[Vision2020] The Salvadorean Crisis and Trump's Twisted Logic

[Nicholas Gier]

NY Times, Jan. 9, 2018

The roughly 200,000 Salvadorans whom the Trump administration is subjecting
to deportation
<http://p.nytimes.com/email/re?location=pMJKdIFVI6pghfX2HXfSzxRpdoyDWYNWWt41ZRRC2Ji2aQxFRYJfx+2vEJr/r7n1eY1rY5LXPgUjTpfVO6KHw5KB6A6AnP1EhVOFnzmq4sEICs5Ky/hfHC7ibb8fAF3hn58eU9YsbWgXb4kruaYcgDBM60Yg0Nr7XtsBslBjBK8SkNalBep7q8XLwmuRvczBqjNWvjF3lEJBZPrpc6uFQoX1EfeARfsI3DQBXk8phOMmjUId2+wu6lueGvImKFv7aG+KTr/xTYCyRWvyXY3GsCKnShAQK5EdDwhOkLCm2zc=&campaign_id=69&instance_id=109569&segment_id=118943&user_id=4a205c5a62f3a4293ec5342704c0aac0&regi_id=29749741>
are
deeply ensconced in American society.
They have lived here for at least 17 years. Together, they have about
190,000 children who were born in the United States. The immigrants “work
in a wide array of jobs, from defense contractors to school cafeteria
workers, commercial office cleaners and restaurant owners,” Maria Sacchetti
of The Washington Post wr
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ites
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The largest group of them lives in the Washington area, followed by Los
Angeles, New York and Houston.
Now President Trump has decided to send them back to a country many barely
know, which is also one of the world’s most violent, Vox’s Dara Lind notes
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The decision is un-American and shameful, as my colleague Bret Stephens
said yesterday
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.
It is also a reminder of how bad our current immigrant system is — and how
badly it needs to be overhauled.
One of the more frustrating aspects of this decision is that the Trump
administration can defend its cruelty with legal explanations that have a
ring of rationality. Those explanations may not sway liberals or immigrant
advocates, but they are real weapons in the battle for public opinion. The
administration is able to point out that the status quo is built on a
series of fictions.
Consider: Many of the Salvadoran immigrants came to this country as
children or young adults, fleeing poverty and violence. Yet the immigration
system has based their legal status on two destructive 2001 earthquakes in
El Salvador, which occurred *after* most of the immigrants came to the
United States. The earthquakes had little effect on many of the immigrants’
decision to remain here.
Or consider: The program that has let the immigrants stay is called
“temporary protected status,” even though it had become de facto permanent,
pre-Trump.
So long as our immigration system is built on contortions of logic like
these, it will be vulnerable to Trump-style cruelty that’s then justified
on the basis of common-sense law enforcement. And these justifications
will, unfortunately, reduce some of the outrage that follows.
The immediate priority should be protecting the roughly 200,000 people who
live and work in our communities. They deserve to remain in this country.
They — and the rest of us — also deserve to live in a country that has a
reality-based immigration system. It should be one with a path to
citizenship for longtime residents, rather than one that depends on the
kindness of presidents and has a patchwork of rules that don’t mean what
they say.

-- 

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they
shall never sit in.

-Greek proverb

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.
Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance
from another. This immaturity is self- imposed when its cause lies not in
lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without
guidance from another. Sapere Aude! ‘Have courage to use your own
understand-ing!—that is the motto of enlightenment.

--Immanuel Kant
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