Fourth Reich Archaeology - #072 - Down by Law, Part 1, Asylum for Mankind

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

We are excited to announce that we are launching a brand new series called “Down by Law.” In it, we are going to talk about how laws and legal systems that create and enforce them are put in place to serve the ruling class, while producing a spectacle of “justice” to distract and pacify the masses. We believe that, despite the law’s ultimate impotence to bring about the type of revolutionary change needed to ensure collective survival for humanity, it is important to understand how the law functions in society. This series is our attempt at political/legal education, jumping between various areas of law that purport to regulate behavior in “civilized nations.”It is certainly true that the legal system - from statutory legislation to the vast regulatory state to the judiciary - does impose restrictions on actors at all levels of the socioeconomic pyramid. We are not implying that the wealthy and powerful are entirely unfettered by the law. That would be an overstatement and would not reflect reality.But the law, too, operates as spectacle. And to a larger degree than most lawyers, government bureaucrats, and policy wonks would like to admit, the real function of the law is spectacular. It serves to inflate the illusion of justice. In reality, the legal system plays referee between factions of the ruling class, while ensuring that overall control of the systems of power remain in the hands of that same class. We start our legal dig site with a dig into immigration and the modern legal regime for asylum. Even though you’d never guess it by the federal government’s utter lack of regard for human rights in the administration of the immigration system, the USA is a party to the 1967 protocol to the treaty on the rights of refugees. That means it is “the supreme law of the land” - with which even the federal government must comply as with the Constitution itself - to afford broad rights to asylum-seekers in danger of death or serious harm in their home countries.We recorded this before the DC National Guard shooting put asylum into the headlines, but the issue is more salient than ever. As Trump essentially seeks to end asylum as we know it, we trace the bipartisan roots of the whittling-away of immigrant rights, spiking especially under the Obama administration. Put on your lawyer hats, it’s time to get down by law.If you want to hear the full episode, head over to Patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology and sign up today!

And I want you to think about your own parents, and your own grandparents, and your own great-grandparents, and all the men and women and children who came here. The notion that somehow those who came through Ellis Island had all their papers right? You know, had checked every box and followed procedures as they were getting on that boat. They were looking for a better life, just like these families. They want to earn their way into the American story. Colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States.

Every nation, in every region, now has a lot. Now has a decision to make. It's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We've found no evidence of conspiracy. of conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission of the science.

I'll never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to require information, which showed that there were two wars going. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small one. For example, with the CIA.

Now here's a mile. See, there's so long as it died. Freedom can never be secure. It usually takes the national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. You get a lot of killers.

Why you think our country's so innocent? Now here's a model. The CIA. I'm going. I decide. Global. This is coming

This is forthrightly Archaeology This is Fourth Reich Archaeology I'm Dick And I'm Don Welcome back

Listener We're thrilled to have you with us And we are excited to let you know that this week We are doing something new We are launching yet another ongoing series in parallel to those that we already have underway.

Because, you know, we are not really the type of podcast that picks a topic and runs through it and then moves on to the next one or does seasons or anything like that. We are a podcast that seeks listener to keep things fresh, to help where we can in the discourse, in your life, in the life of your loved ones, your family and friends, and to assist all of our faithful and beloved listeners to articulate for themselves some of these instinctive common sense reactions to the absolute trough of slop that we are fed from the powers that be, from our propagandists in the media, from the political discourse, and yes, even from academic discourse, and from our

faithful mouthpieces of the status quo. So this brand new series will draw a great deal on. Dix and my personal experiences as practitioners in the law, and we are calling it down by law. And we could not be more excited to have this first episode looking at our first area of law, out of many that we'll eventually cover. This one is going to be immigration. Before we get into it, the moment of gratitude. Thank you for tuning in.

Thank you for your support of our project. Your mere clicking on that play button already means so much to us and your lending of your time. So if you are willing to and if you are able to, we humbly and kindly ask. that if you enjoy this project, that you help us to spread the word. We've been growing steady, steady over the year and about three and a half months that we've been doing this, and that is thanks in great part to all of you. So please, if you haven't already, like the pod, subscribe to the pod on your podcast platform. Tell your friends and loved ones about the pod and reach out to us.

We are on social media, Twitter, and Instagram at Fourth Reich Pod, and we are also reachable by email at forthrightepod at gmail.com. Now, to those of you who are true believers, who are true supporters of what we are doing, we kindly invite you to join our growing community of paid patrons at patreon.com slash forthrightich Archaeology, where you can join any one of our many tiers, get some early access and exclusives, and have our ear, even more perhaps than you otherwise would and really join this community that we are seeking to build around the shared idea, the shared pain that we all feel over the fact that we are living in the Fourth Reich

and that it is sure hard to think of any way out of it, but with solidarity. with love, we believe it's possible and we hope that you do as well. That's right, folks. We do have a Patreon. We have rolled out a tiered patronage system. We are fully listener supported here and we are committed to being 100% ad free and 100% free of corporate interests. And so what that means is that we really do need your support. if you are able to please head on over to our Patreon and give us some support in the amount that you think is fair as you said Don our Patreon family gets access to exclusive content for example in this episode only the first hour or so is available on the free feed and as good as that first hour is going to be

it is in the second hour of this episode that we really do start digging so if you want to hear all of that today, all of that delicious content today, well, you will have to join the club. And for our higher tiered members, we are giving out shoutouts, shoutouts and opportunities for exclusive Q&As with us, your friends, Dick and Don, and we're going to be rolling all of that out in 2026. Well, the shoutouts, you know, we've been doing them and we will continue to do them. I'm going to do them at the end of this episode. episode and the Q and A's. They're going to be coming in 2026. Now, Don and I, we are just two guys here, two friends that are doing this in our free time, out of love for each other, out of love

