Published on Commonweal Magazine (https://www.commonwealmagazine.org)
Borderline
The Calamity of the Immigration Crisis
The Editors July 29, 2014 - 3:28pm
[1]
Across the globe,
hundreds of thousands of civilians, many of them innocent women and
children, are being killed in what seems like an endless cycle of
political, ethnic, and religious violence. The continuing slaughter in
Syria and across Africa, renewed butchery in Iraq, the seemingly
inevitable return of war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza [2],
and the wanton downing of the Malaysian passenger jet in the Ukraine
have shaken, if hardly shocked, the world in just the past month. The
Israeli-Palestinian conflict is as intractable as ever, while the
Shiite-Sunni rivalry in Iraq promises to drag that already devastated
country back into the most brutal of civil wars and send its remaining
Christian population into permanent exile. Despite the efforts of U.S.
Secretary of State John Kerry to get the Israelis and Palestinians to
negotiate, there seems little the United States or the international
community can do to bring such implacable enemies together. Stopping the
violence in Syria, Ukraine, Iraq, and Afghanistan is equally unlikely.
One result of these failures is a refugee crisis of almost unprecedented
proportions, with millions desperately seeking sanctuary.
For the most part, the United States has been spared
both the violence and the social and economic upheaval of the refugee
crisis engulfing so much of the world. The most notable exception to
that benign state of affairs is this year’s influx of more than fifty
thousand children across the Texas border—most of them from Honduras, El
Salvador, and Guatemala. Advocates for these children claim they are
seeking refuge from gang violence and deserve to be given political
asylum. Those who oppose granting them asylum argue that the children
have been “lured” to the United States by the false promise that if they
manage to cross the border and are reunited with family members already
here, they will eventually be granted a path to citizenship.
Predictably enough, the question of what to do with the
children has turned into a bitter partisan fight. Republicans charge
President Barack Obama with being soft on border security and encouraging illegal Latino immigration [3]
for domestic political gain. Obama scoffs at such accusations, pointing
out that the border with Mexico has never been more secure and that he
has in fact deported more illegal immigrants than any other president.
Whether these children have a right to asylum under U.S. law is to be
determined by a well-established judicial procedure, and Obama has
requested $3.7 billion from Congress both to accelerate these legal
proceedings and to provide humanitarian assistance to the children.
House Republicans have balked at Obama’s proposal. The flood of
immigrants can be stopped, they insist, by revising a 2008 law that
prohibits the deportation of minors who can credibly claim to be victims
of human trafficking. Democrats say that this would endanger too many
children.
Despite the harsh rhetoric of some Republicans and the
ugly protests of some right-wing groups, the U.S. religious community,
and especially the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, has been a staunch supporter of the displaced children [4] (.pdf). “It was un-American; it was unbiblical; it was inhumane,” New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan said [5]
of demonstrators who surrounded buses filled with immigrant children,
shouting for them to be immediately sent back to their native countries.
Dolan compared such incidents to the Nativist anti-Catholic riots of
the 1840s.
Unfortunately, it is unlikely that Congress and the
president will agree on how to handle the border crisis. Anti-immigrant
sentiment among Republicans makes compromise on the issue almost impossible [6],
as the refusal of the House this summer to take up last year’s Senate
immigration bill demonstrated. In the meantime, President Obama has
hosted the presidents of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala at the
White House, hoping to collaborate on various strategies for
discouraging parents from sending their children on the perilous journey
to the United States. The White House, for example, has tentatively
floated a proposal to examine claims for asylum at U.S. embassies in
Central America. The Honduran president noted that the gang violence
convulsing his country and propelling the exodus of children is largely
the result of the demand for illegal drugs in the United States. Many in
the United States think the refugee crisis is a problem foisted on them
by unlawful immigrants, but it is a calamity for which America itself
also bears responsibility.
This “children’s crusade” is not an answer to the
violence that plagues Central America. Instead, the United States must
do much more to encourage political stability and economic development
across the region. Our so-called border crisis is not fundamentally a
question of security, but one of poverty, injustice, and disorder. If
the United States takes effective steps to improve conditions in Central
America, our border will secure itself. Doing so won’t be easy, of
course, but it will likely be much less difficult than resolving the
conflicts that are displacing civilians in so many other parts of the
world.
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