7/7/22

By Josh Rubin

The policy of our country—and other such fortunate countries in the world—is to gate us off from the rest of the world and turn away the destitute and persecuted and hungry. The gates go by different names: Remain in Mexico, Title 42, metering. Then there are the unnamed gates. They are special cruelties that are legitimized as disincentives, used to compete with the misery that refugees are fleeing. Then there is the wall, the Darién Gap, the sea. It goes on, this list, each place in the world where people resort to leaving their homes, if they have homes—better perhaps to say, leaving their homelands—to do what we as humans are compelled to do: survive.

There seem to be only a couple of ways to respond to the now millions upon millions of people in motion. The first, and the only one tried it seems, is all the sorts of things we are doing to gate ourselves off. There is a cost to this, for us, those within the gates, that some of us find hard to bear. Others manage differently, with elaborate beliefs, some unconscious, that excuse them for those things.

The other way would be to find ways to share the bounty of the earth fairly. To open the doors to a larder we know well how to fill again and again. That solution has never been tried. Instead, all our energy is turned toward holding back those at our gates, and finding ways to convince them that it will hurt them more to beseech us than the pain they flee.

So, call it by any name. Title 42, which pretends that this is about COVID, though that pretense wears thinner every day. Remain in Mexico. Go to fucking Rwanda and get processed. Drown in the sea. Fry in the desert. Suffocate in a truck. These are the methods we have chosen, or have chosen us.

I find I can’t live with it. But many can.