for all of you, out of love for the game. We are doing our best, but I am not ashamed to say that we do have our misses. And for those of you who tuned in last week, you will already be able to guess what I am getting at. We recorded this episode with the aim of releasing it over Thanksgiving, but due to some technical difficulties in our production, we just weren't able to get it out on time. Now, what that means is that this episode was also recorded

before the shooting of the two National Guard members in D.C. over the Thanksgiving holiday. And of course, the suspected shooter in that shooting is a former U.S. government operative. This is someone who is an Afghan national, but is someone who's also a card-carrying member of the CIA's death squads responsible for these night raids in Afghanistan, which entire homes of people would be murdered. This is someone who, yes, is an Afghan native, but was taken under the wing of the United States government and trained to kill and indeed did kill for the U.S. government in Afghanistan. And in our no-thanks episode last week, we started to talk about the consequences of this incident and the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, xenophobic result of all of this, the consequences of what's going to happen next. And ultimately what we said last week was that this incident, this shooting of these two D.C. National Guards members by this Afghan National who was programmed to kill by the intelligence community, the U.S. intelligence community, to be clear, we ultimately concluded last week that no doubt that this incident would give rise to some new permutation of some oppressive new policy. that the Trump administration would roll out, but when we said all of that, I for one could have

never guessed just how fucking vindicated we would be for doing an asylum episode. Because if you've been following the news in the last couple of days, and this is Dick talking to you on Thursday, December 4th, 2025, and if you've been following the news, you are fully aware that asylum, the asylum regime has once again become a major focus for President Donald J. Trump. And rather than try to paraphrase or summarize or explain to you, my dear friends, what it is that Donald Trump is doing, I thought that the only way to do this moment justice is to just play the track for you in full. So here it is straight from the president. of the United States of America.

How long does your administration would have to cause asylum in statements? Can you give me any kind of time? We don't want those people. We have enough problems. We don't want those people. Is that a year? Two years?

No time limit. It could be a lot. We don't want those people. Do you understand it? I understand. What are you in? I would have a recession. Let me just ask. We don't want those people.

Does that make sense? You know why we don't want them? This media, but no good. And they shouldn't be in our country. People from different countries that are not trying to lose in countries that are having themselves. Countries like Somalia, and that hurts with no government, no military, no military, no.

All they do is go around killing each other. Then they come into our country and tell us how to run our country. We don't want them. We don't want them. Is that we're going to make it? Is that maybe they're cool countries close back for? No. I don't think they're all there in a world, but in many cases, they are there in a world.

They're not good countries. They're very crime-roof-factions. The countries that don't do a good job, the countries that don't register from the standpoint of success. And we frankly don't need their people coming in your country telling us what to do. Mr. First, when you said you might see naturalize some Arabian citizens, all you talk about? people that are in here that should be here.

Well, we'll see. I mean, yeah, we have criminals that came into our country and they would naturalize maybe through a fight or somebody that did know what they were doing. If I have the power to do it, I'm not sure that I do, but if I do, I would denaturalize them. You have a question. What do you mean by my place?

It means to get people out that are in our country, get them out of here. I want to get them out. We had a lot of people in our country that shouldn't be here. And they came in through one, and he was the worst president in the history of our country. But the single biggest thing he did was allow being the worst, allow millions of people into our country that shouldn't be here. Drug dealers, prisons were opened up and allowed to come into our country.

You take a look at the people that were allowed to come into our country. We're paying a big price for it, and we will for years to come, including the recent killer. of you wonderful national guards people and i'll tell you what that animal should not be allowed to come into a country Never would we have thought that when we were prepping an episode trying to sound the alarm on how the U.S. is subverting its obligations under international law, under federal law, under the fucking laws of common sense and common decency, never would we have thought that when we were putting together this episode explaining how the U.S. is shirking its obligations to hear out asylum claims and looking at the asylum legal regime as a way to push immigrants out. never would we have thought that when we were just shooting the shit last week calling things as we were seeing them calling things about how we knew the shooting of these two National Guards members would prompt some crazy anti-immigrant response never would we have thought that fucking asylum would be paused like this and Jesus fucking Christ listener I am spooked because this one has really come together in a weird way So, before we get into this week's episode and our discussion on asylum law, I just need to add a disclaimer at the top here about the intervening asylum travel ban, which applies to citizens of Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. and now there's also restricted access applied to people from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela. Migrants from all of these countries are impacted by this ban, this pause, and their pending applications and review of their applications has sort of been paused, and, you know, we'll see what happens next.

okay now with all of that crazy stuff out of the way let's get back on track last little bit of housekeeping i want to just say that like don i am so excited to be rolling out this new series where we hope to provide useful content a form of educational content that is dare i say entertaining too we are very eager to show off our legal chops to all of you and we are very eager to show off our legal chops to all of you and we are going to be talking about the law. So before we go any further, we just have a few words from our lawyers. This episode is not legal advice and it is not a solicitation for legal advice. Hey there, listener. Do I have your attention? Good, because I have an important announcement to make. Dick and Don are fictional characters portraying the hosts of

a satirical history podcast. They do not represent any persons, real or fictional, and any resemblance thereto is artistically drawn. Any statements regarding persons living or dead herein are not meant to convey or a verb any statements of a factual nature. Whoa! I don't know what all that means, but it sounds like it clears Dick and Don't liability for anything they might say on here. Isn't that neat? Now back to our regularly scheduled programming. Enjoy! Manakou and then Hey, Donnie, Barry, Joe

