We have reposted this item many times. We never dreamt that we would post it in response to the U.S. government taking children and babies away from their parents, putting them into government holding facilities, losing track of them, and then deporting their parents. And all because the parents crossed the U.S.-Mexico border… well, the government says they are crossing illegally, but it is not illegal to cross that border into the U.S. and claim asylum.
Not everyone who crosses the U.S.-Mexico border is from Mexico; many are from other Latin American nations. Not all claim asylum, but many do claim that they are fleeing their own countries in fear of their lives. To have their children taken from them at the border as a punishment for this—again, it is legal to enter the U.S. without a visa if you are claiming asylum or refugee status—is beyond words. The horror of it is wholescale: thousands of children seized and put into detention, lost in detention, or, even more agonizing, into the foster care system, as if they were orphans, and with the goal of placing them in U.S. families to live for the rest of their lives. It is a legitimate fear that putting these children into foster care is not a stopgap, temporary measure, but a way to forever keep them in the U.S. and destroy their families. It is not unlike kidnapping.
Former acting head of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement under the Obama Administration John Sandweg did not mince words on this:
…A guardian is then appointed to represent the best interests of the child. Meanwhile, the parent is shipped off, let’s say, to Honduras. There they are, they don’t speak English, they don’t have any money to hire a U.S. lawyer, and now their child is caught up in the state child welfare system, where an advocate might argue that it is not in the best interest of that child to be sent back to violence-ridden Honduras, to live in a life of poverty and under threat of gang violence.
It gets very difficult: [since] the parent can no longer appear, then at some point, depending on state laws, parental custody rights are severed, and if the parent can’t appear in state court, which of course they can’t, because they’ve just been deported, or they’re in detention, they run a serious risk of losing their rights as a parent to control where their child goes. I think there’s a very serious risk that of the people who are already deported, they are not going to see their child again any time soon, at a minimum, if not until adulthood.
The horrible irony of people fleeing violence and claiming asylum being arrested and deported, and then forced to sit by while the U.S. government justifies kidnapping their children on the basis that it is granting those children asylum is soul-crushing. Parents who came to the U.S. for asylum are refused, but their children are potentially forcibly detained here on the grounds that they must be provided asylum. Children can be refugees, but not their parents.
In case anyone is wondering, this is not one of the United States’ founding principles of liberty and justice for all. If you counter that a U.S. founding principle does not apply to non-U.S. citizens, you are correct. But you must also see that when the U.S. violates and perverts its moral foundations, U.S. citizens suffer. We become rudderless and immoral. We lower our standards of humanity first by hurting outsiders, then by hurting each other. Then nothing is left. The goal is to accept immigrants and help them to become Americans, not to destroy what it means to be an American. Here’s the original post with an introduction from September 2016:
In light of the continuing legal concern with illegal immigration, most notably the anti-immigrant threats currently being voiced by Donald Trump, we’re re-posting a Truth v. Myth staple on immigration and why it is now so often illegal.
Most of us have ideas on how to fix illegal immigration, but we never stop to ask why illegal immigration is now so common, but never was before. Americans have always tried to stop certain types of immigrants—Irish, Chinese, Jewish, etc.—but you will not find battles over illegal immigrants (except when people from those banned groups somehow got into the country). There was no such issue, really, as “illegal immigration” throughout our long history of immigrants. So why is it such an issue today?
The single answer is that we now make it much harder to become a legal immigrant than we have ever done before. That’s it. It’s not that today’s immigrants are more criminal. It’s not that our own sainted immigrant ancestors were more law-abiding. It’s simply a matter of changing the law to make it harder to become a citizen, a process put in motion during and after WWII.
So here’s the original post, with a few new additions:
Myth: Immigration used to be good, but now it is bad.
Supporting myth: Today immigrants are shiftless, lazy, and/or criminal, whereas they used to be hardworking people trying to make a better life for their children.
