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!