A Changed Tune Plays No Better

I attended the Murrieta City Council meeting of July 15th 2014. Those opposed to child “illegal” immigration which they hatefully and raucously demonstrated at the Town Meeting, apparently have moderated  their language from “dirty”, “disease ridden” and “crime-prone” illegal immigrants to a simple “illegal immigrant.” They say they don’t oppose legal immigrants from the affected Central American countries, just illegal ones. This sanitization of the hate demonstrated at the Town Meeting can be tested in a simple manner.

The United Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees has urged the United States and Mexico to give refugee status, under the persecution provision of the Refugee Convention, to those of the children migrants who are fleeing from danger, as most of them are. Published accounts in the New York Times and the Press Enterprise newspapers detail some of the life-threatening dangers these children face. In one case a boy was given a choice between murdering a gang-appointed victim or being murdered himself. How calloused must one be to insist on documented immigration status when a child is faced with such an situation? This is exactly why we have refugee status.

As a signatory to the 1967 U.N. Convention on Refugees, the High Commissioner is calling upon our country to honor its pledge.

As refugees, these children are no longer “illegal.” This makes even the sanitized version of racism and bigotry irrelevant.

The Obama administration has recently begun returning some of these children to their presumed home cities. Among these cities  are some of the most violent and dangerous on the planet. If they have fled this violence, especially if they were targets of it, this action would verge on criminal.

It is our drug policy and the high value market it has created for illegal drugs that has spawned this violence. We should immediately take steps to mitigate the policy’s impact on innocent children while we begin to drastically alter that policy, especially its arbitrary, didactic, treatment of a complicated human issue. We learned in the early 20th century that a total prohibition of alcohol generated intolerable violence and that while alcohol may occasionally result in death on the highway and wasted lives, it does not do so for most people. As in most human affairs we decided that society and its members were better off without the violence and corruption of Al Capone’s gang violence. This should have taught us to avoid the rigid prohibition approach with drugs. The “Three strikes you’re out” policy is a callous approach to a complex human problem. A simple asking of the question of why all human societies have found ways to relieve the varying stress of human existence, would have called for a far more humane, workable solution. Instead of prohibition and its attendant violence, we should, as we did with alcohol, decriminalize drug consumption and treat its misuse as a health problem. This would take away the enormous profit, the violence, and the attendant displacement of citizens, especially children, from their homes. There is a solution to this problem, but it does not lie in political or religious ideology. It lays in a thoughtful consideration of human existence and the search for the best solution, not the arbitrarily perfect solution.

Finally, as I watched congressman Calvert’s representative glad-hand select individuals in a group, that by its applause for pro-demonstration  speakers, were clearly local Republican Party members, it became clear to me that the local Republican Party had a lot to do with the hateful demonstration against migrant children and, especially the Town Hall meeting that broadcast that hate to the world, thereby creating a global image of the City of Murrieta with which all Murrietans will have to live.

What will we do when, in thirty five years the world’s population reaches nine billion and the value of human life plummets even further?

Bob Newhard