A CRUEL POLITICAL STUNT

 

While watching Ken Burns's recent documentary "The US and the Holocaust", I was struck by an excerpt from a  poem written by American poet Thomas Bailey Aldrich that went like this:  "Wide open and unguarded stand our gates, and through them presses a wild, motley throng.  In street and alley what strange tongues are these?  Accents of menace, alien to our air, voices that once the Tower of Babel knew.  Oh liberty, white Goddess, is it well to leave the gates unguarded?"  Take away the flowery language, and you basically have the same anti immigrant sentiment stated by so many Republicans today.  What's even more striking is that that excerpt came from a poem Aldrich published in 1892.  Of course, his point of view was nothing new; ten years earlier congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act to limit the number of Chinese people immigrating to the US during the gold rush.

Yes, the hatred and fear of immigrants, based on our shared human tribal instinct, has been in America almost from the beginning.  But that doesn't make the recent usage of Venezuelan refugees as pawns by Florida Ron DeSantis any less repulsive.  As everyone now knows, DeSantis recently took around 50 refugees from Texas and flew them to Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts to "send a message" about immigration to the mostly liberal people that live there.  It should be pointed out that these refugees (which included several children) were lied to about where they were going and that there was no warning given to the authorities of Martha's Vineyard about what was about to happen.  It's obvious that was just a cruel political stunt pulled by a Republican governor who wants to be president and knows that the road to the White House for his party lies in being as xenophobic as humanly possible.  It's also telling how the different media outlets reacted to it, with the right wing media hailing DeSantis's move as smart politics and the rest of the media pointing out that the essential premise of the stunt failed when the people of Martha's Vineyard welcomed the refugees.  There is a chance that Desantis could face some legal charges for what happened, given the level of deception involved, but as with all the charges facing former president Donald Trump, there's little chance of him ever paying a serious price, and it clearly is helping him in conservative circles.

Lost in all this is the fact that Venezuela, the country the refugees were from, is a Socialist dictatorship not unlike the one run by Fidel Castro in Cuba, and in Florida Cuban refugees are often warmly embraced by Republicans like DeSantis.  The depressing reality is that Venezuela is run by a corrupt dictator, Nicolás Maduro', who's reign has lead to a crackdown on human rights triggering economic sanctions from countries like America.   Those sanctions wind up hurting the average Venezuelan more than the leaders, which causes widespread poverty and crime, leading to people fleeing the country.  In other words, there's no easy answer here, although putting people on planes is no solution. 

Also ignored in this controversy is the fact that the US needs immigrants.  According to US Census Bureau, the nation's population growth in 2021 was 0.1%, the lowest in our nation's history.  Sure, part of that was due to the pandemic, but the trend was already heading downward before Covid hit. And the country needs young workers paying into our retirement system to keep it funded, and that means we need more workers coming into our country.  Workers like these refugees that Republican leaders dehumanize.  

I'll finish this post with another quote from that Ken Burns documentary: "What has happened to this country?  We have always been ready to receive the unfortunates from other countries, and though this may seem a  generous gesture on our part, we have profited a thousandfold from what they have brought us."-Elenor Roosevelt, 1939.