I recently broke my political silence on Facebook to decry the Murieta protests against the unaccompanied minor illegal immigrants en route to a USCIS (fka INS) facility said to be better equipped for their care and legal processing than the one where they had been held over many weeks. Not content with our government shaming this country by detaining children in conditions unfit for adult felons, some American citizens devolved into a mob mentality, swarming the buses until the drivers were forced to turn back. Very brave Americans, shouting hatred at children. Brave along the lines of the bigots who gathered to intimidate the first African-American students to walk into newly integrated public schools.
One of my FB correspondents, a Californian familiar with the economic straights of that state, questioned my characterization of the Murieta protesters as hateful. She surmised that the protestors has not really "seen" the children aboard the buses, but rather only the buses themselves with their economic associations.
I submit that this excuse invalidates itself like a snake that eating itself from the tail on up. The protesters were adults. Adults should always see children!
What can we call the adults who did not see the bus passengers for the children in desperate straights that they were but hardhearted? What can we call adults who would send children back into danger, perhaps to their premature deaths? Hardhearted and in this instance, bigoted.
The popular cant among the anti-immigration set is that Latin American parents only send their children to this country to gain an unfair advantage in escaping poverty. Setting aside the assumption that poverty itself does not risk children's lives, this belief suggests that some Americans do not see the unaccompanied children's parents as entirely human, at least not on the level of good American parents, chock full of family values, who would never break laws or exploit their own children. It is quite alright to abuse the children of others, so long as one can pretend that their parents treat them subhumanly. By extension, parents and children alike may then be regarded as subhuman.
There are terrible people in this world. Among them are some of the coyotes who take desperate people's life savings and sacrifice them to the desert rather than themselves be caught by the authorities. Among them are parents who send their children to be exploited and abused, their lives placed at risk, for selfish reasons. How many do you know? How many do I know? The answer is that, unless we work in the child protective services field, we know very few. Many of us will go our whole lives without meeting even one such failure of biology.
When do normal parents risk their children's lives? Only when they perceive a greater danger if they do not take the risk. A parent permits a stranger stick a knife into her child, when the stranger is a doctor and the child needs his appendix removed before it can rupture. A parent, who may be terribly poor, hand a lifetime of savings and his child to a coyote, because death and danger are so likely at home that an illegal trek across a desert in the hands of a smuggler is hopeful by comparison. This is how a parent behaves during a war or a genocide. She will risk a child's life to save that child's life.
Some argue that these children are not refugees: Their countries are not at war, but only contending with "gangs." Ergo, this situation must be resolved in those countries. Although a legitimate argument in the long term, it is completely irrelevant to the children in federal custody. They can no more wait for a solution "back home" than a person with cancer can wait for research to produce an effective chemo drug. The person with cancer is likely to die and so are many of these children.
The people who raped, robbed and murdered my ancestors in Eastern Europe were not necessarily soldiers or police. The majority of people who committed pogroms were civilians, often neighbors of their victims and they massacred during times of war and peace. In short, they were gangs. I was born in 1965 and I have never heard Jews criticized for sending their children off with smugglers to find their way to safe countries like Canada and the United States. How different things were in the 1930s. "On the eve of World War II, a bill that would have admitted Jewish refugee children above the regular quota limits was introduced in Congress. President Roosevelt took no position on the bill, and it died in committee in the summer of 1939. Polls at the time indicated that two-thirds of Americans opposed taking in Jewish refugee children." (Constitutional Rights Foundation, 1994, 2000). Canada opposed action to alleviate the Jewish refugee crisis on the ground that it would force Germany to solve its own Jewish problem internally. (Sound familiar?) Australia's position was that admitting too many Jews would disturb its racial balance. (Brustein, p. 2). In other words, Jews were not considered white during the 1930s. Today, most Americans, Canadians, Australians et al consider Easter European-descended Jews to be white.
A Hispanic or Latino, on the other hand, is perceived by many Americans as a person of color regardless of the racial make-up of his or her ancestors. The "not white" parent, the unnatural parent, the scofflaw parent who tries to cheat the system; and so, the subhuman child who may be terrorized by the very white American parents who would scream lawsuit if any of their children were to be terrorized, verbally abused-- traumatized!-- like the children on the buses in Murieta. And worse!-- these refugees, as I insist they are, speak a foreign language! What could strike greater fear into the hearts of Americans, so rarely afforded good second language instruction in their own public schools, as they encounter people with whom they might not be competent to deal! How does the American child who must be protected from emotional trauma compare to the resilient child who survives the desert and the coyotes and the detention center? How does the American parent who cannot tolerate even verbal abuse of her child measure up against the Latin American parent who makes a decision intolerable to herself to improve the odds of her child living? The Murieta bigots cannot hold a candle to the strength and durability and of these children and their parents. Bigotry may arise from envy, from greed, from selfishness. It always involves deeming the "other" inferior, because it always arises at least in part from fear of one's own inferiority or insufficiency. Let us bear this in mind during the coming weeks and months, as we try to win the hearts and minds of politicians and other Americans to the plight of these children. Those who would have us spurn humanitarianism may be creating a future America missing many very desirable would-be citizens.
SOURCES:
Brustein, William I. Roots of Hate: Anti-Semitism in Europe Before the Holocaust. Cambridge University Press. 2003.
Constitutional Rights Foundation. Bill of Rights In Action. Vol. 10, Issue 2. "United Statess Immigration Policy and Hitler's Holocaust." Spring, 1994, Updated July, 2000. Retrieved July 11, 2014 at http://www.crf-usa.org/....