The Southern Border

The current presidential campaign has already been characterized by an amazing amount of obfuscatory rhetoric, confusing policy zigzags, and inconsistent argumentation—and we are still almost five months away from the actual election and, other than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., there still aren’t any actual candidates out there, by which I mean candidates formally nominated by their parties to run for the office of President. Nonetheless, and barring the kind of catastrophe that in our gun-crazed society can never really be ruled out, we all know that the next president of the United States is going to be one of two individuals. And neither is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

For me and for many, the ultimate decision about how to cast my ballot will have to do with the candidates record on supporting Israel, and particularly during the war in Gaza that has lasted now for well over 200 days. I suppose that won’t surprise anyone at all among my readers, since I have basically been writing ever since October 7 solely about issues relating to Israel, and particularly to the events of that horrific day and their aftermath in Israel and around the world (and particularly on American college campuses). But there are other issues to consider. And today I’d like to write about one of them.

Americans like to reference their country—our country—as a nation of immigrants, a phrase made famous by then-Senator John F. Kennedy as the title of his 1958 book on the topic. And, for all it has gone out of fashion (to put it mildly) to celebrate our country as one founded and populated by colonialist settlers from other lands who—other than to massacre them or herd them onto reservations—mostly ignored the presence of native people in this place who surely thought of the land our nation occupies as their own, the reality remains in place that our nation’s Founders were either immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, which could also be said of the vast majority of American citizens today. (To refer to the enslaved ancestors of today’s Black Americans as “immigrants” seems both offensive and ridiculous, even grotesque. But, horrific though their story may be, they too came here from somewhere else.) And that truth—that, for better or worse, we actually are a nation of immigrants, just as JFK put it in his book—is at the core of our current issues with immigration.

In other words, President Biden’s decision to issue an executive order earlier this month closing the southern border when our officials are literally overwhelmed by a surge of would-be immigrants seeking to cross the border illegally needs to be evaluated in its historical sense as well as its political one.

The order itself feels almost banal. Targeting only people attempting to cross the border illegally, the order decrees that the border be closed once the average of such people trying to cross into the United States in a seven-day period exceeds 2,500 a day, and only re-opened after that figure drops to 1,500 for seven consecutive days and stays at that number or less for a two-week period. But nothing about our immigration policy is ever that simple. But between the two obvious response-positions—the one wondering why any illegal immigration should be tolerated at all  and the other wondering how a “nation of immigrants” can deny safe haven in this place to any newcomers at all when almost all Americans are personally descended from people who sought safe haven in this place themselves—between those two extremist positions there should be a middle-ground approach that features both charity for the desperate and respect for the law. Complicating all of this, of course, is the nightmarish images that still haunt the American psyche of children being ripped from their parents’ arms just a few years ago, an unbelievable 1,200 of whom have still not been reunited with their families. (For the government’s own avowal of that figure, click here.) For Jewish Americans, of course, it is impossible to contemplate the image of children—any children at all—being dragged away from their families and then forced somehow to survive on their own, or at least without their parents, without evoking the most horrific Shoah memories. And I suppose that is also the case for a large number of non-Jewish Americans as well.

Another part of this, and surely not just for Jewish Americans, is the challenge of setting the whole concept of barring the desperate or the eager from entering our country in its historical context. And that is  a long, complicated story.

We can start with the Page Act of 1875, which had as its specific point, to quote its sponsor in the House, one Horace Page (R-California), “to end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women” by making it illegal for Chinese women to immigrate to the United States. And then, seven years later, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made it illegal for any Chinese laborers, male or female, to enter the United States.

The Immigration Act of 1917 went a step further still, barring all immigration from Pacific Island nations and from the Far East, but also imposing literacy tests on would-be immigrants as well as creating for the first time categories of people to whom immigration was to be denied without respect to national origin. The sanitized expressions “mentally defective individuals” and  “persons with constitutional psychopathic inferiority” were used to deny openly gay people the possibility of entry, along with undesirable “illiterates, imbeciles, insane persons, and paupers.” But it was the Immigration Act of 1924, framed in its day as a mere extension of the earlier act, that for the first time established immigration quotas. Formally, the idea was to restrict immigration to a number equivalent to 2% of the number of Americans who claimed that nation as their ancestral home in the 1890 census. Why it was deemed desirable at all, let alone crucial, for the ethnic balance of the populace to be maintained by law is a good question. But it’s not that relevant a one, because the real purpose of the Act was to keep out Italians, Greeks, Poles, and (I can’t help thinking especially) Eastern European Jews, all of which groups were coming here in numbers that far exceeded the percentage of the population that was already occupied by people of that heritage or national origin. I hardly have to pause to note what happened to those Jews who would have come here to start new lives, but who were instead condemned to be present when the Nazis occupied their homelands. Nor do I have to say out loud that this specifically is the baggage Jewish Americans bring to this debate, that sense that millions died because of an act of Congress inspired by the xenophobic and anti-Semitic desire to preserve the nation’s religious and ethnic mosaic in the future precisely as it had been in the past.

And then there is the counter-narrative, the one that finds it reasonable for the great statue of Lady Liberty in New York Harbor to have on its base engraved the words of Emma Lazarus’s “The Great Colossus,” which poem was actually written in the first place to raise the funds necessary to construct the pedestal atop which the statue would eventually be set. This is my personal way into the debate because I have truly loved that poem ever since I was obliged to learn it by heart as a student in Mrs. Gilbert’s sixth-grade class at P.S. 196. And it was the poet’s description of the statue as “a mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning and her name the Mother of Exiles” that was the most resonant with me because my people came here fleeing persecution from towns in Poland and Belarus in which, as far as I know, no Jews at all survived the Nazi occupation. And the rest of the poem spoke equally directly to the young me. When I read that “from her beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome,” I imagined the three of my foreign-born grandparents passing through Ellis Island and wondering what fate awaited them here. And when the poet imagined Lady Liberty herself addressing the decaying lands of the Old World and imploring them to send to us “your tired, your poor,” your homeless and tempest-tost, and that they would be welcomed by Lady Liberty herself, on duty 24/7 holding aloft her “lamp beside the golden door,” I felt that the values embedded in those words were precisely what made America great.

So was President Biden protecting our nation with his executive order or betraying our core values of inclusivity, tolerance, hospitality, and empathy? I suppose we shall find out soon enough. If this really is just a way to keep the authorities from being overwhelmed with desperate people eager to find a safe, prosperous place in which to raise their children, then it’s hard to find a good reason to be opposed: surely, no good can come from the system in place breaking down and ceasing to function well or at all. But, in the end, if this is really a way to close the border precisely to the people Emma Lazarus had in mind when she composed her poem, then it’s hard to feel sanguine about the nation’s future. Consider the poet’s words, “From her beacon-hand / glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command / the air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.” In Emma Lazarus’s day, the twin cities were New York and Brooklyn. But although Brooklyn has been part of New York City since 1898, the poet’s sentiments are no less relevant today than they were when she wrote the poem fifteen years before the expansion of New York City from just Manhattan to the city it is today and defined, at least for me, what the most basic of all American values was to her and should be for us all.