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.

Making the Cut, Religiously Speaking

Making the Cut: I’m still here, and if you’re reading this so are you, which means neither of us made the cut, the select group of 140,000 souls who were to be saved Saturday evening before the world began its inexorable descent to destruction.

No one I know was transported to heaven while the rest of us, according to the prophesy, endure earthquakes, plagues, war, famine and general torment for five months, until October, when everything comes to an end. Of course, we already have earthquakes, plagues, war, famine and general torment, so it’s hard to say what’s different. Indeed, yesterday a volcano erupted on Iceland, an earthquake rocked New Zealand, and we’re still at war in many places.

I’m not here to make fun of Harold Camping, the 89-year-old Christian radio entrepreneur who predicted universal demise. Lord knows there are many more talented wits who have and will continue to do so. Besides, they get paid to be funny. Nor am I here to make fun of those sorry souls who believed in Camping’s image of the future. They are troubled, perhaps desperate people.

Nary an organized religion has eluded the pull of a return to a time when belief trumped current conditions, when reverence for god and his respective messengers was more appealing than the drudgery of everyday life or, worse, intense hardship and oppression.

The Lubavitcher sect of Jews had a schism over the disputed claim that Rabbi Menachem Schneerson was the messiah. He’ll be dead 17 years on June 12, with no outward sign that the world to come has arrived. In the mid-1600s, many Jews abandoned their homes to follow Shabtai Tzvi, a self-proclaimed messiah. He ultimately converted to Islam.

Jihadists clamor for a resurrection of the caliphate blessed by Mohammed. Camping is just the latest Christian to bedevil the faithful. At least those who believed in him didn’t wind up dead, like the 82 unlucky Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, who followed David Koresh, or the 909 who drank Jim Jones’s Kool-aid in Guyana in 1978. But many who trusted Camping did leave their jobs, sell their possessions and confound their friends and relatives.

I don’t think you have to be totally content with your life, but if you reach the stage where your only alternative is to believe the end of the world is nigh and you will be among those who achieve eternal salvation, it’s time to check into the clinic and stay there, perhaps until all the earthquakes, plagues, wars, famines and general torments end.


Cut It Off, Not Out: Sufficient San Francisco voters have signed a petition to place on the November ballot a vote to ban circumcision for male children under 18. No exception for religious practices of Jews or Muslims. Violators would be charged with a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $1,000 or up to one year in jail.

All it took was 7,700 signatures to get the initiative on the ballot (7,168 were needed). Supporters of the ban (now also being considered in Santa Monica) claim circumcisions mutilate the penis and inflict pain and lifelong suffering. They deny any medical benefits from circumcision, such as reduced transmission of AIDS by heterosexual men.

This latest attack on religious practice can be compared to the challenge some states have posed to the ritual slaughter of animals according to kosher and halal guidelines. It’s argued animals suffer more when ritualistically slaughtered.

However well-intentioned proponents of these restrictions are, their efforts should be dismissed as incorrect, impolitic and ignorant. And unconstitutional, as they infringe on religious observance. Let’s hope San Francisco voters, and any others who face such a choice, leave religious practice intact, allowing animals to be killed according to humane religious custom and permitting parents to cut at will the foreskin of their male progeny.