Awarded Song of the Year at Sunday night’s Grammys, ‘Wildflower’ singer Billie Eilish forwent the customary shout-outs to manager, agent and God (in that order) to condemn Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement. The 24-year-old announced that ‘no one is illegal on stolen land’, rambled for a few solipsistic sentences (‘I just feel really hopeful in this room… our voices really do matter’), before concluding with: ‘Fuck Ice.’ Safe to say the Gettysburg Address isn’t getting knocked off its perch any time soon.
Airhead celebrity inarticulately repeats fashionable views heard on TikTok — stunning and brave, no doubt, but hardly original. ‘No one is illegal’ has become a standard rhetorical trick in the debate over illegal immigration, and if you want to have some fun I suggest asking if that applies to Israeli settlers living in the West Bank. Be prepared for your green-haired interlocutor to leap from ‘it’s all just lines on a map’ to a sudden zeal for national borders that even Pat Buchanan would deem a bit intense.
Also, a point we have to keep going over: the land upon which European settlers built the United States was not stolen but conquered — land fought for and won. The colonisation of North America was hardly a workshop on human rights observance but, by the standards of such enterprises, far, far from the most brutal or bloody. The life of the average native American is immeasurably better — in health, education, income, almost any metric you consider — than would have been the case had the colonists remained in Europe.
Singers and actors have been saying dumb or obnoxious things about politics for as long as journalists have tried to engage them on the subject. During the first Trump administration Madonna admitted to having ‘thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House’. John Wayne infamously told Playboy: ‘I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility.’ Silent-era star Adolphe Menjou, once asked about Canadian communists visiting the United States, retorted: ‘I hope they go to Texas. The Texans will kill them.’ Interventions like Eilish’s are less shocking because they reflect a broader escalation in polarised political rhetoric.
It is of trifling significance that a pop singer speaks in these terms. It is of much greater import that mainstream public figures talk like this now too. Shortly after Joe Biden entered the Oval Office, federal agencies were instructed to stop using the term ‘illegal alien’. His vice president Kamala Harris once said: ‘An undocumented immigrant is not a criminal.’ Democrat congresswoman Ayanna Pressley says: ‘We are all on stolen land.’ Last year, the Democrat National Committee opened its annual summer meeting with a land acknowledgment: ‘This land was not claimed, or traded – it’s a part of a history of broken treaties and promises. And, in many ways, we still live in a system built to suppress Indigenous peoples’ cultural and spiritual history.’
Democrats have to return to the national mainstream
These comments are no less mush-brained than Eilish’s Grammy witterings. The difference is that when the Democrats meme and vibe themselves ever further left in reaction to Donald Trump’s authoritarian populism they ask independent and moderate voters to choose between two extremes: vote here if you think your country is a racist, genocidal endeavour; vote there if you want more soccer moms and ICU nurses gunned down in the street. Your average celebrity, journalist, academic or other progressive activist cannot fathom why anyone wouldn’t gladly agree to the former, which is exactly why such people should be locked in a basement between now and the November midterms.
The Democrats need a position on immigration that is distinct from Trump’s wild west posse raiding and rounding up peaceful, otherwise law-abiding illegal migrants, but which also acknowledges the virtue of borders, undertakes to enforce them, and directs federal agencies to focus on removing violent and dangerous aliens and disrupting workplaces where illegal migrants are being exploited. The Democrats can win in November, but if they want to parlay congressional gains into 270 or more electoral college votes in 2028, thus locking JD Vance out of the Oval Office, they have to return to the national mainstream on illegal immigration and much else besides. Billie Eilish doesn’t need a political party, ordinary Americans do.
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