9/6/21

By Josh Rubin

For decades now, the policy of the United States has been to appear to discourage migration to our country across the southern border with Mexico. There has been some variation. When anti-immigrant sentiment is at an ebb, and voracious and exploitative businesses hold sway, more migrants are allowed across, under the radar, to satisfy demand. Other times, particularly when fear of foreigners is fanned to flames, both major parties have identified themselves with efforts to resist the flow of humanity, and preserve our stranglehold on prosperity in our hemisphere.

The consequence is that, from a very parochial and nationalistic perspective, migration is seen as problem that needs to be subdued, rather than as the movement of people toward a solution to the critical imbalance in the distribution of wealth in the world, from an all-of-humanity perspective. And from that latter perspective, already having reached crisis proportion before the global plague of Covid, and before the breakout of symptoms of climate change became evident, we have now reached a kind of a super crisis.

And still, the reaction, under Republicans and Democrats alike, is nearly identical in its ultimate goal: To preserve the wealth seized from its conquest of land during the European invasion of the New World, and built with the forced labor of imported slaves, by using control of the border as a kind of a tap that can be regulated for our convenience. The humanitarian consequences are, for so-called liberals, regrettable, and for the right, irrelevant.

The difference lies in the rhetoric alone. One can hear in the current phase echoes of the centuries of rationalization and regret about the poor of the earth: as in, there will always be such. And there are now discussions, not about how to cure poverty, but rather, where to put the poor. This goes on not just outside our borders, where the poor build up like a storm surge on the shoreline, but within our borders in pockets of low-lying areas in our cities. They can be seen in camps, and on the lines that form when food is handed out. Have you seen them?

And so it is now. The technocrats struggle with the question, not of how to cure injustice, but how to hide its consequences. And we, witnesses, must continue to see.