Eddie, what if you want to hit this pipe bed? I'll take it if they want or I'll go first or last. I'll do whatever they want me to do. Pass it. Hey, take it easy, Joe. You should pass right away. Now, Barry, don't go trying to appease Donnie. Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 out of 30 top al-Qaeda leaders

who've been taken off the field whether I engage him appeasement. or whoever's left out there, ask them about that. Damn, Barry, that is some cold shit. Folks, we're just having some fun here. We're just having a little fun with it. You know, we got this legal disclaimer, and I thought, why not stretch things out a bit and have a little fun? And now back to our regularly scheduled programming,

but before we get back to it, I just want to say, our president is a pedophile, the people at the highest levels of government, of industry, of academia, they are all in on it, they are all perverts. Every single one of them is a child molester. I would not be surprised if right now, as I am speaking to you, Stephen Miller is giving the president of the United States a full body rub down under the blankets in bed. I would say this is a massage of the adult variety, but given the two perverts involved, I don't think that is an accurate way to describe it. And with that, I'll return us to our regularly scheduled programming. Okay, I think we're ready for the roadmap for the day. And again, I want to say, I know that we are throwing a lot of different things out there, and it could get easy.

It could be easy to get lost in all the yarn we've been spinning. So perhaps we can take a moment and find a common thread. And we can do that by coming back to the basics. I know that we have been at many different Fourth Reich Archaeology dig sites, and now we are yet again at a brand new dig site. Well, don't worry, it's going to be a good time. I will make sure that it will be worth your while. So, look, why don't we get off the trail?

Why don't you put up your rucksack and hang your helmet, your hard hat, and you turn that flashlight off? And let's just sit by the fire for a moment. Let's take a knee and let's talk that common thread. Let's talk some foundational truths. one of the most foundational truths, one of the greatest themes of our project, something that keeps popping up in whatever we are doing, is this tension, this dissonance, this contradiction between the world as we are experiencing it versus what we are being told about it, like the two

are an ocean apart. For example, on one side of this ledger, you have the age-old story that America is a place where liberty, freedom, justice, equality, those are things that are being protected. There is this myth of America being a place that is built on the idea that here you can seek refuge from oppression, that here you can be free to practice your religion, that you can be free to prosper. Think Mayflower, think Ellis Island, all that mushy shit that Obama was getting at in our cold open. All that window dressing, that's done to make the USA stand out as this beacon of Western liberal ideals.

And we can call all of that expectation. Let's call that the expectation part of the story. And of course, when you talk expectation, you gotta talk about reality. And the reality is that from the get, from even before the United States was a country, this place was a business endeavor. The goal for this business,

business endeavor was by and large to generate excess profits by extracting labor, by extracting resources, and by doing whatever it took really, right down to the enslavement of millions of people to get the job done, and the genocide of untold millions more. Let's be real. It was a bunch of white enslavers, Christian men who got together and decided that they wanted the king out of their pocket. They again, and this is by and large, they viewed blacks, let's say non-Europeans and even sometimes Europeans, non-Christians, they viewed that lot as subhuman. And for the avoidance of doubt here, I'm talking about our founding fathers. Many of them who were horrified at the idea of giving immigrants the right to vote, for example, about giving immigrants a ticket into

their club, one in which they enjoyed all those divine rights, so-called divine rights that they spoke so fondly of. I mean, heck, these guys are like the original pull the ladder up from behind you, folks. But nonetheless, this myth persists, and boy, is it one for the agents. For Pete's sake, it says equal justice under the law. right under the building that we that houses the supreme court of the united states this myth persists that in america we have these fundamental rights and that we are a society of laws and not men and that this is a you know this story is one that as i'm saying this to you my dear dear listener i hope you are anticipating what i'm going to say next and i hope that you take a moment as

we join in saying it together. Let's take a deep breath now, but all of this, as we know, this sounds like some bullshit. Where do we start? You got slavery. After that, Jim Crow, you got the genocide of indigenous people, you got Japanese internment, you got mass incarceration, you got mass deportation, you got racial profiling. Just a small greatest hits right there. The list could be a lot longer too if we wanted to go on. Yes, and this is just to name a few. Right, right. And as I said, where do we start? But it's more like where does it end? Because it's clear that the starting point and the starting point of this project is real fucked up. The goal was to protect property rights. It was to protect property rights without regard for human life. Take a look at all the brutal

and really criminal means by which property owners have acquired and consolidated what they have. And I'm talking back then to be sure about, you know, the obvious horrors of, you know, enslavement of millions of people, but I'm talking even today. Think about all the violence that is being gone. All the exploitation of labor globally. Think about the extraction of natural resources and the stabilization of economies and all that. shit that has hit the fan as the result of the US-led world order. The emphasis is and always has been the protection of property rights and things like human rights. Well, that's just window dressing.

