Immigration ‘Panic’

One of the benefits of occasional travel abroad is gaining an outside perspective on one’s own country. We got a strong dose of that recently, when an editorial in the international Herald Tribune, an English language newspaper which circulates widely throughout Europe, took on the topic of the United States’ new hard line on immigration.

The sentiments in the editorial resonated with the experiences by a group of seven Randolph residents, who in May traveled to the Mexican border area with a program called "Borderlinks," which focuses popular consciousness the everyday brutality and human toll exacted by our current solution to the complex problem of immigration.

Below are excerpts from the Herald Tribune’s impassioned editorial. They bear careful consideration.

"Someday, the United States will recognize the true cost of its war on illegal immigration …

"A nation of immigrants is holding another nation of immigrants in bondage, exploiting its labor while ignoring its suffering, condemning its lawlessness while sealing off a path to living lawfully. The evidence is all around that something pragmatic and welcoming at the American core has been eclipsed.

"An escalating campaign of raids in homes and workplaces has spread indiscriminate terror among millions of people who pose no threat …

"This is not about forcing people to go home and come back the right way. Ellis Island is closed. Legal paths are clogged or do not exist.

"Some backlogs are so long that they are measured in decades. A bill to fix the system died a year ago this month. The current strategy, embraced by Republicans and some Democrats, is to force millions into fear and poverty….

"The restrictionist message refuses to recognize tht illegality is not an identity; it is a status that can be mended by making reparations and resuming a lawful life. Unless the nation contains its enforcement compulsion, illegal immigrants will remain forever "Them" and never "Us."

"Every time America has singled out a group o f newly arrived immigrants for unjust punishment, the sham has echoed through history. Think of the Chinese and Irish, Catholics and Americans of Japanese ancestry. Children someday will study the Great Immigration Panic of this century, which hurt countless lives and mocked the nation’s most deeply held values."