President Barack Obama should alleviate the suffering of Latin American refugees seeking relief from drug cartel violence by making the immigration law changes that he had promised . The corrosive political environment in Congress has led to inaction by the nation’s lawmakers on a number of key issues, but this is one that demands executive action.
We are a nation of immigrants. Every generation of Americans has had to make due and make room in this vast land bursting with resources for the next surge of immigration from one part of the world or another.
Every generation of Americans has found a way to marginalize one group of immigrants based on religious, cultural or ethnic prejudices; it is wrong and hypocritical.
Currently, a vocal and caustic group of Americans have thrown a monkey wrench into the works of the Congress with abusive and corrosive language used to marginalize immigrants from Latin America, the latest immigrants to bear the brunt of xenophobia. This time, the victims are mostly children who are escaping brutal and deadly conditions in Latin American countries.
To deport them en masse is deplorable and would be subjecting them to inhumane conditions in their home countries. Drug cartels have been stepping up the already high levels of violence in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras and other Latin countries, according to Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. Given the current circumstances, an advocate for closing our borders and sending the refugees back is an advocate for dehumanization and torture.
To the delight of immigration reform activists, President Obama said he was done waiting for Congress to act and promised in June to take action by the end of the summer to address the crisis of increased border crossings by the youngest and most vulnerable of refugees.
President Obama announced Sunday that he would in fact not be taking the promised action until after the November mid-term elections. Obama made his statement in an interview with Chris Todd in an interview on NBC’s Meet The Press.
President Obama denied that the midterm elections played a role in his decision, but given the grief that he had received recently from Democratic representatives that were facing difficult re-election challenges, this is hard to believe.
To politicize human rights and deny the refugee status of thousands of children fleeing torture is a dereliction of our duty as the champion of freedom and democracy that we as a nation would like to think that we are.
Any idea that we are lacking resources to deal with this challenge is manufactured and ignores the fact that the largest American corporations succeed in depriving the nation of hundreds of billions of dollars in tax revenue every year.
We are a rich country. We are a safe country. We should be a welcoming country. It is high time that America renounces the vitriol and abusive language a few Americans spew so that our lawmakers can do the jobs they were elected to do, namely promoting justice and extending human rights to all the world’s population, regardless of how powerless or poor.
