By way of background, shortly before he left office, on Dec. 23, 2008, George W. Bush signed into law the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. The purpose of this bipartisan measure, named after a 19th century British abolitionist, was to extend and increase efforts to prevent and prosecute human trafficking and protect the victims of trafficking. The legislation contained numerous provisions that regulate the treatment of children, unaccompanied by adults, who present themselves at the U.S. border by the Department of Homeland Security.
Under the law, the Customs and Border Patrol are required to turn undocumented children from Central America over to the Department of Health and Human Services within 72 hours. Because of the turmoil in Central America, the law mandates that HHS hold the refugees humanely until they can be released to a "suitable family member" in the United States. HHS is also required to ensure "to the greatest extent practicable" that these detained children "have counsel to represent them in legal proceedings " who could then explain to them how to apply for asylum or to find other ways to remain legally in the U.S.
The complexities and difficulties of enforcing this law need to be viewed in the light of the overall immigration program in the U.S. which all sides concede is broken beyond redemption. Not surprisingly, this country's unwillingness to control its borders through sensible immigration policies - that could include an expanded guest-worker program, preferences for highly skilled foreigners, a mandatory E-Verify system for all employers and national identification cards similar to those issued in almost all of Western European democracies - provides fertile ground for the worst kind of xenophobia and anti-immigrant hysteria.
Never one to miss on opportunity to pander to the basest instincts of those people who find her appealing, on July 14, 2014, GOP Congresswoman Michele Bachmann complained to Van Jones on CNN's Crossfire that "since April, we've had an invasion of 300-500 thousand foreign nationals." After Jones pressed her about her use of the word "invasion," Bachmann chose to obfuscate with a classic non sequitur: "My heart is broken for a female college student in Minnesota who was raped, murdered and mutilated by a foreign national who came into our country," Bachmann stated in an effort to somehow link the surge of unaccompanied refugee children to increased crimes. "We had a school bus full of kids in Minnesota - four children were killed on that school bus because an illegal alien driving a van went into that school bus."
To his credit, Van Jones challenged her. "There are lines that can't be crossed here. I'm sorry, congresswoman. Are you gonna scapegoat children for the crime of this despicable person?" Bachmann, ever the demagogue, remained unabashed, "Don't scapegoat the American people. Van, don't scapegoat the American people right now who are losing jobs."
A few weeks later, Rep. Bachmann - much like proverbial Senator John Yerkes Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate who announced, after examining the label on a bottle of Heinz Tomato Ketchup, that there were 57 card-carrying members of the Communist Party in the Department of Defense - conjured up an even more preposterous theory to explain the presence of so many unaccom-panied minors at the southern U.S. border. On July 30, 2014, she appeared on "WallBuilders Live," a far-right radio program, and now claimed that the reason President Obama hasn't solved the refugee crisis at the U.S. southern border is because he wants to use the child refugees for "medical research." "President Obama is trying to bring all of those foreign nationals, those illegal aliens to the country and he has said that he will put them in the foster care system," Bachmann insisted.
"[W]e can't imagine doing this, but if you have a hospital and they are going to get millions of dollars in government grants if they can conduct medical research on somebody, and a Ward of the state can't say 'no' - a little kid can't say 'no' if they're a ward of the state so here you could have this institution getting millions of dollars from our government to do medical experimentation and a kid can't even say 'no.' It's sick," Bachmann intoned.
Rep. Bachmann is not the only politician who appears to have become unhinged by the contretemps over refugees. On July 16, 2014, Leslie Larson, a columnist for the New York Daily News, described an incident that occurred in Arizona. Adam Kwasman, a state legislator and Tea Party candidate for Congress, joined a demonstration of anti-immigrant protestors the day before on the road to Oracle, Arizona.
The demonstrators were outraged of the prospect of migrant children being sent to a nearby shelter. Kwasman, reportedly disdainful of President Obama's efforts to address the border crisis, saw a yellow school bus approach and tweeted a picture with the caption, "This is not compassion. This is the abrogation of the rule of law."
Kwasman claimed that the children who were being bused to the shelter appeared to be sad and fearful. "I was actually able to see some of the children in the buses. The fear on their faces," he told a local reporter after the incident, according to the Arizona Republic. The reporter then questioned him about what children he was referring to. "I saw a school bus with plenty of children on it, so I'm assuming that was the bus." After the reporter pointed out the youngsters on the bus he saw were in fact local schoolchildren en route to a YMCA camp, Kwasman said, "They were sad too. I apologize, I didn't know. I was leaving when I saw them. So if that was a school bus - people are not happy down the line."
