This Reuters article published last weeks contained an astonishing sentence. Here it is in full:
Amnesty International and other groups are pressuring the Canadian government to abandon the [Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement], arguing the United States is not safe for refugees.
That single sentence has impacted me in ways that are difficult to articulate.
My parents were children of the Great Depression, and they came of age during World War II. My dad would tell stories of growing up in the Depression and serving in the Navy during the war. I learned more about U.S. History from him than I did in school. He would often say that our country may have made mistakes, but we were still the best place in the world to live. I remember him telling me how brilliant the Marshall Plan was, and how we were not conquerors—we rebuilt Europe, avoiding the mistakes of the Treaty of Versailles.
In the post-WWII era from 1949 to 1952, refugees accounted for one-half of all immigrants coming into the United States:
Immediately after the war, the United States was pressured to deal with the over thirty million dislocated Europeans, including a million displaced persons (DPs) who had been forced from their homelands during the war. President Harry S. Truman issued a directive in 1946 to allocate half of the European quotas for refugee admissions. Enacted in 1948 and amended in 1950, the displaced persons acts authorized the admission of 202,000 individuals in two years. These measures were developed within the framework of the existing immigration law by allowing nations to mortgage their future quotas. The DP acts eventually admitted four hundred thousand Europeans; 16 percent of them were Jewish. From 1949 to 1952, almost half of the new immigrants were admitted as refugees; most of them had no connections with American citizens.
In 1975, a new influx of Hmong refugees started coming to the United States from Southeast Asia. I still remember my high school Spanish teacher looking for student volunteers in 1983 to help teach many of the newly arrived Hmong refugees English. He would have us act out sentences, and worked up to reading the parts of plays to his English as a second language students. In 1987, I served in the Army with 2nd Lieutenant Vu, who came to the United States as a refugee.
This is not to say that the United States has not made mistakes in regards to allowing refugees in the country. Just prior to WWII the United States refused to take in German Jews as refugees. After WWII:
America has spent 70 years atoning for its sin by becoming the most welcoming country in the world for refugees. Half of all refugees who are permanently resettled in new countries are resettled in the United States. That is a legacy that Americans are proud of, and should be. It's the closest America has come, in the 20th century, to honoring the inscription on the Statue of Liberty.
So in the years since World War II we went from being the most welcoming country for refugees to Amnesty International stating that the U.S. is not safe for refugees.
While I wish my dad were still around, I am glad he did not live to see what has happened to the country he loved. In my earliest memories I see him pointing his finger at the TV during Nixon’s State of the Union address and yelling, “That asshole!” He did the same thing to Reagan. He probably wouldn’t recognize the country that elected Trump.
The dark, xenophobic underbelly of America has always been there for people who look different, speak differently, or worship differently. We can see this with the way different ethnic groups have been treated throughout our history. The Chinese, Japanese, Irish, Mexican, and a laundry list of others have have been the moving targets of this xenophobia.
Based on my experience with Hmong refugees, as a youth I naively believed that we were living up to the words in Emma Lazarus’ poem, The New Colossus:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Trump’s election has brought out an ugliness I have never seen in my fellow Americans. We are a nation of immigrants, yet so many of our countrymen are against immigration. Not only are they against it, but Amnesty International and other groups have stated that the United States is not safe for refugees.
My country, the country I served, that my father served, that I grew up in, that I believed in—is no longer safe for refugees.
How did our country go from this during my youth ...
… to not being safe for refugees now that I’m middle-aged?