The statement, “Why can’t we have nice people from Norway?” might sound harmless at first. However, when President Donald Trump made this statement recently, while discussing his rabid immigration policy, it becomes a deeply damaging message.

The comment is inappropriate, not just because it’s so vile to say, but because the President is using his immense power, in his capacity as President of the United States, to say that certain races are better or more valuable than others.

The harm is immediate.

It belittles non-white immigrants. By setting up “nice people from Norway” against people from other, non-white countries that the President has criticized before, the message is clear. Some immigrants are automatically seen as good, and others are not.

This is what we call in political science nativism, which means preferring native-born inhabitants over immigrants. Nativism is a type of government-supported racism.

It tells immigrants of color, no matter how much they contribute (and we’re not just talking about undocumented immigrants here) that they are seen as second-class citizens or a potential problem, simply because of their background or looks.

The President’s statement also gives comfort and strong words to people who already hold racist views, translating their private bias into a public, presidential-level preference.

This comment echoes a racist past. This desire to pick immigrants based on race or culture is not new; it mirrors the ethno-nationalism that has caused trouble throughout history.

The goal of racist nativists is to create a “purer” national identity by choosing who gets to come in. The U.S. has done this before, through laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Immigration Act of 1924.

The 1924 Act specifically set limits to strongly favor people from northern and western Europe (like Norway) while shutting out people from Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. The goal then was to keep America a mostly white, Anglo-Saxon country.

This recent comment brings back that old, racist way of thinking. It treats American identity not as shared ideas and values (something we were taught since elementary school), but as something based on a person’s race and ancestry.

This language directly supports the beliefs of white Christian nationalism.

This movement argues that America was meant to be a Christian nation for white people of European descent, and that all laws and culture should reflect this. In their view, immigrants from non-white and non-Christian countries are not just foreign; they are a major threat that must be stopped to “save” the nation.

When a national leader suggests favoring immigrants from a country like Norway while speaking badly about those from non-white or non-Christian regions, like when the President disparaged Somalians in America as “garbage people,” they are essentially taking the idea of a racially and culturally “pure” America and making it a preference of the government.

By using the phrase “nice people,” the President sends a subtle but clear signal that supports a policy based on race and religion. This confirms to his supporters that the country’s highest office agrees with their vision of a racial ranking.

The preference for “nice people from Norway” is not an accident. It is a powerful, intentional move that smells of historical prejudice, promotes a harmful and unequal view of the world, and encourages those who want to turn the United States into a nation based on ethnicity alone.

It is deeply wrong because it breaks the basic American promise of equality, replacing it with a presidential preference for one race and nation over others.

This is not Christian. This is not American.

We often talk about freedom as if it is a destination. We treat it like a statue carved in stone or a document sealed in glass. We think that once we have it, it sits there, unmoving and permanent. But that is not the reality of liberty.

Liberty is organic. It breathes. It needs sustenance. And because it is alive, it is vulnerable.

Carlos Bulosan, a man who knew the bitter taste of exclusion just as well as he knew the sweetness of the American dream, understood this fragility better than most. He wrote during a time when the world was on fire, yet his observations feel surgically targeted at our current moment.

He said, “Our faith has been shaken many times, and now it is put to question. Our faith is a living thing, and it can be crippled or chained. It can be killed by denying us enough food or clothing, by blasting away our personalities and keeping us in constant fear. Unless we are properly prepared the powers of darkness will have good reason to catch us unaware and trample our lives.”

When you read those words today, the shiver of recognition is not limited to just one group. It is felt deeply whether you trace your roots to the Philippines or Vietnam, to China or Korea, to Mexico or Venezuela. Bulosan was writing about the Manongs and Sakadas, the migrant workers of his time, but he was describing a machinery of fear that is all too familiar to the immigrant communities of today.

We look around us now and see the erosion happening in real time. We see the rise of authoritarian impulses that thrive on the very fear Bulosan described.

For many of us, the “powers of darkness” are not abstract concepts. They wear uniforms. They manifest in the looming threat of ICE and CBP raids that tear families apart in the middle of the night. They appear in the demonization of asylum seekers at the border who are denied that basic sustenance of food, clothing, and safety.

This fear is compounded by the drums of war and geopolitical tension. As rhetoric heats up against China or North Korea, we see how quickly our Asian American neighbors are cast as the perpetual foreigner or the enemy within. As tensions rise with Venezuela or Colombia, we see how easily our Latino communities are flattened into caricatures and targets for political points. It is a specific kind of violence that blasts away our personalities and reduces complex human beings to potential national security threats.

Bulosan was asked to define what freedom meant for someone on the margins. His answer was rooted in the ability to exist without fear.

Today, that means the freedom to drive or take the bus and train to work without the terror of a checkpoint. It means the freedom to speak your heritage language without being viewed with suspicion. It means the freedom to exist in this country without being blamed for the actions of a government across the ocean.

So what does it mean to be “properly prepared,” as he urged us to be?

It means recognizing that our histories are linked. The story of the Filipino farmworker or sugarcane laborer (like my great grandfather and grandfather) is the story of the Bracero, too. The Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino exclusion acts of the past, or Mexican Repatriation policy of the Great Depression, are the travel bans and detention centers of the present. It is a shared lineage of people who maintained their dignity when the law denied it to them.

It means understanding that our faith in this country is not blind loyalty. It is a demand. It is an insistence that the promises made on paper must be kept in practice for all of us.

