Elvira Arellano Misuses Sanctuary
I am a long time protester and advocate of civil disobedience. My disobedience has always been predicated on accepting the consequences of principled protest. When we protested against race prejudice in housing and sat in on private property, we were trying to put the law on trail and not evade the consequences of our actions. Right now Arellano is having to deal with the consequences of her stand and her trespass.
I will probably never get put into some president’s cabinet (unless it is post mortem in a jar), and my chances at the Supreme Court are slight. My sin is that I have employed illegal aliens. I have supported the sanctuary movement in the 60s, 70s and 80s. I have given sanctuary to illegal aliens and contributed food and money for their support.
I offered to shelter one woman and her family in my home if “Migra” came after her. It turned out not to be necessary. She moved to Canada, where ironically the winter was more merciless than Migra and she died that first season.
The reason for my law breaking and my discomfort with Elvira Arellano is the theory and practice of sanctuary. When I broke the law, it was to protect people whom I considered to be political refugees. Soft hearted liberal that I am, I too recognize a distinction between economic refugees and political escapes, who would be arrested, tried and even killed if they were returned to their homeland.
I was not willing to leave the fate of people whom I knew to the capricious and arbitrary policies of our government. If we all agree that our immigration policy is an incoherent mess—and I think we do—it is a paradigm of reasonableness when compared with our political refugee policies. Not even the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, stoned on magic mushrooms could come up with our Cuba policy. To wit: If you get to dry land, you can stay. If you are caught in water, you go back to Cuba. This is absolute. Caught standing ankle deep in a tide pool by Key West, you’re wet and therefore sent to Cuba, where we have every reason, even beyond our propaganda, to believe that life will be worse for them than before they left. This is cruel, stupid and irrational.
In the 70s, there were many political refugees from El Salvador and Nicaragua. While the hard left was no joy, the rightist regimes and rebels our government supported persecuted and disappeared suspected leftists. Grounds for suspicion included being educated and belonging to a union.
People in Poland and France broke the law in hiding members of my family during the Holocaust. They risked their lives and the lives of their children to do what they thought was right. I believed I could do no less. No, we were not and are not Nazis; our government was not going to kill them. Sending them back, as FDR sent back the St. Louis, a passenger ship laden with Jews trying to escape, seemed however morally unacceptable.
We, as a nation, have used political sanctuary very politically—granting it almost automatically when we wanted to punish a regime such as Red China and then not granting it Chinese when our political interests changed, but their persecution of dissidents didn’t.
I am willing to risk my comfort and break laws when lives are on the line. I remain a screaming liberal when it comes to real sanctuary—sanctuary based on immanent danger and not simply economic discomfort or displacement. I may not like the reality of the world, that some are born rich and some poor, some in wealthy nations and others in hellholes of starvation and oppression. I believe we all have duties to help heal our world, but I have lived in the Third World long enough to know that no one individual nor any one nation can solve every problem or save every needy and deserving person.
I do not call for open borders. I do not think it is the birthright of everyone who wants to come to come. I would like some fairness in our immigration policy—fairness that must be built on truth. At the moment there is little candor and lots of politics in dealing with immigration—legal and illegal. We need to admit our need for cheap labor. We need to stop looking the other way when the people who make our life-style sustainable petition for us to accept the facts of our shared situation and shared needs. We also have to admit that we do not have the way or the will to deport 12 to 15 million people. Some will get caught and some will not. It isn’t fair, but it is true, just as birth and wealth aren’t fair. But these are matter of immigration.
Sanctuary is entirely different and Elvira Arellano, whatever her virtues or vices, is not a political refugee. She is a pursuer of the American Dream. I am glad that people still want to come here. I am enriched by their language, culture and what they do to support my way of life. I want to deal fairly with them. I think we did deal fairly with her. I have no complaints other than she damaged the cause of true political refugees by relabeling and mislabeling the word “sanctuary.”
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