4/30/23

By Josh Rubin

Well, that long anticipated shoe is about to drop. Title 42, which attached itself fraudulently to the COVID pandemic, was a tactic too seductive for the Biden administration to resist, but even the most convenient of crimes against humanity must come to an end, it seems. It had its disadvantages.

The main one was that it allowed too many of the world’s poor to arrive at our border, where they can be seen too readily. It’s bad optics to have people suffering on the very doorstep of the wealthiest nation, hungry, unhoused, and prey to criminals, both in and out of government. So, the brain trust needed to come up with a strategy that became more punishing the closer a pilgrim got to the gates of our shining city. They decided to stigmatize those who would approach a port of entry without first saying “may I?” via a phone app for scheduling appointments, an app that offers only a few slots per thousands of supplicants.

How does it stigmatize? By labeling those who arrive without appointment as presumed unqualified for asylum, trampling their right of refuge. The new regulations pretty much have scrubbed asylum from our policies. That’s why we call it a ban. And there’s more.

To reduce the possibility that we might the come face to face with the human consequences of predatory capitalist greed, we have twisted the arms of countries along the route to the north to “provide shelter” much further away, to keep people from ever arriving. That shelter will at its best tie people up in false bureaucratic promises, and at its worst? Well, I imagine confinement. We will watch, from this new distance or as close as we can get, to see where on the spectrum of injustice this grift falls.

This much should be clear to us by now. Any policy that aims at keeping people away, not by improving their lot at home but by making it ever harder to cross to safety—in other words by making the journey hurt so much that people will give up migrating—will look something like the brutal crimes of our immigration policy, no matter what “Title” it falls under, 42 or 8.

The dam that separate haves from have-nots must someday give way for justice to flow like a river.