CHAPTER SEVEN: A POLITICS OF LOVE

The Sojourner among Us: The Hope of Immigrants

CHAPTER 7:
THE SOJOURNER AMONG US: THE HOPE OF IMMIGRANTS

In 2017, traveling with friends to the Za’atari camp, a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan, I met three adorable little sisters so precious that I cried at having to leave them. Despite their parents’ extraordinarily challenging circumstances, these beautiful, intelligent children were raised to be cheerful, disciplined, and friendly. They and the other children in the camp spent all day in class, at sports, even at a circus filled with clowns. Their parents made diligent efforts to make sure their lives were shielded from the harsher realities of their circumstances. Any of us would have been honored and delighted to have such well-adjusted children. Their joy and positivity were contagious.

Leaving the camp, I was silent in the car on the way back to our hotel. I wished everyone I knew in America could have spent the day as I had. I wished they could see the human reality behind the word refugee. I felt a painful juxtaposition between the character and refinement of the people I met at the Za’atari camp and the narrow-mindedness and closed-heartedness of America’s current policies toward them.

Now, as I write this, people seeking asylum on the southern border of the United States are being scapegoated as criminals, their children deceitfully taken from their arms with no plan as to how they will be returned. In violation of American law, which mandates that almost anyone who sets foot in the United States has full constitutional protection here, and almost universally accepted human rights, these asylum seekers have been grossly denied fair protection. They are being prosecuted instead of welcomed, and their efforts to escape violence are being met by another kind of violence.

The traumatized cries of their separated children have become a rallying cry for the American conscience. A howl of outrage is being heard throughout America, not only because of the specific immigration policy of separating parents from children, but because of the moral descent that is represented by such a policy.

This is not the first time America’s immigration policies have reflected the lower rather than higher angels of our nature. The Palmer Raids conducted in 1919 and 1920 during America’s “First Red Scare” were responsible for over five hundred foreign citizens—mainly suspected radical leftists who were mostly Italian and Eastern European immigrants—being ripped from their homes, arrested, and illegally deported. Earlier, during the 1880s, a federal law called the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited the immigration of all Chinese laborers. But we look back on such things in full awareness that they were wrong. Contemporary Americans are now facing something we have never had to face before: our government, caught red-handed in an act of transgression against one of our most treasured principles, responding with a brazen “Yeah, what of it?”

Scapegoating immigrants, particularly Mexicans, has been a primary fear tactic of our current president since the first day he announced his candidacy. Some took him seriously; some did not. Some saw the dangers of his rhetoric then; some did not. In fact, nothing is more dangerous than hatred harnessed for political purposes.

Scapegoating is a deliberate dehumanization technique. Americans had to see Africans as somehow less than fully human in order to enslave them. Americans had to see Native Americans as savages in order to acquiesce to the destruction of their culture. Germans had to see Jews as weeds in the garden of humanity in order to put them into death camps. Rwandan Hutus had to see Tutsis as animals; Chinese had to see students at Tiananmen Square as criminals; Croatians had to see Bosnian Muslims as enemies of the state, which is how Turks had to see Armenians and Myanmar has to see Rohingyas today. Dehumanizing others has always been the required first step in the commitment of history’s collective atrocities. Demonizing others brings out the demons in those who demonize.

When I was a child, my parents took my brother and sister and me to many places around the world. My father was an immigration lawyer, and I was taught at a very young age why America mattered, what my grandparents had escaped from as Jews living in Russia during the nineteenth century, and what coming to America had meant to them. I learned early to appreciate the plight of the immigrant, the blessing of an American passport, and the value of a free society. I realized at an early age that what makes America special is that people can breathe free here. Not just that people can have things, but that people can have freedom. That people can simply be.

I was around thirteen years old when our family visited Budapest, Hungary. Having been invaded by the Soviets in l957, that country was still living under Communist domination. A young man had been our guide on the trip, and when he drove us to the airport at the end of our time there I saw my father surreptitiously hand him his business card and say in a very low voice, “You get yourself out of here, and I’ll take care of you from there.” I registered the tearful look of gratitude in the eyes of that young man. Even as a child, I viscerally understood in that moment what living under Soviet rule meant and what making it to America stood for.

