White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Mass Deportations — the Surfacing of the Worst in Us

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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

The Men Who Should Stand in the Dock with Mugabe

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It is easy to work up a head of hate against Robert Mugabe, the cruel president of Zimbabwe. He has destroyed a beautiful country and inflicted untold suffering on his people. He has so mismanaged the economy that the country’s inflation rate is the world’s highest–over 100,000 percent. He has expelled the productive people from the country and others have fled. He has given choice land and accommodations to his family of thugs.

 

More, he is a murderer. In the early part of his reign of terror, he killed tens of thousands of the Matabele people in southern Zimbabwe, around the city of Bulawayo.

 

It is not hard to vilify Mugabe, who may now be at the end of his bloody reign. But there are other guilty men who should be named. They are the de facto co-conspirators up and down the continent of Africa, who lead countries, enjoy influence and have, to a man (the arrival of a woman leader in Liberia is recent), remained silent as Mugabe has become more maniacal.

 

The guiltiest are those in the frontline states that surround land-locked Zimbabwe. They are the leaders of Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa and Zambia. Each one of them has some of the blood Mugabe has shed on his hands. Because of the silence that they have assiduously maintained, their complicity has been absolute. All four leaders have been the enablers of Mugabe.

 

Each country has suffered from the implosion of Zimbabwe. Each country has felt the pain from the lack of trade; unsatisfied debt; and the surge of people fleeing from the privations of Zimbabwe–once one of the richest countries in Africa, and the breadbasket of the southern region.

 

Botswana, on Zimbabwe’s southwest border, is currently the showplace of Africa. It is a functioning democracy, with a healthy economy based on mining and tourism. But Botswana could have used its economic leverage, as the host of the principle rail line carrying exports out of Zimbabwe into South Africa, and from there to the world, to put pressure on Mugabe. But it did not.

 

To the east, Mozambique hosts many of Zimbabwe’s exports and imports through the port of Beira on the Indian Ocean. If there had been some tightening of this relationship, Mugabe would have listened. Instead, there was silence.

 

Then there is South Africa and President Thabo Mbeki. If there is a judgment day, Mbeki will have much to answer for his connivance in tolerating Mugabe. Mbeki’s guilt extends beyond the suffering of the people to his north to his own people. More than 2 million refugees have fled from Zimbabwe to South Africa, where they have been no more popular than illegal aliens anywhere. The really hapless live on such charity as they can find; while those who are more capable of organization, particularly deserters from the Zimbabwe armed forces, have formed sophisticated criminal gangs, specializing in bank and armored car robbery.

 

Finally, Zambia has shouldered the burden of watching over the giant Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River, which provides electricity to both Zambia and Zimbabwe. Zambia has kept essential goods flowing into Zimbabwe, against the international sanctions; and it has seen its own Victoria Falls tourism plummet because of conditions on the Zimbabwe side of the falls. Yet, Zambia’s leaders have said nothing.

 

If Mugabe is forced from power by the ongoing election, and if he leaves without trying to annul the results of the election, milk and honey will not flow again in the country between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers. Too much has been destroyed in 28 years of his rule. The infrastructure has been destroyed; soil erosion has carried away an incalculable amount of earth from the fragile plain that once produced corn for all of southern Africa; the professional class is scattered around the world, in what they refer to as the Zimbabwe Diaspora; and the people of Zimbabwe have lost confidence in the future. The most optimistic country in Africa has traded hope for fatalism.

 

Assuming Morgan Tsvangirai really has won the election in Zimbabwe, he will have to preside over a massive reconstruction, which will last decades simply to get the country back to where it was when Mugabe destroyed it through racism, megalomania, and economics so primitive that he thought he could print money and it would have value.

 

Tsvangirai will have to turn to the world for economic aid and technical assistance. But he will have to turn to Zimbabweans for goodwill and to resist corruption. And he will have to turn to another silent partner, China, for a better deal on the contracts Mugabe signed with Beijing.

 

Not since Idi Amin was feeding his opponents to the crocodiles has there been such a catastrophic head of state in Africa. And not since Amin’s days, have the leaders of Africa remained so quiet in the face of such palpable evil.