Repealing DACA is cruel, stupid, and deeply counterproductive

The bishops oppose it. Even a number of the GOP oppose it.  But Good White Christian Trump supporters defend this wicked cruelty.

Try seeing Reason. From a purely economic perspective (which is the least important to Christians who care about the gospel but supposedly the most important to the false Christian freak show of “conservative American Christians”, DACA beneficiaries put in $60 billion more in taxes than they consume in benefits. That means about $275 billion in economic and fiscal contributions. And since it costs the US $10,000 to deport a Dreamer, the total deportation cost of all of them would be about $10 billion, adding up to over a quarter trillion total hit to America.

The problem is, sin makes the Freak Show stupid. And so even this powerful economic argument is not enough. Because what is driving this is not economics, but racist malice that cause Good White Christian Trump supporters to cut off their own noses to spite their faces. These are kids who are American in all but a bit of paperwork. “Sending them back where they came from” means, in reality, deporting them to a place that is as much a foreign country to them as it would be to any other born and bred American. It is precisely the kind of deportation the Church condemn as intrinsically and gravely immoral in Veritatis Splendor:

Reason attests that there are objects of the human act which are by their nature “incapable of being ordered” to God, because they radically contradict the good of the person made in his image. These are the acts which, in the Church’s moral tradition, have been termed “intrinsically evil” (intrinsece malum): they are such always and per se, in other words, on account of their very object, and quite apart from the ulterior intentions of the one acting and the circumstances. Consequently, without in the least denying the influence on morality exercised by circumstances and especially by intentions, the Church teaches that “there exist acts which per seand in themselves, independently of circumstances, are always seriously wrong by reason of their object”.¹³¹ The Second Vatican Council itself, in discussing the respect due to the human person, gives a number of examples of such acts: “Whatever is hostile to life itself, such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide; whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in women and children; degrading conditions of work which treat labourers as mere instruments of profit, and not as free responsible persons: all these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honour due to the Creator”.

It is as damnable as abortion, slavery, euthanasia, or torture.  It will be, if implemented, as heinous a blot on the United States as the Trail of Tears or the internment of the Japanese.  It tempts the wrath of God.

And that is *why* it is attractive to Trump and his Good White Christian supporters.  They aren’t thinking about economics.  They are thinking about vengeance against their brown inferiors.  If they can get some mindless punishment enacted, they are gung ho to do it even if it costs a trillion dollars.

Of course, the Righteous appeal to legalism as their defense.  Paperwork–precious, sacred paperwork–is the excuse for this mindless act of revanchism.  They babble about the “rule of law”, all while celebrating Trump’s pardon last week of Joe Arpaio, a lawless criminal who ran what he called “concentration camps” and oversaw a regime of criminality whose neglect killed babies and allowed the repeated rape of children.  He gets a pardon and the Righteous say nothing.  But when the bishops call for pardon for an entire population guilty of no crime and of tremendous benefit to the United States, the Righteous murmur that man was made for paperwork, not paperwork for man and demand the mass deportation of innocents for the sin of being brown.

God sees.

Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever. – Thomas Jefferson