My father himself was the son of poor immigrants. As a child, he was the only one in his family who could speak good English, and he was often asked to help his parents and their friends fill out immigration forms they couldn’t read. My mother’s father came to America alone when he was thirteen years old and sold bananas on the East Side of New York until he had raised enough money to return to Russia and get his next-younger brother; together they sold enough bananas to make the money to return and get their next-younger sibling; and on and on until all seven brothers and sisters and their mother had been brought over to America.

Through stories about the lives of strangers, and about the lives of my own family members, I was taught from an early age about the often desperate plight of the immigrant and the blazing hope that America held out to them. I remember my father explaining to me that at the time when his father grew up there, Jews in Russia were conscripted into the army for twenty-five years of service. Now, in our time, we read of people all over the world who endure situations more horrible and devastating to body and soul than we can imagine in order to make it to the shores of America, where life might be better for them and for their children. What makes their plight less devastating, or less worthy of human compassion, than that of our own ancestors?

TO BE BLESSED, BE A BLESSING

The plight of the modern refugee—the vast majority of whom are asylum seekers—is no different now than it ever was. What has changed is how anti-immigrant fervor has been weaponized in the modern era, taking a wrecking ball to something previously considered a point of pride for our country: that we’re a nation of immigrants. At a time when we have a greater refugee crisis than at any point since World War II, with over 60 million people displaced or homeless worldwide—often, in fact, as a result of tragedies at least indirectly influenced by US foreign policy—America is closing its heart.

The United States has significant border security issues, and other immigration issues, that pose legitimate points for bipartisan problem-solving. But the bigger issue at the moment in this, as in so many other areas, is America’s paramount need to return to our moral axis. Seeking asylum here is a statutory right established in the Refugee Act of 1980. While it’s legitimate to discuss conservative versus progressive options regarding how we help a refugee fleeing humanitarian horrors, there should never be a question of whether or not we do.

Earlier this year, I visited Ellis Island. I was deeply moved not only by the building but by the museum exhibits included in a massive renovation of the island and its buildings in the 1980s. Visitors see a slice of history that is relevant to us all.

The building containing the Great Hall at Ellis Island opened on January 1, 1892, and from the time it opened until it closed in 1954, 12 million immigrants to the United States entered there. Four of them were my grandparents. Pictures at the exhibit show extraordinary images of immigrants from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries—people from many countries, many backgrounds, all seeking a better life in America after having fled persecution, pogroms, and all forms of unspeakable hardship. It is impossible to look at the pictures at the Ellis Island Museum and not have a visceral understanding of what the history of immigration has meant to this country.

When I took the ferry back to the island of Manhattan, I saw a man playing music in Battery Park. He was an Asian man playing an exotic instrument I had never seen, a violin of some kind that emits the most gorgeous music. Across the sidewalk from him sat a woman in a headscarf, sitting on a bench and playing with her baby. Together with everyone else in the park that day, they formed a tableau of modern America. As moved as I was by the pictures in the museum, I was even more moved as I witnessed this man and woman, sitting opposite each other across the sidewalk, both having come from very different places but seeking the same possibility. He with his music and she with her baby, both were passing on to others the beauty of who they are.

The immigrant story of today contains no less richness, variety, contribution, creativity, and life pulsing at its most ordinary and beautiful than it did a hundred years ago. The immigrant is not our enemy. It is so important to remember this today, as immigrants are often viciously scapegoated. This is not the first time this has happened in America, and we must stand up against it now as other generations stood up against it in their time. The story of immigration in the United States has been ugly before. But we got through those earlier dark periods of mean-spiritedness in our history, and we will get through this one too.

On the way to Ellis Island our ferry stopped at the Statue of Liberty, where every visitor is reminded of the power of Lady Liberty’s message. Her torch is held high, and it’s not coming down. As long as she stands firm in our hearts, she will stand firm on that little island of hers. She keeps alive an eternal idea, created by God and a creed of our national identity. There are no strangers in God’s universe, nor need there be any strangers in the family of man.

