The Golden Door Slammed Shut

A traveler was robbed and beaten, left half-dead beside the road. Two passers-by ignored him. Finally another stopped to help, treated his wounds, took him to an inn, fed him. This story of the Good Samaritan was told by Jesus.

In 2015 I wrote about Germany generously throwing open its doors to take in about a million Syrian refugees. I criticized the Obama administration for taking only a handful. My daughter (working in the Mid East for a refugee NGO) chastized me, reminding me that no other nation has welcomed more refugees than America.

That was then.

Last week, in what The Economist calls a calculated pattern, while Trump distracted us with the “go back” outrage, his administration snuck in a big policy change that went almost unremarked. Trump’s mind is actually not organized enough for such cunning; his outrages so frequent that the timing is mere coincidence. In any case, the new policy is also an outrage.

It decrees that no refugee may apply for asylum at the border without first having been rejected by some other country. In practice this means, for most Latin Americans, the end of U.S. asylum.

To be clear, this is not about “illegal immigrants.” People have a legal right to cross our border to apply for asylum, in cases of home-country persecution or endangerment, to be adjudicated through a formal hearing process. This is codified in the 1951 international Refugee Convention and in America’s 1980 Refugee Act. Trump’s new policy (being challenged in court) violates both. Refugees will simply be turned away regardless of the legitimacy of their asylum claims under (previously) universally recognized standards.

Add this to the inhuman cruelty of separating thousands of children from parents (many impossible to reunite) and imprisoning them under horrific conditions, some dying for lack of care.*

This is America? My God, what has happened to this once-noble country? My heart is torn out. Yours should be too — if you have one.

The real point of the Good Samaritan story was that he was Samaritan. The two who passed by the injured man were pillars of the Jewish community. And Jews despised Samaritan people — the “other.” Jesus was saying that maybe their hatred for Samaritans was wrong. Maybe those “others” were at least as good as them.

Go back, you tired, you poor,

You huddled masses yearning to be free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost away.

I shut the latch upon the golden door!

* By people who say every child’s life is so sacred they oppose all abortions. Who call themselves “Christians.” Who call their critics unpatriotic.

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