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!
