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Mass Deportations — the Surfacing of the Worst in Us

February 24, 2017 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

The accelerated deportation of illegal immigrants is brainless, cruel, antagonizing to many allies and neighbors and, ultimately, banal. It is antithetical to our better natures and to the humane face of America that has made us an exemplar for human rights, a voice for the voiceless and, as Ronald Reagan said, “a shining city on a hill.”

It is American exceptionalism abandoned for petty prejudice.

There is linkage — there always is linkage — between the desecration of the Jewish Chesed Emeth Cemetery in University City, Mo., and those knocks on the door as the men from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) perpetrate the obscenity, ordered up by those in authority. Prejudice has been affirmed by government.

No country in this disturbed world can allow unfettered immigration, but to turn on those who have crossed the border for the simplest human reason — need — with the full force of the state and to send them to a place where they fled for a better life, for a dream — the American Dream — is to implement a crime against humanity.

Hate is easily inflamed. The darkest passion of human beings is to love to hate, to blame all of life’s ills on others and to seek to punish them for just being. It is what produced the sectarian violence in Ireland, perpetuated apartheid in South Africa, and caused the great horrors of the last century, including the Armenian massacre in Turkey and the Holocaust. Not only do people love to hate but hate becomes hereditary, handed down through the generations.

The United States has struggled against its incipient hates and even appeared, with the election of Barack Obama, to be able to put them aside. But we have come through a political season where hate has been dog whistled and it has come running.

If you think what you have just read is far-fetched, let me tell you that every time I write about immigration and the plight of the dispossessed, I am deluged with virulent, hate-filled emails. Once this evil genie is loose, no prejudice is out of possibility.

All my emails repeat this political phrase out of last year’s campaign, “What part of ‘illegal’ don’t you understand?” How many things that were illegal in my lifetime are now legal? Try segregated lunch counters and homosexuality, for starters. The goal posts move.

You can build a single act of illegality — in this case crossing a border to get a better life — into a crime of giant proportions without statute of limitations: a mark of Cain, an indelible stain. But it is not. The hard-pressed father and mother, breaking the law by working without papers, and yet holding it all together so that the children might have it easier, is the face of these criminals. Lives in extremis.

Study after study has shown that they are less likely to commit violent crimes or to disturb the peace than Americans whose ancestors arrived on these shores as immigrants in another time.

To break up families, to send people to countries where they are de facto foreigners with no means of supporting themselves and where they will encounter hostility and danger, in the name of legality, is preposterous. It is something that will pass into history as a time when our country — America the Great — did something totally unworthy of its better nature.

When the state moves people by the millions for its own purposes, terrible injustice and human suffering result.

We did that: We have the mark of slavery in our DNA. In small measure we expiated that, until this dark time. Shame!

For InsideSources

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: apartheid, deportation, Donald Trump, hate crimes, ICE, illegal immigration, immigration, racism

The Horror When the Men from ICE Come Knocking

February 17, 2017 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

I wonder daily, really, what life is like on the other side of the windowpane that separates the legal resident from the illegal.

I wonder if the skinny, young Chinese woman working in the restaurant is legal. I have noticed her because she works so hard: She is there when it opens and when it closes.

The restaurant is family owned, so I wonder if she is there legally — a link in “chain migration” — or illegally, in a kind of servitude. The chain is forged when a legal family sponsors other family members, who can then come here preferentially, welcome and free.

If she came here otherwise, say on a tourist or student visa, and did not return to her home country, then she is in danger of a knock on the door, handcuffs and the horror of deportation. And if she is arrested for a crime, no matter what, she is closer to the door.

I also wonder about the Mexican family that detailed my old car so well in the July heat. Cash work without a paper trail tells part of their story. Did they walk across the border from Mexico together or separately? The women speak English, but not the men. Were they a family before or after coming here? Are some of them here legally; will children lose their fathers, wives their husbands, if there are deportations?

Meeting agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), wearing black windcheaters with “POLICE” on top of “ICE” emblazoned in white on the backs, must be a heart-stopping experience. These are federal enforcement agents, police, not paper-pushers. This is rough stuff, not community policing.

I listen to tales of deportations: families torn apart, and people sent to countries where they were born but had never resided. I wonder if these people are yearning for U.S. citizenship and the ability to vote. Mostly, I think they are yearning just to live here in peace, free from the fear of a knock on the door from ICE agents.

Mark Jason, a friend who lives in Malibu, Calif., has devised a way to deal with illegal immigrants that eschews the brutality of deportations and the emotional hostility that amnesty for them provokes in some Americans. He calls it the “Third Way” and for six years, he has been promoting it with his own money.

Like many good ideas, Jason’s plan is very simple: He wants to create a 10-year, renewable “Special Work Permit” with an additional dimension: holders need to earn the permit by complying with our laws and paying a 5-percent tax on their wages, and their employers will also pay a 5-percent tax.

Taxes collected from these permits would amount to $167 billion in 10 years, according to Jason’s think tank, the Immigrant Tax Group. “Payments could be facilitated by cell phone and computer technology, and the immigrants gain their freedom with certain rights and can assimilate more easily,” Jason said.

“These payments would be used to provide hospitals, schools, policing and prisons in the local communities where the immigrants live. This third way is a win-win that can be implemented simply,” said Jason, who is a retired budget analyst for California’s university system and a former IRS agent.

If I am right about the status of the young Chinese woman and the Mexican family, they could all live the American dream, working without the fear of a knock on the door: the knell that sounds for all who live in fear of the state and its agents, who have terrified down through the centuries.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: deportation, Donald Trump, ICE, illegal immigration, immigration, immigration solutions

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