Enough is enough isn't what enough was ...

We have a lot going for us right now. We have one of the best economies ever, unemployment is the lowest that most people can remember, innovations are coming out of the tech-valleys faster than we know how to use them. Things are going along pretty well. If I were President, I would run for re-election with a slogan like “It’s the economy, stupid.” So far, none of the 23 candidates for the Democratic nomination for president has come up with an economic measure that would win the day.

Instead, we are inundated with tweets and sound bites designed, intentionally, to divide the nation along racial lines, along religious lines, and along educational lines. We are and have been for two years, inundated with “no Russia, no collusion, full exoneration, witch hunt, hoax,” none of which is true. In the new norm, it isn’t enough, yet.

In March, the Department of Justice (DOJ) published the report of the two-year Special Counsel investigation. Last week, congressional committees dragged the Special Counsel, Robert Mueller, to testify about what was already in the report. The hearings confirmed the report: Russia did try to interfere with our 2016 elections and several people were indicted. There was not sufficient evidence to convict members of the Trump campaign with conspiracy with the Russians. There was overwhelming evidence of obstruction of justice by White House operatives, campaign officials, and the President, who would have been indicted but for a DOJ rule that forbids indictment of a sitting President. Mueller testified that the President could be indicted when he leaves office. Immediately after the hearing, the President tweeted that there was no collusion and no obstruction. Enough isn’t enough yet.

Last week, in Congressional hearings about the crisis at the southern border Chairman Elijah Cummings criticized the leadership of the Border Patrol and HHS for the way they are caring for people in their custody. Then the tweets started: “Cumming’s District is a disgusting, rat and rodent-infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous and filthy place.” (Send him back?) “No human being would want to live there.” That was the start of the war of words. Today, he called Cummings the racist. Enough isn’t enough yet.

A few weeks ago, the President told four liberal members of Congress they should return to the countries from which they came didn’t like everything about America. Three of the four were born in The US and all elected by their constituents. At a rally in Greenville, chants of “send her back” filled the arena where the President was holding a rally. Send-them-back is a rallying cry of the segregationist back the 1950s and 1960s. When he was accused of tolerating one of the most racist events in recent history, he tweeted that the four members of Congress were the real racists. Most of Trump's attacks are against people of color or immigrants. Enough isn’t enough yet.

There was a time when political opponents went after each other over policy issues. Classic stories abound in the history of Washington about political enemies by day and card-playing scotch drinkers by night. It was about policy, not personality.

Today, the daily tweets from the President take up the news cycle, and policy takes a back seat. We need a vigorous debate about issues. The Russians continue to infiltrate our election process, they are into our electric grid, our infrastructure is crumbling, our debt is at an all-time high, and growing, healthcare processes and costs are burdensome. Those issues should fill our evening news programs and our newspapers. Slanderous tweets from an impolite president should not be the stuff of daily discussion. We should expect our White House and the West Wing leaders to exhibit a bit of class, to show that we are a sophisticated nation with serious concerns for world peace, strong alliances aimed at keeping that peace, educated deliberations about issues, encouraging job formation, and concern for the well-being of fellow citizens.

If we support the verbal and written tearing down of people who differ in their views, support the ill-advised degradation of people, and the racist's taunts, we are complicit. We are and should be better than that.

Enough is enough, but I suspect it isn’t.

Is The Crisis At The Border Or Is It In America?

By now, everyone has seen the videos of our detention centers in Arizona, Florida, and elsewhere. If they do not make you ill, what does? The current immigration crisis is overwhelming governmental agencies responsible for border control and immigrant processing and care. The last two to three years have seen increases in people seeking asylum never experienced before. For sure, the Congress and the Administration share the blame.

We are a country that welcomed the refugee, the oppressed yearning to live free. The statue in New York harbor says who we are! We have not always done the best job of welcoming immigrants or treating them well once they arrive. It has been a constant effort to improve who we are and want to be. The Know-Nothing Party gained too much influence in the 1850s with its opposition to immigrants, Catholics, and generally, anyone who wasn't White Anglo Saxon. The Klan terrified Jews and Catholics alike in the 1940s and 1950s, not to mention their consistent hatred and terrorizing of non-whites. Over the years, we passed laws limiting entry to our southern neighbors. In the early twentieth century, most immigrants came from Europe and were White. In the last few years, a large number of immigrants came from Mexico, China, India, Philippines, Vietnam, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. Today, however, seems so different on so many fronts.

The historical assumption has often been that people will come here legally. That is not the case today. People come to visit and overstay their visas. People come to attend our great universities and overstay their visas. People stand in line for years in some countries waiting for their entry visas. Our immigration and border control systems are designed for legal entry.

We know that many people cross our southern borders illegally rather than through a port of entry. Many, if not most, who seek to live in our country cannot meet the guidelines for refugee status. Hundreds of thousands are sent back each year. However, the numbers have decreased in the last two years, partly because the government agencies can’t keep up with the volume.