That's just a convenience that the powers that be, that's something that they will do. And it really seems like something that they're just barely willing to put up with in order to keep things stable to keep the machine humming along, keep things predictable, and keep things under control. If they can dehumanize a whole-ass population of people and not include them in the calculation when they say it's freedom and justice for all, well, then they will do that for as long as they can do that. And what we get into in this series, it's really going to be all about how those who are we very much unaffectionately refer to as the powers that be, how they use the law and legal systems as a tool, as really just another tool in that toolbox to protect the interest

of the wealthy in a way that is really just like ideology, just like the brutality through war, just like revisionist history, all the things we've touched on in the short year and some change while we've been doing this podcast, it's just another tool in their arsenal. there be no doubt the legal system it's there to be used as a tool to keep power in power and by the way the international stage is no different and it's relevant for today's episode because the modern legal regime we will cover in this one asylum it's a product of international law and the international stage is no different because when you look to the international stage you also see that there's been no effective legal deterrent to keep things in check

And this really all pops off for our purposes in the post-World War II era when America takes the helm as a major world player and has, you know, just year after year, decade after decade, just unabashedly gone about destabilizing governments, killing democratically elected leaders, meddling in world affairs without any real accountability. That's right. Yeah, since World War II and, you know, since long before. And we covered a little bit of that in our last Geopolitic episode number 7, where we traced back the Monroe Doctrine and the way in which that has enabled the U.S. without really any legal pretext at all to go ahead and just do whatever it wants, whether that's invading Mexico and grabbing half of their terror. or snatching a few colonies from the declining and decadent Spanish Empire or whatever you will, right? So this is the idea behind this new series of ours down by law. We are going to kind of hop from one area of law to another to help you our lives. listener understand a little bit better how these somewhat arcane and Byzantine and complex or at least

apparently complex legal systems and legal regimes function in practice because we hear it a lot from the feedback that we get from folks. We get this message from everyone from practicing attorneys, to current law students, to folks considering a career in the law, to folks that just interact with the law as part of their life, although outside the legal system. That there's a general lack of awareness, of depth of knowledge about the legal system. And that's by design. That's by design. In fact, the entire obfuscation around the law, right? The construction of the systems of law within all of this complexity and jargon is meant to privilege a small elite group of people within society.

those of us who are lucky to call ourselves members of the bar with the administration of the legal system and to exclude thereby everyone else. And of course, those people, the everyone else in this equation, are no less affected by the systems of law and, in fact, are constantly interacting with legal systems whether they know it or not and whether they like it or not. And so, you know, I think a fundamental pillar of Fourth Reich archaeology is that everyone both can and should develop an understanding and awareness of the systems that shape our share. reality because without that you are merely reacting to whatever the powers that be say that your life shall be and we want to empower everyone who is joining us here to take matters into their own hands to have that baseline understanding of a variety of topics, of history, of law,

of some of the philosophical and theoretical concepts that we've developed over the course of our podcast. And so this is a focused goal for us to share a kind of both a law school, 101 a real crash course in some of these legal systems because man you turn on the TV news you listen to these pundits you listen to these politicians talk about the way that these systems work and let me tell you and please take it from me and take it from dick because we know that they are lying to you so brazenly in order to maintain this two-tiered society where there's the in-group that are kind of in on the joke and everybody else and that is fucked up it shouldn't be like that the society belongs to all of us its government ought to belong to all of us and if there

is to be any justice in this society, it requires the understanding and the dismantling of systems masquerading falsely as justice systems. So a couple of quick caveats here, you know, for one, it is certainly true that the legal system, everything from statutory law, you know, legislation to the vast regulatory state, which kind of straddles the legislative and executive branches of government, things like executive agencies, the FTC, the SECB, RIP, Yeah, you've got to be careful these days, not sure which agency has been gutted. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the way I've thought about it historically is like these are the sectors of the government

that handle administering the government's work, the government functions of the United States. Of course, these days it seems like their function is to do the exact opposite of that, is to not do the government's work. I should say, well, in certain respects, right? because certain agencies are definitely ratcheting up, getting much more focus under the Trump administration. But my point is that in the historical sense, federal agencies, they touch every aspect of our day-to-day lives,

literally from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed. Just think about it. When you get out of bed, and hopefully one of the first things you do is you go over, to your bathroom and you brush your teeth, maybe have a little drink of water. Well, the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration,

they have regulations about the toothpaste that you're using, the toothbrush that you're using. And there's also no doubt some regs about the water you're consuming. But assuming you were sleeping on a mattress when you were in bed, and that mattress has bed sheets and you were sleeping on a bed frame,

well, guess what? There are also regs on those things too. at least on how they are advertised to you, how they're presented to you in the market, just like everything else that's sold and marketed to consumers in the United States today. By the time you get to your car to go to work, your reality has been shaped by already dozens of federal agencies. And by and large, these agencies, they fall under one of the president's executive departments, And they're headed by one of the president's cabinet members.

So these are places like the Department of Labor, the Department of State, the Department of Transportation. For our purposes, this week we're really going to focus on the Department of Homeland Security or DHS. Now, to be sure, there are legislative agencies under Congress, and there are agencies under the judiciary, too. but for the most part the big boy agencies of today they're going to be under the president's executive departments because it's with the president and the executive departments that the U.S. government executes the laws, enforces the laws. And that's a fundamental point here to sort of take a moment and focus on. Remember, Congress is responsible for passing laws the president, through these agencies, through the military, the president's function is to execute the laws, to enforce the laws, and the judiciary is there to rule on the laws to determine their legality, to determine their scope, and to determine their limits, their application.

And today, the agencies are everywhere. The EPA is a big one. It handles, you know, environmental stuff. The FAA handles aviation, the FDA, handles food safety, public health, and pharmaceuticals. I mean, we could spend hours on the different combinations of acronyms. Yeah, the alphabet, the alphabet agencies, right? And we are not trying to say that they don't impose any restrictions whatsoever on the ruling class, the corporations, et cetera, right? it's not so black and white and there is nuance that is important to appreciate so heck i'd say actually the exact opposite right from time to time the system requires that there be a let's say sacrificial

lamb from the ruling class someone to go down someone to do some hard time just to show everyone that the system does work for justice. The system does help the people. And in this way, the system is able to keep trudging along and you have this great show and you're able to keep the relations between the ruling class and those of us who are not in the ruling class. You're able to keep that stable.

