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Once, when our daughter was six, the three of us were shopping at a new grocery store that opened near our house. Because of the building’s location and shape, the layout of the store was odd; short narrow aisles separated by a single middle row which ran the length of the store.
At one point, our daughter went to get something from down the aisle. She turned the corner to grab the item, and by the time we reached the end of the aisle, she had vanished. Later, we would find out that she couldn’t find what she was looking for, so she asked an employee to show her where it was. The panic lasted for less than a minute, when she came bouncing back around the corner, item in hand, grin on her face. But in that moment, for that span of time that lasted an eternity, she was gone.
Fifteen years later I still have nightmares about that day.
Later that year, we made the agonizing decision to let her go live with her birth father in Maryland. It was so hard for us, especially her mother, to let her baby girl go live with her father in another state. I can’t begin to understand the anguish my wife felt, watching her child get into a car and drive out of sight. She would rejoin our family some months later, and never leave it again, but those months passed filled with sorrow and silence, emptiness and despair.
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This week, as I read the paper or watch the news, like so many others, my heart breaks for the families torn apart at our southern border. I read phrases like “zero tolerance” and “illegal immigrants,” “asylum seekers” and “infest our country” and “crime.” I hear political pundits arguing the nuances of policies and enforcement, ports of entry and the like. Simultaneously, I see images of children being stripped from their parents, alone in a foreign land, with a foreign tongue. On the news, I hear the cries of these children echoing from their chain link cages. My questions, however, lie outside of these political questions. My questions are about the human stories.
The majority of asylum seekers at our southern border are from three central American countries; Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. This area, known as the Northern triangle, is home to gang activity, corruption and extreme poverty. According to a United Nations report, the homicide rates in Honduras and El Salvador last year were 57.62 and 82.84 per 100,000 respectively. The United States homicide rate, although high compared to the global average, is approximately 5.35 per 100,000. The distance from San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, to El Paso, Texas, the most proximate port of entry for asylum seekers, is just in excess of 2,000 miles. It begs the question:
How bad is life in these countries that their emigrants would be willing to risk this journey?
Sometimes, we Americans, myself included, forget what “desperate” really means. It is almost impossible to imagine a life so hard, so full of anguish, poverty, and desperation, that mothers are willing to leave everything they have and travel thousands of miles to a new country, armed only with the faint hope that their children will not have to suffer like they did/do; life so overcome by fear that you would risk the journey to a new land, a land which speaks a different language, knowing that your children might be separated from you as soon as you arrive.
This, of course, is not to discount the struggles that many Americans face on a daily basis. Imagine though, the violence and poverty being so bad in the United States, that you thought it would be better for your children to leave everything behind and travel thousands of miles to a country where you cannot communicate, to seek protection from you’re the turmoil of your own homeland.
How brave must these parents be?
I have spent a great deal of time this week thinking about the children of these families, how scared they must feel, how different their world must look right now. However, I take solace in the knowledge that children can be resilient. Children have a unique way of finding hope in situations where hope seems all but lost. Children are beautiful that way. Still, as a parent, my whole being aches for these mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters and grandparents who traveled across Central America only to reach our border and be told that there was no more room, or come back later when we have more space available.
I mourn for those mothers and fathers who had their children taken from them, separated under the guise of illegality. Perhaps for them, it was worth it to seek out a better life for their children. Perhaps their job was simply to get them across the border, to give them an opportunity they never had.
For centuries, people have immigrated to our country seeking refuge from tyranny or oppression, seeking safety from the violence of their homeland, seeking prosperity in a land of opportunity. We have never turned them away. “The New Colossus” at the base of the Statue of Liberty says:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
I am not a lawmaker. I don’t write this column as an act of political interrogation. I write this column as a parent, and as a child, and as a human. I don’t know what the solution to this problem is, nor do I pretend to. I don’t know what the right policy decision would be. I know that we can do better. Me must do better.
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Photo credit: MCML ➖XXXIII (steal my _ _ art)