wrote editorial board. “The Florida governor’s recruitment of asylum seekers as unwitting propaganda liars is nothing but his own callousness.”
But it’s not just callous. These people are us – we are all immigrants. The only difference between these Venezuelans and my great grandparents is 50year. Like my grandparents’ parents, these Venezuelans just wanted a job and a chance to be safe. They want the American Dream that the Republican Party once supported. By refusing to create our immigrant culture, we fundamentally reject our Americanness. More importantly, we are rejecting our own humanity.
The dehumanization of immigrants (or anyone) is a Rubicon once crossed , will lead to the worst humanitarian disaster. Once people stop being human, once they are just numbers or pawns, once people stop living and breathing beings like the rest of us, they are statistics. This dehumanization can only lead to the devaluation of human life.
My great grandparents came to this country because Jews were hunted in Poland, Ukraine. I don’t really think much about their immigration experiences since all my grandparents were born in this country or the UK. But sometimes I think of a cartoon I once saw at a Holocaust museum. It depicts a line of people at an intersection, facing a pile of signs with the country’s name on it. It says “any country” at the end, which is also crossed out. Comic from British newspaper Daily Express , published in 2017. How many of the six million people who died in concentration camps?
Sometimes I go back and read a little article called “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people,” written in Kayla Chadwick. This article talks about how we live A social contract in a society. We pay taxes and obey the law because we care about each other. This is how we live. This is how we respect our humanity.
Unimaginable cruelty happens when we lose touch with humanity. We spend a lot of time talking about politics and policy. But these are real people with real lives. Debates about refugees are often forgotten Their humanity and our own nature. These are just like us, just born into worse circumstances.
This notion is in the likes of America This is especially true in a country where only a handful of us are descended from aboriginal people. If no one had let my great-grandparents into this country, I wouldn’t be here today. You probably won’t either.