Whatever resources we normally allocate to border control, immigration, and refugee assimilation is inadequate by a thousand times. The people assigned to handle the situation are not trained for it, so we end up with a mess that is embarrassing to the country. Last week Vice President Pence visited a holding pen in Arizona. He witnessed hundreds of men held in a cage, forced to sleep on the cement floor. He smelled the stench of men forced to go weeks without showers, without being able to brush their teeth, without clean clothes, wearing facemasks to filter the putrid air. The officials who run these camps knew that the VP was going to visit them, but the pictures showed how little they could do to clean up the place. He tweeted that the conditions were not great, but acceptable. There is no way that show-and-tell event can be spun in a positive light. Something is rotten on the border.

Government agencies are not equipped to handle the huge increase in asylum seekers coming across the border, hundreds of thousands each month. Most of the immigrants are from the “northern triangle” of Central America: Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. We know the drug cartels control those countries; power is exercised through murder, kidnapping, and low economic security. People are fleeing for their lives, by whatever means available, whether by bus, walking, or with smugglers, called coyotes.

When they arrive, our overcrowded and overwhelmed systems can’t treat them humanely. Congress just appropriated over $400 million to be used to manage the border and the immigrants. But it refused to allocate money for better living conditions, childcare, medical attention, sanitary goods, or even toothpaste. The fault lies with both political parties in the Senate. One refuses to admit publically that conditions are intolerable and the other refuses to provide funds unless those items are included. Except for party bickering, the funds could have been appropriated a year ago.

Hundreds of thousands come seeking asylum. That requires a court hearing. It can take from four to ten years to set a first court date. The San Francisco Immigration Court alone has a backlog of nearly 50,000 cases waiting to be heard by the 22 judges; 2,200 cases per judge. What do the immigrants do until their case is heard? Normal practice was to let them free in the country until their case was heard. Current practice is to detain them in holding pens for extended periods of time.

On Tuesday, July 16, 2019, new rules went into effect that bars immigrants from claiming asylum if they pass through another country to get to the US. That executive order should be tied up in the courts for a long time because it is a radical change in our way of treating the immigrant.

The border calamity is broader than an exercise in large numbers. Millions of people want to escape the tyranny they experience in their home country. Many Americans do not want immigrants to come to our country in large numbers. There is the fear of how a large number of immigrants will change the culture of the country, how it will affect job opportunity for low skill workers who are already hurting. It is interesting that the percentage of foreign-born people in the US has hardly changed from fifty years ago. The numbers may be relatively steady, but there is something more sinister happening.

 We have reached the point where the President feels comfortable tweeting that members of Congress who disagree with him should leave the country and go back to their native land: “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.” The irony is that only one Congresswoman he targeted is an immigrant. The others were born in the US. They were, however, all women of color. At least two immigrant members of Congress tweeted that they had not been subjected to the President’s racism because they were of White-European descent. Later tweets suggested that if the members of Congress didn’t like the way America was run, they could leave it.

 “Love it or leave it” was the establishment’s cry during the Vietnam War era. During the war on segregation, people of color were urged to return to the countries from which their ancestors were sold into slavery. Racism and Nativism are becoming acceptable at the highest levels of our government; led by a President who based his 2016 campaign on complaints about how the country was run and how he could make it great again. Nobody asked him to leave. The ghosts of our past are walking among us, in the halls of government, and on the propaganda radio and television networks.

Members of Congress in both parties need to tell the President that his behavior is unacceptable and that his treatment of asylum seekers is immoral. He tweets that he doesn’t have a racist bone in his body, as he is tweeting racist comments. The House passed a resolution condemning the Presidents racism, but one hundred eighty-seven members voted against the resolution. That made them complicit. The Reuters/Ipsos poll published the next day, July 17, 2019, indicated that because of the racist tweets, the President’s approval ratings increased five percent, to a high of 72% among Republicans. In the same poll, 68% of Americans said they disapproved of the President’s behavior. There is a big divide among the people.

The inhumane treatment of people seeking asylum can be resolved if we put our minds to it and allocate the needed funds. Let’s hire doctors to care for the sick, the pregnant women, and care for those with adverse medical conditions. We can stop taking children away from their parents. We can improve our record-keeping systems so that they can easily find and reunite parents and kids separated in the past. We can hire a couple of hundred immigration lawyers and station them at the border. We can make a massive infusion of money the Northern Triangle countries to develop their economy and take out the drug lords. We can set up immigration centers on our embassy grounds in Central American to eliminate the need to walk nearly 4,000 miles or take caravans of buses to our border. Those would be good first steps.

There is a crisis at the border. We see it on the news every day. We can’t let the videos numb us. We need to let them spur us to action. There also is a crisis in America, when a President calls for the deportation of people of color who criticize his policies. There is a crisis when nearly half of the people in the country support these policies.

The very soul of the nation is at stake!