IMMIGRATION
One of the problems facing Joe Biden is what to do about the people swarming over our southern border. The Republicans have a solution, build a wall, keep them out, force them to go home. In a nation in which almost everyone who is here, except for native AMericans and those dragged here as slaves, almost everyone came here in order to have a better life, to escape religious persecution or poverty or war or famine or simply to make better life for themselves. That is the American way. That is the problem that Joe Biden has, because he feels empathy for immigrants. That makes Joe Biden’s problem much greater than the southern Republican governors’ problem, because their solution is simple and heartless.
This is the same solution that kept German Jews out of the United States before the Second World War when they could still escape Germany. We were afraid of them and thought they would be German spies. That is what caused Anne Frank, whose family applied to come to America, to die in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp five miles from where my wife Kathe lived, instead of dying in Brooklyn at 90. Kathe was a German citizen and immigrant until the day she died.
That is the problem that Joe Biden has, but it is really my problem as well.
The reason it is my problem is because it is quite clear that what the people trying to cross the southern border, from Central America but actually from all over the world including now many Russians whose lives have been made unsafe by persecution or poverty, are simply trying to live the kind of life that I live. And now global warming is driving even more people out of their homes and their homelands. These people are are doing what most AMericans would do if they were caught in the same circumstances, try to take their family to a place where there is freedom and the chance to live decently without fear. They are people just like you and me who are doing the same thing we would be doing if we were them. They are us.
That is the problem. And the problem is because we live in a land of freedom and plenty by accident of our birth, because we got here first, and they don’t. We don’t deserve this, or if we do, then they deserve it just as much as we do.
That is problem. The problem is a form of apartheid in which we want the poor or disenfranchised to stay in their lagers and not disturb the rest of us. Drowning as they try to cross from Haiti to Florida or drowning in the Rio Grande or dying in the desert because they are desperate to have what we have, creates an uncomfortable feeling of guilt in us. The fear of people who want what we have dehumanizes them and of course equally dehumanizes us.
So that is Joe Biden’s problem and my problem. And the irony is that the ones who do make it in and find jobs contribute so much to our economy. We badly need farm workers and badly néed laborers of all types. With an aging population we need to balance old age with youth to be able to afford Medicare and Social Security. If any country should be welcoming to immigrants it should be a nation of immigrants.
And yet we can’t do it. Our immigration systems is broken. We don’t even seem able to assimilate the Dreamers who have lived all their lives in the United States and gone to college and are doing productive work. It is not just Joe Biden who is stuck. We are all stuck. And there is no way out except to face who we really are by changing course and welcoming our fellow humans.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 