Exactly. And that, in fact, segue as well. into the point I was going to make that the law, as well as all of these other structures that we have discussed, especially in the geopolitic series, it operates as spectacle in the Debordian sense, right? The investment in all of these bureaucracies, the recruitment of countless thousands upon thousands of people into these bureaucratic machines is both a personal stake for those people in the operation of those machines, right?

Everybody wants to think that they are contributing to the smooth and the just functioning of society, present company included, I'd say. But at the same time, that spectacle is a smokescreen. It is a image of justice that conceals the ways in which the legal systems around us actually keep the power in the hands of the ruling class while kind of refereeing between factions of that same. class. So on one administration, the oil industry might get a couple of wins at the expense of, say, the solar industry. In another administration, the pendulum might swing the other way, right? The big banks might have a better shake of things in one administration, and the payday lenders might have a better shake of things in another administration.

There are factions and there are factional disputes going on at all times, but the fundamental ordering of society whereby the vast, vast masses of the population, are subjected to systems beyond their control that remain in the hands of the ruling class and its functionaries, that baseline reality persists even behind the screen that this spectacle of justice puts before your eyes as a distraction. That is the case in many areas of laws. So, you know, while we're going to start off today with immigration, we hope to do further series on other areas of law that are likewise broadly misunderstood, everything from, let's say, consumer regulation, to labor law, to securities regulation, to antitrust, right?

over the long course of what I'm sure will be a epic run of this podcast, we will try and cover as many of these as possible. See, I got the thing is with me, you dig, I need to know some more about it. We should ask some more literacy about the educational thing here. Because, you dig, as far as we concerned, and you struggle, When we look at struggle is that this depends on the education thing you did. Because this depends on the education. Well, the whole thing.

No, but in the end, this does. You can form this with no education. No, not the way we're talking about forming it. You know, right, we're talking about forming it, right. You know, it's not on the paper. We didn't write it on the paper. No, no education. Let me give you an example.

Yomo Kenyada formed the excellent revolution with no education. And on the day of the end thing, Yomo told the motherfucker, I said, Well, you know, you've been educated to hate the enemy, but I'm your brother. I'll help you lead the revolution. Now I'm more pressure. Another example, Papa Doc in Haiti. Papa Doc in Haiti hated everything white.

Man, you couldn't put this white paper in front of Papa Doc's face. But he moved all the white people out, and he took over it and be oppressed when he did, because of no education. And the people have been educated, they said that we don't hate the motherfucker. White people, we hate the oppressor, whether he'd be white, black, brown, or yellow. So we got to know your education program to find out what is going to be in the finale. A lot of people work. Yomo Keniata is called not AIDS.

Never a revolutionary, but an ex-revolutionary. So it's Papa Doc. They brought on a successful revolution. That thing in the mile miles was a bitch. Baton to Freedom Fighters, all that kind of action. What we're saying is, that it's the end. That you don't judge Castro now. We can't do it.

Nobody in this room could judge whether Castro is going to be a revolutionary or not. You know what I mean? We're talking about things, you know what I mean? With China, the People with Republic, and even at the stage they're in now, talking about even going on further into a communistic state. That's what we're talking about. That was a revolutionary.

So we got to understand here the education of programs that you have to be able to figure out whether they will go on the right lines where the people will end up in a situation where they can be able to really control themselves. You understand what I'm saying? With no education, the people to take this local foundation and start stealing money because they won't be really educated to why it's the people's thing anyway.

You know what I'm saying? With no education, you have neo-colonialism instead of colonialism like you got in Africa, 9, like you got in Haiti. So what we're talking about is there has to be education in the program. That's very important. As a matter of fact, we are so important with us that a person has to go through six weeks of our political education

before he can consider himself a member of the party, able to even run out ideology for the party. Why? Because if they don't have an education, then they know where. They're going to stand. Okay, we've laid a solid foundation. or what we are going to be doing with this series.

And so now let's talk about the subject of today's episode, Asylum. What is it? It seems to be in the news almost every day nowadays, but the very short version of it is that asylum is a form of protection that countries like the USA and others offer to people who show up at their borders, who show up at their doorstep,

and make a credible claim that they have a well-founded fear of persecution back in their home country. Now, that persecution, that could be physical harm, it could be the threat of death, torture, it could be torture, sexual abuse. And the fear of persecution that they have, it must be based on some, one of these protected characteristics. these immutable characteristics. It's race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership of a particular social group. And the situation must be so that their home government in the home country is either unwilling or unable to protect them.

In many instances, sometimes you find that the home government is the one that is actually persecuting them, right? And a side note here, you know, the protected categories. categories of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, and membership of a particular social group. That last category, particular social group, that one's a doozy. And it's always evolving. But for example, it could mean something like sexual orientation. It could mean membership in a subclassification of society in a class. But getting into those details, that's beyond today's episode and perhaps we'll pick up on that later and the point is that asylum

today operates as a legal regime under which state actors for our purposes it's going to be the united states they're required to provide refuge for the oppressed who show up at their borders who put their who set foot on their soil this is a system that well the modern version we have Today, it came about in the wake of World War II as a result of a series of treaties drafted by the UN and adopted into federal law. In Paris, Mr. Atchison, Mr. Schumann and Mr. Eden come to the Sixth United Nations General Assembly to press America's plan for world peace. The French president sets the theme as delegates meet for the first time in their Paris headquarters. Among American delegates are Mrs. Roosevelt and Senator Warren Austin who sees his old New York adversary Jakub Malik with Vich

but hopes of early agreement fail because Andrei Vichinsky flatly turns down America's plan. Now, this idea of making it the law of the land in the USA that it has to protect those individuals who come to it in need of shelter from human rights violations at home, back in home country, Now, I don't think anyone would disagree with me when I say that that should not be a, that should, that should be a non-controversial idea, right? We would think that the United States, that beacon of liberty, that the United States would welcome the opportunity to provide that shelter from those atrocities that someone might be facing. I mean, from the beginning the USA has at least purported to be exactly that, if nothing else.

