Money v. Morals

CNN Money recently posted an article titled “There’s one thing going right for Trump” by Heather Long. In the article, Long discuses how despite the apparent chaos consuming the White House, the U.S. economy is currently undergoing an upsurge in economic growth. Fox News recently reported that “the Dow, the S&P 500, Nasdaq Composite, Russell 2000 and Dow Transports are all at record levels.” It is good to see that the American economy is doing so well right now. Of course, according to Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG Union Bank in New York, Trump “inherited the best economy since President Bush.”

Recently, we apparently have traded basic human decency for economic growth. However, I do not think this is a good trade. As so many have said before, I do not want the Republican Regime to fail, I want the United States of America to be a strong country, economically, militarily, and morally. However, I do not see this happening, and it is both heartbreaking and infuriating. We as a country have decided that it is more important to make money and crush those who would oppose us, rather than lend a helping hand to our fellow humans.  In the past, we sacrificed our morals in order to ensure our security by detaining thousands of American citizens while we were at war, and we are still haunted by the specter of that atrocity.

Recently, the local newspaper for the conservative California city of Fresno, the Fresno Bee, reported on the World War II Japanese-American Internment. The article discussed how American citizens were thrown into concentration internment camps, simply because American was at war with the Empire of Japan and those citizens happened to be the descendants of Japanese immigrants. It also drew a disturbing parallel between the anti-Japanese sentiment that ran rampant through WWII-era America and the anti-muslim zealotry espoused by the current Republican Regime.

The American Boogeyman is no longer the vile Japanese, the evil Nazis, nor the godless Soviet Communists. Instead, the current monster-of-the-week is the Muslim and the Immigrant , though our fear/anger is typically relegated to either muslim immigrants or immigrants from Central or South America.

Travel Ban

One of the xenophobic policies implemented by the Republican Regime is the muslim travel ban. The ban stops all immigrants from seven predominantly muslim countries from entering the United States. This, of course, is done because of xenophobia in order to protect us until we can implement the as-yet-unspecified “extreme vetting.” The common argument is that we are not properly vetting immigrants and refugees from those Middle-East and African countries which are currently battling ISIS and other extremist groups.

My first year in law school I worked as a volunteer for an organization called the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project (now the International Refugee Assistance Project). My client was a man who served as an interpreter for the fabled 2nd Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment (2Fury) of the 82nd Airborne  for ten months in Afghanistan. During his service and after, he suffered numerous death threats against himself and his family, and moved cities numerous times to escape those death threats. Normally, those interpreters can apply for refuge in America as part of Special Immigrant Visa (SIV), which, among other stringent requirements, requires 12 months of service to U.S. military forces.

Despite his exemplary service, as vouched for by numerous American service members who worked with him, the translator did not qualify for the SIV process; he had only worked with military for ten months. Therefore, he was forced to apply for entrance into the United States through the normal refugee application process.

What most people do not know is that the normal application process for people seeking refugee status is an extremely long process, fraught with the worst aspects of a vast bureaucratic system. Throughout the entire chain of processing, the application can be denied arbitrarily at the whim of one of the numerous application reviewers. The State Department delves into every aspect of the applicant’s life, demanding all sorts of paperwork and conducting intense interrogations interviews. After several years of waiting for admittance, despite sacrificing everything for the United States, he has still not been allowed to enter America.

The current rhetoric supports the harsh vetting process, and calls for even stricter standards. However, it is already an extremely in-depth and successful process. In fact, it is even more vetting than we do for our own military personnel. While serving in the Army, I had the honor of working for the Joint Special Operations Command. As such, I had to be vetted for a Top Secret security clearance. My own vetting process was less strict than what refugees endure. And yet, people still think that they need to have even more extreme vetting. We have nothing to fear from those refugees and immigrants; they have been vetted more than those tasked with protecting our country.

Deportation Force

The Republican Regime has recently begun to make moves against the other American Boogeyman: undocumented immigrants. Despite the Republican Regime’s claim that its focus was on deporting “bad hombres” and other criminals, it actions show differently. Last week, of 678 undocumented immigrants were detained by ICE, only 74% had a criminal history. While that may seem like a lot, 90% of the people the Obama Administration had detained in 2016 had a criminal history.

The increase of non-criminal ICE detentions comes after the Republican Regime’s January 25 executive order, “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States.” Section 5 now allows for the removal of any undocumented person who “[i]n the judgment of an immigration officer, otherwise pose[s] a risk to public safety or national security.” The executive order gives ICE officers the power to arbitrarily remove people from their homes.This expanded power emphasizes the belief that the Republican Regime is not interested in merely protecting America from criminals and other “bad hombres” but is instead pursuing a xenophobic policy to rid America of all undocumented immigrants, regardless of their criminal history.

It is time we let go of our xenophobia and once again try to act civilly toward our fellow human beings.