“Proof” of myth: Immigrants today don’t bother to learn English, want Spanish to be the official language of the U.S., refuse to become legal U.S. citizens, working here illegally instead, and constantly enter the U.S. illegally without even trying to become citizens because they want a free ride without paying taxes.
You know what we so often hear when Americans talk about immigration now?
1. They support anti-immigration laws.
2. Sure, their ancestors were immigrants, and they’re proud of that.
3. But their ancestors “followed the rules,” and therefore deserved to be here, while
4. Immigrants today have not followed the rules, and therefore do not deserve to be here.
This is a powerful myth. It seems to ring true. But do you know what the “rules” were for immigrants coming through Ellis Island for so many years? Look healthy and have your name listed on the register of the ship that brought you. That was it. “If the immigrant’s papers were in order and they were in reasonably good health, the Ellis Island inspection process would last approximately three to five hours. The inspections took place in the Registry Room (or Great Hall), where doctors would briefly scan every immigrant for obvious physical ailments. Doctors at Ellis Island soon became very adept at conducting these ‘six second physicals.’”
When one of the HP visited the Ellis Island museum in 1991, they saw a film that said you also had to provide the address of a friend, sponsor, or family member who would take you in. And off you went.
So we can’t really hand out prizes to past immigrants who followed those rules. They were pretty easy to follow. If that’s all we asked of Mexican immigrants today, we wouldn’t have illegal immigrants.
Immigrants today are faced with much more difficult rules. In other words, they actually face rules.
Go to Google and type in “requirements for U.S. citizenship.” It’s hard to say how many million pages come up. You petition for a Green Card—or rather, you have a family member already in the U.S. or a U.S. employer become your petitioner, and fill out the visa petition. Your employer-petitioner has to prove a labor certificate has been granted, that you have the education you need to do the job, that s/he can pay you, etc.
Then you’re on the waiting list—not to get a Green Card, but to apply for a Green Card.
One could go on and on. Basically, it’s much harder to get into the U.S. today and to become a citizen than it was when most white Americans’ ancestors came through.
The real problem with immigrants today is the same as it was in 1840: each generation of Americans hates and fears the new immigrants coming in. In the 1850s, the Irish were the scary foreigners destroying the nation. In the 1880s it was the Italians. Then the Chinese, then the Eastern Europeans, then the Jews, now the Mexicans.
Each generation looks back to earlier immigrants as “good,” and views current immigrants as bad. In the 1880s, the Irish were angry at the incoming Italians. In the 1900s, the Italians were banning the Chinese from coming in. As each immigrant group settles in, it tries to keep the next group out.
It’s really time we ended this cycle. Here are some quick pointers:
1. Latin American immigrants are not qualitatively different than previous European immigrants.
2. Spanish-speaking immigrants do NOT refuse to learn English; in fact, the children of Spanish-speaking immigrants are less likely to speak the old language than the children of other groups (that is, more children of Chinese immigrants speak Chinese than children of Mexican immigrants speak Spanish).
3. Your European immigrant ancestors honored nothing when they came to the U.S. but their desire to be here. They didn’t anxiously adhere to “the rules.” They did the bare, bare minimum that was asked of them, which was easy to do.
4. If we reverted to our earlier, extremely simple requirements for entering the country and becoming a citizen, we would not have illegal immigrants. If we choose not to go back to the earlier requirements, we have to explain why.
The usual explanation is that if we made it as simple now as it once was to enter this country and become a citizen, the U.S. would be “flooded” with “waves” of Latin Americans, poor and non-English-speaking, ruining the country. Which is exactly the argument that has always been made against immigrants, be they Irish, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, etc. Each group is going to destroy the country and American culture and society. It never seems to happen.
But it might happen now, with Latin American immigrants, not because they will destroy the country but because those in the U.S. who are so afraid of them will rip the country apart trying to keep them out. Taking the long view, I can say there’s hope that that won’t happen. But it will take a good fight to get all Americans to realize that the key to this nation’s success has always been the open-door policy.
Immigration will always be with us—thank goodness! The only informed position on the challenges it poses is a historically informed position.
The Historic Present 