On Immigration

(Note, 19 January 2018:  This was written in 2014; by the end of his presidency, Barack Obama had deported more people than all other presidents up to his time.  The trend, however, began during the presidency of his predecessor, George W. Bush.  But all of the mechanisms the Trump administration is now using were put in place under Obama, whom many pundits--left and right--referred to as the "deporter-in-chief".)

Remember when Jesus said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not, except for those brown-skinned Spanish-speaking children from south of the Rio Grande”?

Yea, me neither.

But you’d pressed hard-pressed to find any among the Republican Tea Party crowd who don’t believe (or at least wish strongly enough to believe, which is good enough for $COTU$) that was the intent when Jesus said it.  Especially swaggering Chesters like Rick Perry and Sean Hannity rushing to defend the U.S against hordes of…helpless children. 

Meanwhile, the allegedly Democratic administration is cramming the kids into dog kennels wall-to-wall and tree-top tall before packing them into buses like sardines to send them back south where they came from while Lady Liberty can do nothing but hide her face in shame.  The idea, of course, being that they don’t belong here because they have the wrong color skin and speak the wrong language.  You know, like white Europeans speaking Spanish and French and English and Dutch and Swedish back in the day coming to a land full of copper-skinned people speaking five hundred different languages.

In terms of Europeans, the Spanish were here first.  Well, after they killed of the French Huguenots at Fort Carolina at the mouth of the Altamaha River, that is.  But really to them goes credit for the first grip of an iron fist. 

The Viceroyalty of New Spain at one time took in not only Mexico but all of the Southeast and Southwest of the modern United States, including Kentucky and Virginia in the former and Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and California in the latter, along with Cuba, the Mariana Islands, and the Philippine Islands.  So, a goodly chunk of America was “theirs” first.

The antics of Perry and Hannity and their ilk plus the acquiescent collaboration of the Obama administration remind me of the MS St. Louis, particularly regarding Perry and Hannity’stea Party hate-group.  The famous “Voyage of the Damned” involved 936 Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis in Germany bound for Cuba.  After they were refused entry there, Roosevelt and his administration wanted to offer them asylum, but the Southern bloc of the Democratic Party, nicknamed Dixiecrats, blocked his plans, and they were turned away at Florida.

This was the same South which produced the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915 based on a fictitious film glorifying Jim Crow, “Birth of a Nation”.  Its immediate predecessor was not the post-war KKK but the Knights of Mary Phagan, a virulently anti-Semitic terror organization that sprang up during the Leo Frank affair and lynched the innocent man after an appeal ruled that his blatantly bigoted trial had been a miscarriage of justice and commuted his initial death sentence to life in prison.

The MS St. Louis returned to Europe after Canada likewise refused entry to its refugee passengers, but the captain, Gustav Schroeder, docked at Antwerp and refused to return to Germany until all his passengers were given sanctuary elsewhere. The UK took 288, the rest divided among France, Belgium, and Netherlands, all three of which were soon to fall to Hitler’s blitzkrieg forces.

Of the passengers of the Ship of the Damned who remained on the Continent, 365 survived the war, the others mostly dying in the death camps.

In 1948, the Zionists in Palestine established the State of Israel.  Since this seemed to fulfill the misreading of the Olivet discourse by less-than-honest Anglo-Irish theologian John Nelson Darby about Israel needing to be restored for Armageddon, suddenly the Dixiecrats decided Jews might not be so bad after all.  At least the ones in Palestine. 

The part of that passage about “when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies”? That happened in 70 CE with the Siege of Jerusalem that all but ended the Great Jewish Revolt.  The prophecy had already been fulfilled and Darby knew it, or at least was peripherally aware of it, and deliberately chose to ignore it.  James Ussher, a fellow cleric and predecessor in the (Anglican) Church of Ireland closed his rather famous work on the timeline of the New Testament with it nearly two hundred years before, in fact, and as a Church of Ireland divine, Darby could not possibly have escaped that unless his head was thoroughly buried in the peat, which it was most certainly not.  On some points Darby was very thoughtful and progressive.

With the beginning of the Reagan Revolution, virtually all the Dixiecrats turned their coats from blue to red.  The ideological forebearers of the Tea Party Republicans today are the Dixiecrats who conspired to refuse sanctuary to European Jews fleeing the Nazis in 1939.

Since the administration and its agencies began smashing the fingers of the children desperately clinging to the life raft of freedom and the right to live, between ten and twenty of them have been murdered back “home”, mostly in Central America.

(NOTE:  The Statue of Liberty in the photo is a one-quarter size replica on the Ile-des-Cygnes in the River Seine off the bank of Quartier Grenelle in Paris.)