The Lower Moral High Ground

We do not have an immigrant and refugee problem. We have immigrants and refugees with problems. The immigrants and the refugees are not the problem. The issues confronting them are the problem.

These are people in extreme conditions. People don’t just pick up and leave their friends, families and homelands at the drop of a hat. They face certain hardship. Why would someone do that? Because they they have to - not to starve, not to be killed or not be persecuted. Rarely do they move like that just for the hell of it.  It is not a decision taken lightly. It never has been. 

To call it an immigrant or refugee problem is to make the displaced people the problem.  Making it seem as if removing the immigrants and refugees removes the problem.  It doesn’t. Wars, dictatorships, ethnic cleansing, death squads and geo-politics are the biggest culprits. But this is nothing new to us. We have been here before many times. Many refugee crises have there been? How many waves of immigrants - Pilgrims, Irish, German,  Jews, Protestants, Catholics, Russians, North Africans, South Americans and Asians, just to name a few? 

You would think we would have this down to a science, and we would if we used more common sense and kept politics out of it.

How should we improve on the challenges to immigrant and refugee communities? We should start by thinking about the words - insisting that our politicians stop sounding like David Duke or Geert Wilders and start sounding like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin. Then we might begin to look like the country we think we are or the country we are meant to be.