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.
