capitalists, but for many years this was the message from the right: White-collar professionals are "elitists," while hedge-fund managers and Fortune 500 corporate chieftains are manly heroes. (This culminated in the election of Donald Trump, widely perceived as a "blue-collar billionaire.")
So now, when right-wingers complain about the "invasion" of our border, they talk the way we talk about the invasion of Ukraine. They talk as if we no longer choose our leaders or run our own country, even though undocumented immigrants don't vote in presidential or congressional or gubernatorial or legislative elections -- although, of course, right-wingers think undocumented immigrants vote in our elections, by the millions. They also believe that the undocumented are here as part of a sinister plot by "globalists" and Democrats to tip our elections (even though Republicans seem to be doing just fine electorally) and change our culture (even though we have to run virtually everything we do in this culture past white conservatives, who continue to control government at all levels out of proportion to their numbers, something you'd think the "globalist" elite would have reversed if crushing the Volk were their intention). To the right, a non-elite "invasion" is an elite "invasion."
It could be argued that all this is a plot by the elites -- but it's a plot by the elites to get cheap labor, period. There's no other motive. The elites want low-paid undocumented workers and also rule by pro-plutocrat tax- and regulation-cutting Republicans.
But right-wingers generally aren't angry at the employers of the undocumented. They may occasionally talk about forcing employers to verify the employment or residency status of the people they hire, but their heart never seems to be in it. They hate the non-elite workers. They treat their mere presence here as the moral equivalent of a military invasion and government overthrow -- and some, like Trump, don't really seem to believe the latter is as bad as the former, maybe because sending tanks into Kyiv is something an overdog would do, and underdogs are the real enemy.
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