A refugee crisis

In the first century AD, a refugee from the war-torn Middle East, escaping civil unrest and religious persecution tried to reach Rome to state his case before the Imperial court.  On his way, his ship was lost in the Mediterranean Sea, and he almost died, then rescued by the good people of Malta, where he was shipwrecked.  His name was Paul, later St. Paul, and he founded the western Christian church.

Here we stand 2000 years later, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people from the exact same place are trying to escape civil war and religious persecution.  Desperate to seek asylum, they undergo terrible and dangerous passage to western Europe.  During this crisis, the good people of Malta have saved many from losing their lives at sea.  Other European countries have mixed responses to the crisis, but the EU is responding, albeit slowly, and at the risk of so many lives.

This past week, 71 smuggles people, many children, suffocated in a trailer truck in Austria, being smuggled to safety.  Another 105 drowned in the Mediterranean.  I think in 2000 years we should have made progress.  Sadly, modern western people have a worse track record than the Roman Empire.  You needn't be Christian to appreciate this irony, just a moral human being.

What about us here in the United States?  In 1951, the UN produced a landmark convention regarding the definition and rights of refugees.  The convention also laid out the responsibilities of signatory states regarding the rights of asylum seekers.

Despite the words of Emma Lazarus, etched onto the base of the Statue of Liberty:

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore....

The US was one of the few countries never to have signed the 1951 convention.  In 1967, due to the concerns of many countries, particularly the US, a 1967 Protocol refining the 1951 convention was adopted.  The US did sign the 1967 Protocol, bringing my country into accord with the rest of the civilized planet.  Tellingly, we are only 1 of 2 countries worldwide who have not adopted the 1951 and 1967 agreements together, Venezuela being the other.

The US has now committed to the worldwide refugee accord.  You can find the summary of the treatise here.

So how does the US comply with our duties as an asylum country?  We utterly ignore our responsibility!
All over Central America, people seek asylum from persecution and violence.  We ignore these obvious threats to life and liberty and accuse them all of 'sneaking in' for economic opportunity alone.  Certainly some, perhaps many, are here due to economic privation alone, but the horrors of Central America, from the genocide of Mayans at the hands of the Guatemalan government to the political persecution of Hondurans, to US fueled drug wars in Mexico, we label legitimate refugees as "ILLEGALS".  Why the capitals?  It think this is the second worse epithet ever uttered by Americans on a downtrodden people. It is a disgusting label.

Prominent politicians speak of erecting a wall at the Rio Grande River.  They accuse refugees of myriad crimes based on anecdote, hyperbole and demagoguery. There is a lot of hate. Families are destroyed. People die.  The truth has been trumped.  Shouldn't we rethink this contradiction of our values?

What we ought to do, as a moral and just nation is open our borders. Fix the mess WE made in Central America.  Assist the EU in the humanitarian crisis emerging from Syria and Iraq; our failure to act fuels ISIS, Hamas, Assad and Hezbollah.

Stop the war.

Stop the hate.