The Heartrending Question

Why are we doing this? The news of the past few weeks are distressing.

It kind of reminds me of the roundup of Jews in Poland into ghettos. While the current situation is not the same, somehow the situation at the border is reminding me of the Poland Jewish ghettos. Kids being separated from their parents? Kids in cages in the shelters? Kids sleeping on concrete floors? Is this what America has become?

I am also hearing that separating kids from their parents is a negotiating tactic. Really? Kids’ lives and mental well-being are being used as a negotiating tactic? That’s not negotiation. It sounds more like blackmail.

I’ve also read that it will be a choice of either keeping families together or saving DACA from deportation. That’s like “Sophie’s choice”. The evil will not be in the choice made; the evil will be the act of forcing a choice.

There’s also stories about housing kids in “tent cities” because the number of kids being held in current facilities has grown so much that there is no more room. But “tent cities” kind of sound like “prison camps” to me.

Since I am not political and really don’t read much about politics, I do not know much about immigration, and so I’ve been reading up on this topic. I’ve learned that Obama too have had image problems with detention centers and had held kids indefinitely while their cases progressed through the immigration system. The court system declared that the Obama administration could not hold kids indefinitely and had to hold them in the least restrictive manner. The Trump administration wants to give us two choices: hold kids in “tent cities” temporarily before being placed with relatives or foster families or keep the kids with their families in detention centers (that probably appears to be more like jails) for months and years. This article from Vox lays out some of the court history and the Trump administration thinking. And here’s another article describing the history of immigration and how the Trump administration arrived at its current zero-tolerance policy.

These two aforementioned articles give a good broad overview of the problems with immigration and so I have a better idea of how difficult this issue is. Tom Friedman spoke about how he wanted to have some kind of immigration policy because we are now living in a world where people want to escape from a world of chaos into the world of order, but we just can’t have that mass overflow from the world of disorder. That concept of massive flow of humanity from the chaos world into the world of order is giving me an inkling of why you don’t want such heavy influx of immigrants. There are a lot of problems associated with such massive immigration and they are not because those immigrants are “animals”. It’s more to do with how society can assimilate such massive inflow.

So the immigration issue is really, really tough.

But separating kids (we’re talking about babies and toddlers here, as well as teenagers) from parents and sending them into caged shelters or tent cities are not the answer. That is just too cruel and inhumane.

America seems to be descending into evil, slowly and in various ways.

I believe that if you are a Republican troubled by this, you need to distance yourself from the term Republican. Become an independent. Don’t call yourself a Republican. “Republican” will become radioactive like Nazis.

If you are an evangelical and you find this policy abhorrent, you need to distance yourself from the term evangelical. Even though the evangelical leaders have said that separating children from their parents is immoral, this may be too little too late. So don’t call yourself evangelicals.