ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION THEN AND NOW

            In 1850 Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which was part of the Compromise of 1850 that, it was hoped, would prevent what was seen to be an impending civil war. The Compromise delayed the Civil War by eleven years and cost Henry Clay his life and Daniel Webster, an abolitionist from New Hampshire, his reputation.

            The Fugitive Slave Act required that slaves who escaped to a non-slave state be returned to their enslavers. The act was unpopular in the North and actively circumvented by many, which brings me to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

            Congress had acted. The law was the law. I’m sure many people then, as today, looked on it as “escaped slaves are illegal; what part of illegal don’t they understand?” One such person in the novel is Tom Bird, an Ohio state senator, who arrives at his home in Cincinnati and explains the law to Mary, his usually timid wife, who asks about feeding, clothing, and allowing escaped slaves to go on their way. Tom responds that she would be aiding and abetting. She asks if he thinks such a law is right and Christian. They  get into quite a discussion of right and wrong. Tom remains adamant that the law must be followed. Mary finally tells John he wouldn’t turn away a poor shivering runaway at his door because he was a runaway. He responds, “It would be a very painful duty.”

            Very soon Tom learns that, in the very next room, Eliza Harris and her son, Jim, were recovering from Eliza’s run across ice flows on the Ohio River.

            It should be noted here Eliza’s son Jim is around age four and was destined to be sold to a “man who buys up handsome boys to raise for market.”

            Once Tom has heard Eliza’s story, he aids her trek north, taking her and Jim to the next stop on the Underground Railway.

            For Tom it was easy to support a law requiring that fugitive slaves be returned in the abstract, but not so much when a concrete example of an escaped slave winds up in his kitchen.

            Fast forward to 2025. Undocumented immigrants are suddenly anathema and must be deported. Even those who have been here decades, married, paid taxes, lived peaceful lives, owned businesses that provided employment for others are finding themselves criminals. Nicholas Kristoff writes of Moises Sotelo, who was deported to Mexico July 18. Sotelo had been in the U.S. since 1994 and had one DUI conviction (in 1994). He owned a vineyard management company in Newberg, Oregon, that employed several people. He was considered a pillar of his community. His arrest and deportation caused outrage in the town that had voted for Trump three times. In his article, Kristof discloses his family owns farms in the area and depends on immigrant labor.

            We have all seen TV footage of ICE arrests that come out of the blue. Masked men in civilian clothes surround someone, arrest them, and throw them in unmarked cars. People show up at hearings for asylum or citizenship hearings and are whisked off to detention centers. The August 8 Wall Street Journal reports even if people in detention find legal representation, ICE plays musical detention centers so that their legal representatives don’t know where they are or show up to hearings for people who were moved hours before their hearings. Or they’re deported despite scheduled hearings.

            U.S. citizens are being stopped and held for hours. People say, “Well, they WERE released.” That’s small comfort when you’re in a cell wondering why you’re being detained.

            In June, ICE arrests at Home Depot stores and other venues in Los Angeles sparked enough protests (in one small area) that Donald Trump used the protests as an excuse to call out California’s National Guard (over the governor’s protest) as well as seven hundred Marines, who looked downright bored as they stood at attention.

            Here in Kansas City, food workers at two Mexican restaurants were arrested in front of shocked onlookers. In one of our Kansas suburbs, a woman who had arrived legally from Mexico as a child, became a citizen, and who had been elected to a city council seat was questioned about her citizenship after an alleged telephone tip, which was deleted, claimed she was undocumented.

            These are the tip of the iceberg. And these things are being done at taxpayer expense and by people who are allegedly representing what America stands for. And things promise to get worse. On August 6 Kristi Noem announced ICE will hire people as young as 18 and offer signing bonuses as high as $50,000 as well as paying off student loans for new recruits. I don’t know about anyone else, but the thought of armed and masked eighteen-year-olds loose on our streets does not give me a warm and fuzzy feeling.

            I doubt that anyone would object to undocumented people who are dangerous criminals being deported. But, in spite of the administration’s insistence that this is, in fact, what is happening, what we’re seeing is law-abiding people who do the work we won’t do, as well as students who are here legally, being stopped and disappeared. And there’s not much sense to any of it. We need those people. In 2024 Congress came up with a bipartisan bill that would have reformed immigration. Alas, Trump held enough sway that he convinced Republicans to kill the bill. He preferred an issue to a solution.

            So, we find ourselves deporting our neighbors, many of whom have been in America longer than those deporting them have been alive. Is this who we really are? Should we ask ourselves the questions Mary Bird asked her husband? And, if all else fails, should we ask ourselves how deporting people we have come to depend on for care of the elderly, crop harvesting, construction, home repair, lawn maintenance, and all the other services we take for granted in our interests? Every one of us will pay for losing the very people who have made our lives easier and affordable. And we’ll pay in ways we haven’t thought of. When my homeowner’s insurance arrived this year, there was a notice that the deductible for roof replacement had doubled. In addition to the doubled deductible, the company uses a formula for roof replacements that drastically reduces the amount they will pay. Think of those people in the recent Texas floods who discovered they had no insurance, and then think of the people here in the Midwest who discover after the inevitable hailstorm they effectively have no roof replacement insurance. And that’s in addition to all the other seen and unseen price increases resulting from deporting the very people we need.

            We elect and pay 435 representatives and 100 senators. Immigration is a problem. While it’s obvious some of these folks are not the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, there certainly should be enough mental horsepower in Congress to come up with a solution consistent with American values and not harmful to American pocketbooks—one that would make Emma Lazarus proud.