When we see authoritarianism rising, we cannot afford to be caught unaware. We have to feed that living thing. We have to protect it. Because if Bulosan taught us anything, it is that freedom does not survive by itself. It survives because we refuse to let it die.

The stakes have never been higher, and the goal has never been more clear. That is the caption the U.S. Department of Homeland Security chose to accompany a single, terrifying command, “Remigration now.”

It looks like a simple policy update, perhaps a bureaucratic shuffling of papers. But if you peel back the layers of that word, you find a history written in blood and a future that promises the same.

Remigration is not just a synonym for deportation. It is a sanitized, academic-sounding euphemism for ethnic cleansing.

To understand why this word is so dangerous, you have to look at where it comes from. It didn’t start in a policy think tank in Washington. It gained traction in the European far-right, specifically among Identitarian groups who needed a softer way to talk about violent expulsion.

The term is designed to sound voluntary, like a return ticket purchased after a long vacation. It implies that people are simply going back to where they naturally belong, restoring some mythical natural order.

But in practice, as outlined by political theorists and recent movements in Germany and Austria, remigration is not limited to undocumented immigrants.

It targets citizens. It targets anyone who “can’t be assimilated” or who are “non-native” regardless of their passport.

When the administration adopts this language, it is signaling a shift from border enforcement to demographic engineering. It is the administration deciding who the “real” people are and forcibly removing the rest.

That is the textbook definition of ethnic cleansing: rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of another group.

We often tell ourselves that this kind of thing doesn’t happen here, that ethnic cleansing is something that happens in the Balkans or failing states, not in a democracy with a bill of rights. But the U.S. has a long, documented history of using the machinery of government to purge specific ethnic groups from the land.

Consider the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Note the bureaucratic, neutral name. It wasn’t called the Native American Death March Act. It was framed as a land exchange, a necessary separation for the good of both parties.

President Andrew Jackson described it as a “benevolent policy.” The reality was the Trail of Tears, where the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole nations were marched at gunpoint from their ancestral homes in the southeast to designated territory west of the Mississippi.

Thousands died from exposure, disease, and starvation. It was ethnic cleansing wrapped in the language of law and order.

Fast forward a century to the 1930s and the Mexican Repatriation.

As the Great Depression ravaged the economy, local and federal officials looked for scapegoats. They targeted people of Mexican descent, blaming them for taking jobs and draining relief funds.

Through raids and coercion, up to two million people were repatriated to Mexico. Estimates suggest that 60 percent of them were birthright U.S. citizens.

They were not deported through legal channels; they were bullied into remigrating by a society that suddenly decided they didn’t belong.

Then there was Operation Wetback in 1954.

The government used military tactics to round up and deport over a million people. It was a massive dragnet that terrorized communities, split families, and often sent U.S. citizens to Mexico by mistake or indifference. The name of the operation itself was a slur, proving that the cruelty was the point.

The danger of the DHS posting, “Remigration now,” is that it signals the return of these dark chapters, but with different branding. It suggests that the government is once again preparing to strip away the rights of residency and citizenship based on blood and soil.

When a government uses a word like remigration, they are trying to numb you. They want you to think of logistics, of paperwork, of “facilitating return.”

They don’t want you to think of the knock on the door at midnight, the buses waiting to take your neighbors away, or the camps that will inevitably be built to hold them.

They are asking you to accept the unacceptable by hiding it behind a word that sounds almost civilized.

But make no mistake. When the administration demands the mass removal of a specific group of people to “purify” the nation, there is only one honest name for it.

And it isn’t remigration.

When I hear the name “Black Friday,” I think about how it perfectly shows what capitalism is really about. The name comes from accounting. Red ink means a store is losing money, while black ink means they are making a profit. So, this holiday is named after the moment businesses start making money. It is not about being thankful or being with family. It is about businesses making sure their bank accounts look good. I think this holiday hides some big ethical problems with how we buy things today.

The first big problem is how stores trick our brains. Black Friday is not natural. It is a panic created by companies on purpose. I see how they make us feel scared that we will miss out on a deal. They use short time limits to stop us from thinking clearly. We do not buy things because we need them. We buy them because we are afraid we will not get another chance. I think it is wrong to treat people this way just to sell products.

This trick leads to the second problem, which is waste. This holiday is built on buying things we will eventually throw away. The cheap items sold on Black Friday are often made poorly so they can be sold for less money. They break easily. This hurts the planet. We use up natural resources and burn fuel to ship these things around the world. Then we wrap them in plastic. Soon, these items end up in the trash. It feels like we are destroying the earth just to save a few dollars.

Then there is the cost to actual people. I know that low prices usually mean someone is being treated badly. It might be the person making the product in a factory for very low pay. Or it might be the worker at the store right here in America. Many workers have to leave their own families on Thanksgiving to get the store ready. We act like it is normal for workers to be tired and treated poorly so we can get a cheap TV. Sometimes people even get hurt in the crowds. This teaches us that owning things is more important than treating people with respect.

Finally, I worry about what this does to our hearts. Black Friday takes over Thanksgiving. We stop saying “thank you” for what we have and immediately start running to get more. It changes our focus from being grateful to just wanting more stuff. To me, Black Friday puts money over people. As long as we join in without thinking, we are part of a system that only cares about our wallets, not our well-being.