Thursday, January 25, 2018

To Legitimize the Dreamers, Fund the Wall

When the Branch Davidians holed up in their compound outside Waco, Texas, the federal government pleaded with cult leader David Koresh to release the children inside the building. They, after all, were too young to differentiate right from wrong, the wrong being the Davidians alleged sexual abuses and illegal weapons violations. The  children should not suffer any consequences for actions taken by their parents. Nineteen children were evacuated before the 51-day siege turned into a conflagration that killed 76 Davidians. That was in 1993. 

For the most part it has been the position of our government, at all levels, to absolve children for the misdeeds, alleged and real, of their parents or elders.

Even the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that juveniles should be treated differently than adults. It ordered a review of mandatory life sentences handed out to youths. Included in the fallout from that ruling is Lee Boyd Malvo, the teenage accomplice of the Beltway shooter whose killing spree totaled 10 victims around Washington, DC, in 2002. https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/local/beltway-sniper-lee-boyd-malvo-granted-new-sentencing-hearings/2017/05/27/e252529c-4300-11e7-b29f-f40ffced2ddb_video.html?utm_term=.f0622a41d5fc

According to Allen Weintraub, an attorney involved in asylum law, “The Trump  immigration policy is … denigrating American ideals of justice and fairness by the administration’s refusal to recognize the long-standing  common law tradition, codified in many state and federal statutes, differentiating the application of the law between minors and adults. In civil law, any contract entered into by a minor is void on its face; and in criminal law there are major differences in determining the guilt and sentencing for a minor. In no way are the DACA minors complicit in violating U.S. immigration laws. They cannot be punished for the illegal acts of the adults who brought them into the U.S.”

The sympathy, if not benevolence, of the federal government seems to have dissipated under Donald Trump. His vacillating stances on the fate of youngsters (median age 6) brought to America illegally, mostly by their parents, have become conflicting chapters in an ongoing saga of venality as Trump uses the precarious position of the so-called “Dreamers” to push Congress to fund a southern border wall with Mexico. 

Last year Trump vacated DACA (the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program initiated by President Obama), setting March 6 as the day deportations could begin if Congress didn’t pass enabling legislation to grant the near 800,000 Dreamers enrolled in DACA renewed residency rights. 

(March 6 happens to be my birthday. I have always comically associated the date with the fall of the Alamo to Mexican forces. How ironic that Trump could exact revenge on Mexico—for the Alamo and for rejecting any suggestion it would pay for the border wall—by beginning deportation procedures on March 6 as 79% of DACA recipients are from Mexico. Here’s a statistical profile of young undocumented immigrants brought here: https://nyti.ms/2xN3tIu.)

Folklore would have you believe America was always a welcoming country. Not so. Our past is speckled with eras of discrimination against the Irish. The Chinese. Southern Italians. Eastern European Jews. Even in the face of death our shores were not open to those yearning to breathe free from persecution.

Trump has cut by more than half the number of legal immigrants permitted to enter the United States each year. It is 45,000, the lowest since the 1970s, an especially harsh number given the unprecedented volume of refugees around the globe. 

Pushed by zealots such as presidential advisor Stephen Miller, Trump says he wants to restrict immigration to an educated, professional class that could integrate smoothly and quickly into the country’s manpower needs and all but erase entry based on family ties beyond spouses and children. 

Miller apparently has forgotten his family history. A descendant on his mother’s side of the Glosser Brothers retail company of Pennsylvania, Miller’s ancestors fled pogroms in Russia. He and other members of his extended immigrant family started a successful, but now defunct, chain of department stores (http://jewishjournal.com/opinion/rob_eshman/214361/stephen-miller-meet-immigrant-great-grandfather/).  

My father, as well, came from Eastern Europe in 1939 when he was 28, with little beyond initiative and moxie, to become a successful small manufacturer who, if memory serves me right, supplied Glosser Bros. with lingerie. As for Trump wanting only the highly skilled and educated, my father, again, had no more than a sixth grade education. He spoke little English when he arrived on our shores. I shudder to think where I might be if Trump’s Draconian immigration measures were in place decades ago.

But enough of my personal story. How about the poster boy for the value of benign immigration? 

As many others have pointed out, imagine if Trump’s restrictions on Muslim immigrants were in place in the early 1950s. The biological father of Steve Jobs of Apple fame, a Syrian leaving Lebanon because of political unrest, would have been denied entry into the United States. He would not have met Jobs’ biological mother. They would not have spawned the co-founder of the richest company in the world.

The question remains, why do all immigrants have to be skilled? Or rich? Or from Caucasian countries? Is there something wrong with immigrants serving in the home health care field, or in foodservice, or in agriculture, or in any field open to those with less than a college degree? 

Late Thursday afternoon the White House packaged sweeping changes to immigration law tied to the possibility of a path to citizenship for 1.8 million illegal immigrants (https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/25/white-house-presents-immigration-plan-with-path-to-citizenship-for-18-million-369457?lo=ap_a1).

Hailed as a compromise that could get 60 votes in the Senate, the White House is mum on prospects for passage in the more conservative House where the prospect of amnesty is anathema to hardliners. 

Should Democrats sign on, even though it includes $25 billion for a southern border wall and other security measures as well as changes to our traditional immigration policies?

I’d have to say, yes, as it represents the only avenue Dreamers have to legitimize their lives in the United States. Let Republicans be the guilty party if the proposal dies in Congress. 

Our heritage is as a nation of immigrants. Through quotas and discrimination we have grown stronger because of our open doors. Overwhelmingly, according to surveys, Americans favor granting residency to Dreamers. We should not let a vocal minority, a repressive, self-centered minority, change the criteria upon which the best values of our country rest.