the story of the United States is the story of people who are escaping a bad situation in home country that is part of this American mythos. It's from the beginning and in fact through the years that mythos persists and by the time you are in the late 19th early 20th century when you have this influx of migrants from Russia from Eastern Europe escaping religious persecution because of their Jewish faith, they're escaping Tsarist Russia, and then you have Emma Lazarus dropping her goaded poem, New Colossus, talking about, give me, you're tired, you're poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.

Like, asylum law is very much in line with all of that. But of course, we know, again, that there's more to this story, that there is tension here, that not all is what it seems, because throughout history, immigration, and I should say maybe anti-immigration policy, that has been front and center for the powers that be. That has been front and center in the political discourse. And notwithstanding the laws on the books, and notwithstanding the mythos of what America purports to represent

with respect to providing safe harbor to those in need. And this is a through line. It goes throughout history to this very day, and is really the reason why we are starting off this series talking about immigration, but specifically on this issue of asylum, which is really what's taken over to be the legal regime that operates to administer really this notion, this mythos of providing safe harbor. So notwithstanding all of this, the reality of what plays out is really just so far from anything you could defensively consider a regime that is being deployed to help those in need.

And if you want to just think about how powerful and how entrenched this anti-immigration sentiment is today, just consider the following. And I'll start with the extreme right, with the right wing of the political spectrum here, because it is really such low-hanging fruit these days. Just listen to whatever. right wing pundit you want to like literally insert name here Tucker Carlson Nick Fuentes Alex Jones whoever you want just insert that name go listen to them heck listen to the administration listen to what President Trump has to say what

Marco Rubio has to say what Tom Homan has to say what Christy Noam has listen to all these ghouls and what they have to say about immigrants And what do they say? They say they're criminals, they're terrorists, that they're destroying America, that they're not the ones who are contemplated, really, when it comes to the protections and the great things that America has to offer. And so what it is, is what we're getting is that asylum is being used as a way to flush immigrants out, as a way to get rid of a backlog of cases rather than deal with them. And so it's this subversion of the legal regime, something that's meant to protect those in need,

but has been deployed in a way to ultimately harm those very same people. But I want to make clear, even the lips, even those who would consider themselves progressives for voting for Hillary Clinton or for following Pete Buttigieg, these normie Dems, they would tell you that they are okay with immigrants, but they want them to come to this country the right way, the legal way, whatever that means. I have no doubt that many of our listeners have people in their own families, in their own social circles,

who would consider themselves, you know, leftists, liberals, progressives, but they would nonetheless hold this viewpoint that if an immigrant wants to come to this country, they have to do it the right way, the legal way. and they hold these sentiments that you know Barack Obama held and articulated so well I should say and that basement Joe articulated not so well and you know to be sure these people are disgusted by the sentiments from the right wing but nonetheless these folks ignore that every one of those people and I'm talking about Barack Obama I'm talking about Joe Biden I'm talking about Kamala Harris, if she could.

Every one of these people would have pulled on these same levers of power and indeed have in history in the case of Obama and Biden and Clinton, for example, they have pulled on the levers of power to keep immigrants out, to keep the regime deployed in a manner to make it harder and harder to come here the legal way. So that's just another part of it, you know, like how entrenched the sentiment is and how it always has been and how actually since World War II, which our long-time listeners will know that that's when the Nazi experiment, it didn't die. It just moved over to the laboratories of democracy, the old US of A. And now notwithstanding these laws on the global stage and at home here in the United States that during this, post-war era that we are living in still today,

it hasn't really gotten better for the tired, huddled masses yearning to be free. It's only gotten worse, and it's gotten worse in such a spectacular way. Yeah, our focus is going to be on the period that we have referred to as the consolidation of the Fourth Reich or the integration of the spectacle. And I think that this is a good time to say the old line as we transition into that discussion. Although first, I do have here, Stephen Miller, he wanted to give a correction, Dick, to something that you said, which is... Emma Lazarus was a communist, a socialist, and her poem, does not reflect the values of the American nation,

and it does not reflect the goals of American immigration, because we do not want your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. We want your rich, your high IQ, okay, like myself and President Trump. and we want to make America great again. Shut the fuck up, Stephen Miller, you piece of shit. Let's get digging. My fellow Americans, tonight I'd like to talk with you about immigration. For more than 200 years, our tradition of welcoming immigrants from around the world

has given us a tremendous advantage over other nations. Look, I'd like to see something done about the illegal alien problem. that would be so sensitive and so understanding about labor needs and human needs that that problem wouldn't come up. All illegal entry will immediately be halted, and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens

back to the places from which they came. But today, our immigration system is broken, and everybody knows it. Families who enter our country the right way and play by the rules, watch others flout the rules. flout the rules. Business owners who offer their workers good wages and benefits see the competition exploit undocumented immigrants by paying them far less. All of us take offense to anyone

who reaps the rewards of living in America without taking on the responsibilities of living in America. America needs to secure our borders, and with your help, my administration is taking steps to do so, increasing work site enforcement. When I took office, I committed to fixing this broken immigration system. And I began by doing what I could to secure our borders. We've effectively ended the policy of catch and release at the border. Today we have more agents and technology deployed to secure our southern border than at any time in our history. Deploying fences and advanced technologies to stop illegal crossings.

