The following is a revised version, as of 9:56 am on April 22, of my comment which was originally posted on April 21.

On April 18, Donald Trump issued a tweet which not only hit a new low point in his racial attacks on immigrants but contained disturbing echoes of Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda as well as "American as apple pie" style white supremacy. The tweet, as has been widely reported, was as follows:

"There is a revolution going on in California Soooo many Sanctuary areas want OUT of this ridiculous crime infested & breeding concept. Jerry Brown is trying to back out of the National Guard at the border, but the people of the State are not happy. Want Security and Safety now."

As in the case of many of Trump's other exercises in anti-immigrant demonization, the word "breeding" in this tweet appears to be ambiguous. It could refer, as the White House later claimed, only to "breeding" crime.

But there is a darker and more ominous reference, namely to the of Mexican and other dark-skinned immigrants breeding too many children and thereby threatening America's white majority..

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and CNN, this is exactly the charge that Dan Stein, the head of one of today's most active and best known anti-immigrant groups, FAIR (Federation for Immigration Reform) made when he accused immigrants of "competitive breeding" in a 1997 WSJ interview, among the many other statements he has been reported as making accusing immigrants of undermining white "civilization" in America: See

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-h...gration-groups

and

https://www.cnn.com/2017/04/11/polit...ers/index.html

also

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-h...dual/dan-stein

Stein is far from the only immigration opponent in America today using dehumanizing ways of referring to immigrants. Dana Milbank, in an April 20 Washington Post article, quotes two present Republican Congressmen, Jeff Duncan (R-SC) and Steve King (R-Iowa) as also making remarks comparing immigrants to animals. See:

Is it a coincidence that Trump uses the language of white supremacy?

(I do not have a working link to this article - please use Google to access.)

Even more ominously, Milbank also mentions the following example of Nazi propaganda against the Jews. whom the Nazis described as"

"... the product of the inbreeding of asocial, criminal, degenerate and rejected elements..."

While Trump of course does not support antisemitism or genocide in any form, any statement implying that Hispanic or any other groups of non-white immigrants are "breeding", with all of that word's connotations of animal reproduction, should be taken with a great deal of concern.

If Trump does not look at a particular group of immigrants as fully human, what kind of immigration policies can we expect from his administration? Without undue cynicism, one could answer that we might expect an anti-immigrant agenda very similar to the one which the Trump administration is now pursuing in order to reduce the number of nonwhite immigrants of every category - including legal as well as unauthorized immigration.

There is, however, one context in which the term "breeding" had a positive connotation for the Nazis, namely in the "Lebensborn" program which was designed to "breed" "racially superior" children. Ironically, the biggest Nazi Lebensborn birth center was located in German-occupied Norway.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...-a-446978.html

There is no reason, of course, to think that Trump was aware of this when he made his infamous January 11 statement that he wanted America's immigrants to come from "Countries like Norway" instead of from what he called the "shithole countries" of Africa, Central American and the Caribbean.

It is, however, disappointing to say the least, that Trump's DHS chief, Kirstjen Nielsen, whose name coincidentally suggests Norwegian ancestry, allegedly tried to convince a Senate committee at her conformation hearing that she did not know that Norway was mainly a white country!

http://www.newsweek.com/kirstjen-nie...y-white-782678

Nielsen also pointedly refused to speak out against Trump's latest "breeding" slur against immigrants who, we can be quite sure, are not from "Countries like Norway."

http://us.pressfrom.com/news/politic...reeding-tweet/

How sensitive to the basic human, constitutional and statutory rights of non-white immigrants, whether they are applying for legal visas or green cards, or whether they are in the US without legal status, can we expect DHS policies to be under Nielsen's stewardship in Donald Trump's America?

Roger Algase
Attorney at Law
algaselex@gmail.com