“Today is World Refugee Day.
If you’ve been fortunate enough to have been born in America, imagine for a moment if circumstances had placed you somewhere else. Imagine if you’d been born in a country where you grew up fearing for your life, and eventually the lives of your children. A place where you finally found yourself so desperate to flee persecution, violence, and suffering that you’d be willing to travel thousands of miles under cover of darkness, enduring dangerous conditions, propelled forward by that very human impulse to create for our kids a better life.
That’s the reality for so many of the families whose plights we see and heart-rending cries we hear. And to watch those families broken apart in real time puts to us a very simple question : are we a nation that accepts the cruelty of ripping children from their parents’ arms, or are we a nation that values families, and works to keep them together? Do we look away, or do we choose to see something of ourselves and our children?
Our ability to imagine ourselves in the shoes of others, to say “there but for the grace of God go I”, is part of what makes us human. And to find a way to welcome the refugee and the immigrant – to be big enough and wise enough to uphold our laws and honor our values at the same time – is part of what makes us American. After all, almost all of us were strangers once, too. Whether our families crossed the Atlantic, the Pacific, or the Rio Grande, we’re only here because this country welcomed them in, and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, how our last names sound, or the way we worship. To be an American is to have a shared commitment to an ideal – that all of us are created equal, and all of us deserve the chance to become something better.
That’s the legacy our parents and grandparents and generations before created for us, and it’s something we have to protect for the generations to come. But we have to do more than say “this isn’t who we are.” We have to prove it – through our policies, our laws, our actions, and our votes.”
If we can unite and focus on swing districts this November, there will be a time again when this country is led by a leader like Barrack Obama, who raises our heads to the sky to imagine how we can be better and how we as a nation can think higher.
“Think higher.” -Elie Wiesel
If we can unite and focus on swing districts this November, there will be a time again when this country is led by a leader like Barrack Obama, who raises our heads to the sky to imagine how we can be better and how we as a nation can think higher . . . and then was one of the worst and most brutal Presidents on immigration, overseeing record deportations.
So, yes, let’s think higher. And that ain’t the standard Obama set.
“The zero-tolerance policy is an anti-immigrant dragnet. We can only assume this executive order would imprison children in the same correctional facilities as their parents. They will be sleeping in cages instead of cribs.
Families and children don’t belong in jail. Period.” US Senator Ed Markey (D-MA)
What if the new citizen population was equalized to be 50% Republican and 50% Democrat?
Everyone knows that the effort to have more illegal border crossers is a ploy to increase the Democratic voting population, since at least 70% of those who became citizens from previous amnesties voted Democrat. (If the proportion was reversed an amnesty would not get support on this web site for instance.) A good compromise would be to balance the population of new citizens demographically to avoid changing the political composition of the US voting population.