The government is within its rights to deport both men.
But can’t we do so with a little compassion?
Our country, which is supposed to be a beacon of justice and decency, showed that in these cases, it was neither. Instead, its cruelty and heartlessness were on full display.
President Donald Trump vowed to deport criminals here illegally, a policy that has support across a large portion of the electorate. Instead, he and the America First movement have made all immigrants the enemy.
Sadly, America has a long and checkered history of how it treats immigrants.
Immigrant laborers recruited to come to the U.S. often wouldn’t get paid since companies would use their wages to cover the cost of the trip abroad. The Immigration Act of 1864 allowed this indentured servitude before Congress repealed the law four years later.
The Chinese were welcome until they weren’t. Chinese immigrants started arriving during the Gold Rush and later played a critical role in building the Transcontinental Railroad. The Burlingame Treaty of 1868 eased restrictions on Chinese immigrants since the railroad companies needed a steady stream of labor. But by 1882, lawmakers banned the immigration of those workers to the United States. People who remained in the country were forced to carry a certificate of residence or face deportation.
There’s so much more. Trump gets a lot of attention for barring immigrants from certain countries, but he’s not the first president (nor will he be the last) to do so. In 1917, Congress barred immigrants from large swaths of the Middle East and Southeast Asia and then imposed immigration caps four years later.
Between 1943 and 1964, the American government worked with Mexico to recruit farm and other workers. Now we’re hellbent on kicking them out, just like we did with the Chinese almost 100 years earlier.
Our immigration history isn’t all bad. In the 1980s and 1990s, the country took on a more humanitarian posture. The Mariel Boatlift in 1980 resulted in the Cuban Haitian Refugee Act. Ronald Reagan said in 1984, “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though some time back they may have entered illegally.”
Congress passed various acts in 1986, 1990, and 1997 that welcomed immigrants under certain circumstances.
As recently as 2013, one powerful Republican, speaking about a path to legal status, told the Wall Street Journal that immigrants, “would have to come forward. They would have to undergo a background check…They would be fingerprinted…They would have to pay a fine, pay back taxes, maybe even do community service. They would have to prove they’ve been here for an extended period of time. They understand some English and are assimilated. Then most of them would get legal status and be allowed to stay in this country…They’d get behind everybody who came before them in line for citizenship.”
There wasn’t any mention of picking up immigrant fathers, deporting them, and separating them from their families.
That powerful Republican? Marco Rubio, now the Secretary of State. He’s now an immigration hardliner, because that’s what you have to be to work for Trump, whom Rubio famously called a “con artist” unfit for the Presidency. Rubio shows how we’ve reverted back, for now, to our intolerance.
That insolence isn’t just bad for the immigrants we mistreat. It’s bad for an America that has, for now, lost its standing in the world as a nation of virtue and character.
We’ll get it back, just not anytime soon, and not in time to help those who saw their chance at the American dream hijacked by an immigration policy that has no room for the slightest compassion.
Ray Marcano’s column appears on these pages each Sunday.
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