11/15/21

By Josh Rubin

The problem is not migration. It is not migrants.

The problem: the conditions that drive people from their homes, and the borders that stop them.

The insistence that humanity must tolerate the unequal distribution of the wherewithal to live—that production relies on avarice by an accumulating class and perforce relies on the undervaluing and undercompensation of another class—guarantees us that, just as wealth is unevenly shared, so will hardship be. And so we make borders, and we fortify them, to make sure that we can maintain inequality. We live in fear that what we have will be taken away. We are convinced, many of us unconsciously, that we do not deserve what we have, and no matter how hard we try to shield our eyes from the sight of the needy, we catch an occasional glimpse. For many of us our response is to deny their humanity.

But their quest, the quest for survival in a world that punishes them with neocolonial exploitation and an atmosphere akilter from what rapacious industry spews into it, has a fierce poetry to it. Look at the borders: the European Union wrings its hands over the geopolitical implications and manipulations of the refugees, but cannot get around the ultimate moral prerogative of hungry and cold families at the fence. And in our hemisphere, sterile musings about the cross-border chess game at the levels of governments cannot obscure the biblical crossing of the desert that families with their lives on their backs make to stand finally at our border.

They come to beg, the hateful among us insist. But they come only asking for what is theirs: the right to live. We have no moral standing to block their way.