The crisis on the border and blame to spread around
The border crisis, a pileup of humanity—including women with children and record numbers of unaccompanied minors—is bringing out the worst among “native” Americans in what has already been an overheated season of anti-migrant fever. With as many as 90,000 unaccompanied children now anticipated this year, President Barack Obama has called for $3.7 billion in emergency funding, money that will largely be used to improve border policing and accelerate deportations. Meanwhile, a vast machinery of nativist rumor-mongering has sprung into gear, turbo-charged by the various advances of social media.
The closer to the border you get, the crazier the stories become: These Central American migrant kids are—somehow—infected with West Africa’s Ebola virus. The children have been hired by drug dealers to swarm the border. The Democratic Party and its conspirator-in-chief Obama are orchestrating a flood of new voters. Americans are responding with such hysterics because they look upon the crisis at the border as something that is happening to them—an offense against U.S. sovereignty inflicted from the outside.
That view is mistaken in a number of ways, not least of all because it obliterates the experience of these desperate migrants. Certainly if anything is happening to anybody, it is primarily happening to those who have made the grueling and sometimes fatal sojourn to the border.
But some Americans also miss the fact that they are witnessing not an isolated phenomenon, but the inevitable outcome of a motley collection of problems and policies that have “happened” to their neighbors to the immediate south. An unacknowledged preference for cheap labor pulls thousands into the economy each year, while U.S. appetites propel a drug trade that is the source of much of the chaos in the streets of Central America. At the same time, U.S. free market policies have created massive social dislocation in neighboring nations, driving subsistence farmers off their land and into a search for work that relentlessly leads northward.
Much of the everyday violence these young women and children are fleeing also results from shortsighted U.S. policies. Deportation decisions in the 1980s and ’90s literally transplanted the Los Angeles gang culture to Central America. Young men who had come to the United States as small children were deported back to countries they did not really know, armed with the only skill set they had acquired in the North as gang members. Now these deportees are part of the reason a country like Honduras suffers the highest murder rate in the world.
This is a kind of economic and political interconnectedness that makes a mockery of national borders and the inviolability of sovereignty; it is a de facto solidarity of the worst kind. Some Americans, insisting that all people are ruggedly individual islands unto themselves, prefer to see such problems in isolation, performing our national inverted act of contrition: “It’s their fault, it’s their fault, it’s their most grievous fault.”
But in truth it is also our fault, and for this we must make amends. In his most recent appeal on the issue of undocumented migrants, which is becoming a primary focus of his papacy, Pope Francis deplores what he bluntly termed the racist and xenophobic displays witnessed since the children’s crusade to the border began. The children at the border, he implores—emphasizing the humanitarian nature of the crisis—should be “welcomed and protected.”
Francis calls us to something better than a cobbled-together emergency response. Such a response is doomed to be inadequate. What is needed is a holistic approach that invests as much in resolving the “push” issues in migrants’ home countries as it does on law enforcement at the border. Our problems are interconnected, but so is our humanity. The pope urges us to accept the border problem not as something happening to someone else, but a crisis to be shared and solved by everyone.
(From the: U.S. Catholic)