A more disturbing incident was chronicled by Kate Taylor and Jeffrey Singer of the New York Times ("In Queens, Immigrants Clash With Residents of New Homeless Shelter," July 25, 2014). They reported that, in early June of this year, the City of New York began to move homeless families into a defunct hotel in Elmhurst, Queens. The city's decision prompted a series of protests, culminating in one on July 22, 2014 that drew approximately 500 people. The crowd was said to comprise, among others, grandmothers, small children, Chinese immigrants and the president of a local Republican club, all of whom complained that Mayor de Blasio had trampled upon their rights.
The local residents expressed their fears about the presence of the new arrivals and cited rumors of shoplifting from a local supermarket and episodes of public urination and panhandling. These were the kind of antisocial acts that, the residents contended, had been unheard-of in their neighborhood until now.
During the protest that night, one of the organizers spoke through a bullhorn in Mandarin, as a few people looked out the windows of the hotel. "Speak in English!" a woman who was leaning out of a window was reported to have shouted, and held up her phone, possibly to videotape the protest. "Homeless with money" was the response of a protester to the woman with phone.
Pathetically, because many of those opposed the use the hotel as a shelter in Elmhurst were recent Chinese immigrants, the conflict has pitted immigrant families and the mostly black and Latino homeless families against one another. Earlier, in late June, The Times' article reported, a local civic group organized a series of demonstrations in which some of the protesters were reported to have chanted at the shelter residents "Get a job. The homeless families retorted that the protesters should "go back to China."
How does one explain the current vitriol and the hysteria? At least part of the explanation can be traced back to the political ideas upon which the "American experiment" was created and the culture of individualism that it apotheosized.
Historically, the emergence of liberalism as a political theory during the Protestant Reformation engrafted onto this unfolding political paradigm a permanent sense of anxiety and apprehension. Luther's insistence that personal salvation could be gained by one's one receptivity to the Word alone released the self from the bonds of obedience to the universal church and its magisterium, but the penalties for personal emancipation have, to the present, continued to exact a severe psychological toll. As Hobbes observed, the severance of man from nature - the natural order, natural law - estranged man and left him alone and afraid. Fear and a sense of personal isolation, and therefore personal vulnerability, in turn, can lead to panic and hysteria.
With the gradual demise of the Great Chain of Being came also the demise of the imperium - the traditional authority of the magistrate to bind his subjects and his power to command. Even the ascension of the Protestant William of Orange to the throne of England in 1689 was effectuated, not by the right of succession, but by an invitation from the Parliament.
Thereafter, the power to command would depend upon the need to receive formal, legislative consent. While a significant advance for democracy, this political change was not without its downside: since political institutions were, in the view of John Locke and other liberal thinkers, of dubious legitimacy and should be allowed to exercise only limited, arbitral, transitory authority, it instilled within the corpus of the liberal consensus a sense of the fragility of social and public institutions. This has been especially true in the U.S. where many of the thirteen colonies and later the republic itself were explicitly created by acts of covenanting - contracts.
As one unforeseen and unintended consequence, a toxic brew of fear, anxiety, vulnerability, and concern about the fragility, and hence, stability, of political and social institutions has contributed to the periodic eruptions of extremely ugly incidents in American politics that Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America described as "irrational Lockianism." The Salem Witch trials and the frequent preemptive forays into Indian territories by colonial settlers who feared Indian insurrections (which, in turn, lead to the extermination of countless numbers of the aborigines) were precursors to the kind of hysteria that gripped the newly-independent United States after the French Revolution. The XYZ and Citizen Genet affairs were the precipitants for the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in the administration of John Adams.
Later, recurrent fears of slave insurrections in the first half of the nineteenth century prompted the enactment of ever-more punitive laws in the slave-holding states to punish "run-aways," abolitionists, and anyone who tried to educate the slaves. In the 1840s, the Native American Party - the Know-Nothings - emerged in the Northeastern United States in response to a climate of intolerance and fear that had been preceded by the burning and sacking of an Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts in 1834, and by frequent attacks upon Irish and other Catholic immigrants.