And by the end of this year we will have doubled the number of border patrol agents. And over the past six years, illegal border crossings have been cut by more than half. Immigration has always been essential to America. Let's end our exhausting war over immigration. For more than 30 years, politicians have talked about immigration reform, and we've done nothing about it. On day one of my presidency, I kept my commitment and sent a comprehensive immigration bill to the United States Congress.

If you believe we need to secure the border, pass it, because it has a lot of money for high-tech border security. Pass it. All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected, but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That's why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more

by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens. In the budget I will present to you, we will try to do more. Okay, so we are going to start out with a very condensed overview of the historical development of immigration law the ideology and context behind it.

But before we do that, I thought, Dick, that perhaps we could expand a little bit upon this very functional approach that you touched upon just a moment ago. Namely, we thought it would be useful to lay out the various articulations of conventional wisdoms, plural, on immigration, along the political spectrum. Starting on the sort of extreme end, the far right wing end, you know, those people may not actually be reachable, because if you're a committed Nazi, you're a committed Nazi. And the truth is that the right end of the spectrum on immigration discourse is absolutely Nazi coded to the hilt. Moving along from that, though, there is the sort of George W. Bush approach, which was actually,

maybe it's actually to the left of Obama, but the kind of classic Republican line, which generally reflects the material interests of industry, of owners of large properties, you know, agribusiness, people that own and operate golf courses and large estates and other properties that require the cheap labor made possible by illicit migration into the country and clandestine living by those who make that trip without documentation. And those folks will say something like, well, there is always a need for labor, and we should have a system that allows people to come here to work,

and oftentimes you'll hear this camp advocate for measures like guest worker programs, in the Australian or the Israeli models and they'll advocate for things like E-Verify that holds employers accountable but actually just further plunges the undocumented worker into precarity. Those people have somewhat of a charitable view towards the immigrant, right?

It's not always overtly racist. Can I just jump in real quick to say... Do it. First of all, absolutely right. I would say George W. To the left of Obama on immigration. If you look at a couple things, first of all, he came before Obama.

So if we know anything about immigration, it's just been ratcheting up. Yes. Year after year. So Obama's numbers, put GW to shame, but also GW from a border state, Texan, speak Spanish, understands exactly as you laid out, but, you know, the need for workers. And the other thing that I just wanted, without getting too much into it, but so far, both of these camps, they've existed forever,

you know, the Christian fundamentalist extreme, right? That's from day one, been in a part of America. And you recall in our geopolitic episode on this, we talked about the second camp of Texans and folks in the border states who are really apprehensive about restricting immigration laws, restrictive immigration laws preventing Mexicans from coming over to help them work the land. Right. Yeah, exactly. And I guess at the risk of overgeneralizing, I will just give one more bucket. So we could say like far right kind of center and then the quote unquote left

or liberal view that is kind of the Obama mentality, Obama, Biden, Harris, whatever, absolutely as a matter of policy, not really distinguishable, but at least as a matter of rhetoric, pays lip service to America as a nation, of immigrants, to the Great American Melting Pot, as Schoolhouse Rock put it, to the need for available paths to citizenship, for some, at least some of the people already here without

documentation, and the need to continue legal migration into the country, whether it's in the name of family unification, or in the name of recognizing refugee rights to asylum, or even in the name under some circumstances of what we call economic immigration. And I think Obama is the best articulation of that because he was so studiously aware of the need to put a pretty package around essentially a harsh, a violent, and a brutal machine of incarceration, deportation, and forced precarity upon the ever-growing number of immigrants fleeing from the conditions imposed by imperialism upon their home countries. So, you know, hopefully the information that we're going to share today will offer effective retorts to all three of these buckets of sort of discursive

approaches to the immigration question. What they all have in common is that they consider immigration to be fundamentally a problem, right? They consider the idea that more people want to come into the country to be a problem that needs to be solved rather than a phenomenon which is not ever going to change. So at the very jump, their entire framework is infected. by the unreality of their assumption, of the way that they're considering immigration in the first place, because if, and these are the same people that believe in the neoclassical economic notions of supply and demand. So it's actually absurd that they would think that there's ever going to be a world in which the United States can maintain its economic.

economically dominant position vis-a-vis the global south and impose exploitative economic conditions on those countries in the imperial periphery without reaping what Juan Gonzalez called the harvest of empire namely flows of migrants northward into the imperial core that has always always been the case ever since the beginning of imperialism if not before and it always always will be the case and so just at the jump the very first principle that we might consider is that the way to allow people to facilitate people to make a living in their home countries is to cease the global inequity between the so-called first-world countries which utilize military might and economic exploitation to extract and exploit value from the depressed labor of the global south and to foster a system of reparations

whereby those crimes of empire can somehow be litigated or be remedied. Okay, now I think we can get into the sort of historical development of immigration, because At bottom, what we're really putting out here is that immigration discourse and immigration law in the United States is built on two pillars, two fundamental concepts. One, eugenics, racial purity, right? Whiteness. And two, economic exploitation. And they work hand in hand.

