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Wake-up call

Stay/Go/Yes/No?

Posted

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement deports convicted felons who committed heinous violent crimes while in this country illegally, let there be neither obstacles nor crass public rejoicing. Their removal is morally imperative, but neither gloating nor unseemly victory laps by self-righteous guardians of demographic "integrity" are called for. 

The broader issue of determining criteria for expatriating other migrants who breached the border but not the peace, is a more complex and somewhat unrelated issue. Let's kick that can down the calendar.

The "rule of law" must always prevail and be tempered by mercy as applicable. In this case it is not due. This sub-set of migrants are not being punished just for the apocryphal sin of economic parasitism. Being a drain on budgets and social services does not warrant harsh retribution, even when the law countenances it. 

But human trafficking, kidnapping, arson, drug dealing and murder, when culpability has been established by uncompromised standards of proof, are grounds for banishment that should be advocated as an exercise in social justice that transcends any immigration code.

Tom Homan, Trump’s incoming "border czar," insists that known criminals, on the lam or in jail, are the immediate targets, though he clearly opposes amnesty for the millions who are not. They may have "fallen through the cracks" for now,  but a government-engineered sinkhole may await them.

He does not rule out National Guard participation under some circumstances, and neither favors nor forecasts their deployment on a large scale. But he is quite amenable about raids on workplaces. 

Are schools workplaces? Will children be allowed to finish their daily lessons? Will SWAT teams interrupt origami lessons?

All children on earth in every generation are innocent. Yet they are inextricably entangled in their parents' mistakes.

Homan estimates there are more than 300,000 missing children in the US,  some of whom have been conscripted into forced labor and the sex trade. Others may be thriving but nowhere to be found. When children are eventually located and their deported parents cannot be traced, what will become of them? In the blind chase for legal status, will they be adopted by sponsors and thereby, in effect, rendered orphans?

When children of targeted deportees are in their parents' custody, Homan is giving the parents the Hobson's Choice of deporting them together or separately, treating these kids like contraband. He plans on constructing family facilities for those who wish to cling to each other after it has been ruled that they should have no further hope to cling to.

Homan seeks to privatize the search for missing children. 

The government's use of contractors has a sordid history even beyond prisons and the military. Where there is a profit motive, there is certain to be greed, temptation, and the mere pantomime of oversight. 

The use of "nonprofits," which Homan further champions, is no better. Though the term "nonprofits" implies selflessness and civic virtue, they often fly under the IRS radar just as ruthlessly as the "cash-only" businesses in certain sections of Brooklyn and Queens. They are some of the seediest outfits in the hemisphere. Their operators are often navigators of the seas of opportunism, not minions of charity. 

Regardless of how we feel about detention of prosecuted migrants, we must stop the idiotic commandeering of language to accommodate false equivalents. The United States has never used "concentration camps," never will and nobody would have it otherwise. And neither Homan nor his boss are Hitler. And the odious document "Project 2025" is still not “Mein Kampf.” 

The migrants should not be termed "invaders" to be repulsed as in war. Using "fighting words" to fix a humanitarian crisis doesn't work. Our humanity is not better than their humanity. Who would not brave Nature's elements and the law, if necessary, to escape rigged perpetual poverty in search of a better life?  

Migrants demand "due process." So commonly do ordinary citizens, who are much in the habit of strategically seeking protection in order to circumvent and mock justice. Apparently, the Constitution recognizes as many variants of "due process" as there are variants of the Covid virus.

The great majority of migrants seeking asylum on the basis of persecution in their home countries do not have a legitimate case, but we can't blame them for trying. Lawyers throw hail Mary passes in courtrooms on behalf of their gainful American citizens all the time.

These migrants are not analogous to the Jews who were passengers on the MS St. Louis, the ocean liner that safely reached these shores, but most of whose Jewish passengers perished in the Holocaust, because FDR, swayed by the antisemitic Department of State, refused them entry and returned them to Europe.

The British did something similar. 

They refused ships of Jews who were fleeing genocide by Germans and their collaborators, permission to disembark in Palestine. Instead, they turned the ships around and changed the itinerary of its hapless exiles to death factories like Auschwitz and Treblinka, a relatively obscure extermination camp, where one million Jews were incinerated in a single year.

Perhaps the British did it to pander. Maybe to avenge Little St. Hugh. Possibly just not to be outdone.

Although the sufferings and dangers faced by even the law-abiding, low-priority migrants on Homan's hit list are not in the same league, it is no less alarming that the word "migrants" is increasingly being used as a collective term to describe unproductive and contemptible people. People are not contemptible for not having volunteered for a police dossier about them, or for not being employed when they are ineligible for gainful labor and exiled from the contingency for self-improvement. 

Why is the resentment of the latest migrants spreading? Is it entirely due to alleged criminality, exponential hits on taxpayer-funded budgets, and extravagant benefits showered upon them, even at the expense of veterans and legal permanent residents? Or is there at least a smattering of nativist cultural protectionism?   

We are already, thankfully, far too heterogeneous a nation, racially, religiously, ethnically and linguistically, for the minuscule number of believers in an American "volk" to get any traction or make any headway. The discredited and retired German word "volk" sounds like "folk" but is demonic and untranslatable. Nothing like Pete Seeger's folk music.

No matter what Tom Homan says, the overwhelming majority of migrants will never be deported. Doing so would be logistically, economically and politically impossible. Millions of people who made sacrifices and wait patiently in queue for years for their turn will feel demoralized and perhaps disenfranchised.

In the neither recent nor too distant past, immigrants needed to demonstrate that they would not become "public charges.” Their mandated sponsors would have to accept responsibility and assume liability for debts of immigrants who had defaulted on them. This would, in today's context, be neither equitable nor practical.

On the road to citizenship, surely we can pave paths of respectability!

Will ICE stop after expedited deportations of apprehended criminals or will they, as promised, then target others who entered the country illegally but were otherwise law-abiding? Should they gamble that they will be left alone, or cut their losses and volunteer for self-deportation, if the government agrees to grant them admission without prejudice if they otherwise qualify and wait their turn?

Is it smarter in the future to get over the wall or let the system get over on them?

Which immigration laws, if any, should be tightened, relaxed, abandoned or created, to meet the nation's changing needs? If a 9-month pregnant tourist on a three-month visa gives birth in the United States, should her child automatically be an American citizen? What are the ramifications and fallacies of so-called "chain migration"?   

Should anything be done to curb current large-scale abuses  among people who claim they are seeking asylum? Although their case is usually baseless as legally defined, it nonetheless prioritizes them ahead of other aspiring immigrants, and they have nothing to lose by parroting the magic words they were taught to memorize.

Soon there will be a seismic shift in immigration policy. Tom Homan comes on strong, and so should the national consensus, though with modifications. We should for now, and perhaps indefinitely, go easy on migrants who have so far given every evidence of good-faith desire to assimilate and contribute positively to our well-being. And we should unapologetically expel violent criminals.

The poem on the Statue of Liberty lends itself to misinterpretations, especially the characterization of "wretched refuse." We are all "yearning to breathe free."

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