Bound by Fear and Misery: New World Refugees and Old World Refugees

As Trump enjoyed his Father’s Day today, it is unlikely that he would give even a passing thought to the dilemma faced by refugee fathers and their children around the world.

The United States Department of Homeland Security tacitly permits illegal Latin American immigrants who avoid boats and planes on their way to the southern American border to make the trip north by land vehicles and/or on foot to the Rio Grande, southern Texas, and California. At which point DHS either turns them away altogether or, if they have the effrontery to claim asylum, detains all participants—separating many parents from their children in the process.

In this way at least 2,000 young Hispanic immigrant children have been summarily removed from their parents (who face delayed court proceedings) and housed apart from them in the past two months, many in an old repurposed Walmart building, some in a brand-new tent city. This has created a humanitarian crisis for children and parents, one of whom committed suicide in his anguish.

Alarms have been raised in numerous circles and the crisis is becoming worse every day.

Illegals who manage to cross the border unnoticed by federal or local officials often die in the desert from the dangerously hot weather conditions within huge areas managed by a finite number of U.S. Border Patrol checkpoints in the sparsely populated terrain.

The mandatory separation of families has been deemed by Donald Trump to be application of a “law” enacted during the Obama presidency (an outright lie). Trump’s proposal to avoid separating parents and children (which he claims to abhor) is to provide lukewarm enthusiasm for a GOP immigration bill that has been lackadaisically moving through the House for weeks (months?) and may never actually get to the floor for a vote.

That unlikely bill would provide, in addition to (1) a modification of the mandatory family separation policy—enforced by fiat of the Trump administration with Biblical underpinnings enunciated by Attorney General Jefferson Sessions without the slightest evidence of shame, (2) the resolution of the DACA crisis created entirely by Donald Trump and (3) a $25 billion Congressional appropriation to build Donald Trump’s much ballyhooed border wall.

Never a slacker when it comes to building his Wall of All Walls, Trump has made sure that his cult members in the House are including financing in their current draft bill for the damnable thing. (Vegas bookmakers still deem construction of more than a fraction of the wall to be a long shot.)

Hence, according to Trump, families can—“must”—be legally torn apart at the border, and the long-suffering DACA adults, brought to the U.S. as young children, can be left to continue living their American lives in fear and limbo so long as Trump can build in the style to which he has become accustomed: grandiose, exclusive, expensive, and one-of-a-kind construction that would shout his name to the world for decades to come (just imagine the future graffiti).

Marble or gold-plated, anyone?

Emblazoned with the Trump brand and phony family coat of arms/heraldic shield?

On the other side of the world, in the past four years smugglers from Libya have tried to ferry more than 600,000 North African migrants across the Mediterranean to Italy, claiming that the Geneva Convention requires the safe acceptance of the migrants by Italy.

Italy begs to differ, and “[v]essels chartered by an assortment of European NGOs have plied the waters off Libya . . . rescuing migrants [from leaking or sinking ships] . . . and transporting them to Sicily.”

Disputes over who is willing to accept these migrants rage across Europe, and in the process, traffickers continue to tow “rubber boats full of migrants” near Libya’s territorial waters “before setting them adrift.” Many migrants are subsequently pitched into the sea and drown.

Small dead children have washed up on nearby shores to international condemnation.

Hence, Trump is learning at least some of his migrant exclusion lessons from the often barbaric treatment of North Africa’s teeming refugee masses.

Hitler and Mussolini formed an historic evil partnership to decimate European Jewry and other minorities more than 70 years ago. Trump appears to be emulating the worst that 21st century Europe and Asia have to offer, including public adulation of deadly autocrats in Russia, Turkey, The Philippines, China, and North Korea.

The world judges the humanity of a country by its treatment of the most needy, generally its refugees and asylees.

Mr. Trump, the world is watching and it has a long memory.