9/15/21

By Josh Rubin

It is now past time for us to realize that there is little substantial difference between the anti-immigrant policies of the brutal regime of our last president and those of the current regime. This comes about because the goal is largely the same: to discourage people from coming. And although some of the rhetoric takes on a tone that sounds like regret and compassion, the tools that the United States falls back on are largely the same. We rely on layered disincentives.

To put that in plainer language, we do things that might convince desperate people that there is little hope of improving their chances for a decent life by trying to get themselves into the gated community that we live in. Our country demonstrates, with expulsions, imprisonment, deportations, and collaborations with the brutality of neighbor countries that suffering lies along the way of a journey that begins with hope. We extinguish any light left at the end of the tunnel.

It strikes me that those of us who wished for a change from the four years we went through have been much too willing to think that an adjustment to the rhetoric of compassion would temper the evil of hoarding our privilege, by merely exciting pity. Pity is not enough to end the injustice that we tolerate, and that benefits so many of us personally. It will not change the perpetual insecurity that members of our own society feel in a system that makes the struggle of competition a virtue, and regards poverty as something handed out, with purpose, to those who deserve nothing better.

Humans are not easily convinced of the humanity of strangers, but that is the conviction we will need to take down the wall we have built to keep others away. And until then, we witnesses will need to nourish ourselves, not from our stashes of gold, but from the hope that such a change might be possible. That we all may learn from the world’s impending disasters that humanity shares a fate, and so must learn to share other things as well.