Here in early 2017, there is a tremendous crisis of immigration in progress. The travel ban held refugees, residents and visitors alike at the border. Even with the ban overturned by the court, there is still injustice at the border – people turned away for nothing, for no other reason than their religion or their politics. There is constant talk of extreme vetting of refugees. And yet – there is already extreme vetting. It takes years and constant paperwork and interviews and only the squeaky cleanest mothers and children mostly make it through that process.
There is no metric that these folks have not already been measured by. At least no reasonable metric. But we have come to an age of no reason. And refugees that were bound for our shores are now in limbo.
Meanwhile, our kinder saner neighbors and friends, take in refugees by the boatload. Greece and Italy take the lion’s share. Canada picks up our slack. But here we are – some of us with our arms open –but there are guards at the border who would handcuff a 5 year old child to a pipe and deny a baby food for 18 hours.
Immigrants and refugees have been proven to work harder than most natural born citizens. Their contributions are measurably immense to a nation’s progress. To hold them away diminishes us – not just in making us seem unkind – but in failing to benefit of the refugees collective wisdom.
Please. Let them come in.
*
This is still true two years later. I want to weep for five thousand years.
The Hamlet Project 