Refugees- Our responsibility

  

Refugees. Houston, Texas.  Dec.24, 2023. 

 

As residents of a state whose “ruler” on this Christmas Eve is closer in spirit to King Herod than Jesus’ Good Samaritan, it’s disconcerting to reflect on how the Christmas story is about refugees in distress. It’s a story of two people and their soon-to-be infant child forced to leave their homeland for fear the child will be murdered. (“Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt ...”) 

During the week before Christmas, Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill that will make it a violation of state law for people to cross the border into Texas between ports of entry. It’s already a federal offense to cross that way. Beginning March 1, local law enforcement will be empowered to arrest, and judges to order removed, anyone determined by a standard of “probable cause” to have entered Texas unlawfully. If the law is allowed to stand, racial profiling and harassment throughout Texas are sure to follow. Already, Hispanic Texans are preparing for the inevitable — having documents at the ready in their vehicles to show a Department of Public Safety trooper who may stop them, counseling their driving-age children about what to say and what not to say if they are stopped, making sure they have emergency phone numbers to call. 

Contributing to our growing reputation as arguably the most heartless state in America, Abbott’s new law is the latest iteration of his border-security crusade. Instead of working with the federal government and other border states to solve a vexing problem, he’s adopted a Lone Ranger approach that includes using people as pawns for political gain by busing — and now flying — them to distant cities, lining the Rio Grande with razor wire and dangerous floating buoys and constructing a made-in-Texas border wall. He’s also wasted billions of dollars of our money on an occupying army of National Guard and DPS personnel who have been dispatched to border counties. None of these ill-conceived measures have stemmed the flow of vulnerable people seeking to enter this country through 

 

Even more disturbing on this Christmas Eve is to ponder the possibility — the very real possibility — that the most corrupt, ill-equipped and dangerous president in our nation’s history, a man whose brutish border inclinations our governor has endorsed, will once again occupy the White House. This is the man whose “zero tolerance” immigration policy in 2017-18 resulted in several thousand children being wrenched from their parents’ arms when the parents, many of them asylum seekers, were detained at the border for possible illegal entry. Hundreds of children, to this day, have not been reunited with their families. At least Texas DPS has ordered troopers to avoid separating families.

Donald Trump has implied he would seek to implement the same cruel tactic if elected president again. He also wants to dispatch law enforcement to round up the millions of undocumented immigrants already in this country and impound them in vast detention camps, probably in Texas, while they await deportation.

This is the man whose sneering, anti-immigrant deprecations parrot none other than Adolf Hitler. “They’re poisoning the blood of our country, that’s what they’ve done ...,” he told cheering supporters at a rally in Durham, N.H., last week. “They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world, they’re pouring into our country, nobody’s even looking at them. They just come in. The crime is going to be tremendous.” 

It’s hard to understand how some of Trump’s most ardent supporters profess to be among the most vocal followers of the Prince of Peace.

“I don’t know how you can take someone like that and say that they’re fit to be president of the United States,” former New Jersey governor and Trump challenger Chris Christie told CBS’ “Face the Nation” last week. Neither do we. 

 

Like Joseph and Mary and their child, more than 100 million people around the world are estimated to have been displaced this year, many of them on the move this very night. Refugees and migrants, they are fleeing persecution, grinding poverty, war and unspeakable violence. With children in tow, they are crossing dangerous Central American jungles, riding atop swaying trains across Mexico, trudging across deserts. They are clinging to crowded, leaky rafts on the Mediterranean, hoping to reach safety in Europe. They are fleeing starvation and disease in North Africa and the Middle East. Within a few miles of Bethlehem, Jesus’s birthplace, they are frantically pushing up against the war-ravaged border separating Gaza from Egypt. Migrant distress is a global phenomenon.

It is not America’s alone to face but we would like to believe, still, even in this polarized state, that America is one of the nations most equipped, most obligated and most resolved to meet the challenge.  

Trump, by the way, has said he’s never read “Mein Kampf,” the Hitler manifesto, and that’s probably true, but someone among his past and present advisers surely has. Our guess is one or both of “the Steves” — anti-immigrant ideologue Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon, former presidential adviser and cheerleader of insurrectionists. Miller, architect of Trump’s family-separation scheme, is a potential attorney general in a Trump Cabinet; Bannon is under indictment at the moment, accused of cheating donors who gave money in support of Trump’s proposed border wall. If convicted, he’ll expect a presidential pardon.

Neither Trump nor Abbott knows or cares, it seems, that immigration policy and border integrity are devilishly complex issues. They involve numerous moving parts, some overlapping, some contradictory. To get beyond the crude “solutions” that ideologues and political opportunists trumpet requires negotiation among interested parties who will not agree on every issue. It requires, also, an acknowledgement, a basic understanding, that we are dealing, not just with policy, but with people, often fleeing brutality, turmoil and the agony of uncertainty. Finding the appropriate balance is a dilemma challenging nations around the world, including, most recently, the European Union, where anti-immigrant politicians are in the ascendancy.

In his new book, “Ours Was the Shining Future,” New York Times columnist David Leonhardt, offers a more positive prototype, a major American city where a combination of affordable housing and plentiful jobs have attracted immigrants in droves without disrupting existing ties of community. Leonhardt points out that in 1960, the city was almost entirely white or Black; in the six decades since, immigrants, undocumented and otherwise, have helped to quadruple the population. With a population today that’s 39% Latino, 33% Anglo, 17% Black and 8% Asian, the city has become, in Leonhardt’s words, “a mosaic of post-1965 America — and a social mobility machine.” 

 

Leonhardt’s shining immigrant city on a hill is, of course, Houston, a city whose relative openness has been of mutual benefit — to its newcomers and to the community as a whole. 

At the same time, Leonhardt recalls the cautionary observation of a legendary Houstonian. Appointed in 1995 to a federal commission on immigration by President Bill Clinton, the late Barbara Jordan eventually concluded, in Leonhardt’s words, “that being strongly pro-immigrant and strongly pro-immigration were not the same thing. At times, those principles could be in conflict.” 

She considered herself resolutely pro-immigrant, both as a matter of principle and of personal experience, but she also realized that successful immigration policy acknowledges the existence of — again in Leonhardt’s words — “a community, with traditions and bonds that fostered trust among citizens and investments in their shared future.” Jordan maintained that it’s a nation’s right to decide, fairly and humanely, whom to admit and whom not to admit. Chaos at the border and in a flawed immigration system isn’t any more productive than Trump’s cruelty.

Houston, of course, can’t solve the nation’s border and immigration challenges, but this city does represent that combination of openness and good sense that Washington could emulate. At a time when crowds clamoring to cross the border threaten to overwhelm border security and the immigration system — not to mention Joe Biden’s prospects for a second term — the White House seems to be seeking to balance security and humanity. As the president negotiates with Congress on a $110 billion request that combines additional funding for border security, wartime support for Ukraine and Israel, as well as funding for Taiwan, it’s unlikely that either side will be totally pleased. That’s democracy.

We can only hope Congress and the White House can reach some kind of reasonable agreement when lawmakers return to Washington after the holidays. Meanwhile, this winter night, the holiest of the year for so many Americans, thousands likely wait under the international bridges at Eagle Pass and Del Rio. Their fate is in the hands of our elected officials. We hope those officials recall the story, now more than two millennia old, of a young family that became a refugee family, fleeing to Egypt to escape a murderous ruler. 

 

 

Two thousand years ago, a young family became refugees (Editorial)
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/refugees-christmas-eve-abbott-texas-border-18567897.php?utm_source=marketing&utm_medium=copy-url-link&utm_campaign=article-