making sense of the onslaught

lessons from deep history and tracking student visa revocations

To understand what’s driving the sophomoric imperialism of the United States, with the Trump administration simultaneously grasping for Greenland — and Canada, Panama, and maybe even Gaza — and turning inward through “protective” tariffs and a population purge, I’ve been focusing on a review of Greg Grandin’s forthcoming tome, America, América, which I’ll share here later in the year. I’ve also been reading, as a sort of companion, David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

The books pair well together — like intellectual gas and a match.

One of the biggest takeaways from both is that ideas for more responsible and just political stewardship are within grasp. We have the capacity to construct more humane, egalitarian, and peaceable political systems — in fact that’s what Latin American jurists have proposing for centuries (Grandin) and Indigenous leaders have been doing for millennia (Graeber and Grenbow). But that’s not what we’re doing.

Why aren’t we doing that? I think it’s, in part, because we’re not building any of these systems, parties or policies based on principles.

Principles need to be the foundation, not the patchwork or wall-covering, of just politics.

Something I’ve long noted when discussing border and immigration policy, if you start with the premise that all human beings deserve basic rights and dignity, you can bicker over the finer points of immigration policy but you can’t really defend the abject misery of immigration detention camps or sending people in shackles to far-away countries where they’ve never been, know no one, and are in mortal danger.

Let me turn to a distant example from another period. (I keep dipping back into the late 19th century American history this past year.)

Consider Abraham Lincoln’s infamous response to Horace Greeley, in which Lincoln considers enslaved people as a means towards saving the union: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would also do that.”

Is that approach what led to the disaster of Reconstruction and Jim Crow? Not exclusively, but I think it’s a key factor.

There is all the difference between having power and using power. When the first becomes the goal, we descend into skirmish and strife, and lay the groundwork — advertently or not — for fascism.

Visas

Over the last couple weeks I’ve been reporting on international students who have had their visas revoked. At AZ Lu and The Intercept, we first broke the story of eight international students at Arizona State University who got summarily stripped of their student visas. Within a few days, that number ballooned to over 50 — just at ASU. Countrywide, according to attorneys I’ve spoken with, the number is now over 1,000.

Applying and receiving a student visa is a painstaking, laborious, expensive, and often years-long process.

You need to first be eligible and then be accepted into an American school — no simple or easy feat in itself. You then need to get an I-20 form from the school, then pay the I-901 fee of $350, then complete the DS-160 form to apply for an F-1 visa so you can schedule your interview, for which you’ll need a valid passport, more application fees, headshots, plus your home country transcripts and proof that you have strong ties to your home country and will have the means to live in the United States. And then you wait.

If you’re accepted, you travel to the U.S., find a spot to live, orient yourself at your new school, and then crack the books. And then, in the last couple of weeks, some-thousand or more such students got an email saying their visa was revoked. No explanation, no reason. Just: you’re done, go home.

“No one has a right to a visa. These are things that we decide,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said late last month in response to questions about the revocations. “We deny visas every day, and we can revoke visas. If you have the power to deny, you have the power to revoke.”

A few of the students on whom was wielded that “power to revoke” were just a month away from graduating. It’s likely, after years of study, they’ll no longer be granted their degrees.

The University of Arizona, among other schools, has recently recommended students carry a copy of their passports, I-94, and “proof of status at all times.”

I’ve spoken to international students, and their current status could be summed up as a state of disappointment, dismay, and fear.

Singing the Boundary

That’s the onslaught? What’s the resistance?

In 1533, Yaqui elders along the borderline of modern day Arizona and Sonora smelled something foul. Something dangerous was coming their way. So they smoked sacred tobacco and flew, or dreamed they were flying, to get a better view of a band of coming intruders: Spanish colonialists storming north through Mexico on a slave drive. What the Yaquis decided to do next was to “sing the Boundary” of their homelands.

They also dressed in rattling gourds, donned white tail deer antlers on their heads, and danced to intimidate the Spaniards.

The spectacle succeeded in turning around the war party: the Spaniards were terrified. For the next seven decades the Yaqui people would not be contacted again by colonizers.

The episode is described in a beautiful new book, Against the American Grain: A Borderlands History of Resistance, by ethnobotanist and agave-spiritualist (my coinage here, that’s not how he identifies) Gary Paul Nabhan. I recently spoke with Nabhan about his book here.

I’ll also remind readers of a more recent act of resistance, when, in 2023, a ragtag crew of activists convinced the federal government to take down a portion of the borderwall not far from where the Yaquis turned back the pusillanimous Spaniards 500 years earlier.

That act was likely the first time since the Berlin Wall that a physical international boundary was dismantled. The trend, since 1989 — since Reagan’s command to “Tear down this wall” — has been unidirectional: border walls across the world have been going up.

Last recs

Between things I’m reading Masha Gessen, Austin Kocher, El Faro, and I’ve finally made my way back to The Dig.