The Road We're On

I am of Jewish descent. While I was fortunate that none of my immediate family were directly affected by the Holocaust, I grew up keenly aware of what had happened. I remember meeting a friend’s grandparents, who were concentration camp survivors and still bore camp tattoos on their arms. Seeing those crudely inked numbers made me feel so grateful that I had been born in America, where nothing like that could ever happen.

My husband is Latino. Up until recently, I never gave this much thought. We were both born in this country and raised, speaking only English, in the San Fernando Valley (California). While we had very different childhoods, this had more to do with family dynamics and socio-economic status, rather than ethnicity. He is so fair-skinned and “American” in demeanor that when my parents met him, they just assumed he was a nice Jewish boy (like me) until at some point they heard his last name.

Now, for the first time, as we travel together and just navigate the world, I am grateful that he is not visibly Latino. I never thought that in America people would have to worry that they might be targeted, by their government, because of their ethnicity. But here we are. People are now being detained based on looking Latino. There are countless cases now cropping up in the news of citizens and legal residents being questioned or detained. I live in the small city of Eugene, Oregon (which is very far from the Mexican border) and I just learned of ICE agents questioning a man — in front of an elementary school — when he was dropping his son off. The man was driving a landscaping truck, which had his name (Latino) stenciled on the side as part of the name of his business.

I don’t know if this man is in the U.S. legally or not. Frankly, I don’t care. No one in a free country should be detained or questioned without probable cause. Having a Latino last name, or looking Latino, is not probable cause. In a free country, police (or ICE agents) do not have the right to randomly stop people and demand that they “show their papers.” That is standard practice in dictatorships. It should not be in a free country.

Of course, no one is saying not to prosecute criminals. If someone is a gangbanger, or is in any way violating another human being’s rights, he should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But this should be true regardless of immigration status. And that prosecution must be done according to the guidelines set out in the Constitution.

MAGA seems to have decided that “illegal” is now a noun — as if having violated America’s byzantine immigration laws should be a person’s defining characteristic. But our country has become so statist over the past decades that you’d be hard pressed to find an adult who has never broken a law. I would venture to say that anyone who has ever driven a car has at some point exceeded the speed limit or rolled through a stop sign. Jaywalking? Hiring an “undocumented” worker (a gardener, a handyman, a cleaning person)? Paying a babysitter under the table? If you can find me a single American who has never done any of these things, I would be shocked. Should all of us now be known as “illegals?” Or does it only matter when it’s immigration law that we’re talking about?

If a person’s only “crime” is coming to the U.S. without proper paperwork, I have a very different outlook from MAGA. I admire people who come here seeking a better life. Where MAGA denigrates and dehumanizes people who cross rivers and deserts to get to this country, I see kindred spirits. If I’d had the misfortune to be born someplace without economic opportunities, or someplace where I would be persecuted for my sexuality, I hope I would have the courage to risk everything to find a place where I could thrive and prosper. These are the kind of people who built this country. These are the kind of people whom any free country should welcome.

I wish I could ask some of these MAGA folks: If you’d been born in some hellhole country — say El Salvador — would you not want to come to America? And if you were a parent, would you not want a better life for your child? If it were virtually impossible to come to the US via legal means, would you really just shrug and stay where you were born? If so, what kind of person would that make you? What kind of parent? Not one I’m interested in knowing.

Some MAGA still claim that they just want immigrants to do things the proper way, the legal way. But Trump’s policies — and MAGA’s unqualified support for those policies — shows this is a false flag. There has not been any attempt to improve our broken immigration system to make it easier for hard-working people to come to this country. On the contrary, the Trump administration is sending letters urging “self-deportation” to people who did follow the rules and came here legally. What’s more, many of the people shipped off to El Salvador or being detained here in the US, were in the process of seeking asylum. This is a process that was set up by our government. You may not like it (or the way that Biden was enforcing it) but it was the law of the land. Most of these asylum seekers were doing things “the right way.” And now Trump wants to punish them for following our process because he doesn’t approve of it. What were they supposed to do? MAGA seems to think that the proper thing for these people to do is go back where they came from to suffer and die. I can’t think of a more anti-human, anti-life position.

I have never understood the animus against immigrants. The vast majority of people in this country are descended from immigrants. What’s more, all the evidence indicates that immigrants are a net win for the economy. A recently leaked federal study found that refugees to America brought in $63 billion more in government revenues than they cost in the last 10 years. Study after study also show that they commit crimes at a lesser rate than native-born residents. While it might be rational to have concerns about a particular immigrant population, I don’t think there is ever a rational reason to be anti-immigrant in general. In a free country, of course, people are entitled to be irrational. The problem is when these irrational fears work their way into the political sphere and erode the foundations of freedom. That is what is happening now. Far too many Americans seem to have decided that due process is too cumbersome and costly to worry about for “illegals.” Without due process, though, how do you even determine whether someone is in the country legally or not? Blank out.

Many years ago, I read Leonard Peikoff’s The Ominous Parallels (he later rewrote and rereleased it under the title The Cause of Hitler’s Germany). In it, he explores the similarities in the ideas that brought Nazism to Germany, and the ideas that were permeating American culture. I thought the book was very well-reasoned — and frightening — but I also thought that we had plenty of time to correct course and avoid the same catastrophic results that nearly destroyed Germany. I am no longer so confident.