Tag Archives: immigration

Cold As ICE

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From an article about a deportation proceeding in Monday’s New York Times:

Adding to the sting, immigration officers refused to let the twins or his wife give him a final hug goodbye, Ms. Hopman said.

“They told us they no longer provide that courtesy,” she said, “because they don’t like emotional scenes.”

In other words, federal law enforcement officers can’t seem to do what police officers, paramedics, firefighters, doctors, nurses, therapists, family-law attorneys, and funeral service workers do every day: deal with honest expressions of intense emotion. They have no problem breaking up families; they just have trouble observing the emotions that arise when they watch the effects of their handiwork.

The right likes to taunt “Social Justice Warriors” as “snowflakes,” but the SJWs I know are a lot tougher, and a lot less hypocritical, than officers like these. And yet it’s law enforcement that keeps making its insistent demands for our “respect” in a climate of opinion supposedly stacked against them.

Well sorry, but I can’t respect people like this–people too cowardly to endure the emotions that arise when they break up other people’s families. It’s hard to respect people who demand Stoicism of the victims while demanding a “safe space” for those who victimize them. The people responsible for these policies should perhaps remember that there is no “safe space” from moral judgment. They can’t seem to endure tears. Perhaps they should confront contempt.

Felician University Statement on the Repeal of DACA

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Almost all readers were unimpressed with the “Statement of the Faculty of Felician University” that I posted here in January, responding to the election and inauguration of Donald Trump. I’m happy to report that Felician’s president, Anne Prisco, has released a statement that takes a much stronger and more substantive position on the repeal of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) program. I’ve excerpted it below the fold. I’m grateful for it.

I can’t help remembering the “proseminars on pedagogy” I attended back in grad school, intended to prepare us for the ups and downs of college-level teaching. Oddly enough, I don’t ever remembering anyone’s covering “what to do when the federal authorities come in force to campus, invade your classroom, and seize your students as a preliminary to deportation.” But hey–the great thing about this job is that it forces you to learn new things. What I’ve learned is a twist on the old cliche that “life is a journey”: for some of us, it promises to be a journey from the classroom to a prison cell, and from there to a permanent exile from the country of one’s birth.

To be honest, if such deportations are to take place at all, I prefer that they take place on campus. Better collectively to have to bear witness to them than to have the luxury of pretending that they aren’t happening.

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Immigrants and Slaves

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I have zero admiration for Ben Carson, but even Ben Carson deserves better than the criticisms that have been made of his first speech as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Ben Carson’s first full week as secretary of Housing and Urban Development got off to a rough start on Monday after he described African slaves as “immigrants” during his first speech to hundreds of assembled department employees. The remark, which came as part of a 40-minute address on the theme of America as “a land of dreams and opportunity,” was met with swift outrage online.

Mr. Carson turned his attention to slavery after describing photographs of poor immigrants displayed at the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration. These new arrivals worked long hours, six or seven days a week, with little pay, he said. And before them, there were slaves.

“That’s what America is about, a land of dreams and opportunity,’’ he said. “There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less. But they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandsons, great-granddaughters, might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.”

Carson’s remarks elicited widespread “outrage” for his supposed failure to observe the fact that immigrants migrate by choice to a country of their choice, whereas slaves are seized by force, transported by force, and sold involuntarily into forced labor. The implication of the criticism would appear to be either that Carson was unaware of the distinction between voluntary migration and the forced nature of slavery, or that he was aware of it, but minimized the distinction so as to make slavery seem less bad than it really is. Unfortunately, both criticisms are absurd, as is the outrage itself. Continue reading →

Revisiting “The Muslim Registry”

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In light of recent events, including Donald Trump’s firing Sally Yates, the Acting Attorney General, I thought I’d re-post this item from November, on the so-called “Muslim registry.” Actions like Yates’s were just what I had in mind when I wrote the post. My hope is that others will emulate her.

A postscript: In the November post, I mentioned that I had intended to try my proposal out on the Bergen County Prosecutor, Gurbir Grewal, on a visit he was making to my university that week. The question I asked him back in November was whether he would be willing to withhold county law enforcement resources from efforts to enforce unconstitutional deportation orders. He side-stepped the question to some degree, pointing out that he was obliged, in the case of undocumented aliens within his custody, to pass relevant information on to the federal immigration authorities, and presumably to cooperate in any legal proceedings they initiated. Continue reading →