America's Callous Border

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Several years ago, a gray-haired passport control official at Heathrow Airport in London, noting “writer” under “occupation” on my landing card, asked me what I wrote. I was finishing a book on civil liberties, I told him, with a chapter on immigration. That caught his interest. He leaned forward, glanced around, lowered his voice and said, “I loathe borders.”

    Funny line of work you’re in, I said. We shared a chuckle, he stamped my passport, and I crossed the border that he loathed.

                We have nation states, and so we have borders. Dictatorships need them to keep people in, lest their countries be drained of the talented and the aspiring. Democracies need them to keep people out—often those with talent and aspiration who are fleeing to safety and opportunity. So far, the United States is lucky enough to be the latter. So far.

                When desperate fathers and mothers are drawn with admiring naïveté to the beacon of America, when they carry their children through months of torment by mountain jungles and predatory gangs, when their courage and towering fortitude set them apart from the masses, shouldn’t they be embraced when they reach the final border of a nation of fellow immigrants that touts its compassion and humanity?

                Cut through the crazy tangle of immigration laws, regulations, and inconsistent enforcement to the essential ethic, and the answer is an obvious yes. But the obvious is not obvious in the White House or in the Department of Homeland Security or in the ranks of the beleaguered Border Patrol, whose horsemen scramble, as if herding cattle, to intercept frantic Haitians wading from the Rio Grande onto the banks of freedom and promise.

California's Next Step (I'm Kidding)

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Now that Californians have crushed Republicans’ effort to recall Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom (with 63.9 percent of the votes at last count), maybe the left ought to try what the right has done in Texas: Let anyone sue anyone who helps anyone do something you don’t like. In the case of Texas, it’s getting an abortion.

Imagine if liberal California—or New York, or the District of Columbia, for example—did the same on issues dear to the hearts of “progressives.” The Texas law recently enacted by radical Republicans allows anyone in the entire country to bring a civil suit against anyone in the state who helps a woman exercise her constitutional right to abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected. Any bounty hunter who wins in court gets $10,000 plus legal fees from the suit’s target, whether doctor, nurse, receptionist, or possibly the Uber driver who takes the woman to the clinic.

The tactic is designed to remove the state as the enforcer and thereby befuddle the courts, which otherwise might enjoin government from putting the law into effect. That gave five anti-abortion Supreme Court justices just enough leeway to refuse to block the Texas law, even temporarily. So, let’s consider what the left might do in return.

First, California could pass a law allowing anyone who refused to be vaccinated against Covid to be sued by anyone anywhere in the country. Going unvaccinated is an obvious public health threat, and while legitimate medical and perhaps religious exceptions could be made, those refusing the shots incubate evolving variants and endanger children and the immunocompromised. Therefore, under the Texas formula, everyone has what judges call “standing” to sue.

The Scars of 9/11

 

By David K. Shipler 

                About a dozen years after September 11, 2001, I asked a class of college undergraduates what they remembered about the attacks. They had been kids, and those who answered remembered most vividly their parents’ reactions, not their own. It was a fascinating illustration of one dynamic of trauma: the response of those around you figures into how you carry the injury forward. So it has been with the country’s behavior in the last twenty years.

                Chaya Roth, a Holocaust survivor whose mother and sister were repeatedly sheltered and saved by non-Jews as they fled across Europe, eventually recognized the healing effect of the courageous generosity—a post-traumatic syndrome of another kind. “That is why I never lost faith or hope in people,” she told me. “If one goes through difficult times, but comes out of these alive, it is because in the last analysis there was someone who provided help.”

                What has happened among Americans? Yes, at first we rallied in an uplifting sense of kinship. Three days after 9/11, as I drove to Kent State in Ohio for a colloquium on race, every American flag hanging from an overpass brought a rush of mournful pride, almost tears. At the university, during a small reception, a professor who was surely a star in her church choir suddenly began singing “America the Beautiful.” Some wept openly, others wept within, both in sorrow and in celebration of the bonds of harmony.

 And then? The administration of President George W. Bush, combined with local police departments across the country, proceeded to inflict damage on civil liberties that no subsequent president or Congress has been brave enough to repair. The FBI was instructed to investigate every citizen’s tip, no matter how ludicrous or obviously based on personal vendetta. One FBI agent told me that some of his colleagues shared his distaste for the strategy, worrying that innocents would be targeted.

As indeed they were. Muslims were surveilled, hounded, and jailed on the slimmest of pretexts, and held for months during slow-paced background checks that uncovered no terrorists but might naturally have sown the seeds of antipathy toward the United States. The consequences for those illegally in the country were so severe that abused wives feared calling the police, and some undocumented Pakistani residents fled from the US to Canada seeking asylum. When Canadian authorities couldn’t process them fast enough, they crammed into churches and homes in northern Vermont or took refuge in their own vehicles in the deep of winter.