End toxic immigration war? It’s up to you
Our national decency is at risk in the toxic political wars over immigration.
But don’t just wonder how vicious it will get this election year.
Instead, demand some real leadership.
OK. OK. We know.
There’s little hope politicians will rise to the occasion.
Yet there is a big need to hold them to a higher standard.
We need strong voices to call us together on an issue that’s long been gamed for partisan gain.
An issue where decent, honest people are vilified and systematically dehumanized.
An issue where legitimate concerns about border safety are sublimated to tweet-sized panaceas.
An issue that would have been comprehensively addressed years ago if reason had held a bigger microphone.
This is our national shame: We have conflated the need to secure our border with the desire of some extremists to dehumanize people they don’t like.
We have allowed those who feed xenophobic anger to shout down those who recognize our border with Mexico as a valuable social, intellectual, environmental and economic asset.
Of course we are a sovereign nation. Of course we have a duty to secure our borders.
But let’s do it with intelligence. Let’s do it with humanity.
Let’s do it like America.
Despite all that post-Mitt Romney soul-searching about the need for the GOP to become more inclusive, Donald Trump revitalized the Sheriff Joe Arpaio model of migrant-bashing and rode it into the White House.
He still sees it as a winning strategy for the Republican party to exploit — rather than fix — our nation’s broken immigration system.
Trump is “really beating the immigration drum in the lead-up to the midterm elections as a rallying cry and as a way of mobilizing voter support for Trump and the candidates that he chooses,” says Doris Meissner, senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute and former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.
The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy to press charges against all people caught crossing the border illegally is raw meat for his base.
It will result in taking children from their parents. But he dodges responsibility by blaming Democrats for what he called a “horrible law” that forces the separation of children from their parents.
It’s a false accusation.
There is no such law.
The truth is that his policy was designed as a political tool, not a legitimate border-security strategy.
It will cause suffering among families who fled poverty and violence in the hope of finding something better.
From May 6-19, nearly 700 children have been taken from parents, according to the Associated Press. That’s in addition to hundreds more who have been taken from their parents since October.
They are frightened and vulnerable in a strange country. What’s more, the federal government cannot track nearly 1,500 unaccompanied children who were placed with adult sponsors in the U.S.
Some wound up with traffickers, according to reports from “Frontline.” Some are likely being cared for by parents or sponsors who are undocumented and don’t want to be found.
Careless treatment of children by our government is intolerable. So is the inhumanity of treating would-be refugees like criminals.
But it isn’t new.
This is where the loyal opposition — the Democratic Party out of power — fails to articulate a convincing counterargument.
Photos of children sleeping behind cage walls were recently tweeted out by liberal activists protesting Trump’s policy of ripping families apart.
But the pictures were from 2014, when the Obama administration responded with detention to a wave of unaccompanied minors fleeing violence in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.
Trump seized on the mistake, further elevating the hyperbole that has hijacked this issue.
On immigration, the extremes define the debate. That’s not good for America’s soul.
We can do better.
America needs leaders with the guts to say that we are a country that values human life, human dignity and the sacred bonds of families. We need thoughtful, rational changes in our immigration laws that respect the integrity and humanity of our country.
And because politicians may not do the right thing without an incentive, Americans need to make it clear they disagree:
With splitting up families at the border. With keeping “dreamers” in limbo.
With pretending migrant labor is unneeded. With driving hard-working undocumented people further into the shadows.
With insulting our southern neighbors. Americans need to stop rewarding politicians who further the immigration wars, and demand a detente for the sake of decency and to create a space to find solutions.