In 1883, Emma Lazarus wrote a sonnet titled “The New Colossus” to raise money for the construction of a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. Millions of immigrants over the years have viewed the statue as they entered New York Harbor and knew that they had come home. Visiting Ellis Island today, one can practically feel the ghosts of the 12 million immigrants whose entrance to the United States was processed between the late nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. Their hopes, their dreams, and their stories were not so unlike those of almost everyone seeking to enter America today.

Lazarus’s poem, inscribed not only on the base of the statue but in the hearts of millions, is a reminder to all of us of one of our most treasured values. Yet its words, like the words in our founding documents, will lose moral force if we fail to embrace and protect them. A nation, like an individual, compromises its principles at the expense of its soul.

Poetry read quickly doesn’t penetrate the soul. But poems such as this one, read slowly, savored and embraced, can change your entire view of being an American.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Who do we resemble more today—the “brazen giant of Greek fame, with conquering limbs astride from land to land,” or the “Mother of Exiles”? Do we really want to destroy the very notion of America as a nation of immigrants?

America has undoubtedly been blessed. But the blessings upon us are not due to some special dispensation from God; they’re due to our having chosen to be a blessing to others. We set out to be a blessing, and as with all cause and effect, it was the blessing we gave to others that magnetized so much blessing to us. That is why it’s so dangerous when we withdraw those blessings—as we do with policies like imposing a Muslim travel ban, separating children from their parents at the border, or enacting reckless environmental policies. We’re not just messing with visible forces when we do that; we’re messing with invisible forces too.

A question central to our current immigration drama is this: who we do we think America belongs to? How ironic that a people who stole this continent from Native Americans, who had lived here for thousands of years before we arrived, now turn around and claim some God-given right to ownership. It’s like stealing a house and then proudly sending out a “We Moved” card to your friends.

Seeking asylum in America is not a scam, it is a statutory right. And immigrating to America is not a crime. The modern immigrant is chasing the same dream of a better life that lured the ancestors of every American who isn’t descended from either slaves or Native Americans.

When I was a little girl, my father used to point out to us that the entire concept of national boundaries was created by man, not by God. He would have us look at an atlas, or a globe, in which the boundary lines weren’t present, to see what the world looks like geographically from miles above. God didn’t draw a line between France and Spain, or between the United States and Mexico. The whole idea of national boundaries is a man-made material category. National borders have a place in our material functioning. But they should be used to organize our societies, not to divide our hearts.

The deeper questions for a nation are the same as for an individual: did God put us on the earth to be brothers and sisters, or did He not? I was taught as a child that people are the same everywhere. The love of a mother for her child in Malawi is no different from the love of a mother for her child in Minnesota. No matter where we were born, no matter what our socioeconomic background, we are made of the same essence, the same intersection of the human and the divine.

We should reject any notion that while such sentiments might be lovely, they have nothing to do with politics. The humanity of all people should have everything to do with politics. I have never forgotten how my parents made us aware that here in the United States their parents and many millions like them had found refuge from lives of suffering and oppression. My siblings and I were not just taught to be grateful for that; we were taught to never forget where our family had come from, what a gift America had given to us, and the importance of that gift to so many people in the world. Too many Americans seem to take for granted a gift that did not just fall out of the sky; rather, our freedom was created through extraordinary struggle and sacrifice, meant to be passed from generation to generation. What we have received from our ancestors it is our moral responsibility to pass on to others.

What makes America great is that America is good. In both the Old and New Testaments, we are told to greet the stranger with respect and with an open heart. “Treat the sojourner as you do the native, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34). But many Americans today can’t relate to the idea of being a refugee with nowhere to go, even though that was the plight of most of their own ancestors. We’re allowing our national heart to harden, our moral compass to be driven off course, our critical thought processes to be jangled, and our minds to be propagandized by the notion that people who are no different from us are somehow our enemy.