        Tell your senators and congressperson to get to work!         

         

 

DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME: A REVIEW OF KEVIN ROBERTS’ DAWN’S EARLY LIGHT: TAKING BACK WASHINGTON TO SAVE AMERICA

            Last August Kevin Roberts delayed the publication of his Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America until after the election. His publisher had originally scheduled the book to be published in September and had sent out advance copies. For some reason these advance copies were considered controversial enough to be a threat to Donald Trump’s campaign. Unless the issue was that JD Vance had written the forward to a book that is truly awful, I honestly don’t see what the fuss was all about.

            First, I don’t condemn books written by conservatives simply because they’re written by conservatives. I’ve read and reviewed books such as Patrick J. Deneen’s 2018 Why Liberalism Failed and Rod Dreher’s 2017 The Benedict Option and found in them points I could agree with, especially Dreher’s proposal that people who feel uncomfortable in a society they find too permissive join together and form communities with those who are similarly inclined. I find that preferable to the current inclination of those who find society too permissive to impose their views on those of us who are just fine with our permissive society. Sadly, I found little to agree with in Kevin Roberts’ book.

            Beginning about page 17, Mr. Roberts constantly looks to Virgil’s Aeneid for inspiration and seems to believe the poem is a historical record of the founding of Rome when in fact it was an invented origin story ripped off from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. By page 19 he’s proposing that men and women should marry for life “and do so younger than most do today” and bring children into the world “more than most do today.” He says American society is rooted in the Christian faith and favors policies that encourage religious observance such as Sabbath laws. As we might expect from someone inclined to impose his views on others, Mr. Roberts takes a Manichean view of his opponents. While he never explicitly says he’s referring to Democrats, he constantly refers to the “party of destruction” while at the same time proposes a “forest management” approach to our political system—burn down what is offensive so something new can replace it. As many who have followed this path before have found, and I’m thinking of the Russian Revolution, when we destroy something, there’s no guarantee we’ll find its replacement is an improvement. But, Mr. Roberts is in favor of throwing caution to the wind—he even refers to conservatives who want to do what conservatives used to want to do—conserve—as “wax museum conservatives.”

            Mr. Roberts favors doing away with contraceptives, IVF, and certainly abortion. As I mentioned above, he favors having a lot of children and believes families (presumably the right kind of families) should make the sacrifices necessary to raise these families with a stay-at-home mother. Oh, and big-screen TVs should be considered a contraceptive, since it might prevent people from, uh, “doin’ what comes natur'lly.”

            As we get further into the book, we find that Mr. Roberts’ father was an alcoholic, his parents divorced, and his brother committed suicide. Sadly, Mr. Roberts blames this on what ‘60s radicals used to call “the system.” He says, “the suicide of my brother, Doug, was the product of years and years of cultural decay, lies, and neglect. So many of the authority figures who should have sheltered and formed him passed the buck. Or they assumed it was someone else’s job. Or they were obsessed with their own problems. It took a village of institutions losing their way to make his death possible.”

            There are way too many grievances aired in this book to mention them all, but a few stand out. Mr. Roberts bemoans a dog park near him that allows the dogs to roam free while children are provided a presumably large fenced yard to play in--most likely to protect the children from the dogs and vice versa. (What is it with conservatives and pets? JD Vance had his “childless cat ladies;” Roberts bemoans “dog moms.”) Another is the state of Louisiana approved textbooks only in English. Now, you’d think a party that is as xenophobic as his party—and this administration—is would celebrate this fact. Alas, in Mr. Roberts’ part of Louisiana, there are many Cajuns, and Mr. Roberts believes Louisiana textbooks should accommodate these folks.

            As do most conservatives, Mr. Roberts plays fast and loose with facts. He bemoans the loss of families’ sitting down to dinner together. I’m not convinced this is actually happening, but for the sake of argument let’s say it is. Mr. Roberts then goes on to say that between 2018 and 2023 the average size of new homes shrunk by 10%, and much of this loss was the elimination of dining rooms. A quick Google check confirms the average size of a new home in 2018 was 2,486 square feet compare with 2,286 square feet in 2023. So far, so good, but…

            My parents built a new house in 1958. It was 1,650 square feet and housed my parents and four children. The dining area was part of a large family room. The house I’ve lived in for more than a quarter century was built in 1927 and has just over 1,600 square feet; it has a dining room. Going back further, let’s take a look at what was available just after World War II. Here is the floor plan of the iconic Levitt Cape Cod. There are thousands of these on Long Island and in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. In the 1970s I went to an open house at one that had not been modified. These houses are 750 square feet, have no dining rooms, and managed to accommodate the generation that produced us Baby Boomers. As you can see there are stairs in the floor plan. These went to an attic entrance and were there in the event a family might want to expand into the attic at a future date.

        So, contrary to Mr. Roberts’ implication that home builders are nefariously building cramped houses and depriving families of eating space, we can see that historically, the average home being built today is quite spacious. (Mr. Roberts has a Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas; they might want to consider repossessing it.) In fact, I would propose that if builders were willing to build and people were willing to live in Levitt-size houses, more people might be able to afford a piece of the American Dream. Further, Mr. Roberts’ belief that large homes are necessary to a family kind of makes his assertion that America needs large families with a stay-at-home mother living in a large house with a dining room a bit preposterous. Why, that would require… well, the kind of money Mr. Roberts brings home as President of the American Heritage Foundation.

            As I was reading through this tedious book, I began to wonder if the real reason the publication date was delayed was the book is just… terrible.