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Young, desperate immigrants and refugees to the USA are caught between two sides of a debate on “principles” after having suffered in their home countries and again in this democratic society

In recent years, crushing poverty, gang violence and the flow of illegal drugs – each year worth more than the GDP of some of their home countries – have forced increasing numbers of children to flee their homes, mainly in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. These children travel hundreds of miles to the United States, where there is a chance that the government will grant them asylum due to their circumstances. Arriving without adult guardians, as “unaccompanied minors”, they are supposed to undergo a process to determine if the nightmares forcing them to flee were bad enough to earn them some shelter.

Right now, tens of thousands of these kids languish in warehouses, indefinitely awaiting that process. Adding insult to injury, some of the seedier, viler legacies of spoiled American entitlement have energised right-wing activists to confront and terrify the children, most notably this summer in the city of Murrieta, California. These anti-child thugs, the latest in a long tradition of nativist alarmists, held protests demanding that the kids be turned away. Disappointingly, President Obama responded promptly, calling for a speed-up in deportations. The collaboration between right-wing activists and an ever-accommodating democratic president has already begun to bear its bitter fruit. At least one of the children that Obama deported is already dead.

Is it really about principles over suffering?

The message that these refugee children are sending is clear, and it’s at the centre of this essay, even if the stories on television are more about the “principles” of a select number of Americans: “we need help”. Adults in this country need to take the pleas seriously. To treat this life or death situation as secondary to personal opinions is frivolous and callous.

As happens all too often in affairs of this kind, political expediency gives greater weight to the complaints of the comfortable than the anguish of the vulnerable. To curry favour, or to escape deserved condemnation, the concerned public is told by the politicians that this issue is not about children suffering so much as it is about principles.

Enter the corporate media

The corporate media can frame things by amplifying the right-wing principle: a desire to maintain an unwelcoming, paranoid society, forever on the lookout for threats. The frenzied, hostile and judging fantasy of nativist hate transforms the children; little hands extended in yearning for rescue undergo a metamorphosis into dirty, unrecognisable appendages projecting forward lustily into all corners of The Homeland by an obscene desire to wrest away the tools utilised in honest labour by more deserving servants.

This terrified and self-absorbed narrative, as stupid as it may be, serves a useful purpose. It gives the corporate media a group of good guys (or bad guys for you lefties out there!) to contrast against the evil refugee kids, who look like replacements for the earlier immigrants and that makes them scary.

These attention-seeking-holier-than-thou foot soldiers of air-conditioned leisure get a lot of airtime on TV, because they confirm that the sadness at the heart of a consumerist society cannot be gentled away, no matter how many bags of chips, Sunday catharses, motivational YouTube videos or addictions they indulge in. Instead of addressing these serious social problems, they project their self-loathing outward. “It’s not about anybody’s suffering – it’s about my principles.”

The “other” side of the argument

The pro-refugee, pro-immigrant counter-protestors – themselves also liberally festooned in all manner of red, white and blue regalia and sharing a similar view of their colonial family histories – insist that principles, like those enshrined in the constitution, show us how we can make good Americans out of these kids. Just give them a chance.

But this is not a story about America and its promise, no matter how many flags people wave. Nor is this about the red-faced temper-tantrums of over-privileged conservatives. This is a story about the suffering that dominates too many and too much of our lives. The attention to such combined performances of conservative xenophobia and model immigrant patriotism serves to distract from our responsibility to change how we work and live together in a society filled with flimsily-concealed, but all-too-real, hierarchies operating to exploit women, children, immigrants and people of colour.

Observers looking for a concrete case illustrating current liberal versus conservative positions on immigration in the U.S. would need to look no further than to the memorandum Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) enacted by the Obama administration in mid-2012. DACA, applying to undocumented immigrants under 31 years of age meeting certain requirements, does not allow for a “pathway to citizenship”, the key liberal phrase in this debate, but enables individuals to stay in the country and to find work legally. The Republican House majority symbolically neutered DACA in August of this year, as the Murrieta story persisted; however, this measure will stall in the Democrat-led Senate.

Both of these positions on DACA offer a vision of a neoliberal world order that puts the needs of employers exploiting immigrants above any other consideration. The liberal efforts aim to rationalise tight capitalist control over a fully transparent economy, while the conservatives prefer racialist authoritarianism, leaving the reality for millions of workers as it is: a monumental open secret.

Who stands to gain?

Let’s call into question the classic binary of good versus evil required by the infotainment industry by pointing out that refugees and migrants are great, awesome people. And let’s insist that dehumanising rhetoric is unacceptable in our society and cannot be buried beneath flags and vignettes about hard-working ancestors.

While migrants and refugees – not to mention millions of people who may “look” or “sound” like them – are exposed to unrelenting stigmatisation and discrimination, they are too often treated as a blank slate to be covered in the epithets or defences offered by those who deny or affirm their humanity.

This dynamic works to the advantage of those who demonise the refugee or migrant. The liberal left attempts to play a lose-lose role of referee between the business interests who amass epic fortunes on the backs of migrants, and the conservative Joes and Jane Sixpacks who use the politics of hate to drive refugees and immigrants into more precarious flight. Whether from or into the hands of the government or businesses, this dynamic tragically illustrates the priority of poverty wages over basic necessities and protections in this country. The mainstream media reinforces this country’s most easily digested stories about immigrants – constructed on a social, historical, and cultural foundation that reinforces the employers’ narrative first, the xenophobes’ next, with a little room for the perspective of those who model the “right way” to assimilate.

Putting our foot down

We can make the choice to protect these children and to demand decent wages for all workers, wherever they were born. Many people in the U.S. would agree that businesses shouldn’t profit from desperation – but instead of supporting a movement to put down our collective foot and say, “No one who contributes to society should be paid poverty wages, starting today,” we are encouraged by the framing of the immigration debate to argue whether certain workers deserve reasonable treatment at all.

And that’s simply not the debate we should be having.

Photo Credits: AP / Rebecca Blackwell