In the twentieth century, the imprisonment of war critics, such as the socialist Eugene Debbs during World War I, and the aggressive acts of Attorney General Palmer's "Red Raids" after the Bolshevik Revolution exemplified the kind of war frenzy and jingoism to which Americans have so often succumbed. Two decades later, after the isolationism espoused by Father Coughlin and the America First Committee proved to be delusional, the attack on Pearl Harbor made palatable the confinement of thousands of American citizens - citizens of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast of the United States were forced into internment camps, without trial or any evidence of personal guilt, for the duration of World War II.
Justice Black's infamous decision in Korematsu v. United States, 321 U.S. 760 (1944), which excused this mass imprisonment, is stark evidence that has been confirmed on countless other occasions throughout American history of the refusal of the federal judiciary - as the designated arbiter of constitutional rights within this putatively liberal democracy - to defend the most basic civil liberties whenever the courage to decry public hysteria is required. Instead, the courts have, with few precious exceptions, routinely deferred to the executive branch's claims of a national emergency even after the evidence has shown that the alleged emergency - such as the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 - did not threaten or imperil the continued existence of the United States.
In his extremely insightful book, Escape From Freedom, Erich Fromm observed that "The individual became more alone, isolated, became an instrument in the hands of over-whelmingly strong forces outside of himself; he became an 'individual' but a bewildered and insecure individual..... Once the primary bonds which gave security to the individual are severed, once the individual faces the world outside of himself as a completely separate entity, two courses are open to him since he has to overcome the unbearable stage of powerlessness and aloneness. By one course he can progress to 'positive freedom;' he can relate himself spontaneously to the world in love and work...he can thus become one again with man, nature and himself, without giving up the independence and integrity of his individual self. The other course is to fall back, to give up his freedom, to try to overcome his aloneness by trying to eliminate the gap which has arisen between his individual self and the world."
In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith extolled the importance of what we today call empathy: "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it.... As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation..."
To experience empathy, as Smith would have it, one must put oneself in another's place. Where fear, insecurity and anger, however, are given free vent, however, empathy itself becomes a casualty.
There is little doubt that millions of Americans, burdened by the failure of the market economy to improve their standards of living and befuddled by the unwillingness and the inability of this country's political institutions to address their most basic needs, feel extremely insecure and vulnerable. This sense of vulnerability and fear of imminent danger has been continually stoked by politicians since the beginning of the Cold War. Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and a cabal of professional fear-mongers and political opportunists successfully intensified the worries and concerns of ordinary citizens about the evils of foreign, left-leaning ideas and the purported infiltration of American institutions by individuals by assorted "pointy-headed" intellectuals, and "fellow-travelers" and naive "do-gooders" who relentlessly sought to undermine the "American way of life."
After the attack the Twin Towers, this lamentable penchant to induce, and then to pander, to the basest fears and anxieties of ordinary Americans for purely partisan political purposes was honed and perfected by the administration of Bush-Cheney and by their Svengali, Karl Rove. Perhaps as appalling was the unsuccessful attempt by Rudolph Guliani to win the 2008 Republican Presidential nomination by running, as then-Delaware-Senator Joseph Biden sagely remarked, "on a noun, a verb, and 9/11."
The
resulting hysteria - endorsed by a largely compliant elite and its
political and media surrogates and at least tacitly supported by a
totally clueless population - led directly to the catastrophes of Iraq
and Afghanistan. An estimated $14 trillion dollars of that has been
squandered to date on these two misbegotten wars. Had $8 trillion of
those dollars been invested, instead, in infrastructure, jobs creation
and other urgent needs, the money would have substantially addressed
almost every pressing domestic need.
If only a part of the remaining $4 trillion dollars had been invested in programs to aide our county's troubled neighbors to the south - that are suffering from many problems that the U.S. has exacerbated - i.e., the spill-over effects of our gun culture, our unquenchable appetite for drugs, and our continued support for repressive, self-serving elites, the spectacles of thousands of waifs appearing at the Texas border would not by an almost daily phenomenon.
It
would also provide an opportunity for the Rick Perrys and Ted Cruzs of
contemporary American politics not to embarrass themselves - and the
rest of us - by their brazen displays of demagoguery and insensitivity. Both
Perry and Cruz claim to be God-fearing, Christian believers. What then
do they make of the injunctions contained in the Gospel of Matthew, "But
Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto
me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven," Matthew 19:13, and "Blessed
are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy," Matthew 5:7?
And what are we to make of them and the rest of the naysayers among us who are habituated to criticism yet are unwilling to participate in the quest for solutions?