so dick you want to you want to don your powdered wig and take us back to the founding i will do that don i'm going to put on that powdered wig and in fact i'm doing that right now i got my bobby pins here i'm tucking my hair back and while i do that and before we get headed to the past here i just want to start with some table setting something to maybe level set because remember our point here is that immigration law and the immigration legal regime today, and specifically we're talking about asylum now, that is being used as a tool, not as a tool to help refugees as the law commands, but as a way to advance anti-immigration goals, to push immigrants out and to stop the flow of people seeking this kind of relief. So I just want to start with a layout, albeit high level,

of the immigration system today, this government apparatus that is responsible for administering immigration. And maybe this is a way to respond to that lib, auntie, or uncle, or friend, or coworker in your life who says that they believe immigrants have rights and they believe that they should be able to come to this country, but they want them to come here the right way, the legal way. And the response to these people, the way you can respond is by posing a question. And that question is, how does someone come here to the United States? And how does someone come here to live here the right way, the legal way? Like, what does it take to be an American citizen today? And I'm

curious to know, listener, when you do pose this question, if you do pose this question, when you are next encountered with this situation, let me know how that person responds, because the reality is that there are really only a few narrow pathways that lead to citizenship in the United States today, and as we'll see in a moment, it's not really open to everyone and certainly not to the tired, huddled masses yearning to be free. So to become a citizen, you need to first be a lawful permanent resident in the United States for a period of five years and during this time you can't take trips out of the country for a period of more than 180 days so six or so months so you sort of have to stay grounded in the US you have to maintain a presence in the US and

basically this is so that you can establish roots here right but I'm sure many of you're thinking now Okay, well, how do you become a lawful permanent resident in the United States? The way to do that is through a visa that offers permanent resident status. Now, the federal agency that's responsible for administering the U.S. visa system, that federal agency is known as United States Citizenship and Immigration Service, or USCIS. USCIS falls under the Department of Homeland Security or DHS, which is, of course, an executive. Department of the United States Executive Branch. Now, like I said, U.S.CIS administers the process for visa petitions, and it also

administers the process for naturalization, and that's the process of, you know, a foreigner becoming a U.S. citizen. And this process, this process of obtaining the visa, of becoming a lawful permanent resident, of eventually becoming a citizen, it's your classic, administrative slog. It's filling out forms. It's showing up to appointments. It's spending days and waiting rooms that are not far off from what the DMV or the vehicle registration department in your hometown feels like. It's very much on point vibes wise with any sort of classic bureaucratic red tape mess. Think of the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy or

scenes from Brazil. It's like paperwork and paperwork and you're waiting. Sometimes you've got to show up to do evaluations, medical evaluations. And for asylum, there might be an interview or even a court hearing. And things move slow and things are also highly technical. So odds are, if you have the money and the means, of course, you hire a lawyer to do all of this for you. But let's say you do want a US visa. You do want to become a lawful permanent resident and eventually a citizen. How do you qualify? How is it, you know, how can you obtain a visa? And to obtain one, you've got to fall under one of these very narrow visa categories. And you have to apply through the appropriate form and petition process. But let's just go over the handful or so

pathways at a very high level. Let's go over what the various pathways, what the various types of visas you can get are. The first one is probably the one that most of you are most familiar with, and that is the immediate family member visa. So you can think of this as someone who is the son or daughter or the child of a American citizen but was born out of the country. This is also someone who gets married to an American citizen. Then there is the employment visa. This is one that is always in the news and seems to be in the news now more than ever. But these are going to be your visas that are, you know, the employer sponsors you or you have some exceptional talent that the United States just has to have you here. And after that, we start to get into some of the more humanitarian avenues, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the United States. basis to obtaining a visa, and this includes the process of asylum.

But these humanitarian avenues for getting a visa, they also include what have been historically really specific circumstances. For example, visas for Cuban nationals or visas for certain American Indian or indigenous peoples who were born in Canada, what is now Canada, but that their indigenous people's, their roots trace back to what is now the United States. And ironically, it's like specific instances that often signal some atrocity the United States has committed, right? Of course, another category is going to be, you know, people from Vietnam. What I'm getting at is that for most people usually, and it's, you know, I'm generalizing here, I admit, it's going to be, you know, they're going to be familiar with the immediate family member visa or maybe the employment visa.

And by the way, as you might guess, for the employment visas, there's a preference for highly educated, highly specialized, you know, people, what they say, people with extraordinary abilities. And what I hope this illustrates is that there really are very few pathways to getting a visa in the United States. And I almost forgot there is, of course, and there has been one for a while. but really the Trump gold card, it's taken things to a next level, but there's always been a way for people who have money, people who are investors, people who are willing to put down, there has been a visa avenue for those folks as well. All of this is to say is that this notion that someone who wants to come to the United States,

someone who if they just do it the right way, they can come here and live here as long as they abide by the law and do it the American way. That's a really wild contention to make in this day and age. And really for like the last, I don't know, 50 years at least, because there are clear roadblocks. Like if you don't already have an American in your immediate family or if you don't marry one or if you don't have some advanced degree or a lot of money, the gates are closed. now it was not always like this in all respects so there are many things that have been consistent throughout history the anti-immigration sentiment for one but there are many things that were different

back in the day and i think now is a good point for us to hop in that time machine to turn back the clocks and go back to the time of our so-called founding fathers. All right, folks, that does it for our show this week on the free feed. If you would like to listen to more today, of course, you are welcome to join our Patreon. Please head on over to patreon.com slash 4th Reich Archaeology and join the club and you can continue listening to this episode right now. And thank you very much to all of our generous supporters on Patreon. We love you, we see you, and the world is about to hear your name. Shout out to Mick G.

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