If the US was Africa or Europe, what's happening at our border with Mexico would be labeled a humanitarian crisis, not an immigration issue. In fact, NGOs would be en route. Sure, what's happening in Central America is not the kind of sectarian violence that is typically the cause of this kind of exodus, but it is, as the AP reporters Alberto Arce and Michael Weissenstein distinguished it, "criminal gang" violence.For those Americans still struggling to grapple with this concept, think of it as the "War on Drugs" coming home--not via more needles in the arms of our kids or overdoses in clubs but via lives destined to carry out the drug trade if they don't escape.
I get it, humans take a while to absorb new information. We want to keep pressing square peg information into our existing round holes: People crossing our border with Mexico can mean only one thing: illegal immigrants. That understanding of this situation is, at best, misguided, at worst, criminal.
Are we, the American people, really so frightened of being hoodwinked by these children--potentially masquerading as victims--that we would dare to send them all back to the violence most of them are fleeing? Can we not stretch our imaginations just a bit to realize that this situation cannot be categorized as an illegal immigration problem?
Another problem with America's mentality is that we like to think we are impervious. Oceans to the west and east. Neighborly countries to the north and south. We don't get refugees en masse.
Of course, speaking of our neighbor to the south, we are so used to thinking of Mexico as an immigration problem that we are failing to interpret what is happening down there now through the proper lens. For those who fear immigrants, or at least illegal immigrants, the image of all of those "illegals" at the border is a frightening prospect. Will we have to feed them, clothe them? Will they be eating up our tax dollars? Who is paying for their social security? How many more will come if we don't send those kids right back home?
Has anyone considered that, seriously, the countries from which these kids are fleeing are at war, and, as happens in war, refugees are pouring out of their countries and into safer spaces?
In everyone's effort to make Americans sound less selfish than we are, I keep hearing, the American people are compassionate. As if America's compassion is better than any other place's compassion or as if, unlike other places, America is compassionate.
I think the US is different from other places, not because we are compassionate, but because we are not accustomed to war in our backyard, and, because we like to think of war as something that happens elsewhere, when it does come knocking, our first response is to close the door.