As we learn more about the conditions in immigration detention centers and as the federal government threatens mass deportations, these writers give expression to the sadness, anger, and despair engendered by the experiences of those seeking sanctuary in our country.
Julia Alvarez, poet and novelist
“Saving the Children”
Every day they were trapped, we checked in
with the nightly news to hear how
the Wild Boars were doing. A boot camp
had been set up at the mouth of the cave
after two divers discovered the boys
and their coach perched on a rocky ledge,
licking the walls for water, edging away
from the questioning sweep of the camera
as if afraid of exposure to the light
of the divers’ flashlights, then bowing
in gratitude, their thin limbs,
reminiscent of children in newsreels
from the liberated camps.
We listened for updates:
volunteers pouring in—an Aussie doctor
stayed with them, checking their hearts,
their lungs, the ambient oxygen; a Danish
spelunker cut short his vacation to map
the underground labyrinth; a billionaire
built a mini submarine to float them out
of the narrow birth-canal-type tunnels;
ministers offered prayers, rescuers their lives
(one taken in earnest)—everyone working
together to get the Wild Boars out
before the rains fell and the waters rose.
But before we could switch
channels and savor the jubilation
of watching them saved from the worst
that could happen, trotted out of the cave,
wrapped in tin foil like baked potatoes
and rushed under golf umbrellas
to the thunderous sound of a downpour
of clapping into the waiting helicopters,
their mothers, aunties, grandmothers already
readying the meals the boys had requested—
fried rice with crispy pork, spicy chicken—
we heard the crying
of children ushered into chain-link
enclosures, calling for their mothers,
their fathers, the wrenching look
of a toddler glancing up at the face
of a stranger speaking a language
she didn’t understand—
And we didn’t understand
how this could happen: on the one hand,
saving the children, on the other hand,
wresting them from their parents,
as if we live in a zero sum world
where something has to be taken away
if something is put back together,
happiness being the give of a rope
that goes taut somewhere else—
where a body hangs limp
from the branch where the lynch mob
has strung it.
It must be the fault
of such cruel mathematics, for how
else to understand this strange
disconnect, as if a part of us
we didn’t know we had lost
in the fear-filled caverns of the heart—
the selves we discovered we could be
when we saved the Wild Boars—
were calling to us in the voices
of terrified toddlers,
in danger of being drowned out,
as the waters keep rising.
Hari Kunzru, novelist
America finds itself at a crossroads. How we respond to the manufactured migration ‘crisis’ on the southern border will determine the future course of domestic politics, and will have global repercussions. At stake is a core principle which has defined the post Second World War international order. Do we accept, as the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights puts it, that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”? If so, then the treatment of migrants on the southern border is not only despicable, but a crime that strikes at our authority to fight human rights abuses, up to and including genocide, around the world.
The explicit political aim of many who support the Trumpist border regime is to destroy the belief that humanity has a shared dignity and a common destiny. They wish to restrict rights to citizens, and open the way for non-citizens to be treated as non-persons, ‘illegals’ who are less than fully human, and to whom nothing is owed. ‘We’, the fully human, would experience terrible pain if our children were taken from us and put in camps, to be abused and neglected by their captors. They, the lesser ones, have only themselves to blame.
If we are honest, we will look at the causes of the flow of migrants toward the southern border, which include political unrest, endemic social violence, and climate change, and see that no wall can solve them. No border regime, however harsh or spectacular in its violence, will alter the terrible calculation that migrants are making. If the U.S. does not close down its archipelago of camps, and institute a policy that respects human dignity and takes account of the actual conditions in the world, future historians will wonder how so many stood by and did nothing while the most powerful nation on earth slid into barbarism.
Jhumpa Lahiri, Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Hemingway-winning novelist and translator
The arrest on June 29 of Carola Rackete, captain of the NGO rescue vessel Sea Watch 3, is now front-page news in Italy. Her crime was to bring migrants in imminent danger into the port of Lampedusa against the specific orders of the Italian government. She will likely be charged with the crime of saving lives. This case caps a year I have spent living in Italy and watching, with increasing outrage, the abhorrent treatment of desperate individuals fleeing war and desolation and arriving, if so fortunate, in a country now dense with hatred and hostility toward migrants. As I write this, I am packing my bags to return to America, where humanitarian volunteer Scott Warren was tried, also in June, for providing water and food to migrants crossing the desert in Southern Arizona. As I write this, I am watching my husband and daughter swim together in the same Mediterranean in which, this year alone, over three hundred people have drowned off the shores of Italy and Malta. I can’t help but think of another father and daughter, Salvadoran Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and Valeria—she was one month short of her second birthday—photographed face down in the mud. They died in late June attempting to swim across the Rio Grande into Texas. As every school child in America knows, the United States is a country in large part founded by immigrants and refugees, with the labor of slaves, on land taken by Native Americans. There is a beautiful statue in New York Harbor that celebrates the brave journey immigrants made. Italy, too, seems to have re-pressed its own migrant history. Like America, it currently aims to barricade its borders and perceives those crossing them as a threat. I will observe this July Fourth in celebration of figures like Rackete and Warren, who put themselves at risk in order to help the most vulnerable among us, who insist upon the human rights of those yearning to breathe free.
Andrew Solomon, author
This idea reeks of groundless arrogance: that having happened to be born on one bit of soil entitles you to everything you would deny people born on another bit of soil. This idea stinks of injustice: that Americans across the board deserve prerogatives unknown to most of humanity. This idea is shocking and appalling: that anyone, anywhere, could think that the appropriate way to deter immigrants and asylum-seekers is deliberately to separate them from their children, placing those children in inhuman conditions. Family is sacrosanct; it is the one thing humankind holds in common. Whether rich or poor, American or foreign, white or of color, we have a small group of people to whom we are related, to whom we owe allegiance, and whom we tend to love. Family is our deepest responsibility: to care for and help one another. There is no greater cruelty than to deprive a parent of his or her child. The language of righteousness used in relation to this violation of human norms at the border is a malign and un-American rhetoric. “All men are created equal” was the opening gambit of these United States of America. Now such equality is under siege. Immigrants don’t come to the United States because it’s fun to do so; they come because they have run out of other options. They come full of hope, but also full of regret about the familiar world they have left behind. They come in abjection, and the responsibility of a country rife with privilege is to welcome them and lift them up. If we want fewer immigrants, we could help the poor of the world so that they don’t become so desperate as to flee their native lands. But even that would not absolve us of responsibility to those who come seeking solace at our gates. Yes, we should recognize that immigrants have built the America most of us love, but we don’t admit immigrants because they will get Nobel prizes and so bring glory to the USA; we admit them because those in the world who have owe a debt to those who have not.
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