For anyone inclined to support or forgive Trump’s immigration policies, our experience in Vietnam offers a searing cautionary lesson, even if the connection seems at first improbable.
It was axiomatic to those of us who did intelligence work in that terrible conflict that every time you burned down a village in order to save it you were doing the Viet Cong a priceless favor. The next time their recruiters showed up in that charred or bombed-out “ville,” with its newly dug graves of innocent dead, they could count on being secretly enabled or openly embraced.
Seemingly gratuitous barbarism had a way of focusing loyalties on the ground. And those who inflicted it, however arguable their larger policy objectives (and they were a dime a dozen in Vietnam), became heirs to the everlasting animosity of the survivors.
I am reminded of this ghastly truth as I read stories about how cruelty has become the very objective of Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration. The architects of this policy, history-illiterates like Stephen Miller, seem to believe that separating children from undocumented detainees will discourage illegal border crossings in the future and thus strengthen our economy and security. It would serve them to study the legacy of policy-driven brutality in Vietnam, like high-altitude bombing or Westmoreland’s search and destroy blood fest.
While the immediate effects of such “quick fixes” is always satisfyingly quantifiable to those foolish enough to measure progress by numbers, the long term results are inevitably the bankrupting of American moral authority and the kind of generational hatred that in the post-Vietnam era gave us the Twin Towers and Isis.
Like Vietnamese kids whose parents died in a U.S. clearing operation or B-52 strike, children orphaned by ICE agents in the name of Trump’s thinly veiled policy of ethnic and cultural purification will remember only one thing as they grow to maturity in hiding or in the wilderness of the displaced: the brutality done to them and their loved ones was Made-in-USA. In Vietnam that was enough to defeat us and leave the policy-makers responsible and their cheerleaders forever shamed.