Americans have an instinctive understanding that America matters and that it matters for a reason: to light the way for all humanity. But to lead the way, we must be the way. Hatred and bigotry and racism are not light; they are spiritual darkness, and it is that darkness out of which we must pull ourselves now. If our spiritual values matter at all, they must matter everywhere. And that includes in the arena of politics.

America’s covenant with history is to always set our sights high, whether we are able to reach those heights or not. The push-pull relationship between the highs and lows of our national character is baked into the cake of America’s historical narrative. We like to think, however, that as we evolve through time we move forward, with every generation adding to the formation of a “more perfect union.” Today, dangerously and tragically, we are moving backwards in certain ways. The moment is perilous, though filled with miraculous possibility. We need a politics of love to put our nation back on its moral course.

A TRUMPED UP CRISIS

Where some have harnessed fear for political purposes, it is time to harness love for political purposes. A politics of love not only says yes to what we do want; it is also capable of saying no to what we do not want. Where crowds have gathered to protest a Muslim ban or the forced separation of families, the spirit of the “Mother of Exiles” has expressed itself. And it will continue to do so. The better angels of our nature have often been silenced, but never forever. It is time for our generation to rise up as others have, to sing in our time the eternal song of a loving heart. Angels can sing only if we allow them to sing through us.

When someone says, “Yes, but what would you do about the immigration crisis?” remember this: although there are certainly reasonable changes that need to be made in our immigration policies, the idea that we have a crisis is simply a canard. Our border crisis is a made-up crisis, used to distract the most disadvantaged Americans from seeing who and what is really leeching their resources, who and what is really undercutting their power, and who and what is really stealing their democracy. In the words of Mayor Tony Martinez of McAllen, Texas, in the midst of the literally Trumped-up crisis at the border, “We were doing fine, quite frankly.”

In fact, over the last decade, illegal immigration has been going down. There are no hordes of immigrants “infesting” us. And while no one wants violent criminals in our country, and all Americans want the violent gang MS-13 expunged both here and in El Salvador, the current anti-immigrant fervor has little or nothing to do with such matters. The actual rate of criminality among immigrants—even the undocumented—is lower, not higher, than the rate of criminality among our non-immigrant citizens. And the rate of their contributions, in fields ranging from the arts to science to academia, is at least as high. The deliberate attempt by some of our leaders to make Americans fear something so basic to our greatness in the name of our greatness will one day be seen as a dark, aberrational chapter in our nation’s history.

The contributions of many of America’s immigrant communities are among the highest of any subpopulation, whether measured culturally, academically, or economically. We have much more to fear from the domestic terrorism of anti-immigrant hordes than from anything immigrants are bringing into the country with them.

The hardening of the American heart is far more dangerous than the softening of our borders. Those who scapegoat immigrants, like demagogues throughout history, are demonizing others to increase their own power. Their lies, like all lies, have risen to prominence temporarily, but they will not stand.

It is only in devoting ourselves to the things this country stands for that we will reclaim our invulnerability to forces that would tear us down. It is not enough to be appalled by bigotry; we must rededicate ourselves to the idea of a nation in which bigotry has no place. I don’t know any progressive who is arguing for open borders, but we are arguing for open hearts.

A politics of love is not just a sweet and gentle concept; it is a fierce and committed field of energy made of people who have awakened not only to the darkness in our midst but to the eternal light that casts it out. It is not enough that the Statue of Liberty holds the torch. Each of us must hold it in our hearts as well, and hold it high. Neither angels nor demons are a thing of the past. They are present in the choices we make today: whether to stand for love . . . or not.

Chapter 8 will be emailed tomorrow!

Chapter 1: Love in a Time of Crisis: Lessons in Fear and Love

Chapter 2: A Revolution of Love: Reviewing the Plot

Chapter 3: Love and Conflict: Disagreeing with Love

Chapter 4: An Economics of Love: A New Bottom Line

Chapter 5: American Youth: Equal Rights for Angels

Chapter 6: Race and Repentance: Out of Many, One