5/27/21

By Josh Rubin

When people migrate, and they always have, it is because things are not going well where they live. And in a world as fraught with inequality and climate change as ours seems to be, migration will be happening at an accelerated pace. If we could make choices as a species, the choices would be simple. We would address the causes of inequality and climate change, while making space for those dislocated. We would, in a word, cooperate.

Desperation and fear, and greed, keep this from happening. What happens instead is we are put into competition for resources that seem scarce, and we do what we can to keep our place at the trough, shouldering others out. And we keep our heads down, never looking to a horizon which carries out fate. We live our lives at war.

What I describe sets the scene for our policy toward immigration. No matter whether we profess sympathy for those who take to the road, or anger and cruelty, we think that the solution to the discomfort of watching the needy come towards us is to find a way to stop them. And it seems we will use any means.

We will lie about pandemic danger and turn people away, for “humanitarian reasons.” We will hold children in tents on military bases to protect them from the families who love them. And we will train and coax neighboring countries to help us keep them far enough away that we don’t see the misery we cause.

And, as Title 42 will soon recede into the ignominy of our shameful history of xenophobia, we are engaged in buttressing the wall we are building together with Mexico. They are doing our expulsions now, and likely they will do more, as we take down the wall that Trump stood up, and that Biden hides behind.

Biden’s wall will be all of Mexico. It will be all of the corrupt and cruel governments of Central America. It is a cloak of invisibility. And we, the human race, will pay dearly for it.