2/23/21

By Josh Rubin

So we wake up this morning to what feels like floodwaters rising.

The way we address the migration of people from other places, places we have sunk into poverty and criminality with our greed and indifference, falls into old familiar patterns, across administrations. So, once again, we turn a humanitarian question into one of security, this time pretending that disease is preventing us from exercising our humanity.

Does this sound familiar? Kids are stacking up in Border Patrol facilities, so we are reopening influx shelters for them. Carrizo Springs got its first bodies last night. Trail House is staffing up. Homestead’s mold encrusted walls are getting scrubbed with bleach in anticipation of their restored revenue stream.

On the border, the promised deliverance of the people who spent years in Mexico obeying a draconian quarantine called Remain in Mexico now has been delayed so that we can figure out which country needs to impose the next quarantine on them, this time pretending that the U.S., the most infected nation on the planet, is in danger from “diseased” refugees.

What else can we do, cries the new regime, tears welling in their eyes?

There’s an answer, if you were only ready to hear it. These people are trying, struggling, working to solve the problems we make for them. Their solution? Migrate. Join their families in a country that can afford them, that in fact needs them.

They travel with a phone number somewhere on them, on paper, sometimes written on an arm. They know the address. They are coming home, because their old home is the mouth of a shark.

Let them in.