Clint Schnekloth
Let’s talk about immigrants and the president a bit more. You’ve probably seen the video, but in case you haven’t, watch Donald Trump read The Snake. He performs it often, even though the daughter of the author of the poem has asked him to stop. Trump has been rehearsing the lie that immigrants and refugees are like snakes for so long, you’d think he’d have the poem memorized by now.
Blame-shifting of Herculean proportions keeps our attention off a simple truth: it’s the elites, including the president at the very top, who are violating our deepest values, not the American public. PRRI reports, for example, that 75% of all Americans think the United States should offer refuge and protection for people facing danger in their own countries. 75% of independents. 90% of Democrats. Even a majority of Republicans support it (54%).
The myth that it’s the populists, or a large swathe of the white working class, who oppose welcome, is just that, a myth. And it’s a myth that shifts blame and gives a lot of power to the racists among us.
The lie also conveniently obscures the biggest liar of all, Trump himself.
Historically rural and working class peoples have been welcoming of immigrant workers (I mean, the working class is made UP of many immigrants), and many small communities all across our nation welcome refugees, often doing it even better than their big city counter-parts.
Anecdotally, I grew up in eastern Iowa and saw the welcome extended to Vietnamese refugees. I now live in Northwest Arkansas, and have witnessed a similar passion for welcoming refugees to our community. My own city, Fayetteville, recently became a Welcoming City. In communities all across our nation, immigrants and refugees help build vibrant and strong neighborhoods, invigorate schools and renew commercial districts.
The impact of Trump’s racists policies can be seen in Trump’s hometown of New York City (of New York’s 3.1 million immigrants, about 560,000 are undocumented.). The Marshall Project and New York Magazine surveyed immigrants, lawyers, and advocates in the city, and learned that some immigrants have stopped traveling, or are avoiding certain neighborhoods. Immigrants are afraid for their families, afraid to go to work, afraid at school, and even insecure if they have certain forms of legal status, such as DACA. Trump’s racist policies are especially hard on the most vulnerable immigrants, and incredibly hard on families.
Read the full report. It’s artfully done and worth the time, especially the conclusion of the article which reports on immigrant resilience and agency.
https://immigrationforum.org/article/factsheet-family-separation-at-the-u-s-mexico-border/
But treatment of immigrants in country is just one aspect of Trump’s racism implemented in policy and action. Everywhere you look, you can find more of it.
More quietly, but nevertheless with intention and purpose, Trump has eroded our historic commitment to refugee resettlement. The report card is out for 2018, and it isn’t good.
Not only did Trump drastically cut back our commitment to refugee resettlement, slicing approved admission levels from 110,000 to 45,000; we are not even hitting the goal we set for ourselves. To date, with a fiscal year ending in October of 2018, we have admitted only 16,230 refugees. We will not meet our goal, while internationally, the world is experiencing a refugee crisis.
This is intentional callousness, and it isn’t who we are.
The most egregious racist practices have been at the U.S. Mexico Border. Although public outcry and legal action has reversed some of the family separation at the border, many families are still separated, and on July 27th “the federal government failed to meet court-imposed deadlines to reunite separated children with their families.”
What Child Would Jesus Cage? Christians Join Rally for Protecting Immigrant Families
It’s important to keep in mind that families weren’t separated by the Trump administration because of administrative oversight. They were separated because of the implementation of a zero tolerance policy, and the administration knew exactly what they were doing. They contracted with private prisons to house all the additional children. It wasn’t an accident. Family separation was purposeful. The cruelty is intentional.
When such cruelty is made public, sometimes public outcry is sufficient to temporarily shame the racists into action. But we should remember that the racists are playing the long game. They will take small ameliorative forms of action in the short-term to placate the masses, while continuing their long-term strategies. So public outcry is effective, if exhausting, but also…
focus like a laser on getting out the vote. Only if we elect less racist candidates can we reverse the current xenophobic trends. Most Americans know that immigrants make us better. Most of us know it is the moral thing to welcome refugees.
We have the opportunity this fall, and then in an ongoing fashion, to vote or values.
Host a refugees welcome dinner (http://refugeeswelcometodinner.com). Here American values, Christian values, and human values all align. Remember that the Christian movement was launched with a call by Jesus to eat together regularly (1 Corinthians 11:24), and a reminder to Peter that the table should include all, Jews and Gentiles (Acts 10:9-16).
It’s not simply that Christians know racism is wrong because it’s inhumane. Christians should know racism is wrong because opposition to racism was part of the founding narrative of Christianity itself. All are one in Christ Jesus in the coming (and already arrived) kingdom (Galatians 3:28)
Remember who you were, and are. Since Israel kept repeating the mantra to itself so often that it appears dozens of times in Scripture, it’s worth repeating again here. Instead of reading a snake poem out loud, faith communities the world over remember their history. And the regular and repeated part of our history we remember? “Welcome the immigrant, refugee, and asylum seeker, for you were once immigrants in Egypt.” Welcoming immigrants, providing refuge, are important for many reasons, but one of the central ones is as an act of empathy and remembering.
When we stop welcoming immigrants and refugees, we forget who we are. When we start telling the truth about our own history as immigrants, and the truth of the value new immigrants and refugees bring to our communities, then we become our better selves.
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