On immigration

"At his first campaign rally, Mr. trump pledged to remove “millions” of undocumented immigrants. The frenzied crowd of red hats cheered. 

This time again, Mr. Trump skillfully uses a tactic he knows best: raising fear and anger.  Anger at those “criminals who broke our laws”; fear in the heart of ethnic diasporas whose names and skin colors could make them targets of police profiling.

Now that the fight against abortion and for gun rights is in our stagnant courtrooms, tugged away from the flow and web of human passion, immigration is the perfect offensive weapon for Republicans. Indeed, it is an important issue to address, even if it is not the crisis that it is made to be. Immigration is blamed for many of our problems: job opportunities and pay structure; illicit drug trade and crime; allocation of resources for social services. At a deeper level, immigration touches our cultural and moral emotions, and stirs our racial and tribal anxieties.  Sadly, at the end, what determines election turnout is not facts and rational debates, but darker feelings whipped by social media and campaign slogans. Remember the “Lock Her Up” chants.

There is a definite danger to let Mr. Trump set the tone of the election season. Current presidential Democratic candidates have proposed their own “great ideas”, but few if any have adequately addressed immigration issues. Political rhetorics come and go. All of us Americans need to work toward a long-term solution that is economically fair, logistically sound, and morally just."

(Submitted June 20, 2019; published in the Gazette Times, June 26, 2019)