Wow, This Bill Sure Is Racist

By Hamilton Nolan  |  June 5, 2017 | 3:30pm
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In the fast-paced news environment that we live in today, it’s important sometimes to take a deep breath, sit back, and focus all of our attention, at least for a moment, on one single shockingly racist thing that our elected leaders are proposing.

The Border Wall Funding Act of 2017, a bill proposed at the end of March by Alabama Republican Mike Rogers, manages the impressive two-fer of paying for a racist policy by racist means. Rogers’ bill would place a 2% tax on all remittances—wire transfers of money—sent from the U.S. to Mexico, Latin America, and Caribbean nations. Only. As NPR points out, “It should be noted that these proposals would only apply to personal transfers and not to businesses moving money abroad to say, Mexico or the Cayman Islands.” This tax, to be clear, would target money that regular working people have earned by working and have already paid taxes on. This is the extra “you are not a white person” tax.

Generally, it is good policy to tax things that we want to discourage. Here we see Republicans attempting to discourage… immigrants being able to work in America and send money home to support their families. “Hard work and sacrifice for your family are bad,” is the overriding message of this bill. The other message is “We hate brown-skinned people.” Hardworking Swiss and British and Australian immigrants may continue to send money home un-taxed.

This shit is incredibly racist!

I apologize because this news is not incredibly new, in the sense that the bill has been in Congress for months now, and Trump’s border wall proposal itself has been floating around for more than a year now, and many of us did not believe it would ever come to fruition but now it looks like it might, and it is just a crazy fucking nation we live in now, although, of course, our national history of racism is shocking in itself, as is our racial wealth gap, which we all collectively ignore, shamefully. But seriously, damn, this is a racist-ass funding bill.

The system works.

 
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