As the misguided hysteria surrounding the separation of illegal alien families at the border reaches fever pitch, a cohort of “progressive” organizations under the umbrella of “Families Belong Together” are organizing a nationwide protest on June 30th.
The groups include the usual suspects like MoveOn.org, Soros-funded Priorities USA, the Women’s March, Obama-affiliated Organizing for Action, the ACLU, the SEIU, and Planned Parenthood.
The news of this astroturfed “grassroots” protest is being enthusiastically shared in a variety of leftstream news and media outlets including those targeted at teens: Seventeen and Teen Vogue.
The underlying premise for the protest, however, is faulty, as the prof noted:
The border separation issue is a real issue, but it’s a problem caused entirely by foreigners who bring their children with them on the dangerous and illegal trek across the U.S. border. It’s not a problem caused by Trump.The result is child exploitation by Democrats and open borders advocates (increasingly one and the same) who simultaneously argue: (a) you can’t separate a child from an arrested parent, and (b) you can’t detain the child with the arrested parent. So the only alternative for #TheResistance is to allow foreigners to evade and avoid U.S. immigration laws so long as they bring a child with them. This guarantees that using children as immigration human shields will continue.
The National Domestic Workers Alliance, a sponsor of the “Families Belong Together” cohort, posted a petition that contains some revealing language:
Don’t let Trump’s latest move fool you: Children are still being jailed, and they’re still being separated from their families–both at the border and at ICE detention facilities across the country. Demand the Trump Administration stop caging children and jailing their parents IMMEDIATELY — and reunite jailed children with their families. Families belong together, and free! [emphasis in original]. . . . The Trump administration is causing lifelong trauma to children — whether taken by Border Patrol, jailed alongside their parents after seeking safety, or snatched from their school by ICE. Their claims of compassion are false — this crisis is proof that this administration does not care about the wellbeing of children or families. Families deserve to seek asylum without fear of jail or family separation. [emphasis mine]
Children “jailed” alongside their parents, as a family unit, would seem to meet the demand that “Families Belong Together,” the purported goal of the protests. However, here we have another requirement, not only that families be together but that they also be “free.”
“Freeing” illegal aliens and not “jailing” them as they enter our country illegally, however, amounts to advocacy for open borders.
Notably absent from the published list of regressive groups involved in the June 30th protest is Soros’ Open Borders Foundation.
Much of the radical left is not yet willing to admit that they are, indeed, for open borders, so they are amping up the disingenuous “family separation” narrative to simultaneously conceal and to lay the groundwork for—to “nudge” toward—mass support of open borders.
Writing at the Week, Damon Linker lays out the “Immigration Trap” the fringe left and Socialist Democrats are galloping into in their hazy #Resistance fury. Linker warns that pushing for de facto open borders will result in the opposite.
If you wanted to ensure the eventual triumph of immigration restrictionism in the United States, you couldn’t devise a surer path to that goal than getting the Democratic Party to explicitly embrace a policy of de facto open borders.Unfortunately, this is precisely where the liberal reaction to President Trump’s viciously harsh immigration policies is headed.. . . . In reaction to the administration’s brutality, liberals have moved further than ever in the direction of embracing the view that enforcing the distinction between those who enter the country legally and illegally, and punishing or deporting those in the latter category, is morally suspect. From there it is one small step to declaring and defending a right to the free movement of persons across borders.Without even taking that last small step, the center-left’s sweeping declarations of universal humanitarianism play into Trump’s xenophobic hands by lending plausibility to his claim that he’s defending the good of the country by combating “extremist open border Democrats.”
For now, Democrats are piling on the issue because they believe it will resurrect their “blue wave” in November’s midterms; that, however, is unlikely because it’s simply a bridge too far for the majority of Americans.
This is not just a rerun of the argument Americans have been conducting about what to do about the estimated 11 million plus illegal immigrants that were already here during the Obama administration and whether they deserved some form of amnesty up to and including a path to citizenship. Now the appeal for not merely mercy and compassion but for amnesty applies to those crossing the border now, with or without children.The political impact of this development has made the already dim chances of passing any sort of compromise on immigration — even on the status of those brought here illegally as children — even more difficult to reach.In part this is because Democrats believe the furor over the children might be the silver bullet they’ve been searching for to decisively defeat Trump and help generate a blue wave at the polls in the midterm elections this fall.. . . . At this point, it is hard to see what this all amounts to other than an argument for open borders. And that is why, once the anger about the images and audio of crying children are no longer the only topic of discussion, this controversy may not be the decisive political edge Democrats think it is.
The calls for an outright declaration of their open borders agenda are already beginning to materialize.
In a New Yorker article entitled “Trump’s Opponents Aren’t Arguing for “Open Borders”—But Maybe They Should,” Masha Gessen advocates stripping away the facade and boldly declaring the actual goal.
The arguments presented by Gessen: Immigration is a “human right” and the “right of the governed” is violated in the case of illegal aliens who are “governed” but have no vote.
In a recent academic collection, Kieran Oberman, a political theorist at the University of Edinburgh, makes the case for a human right to immigration. He argues that the right to enter a country and spend any amount of time there—though not necessarily the right to obtain citizenship—flows naturally from universally declared human rights to freedom of movement, freedom of association, and freedom of occupational choice.In an interconnected world, it is often necessary to cross borders for personal, professional, and political reasons. The last is the most interesting part of Oberman’s argument: the right to meaningfully participate in politics—to exercise the human right to freedom of assembly—increasingly requires individual action, and movement, across borders.Sarah Fine, a political philosopher at King’s College, in London, who is working on a book on the “right to exclude,” or the right of states to keep people out, has raised another provocative argument. If democracy is a system that guarantees the right of the governed to participate in the governing process, then democracy confined to protected national borders contains an internal contradiction.Those who are banned from entering a country are, in effect, governed—the Central American mother at the border whose child is ripped away from her by U.S. Border Patrol agents is being governed in the extreme—yet they have no say in the rules, or in the election of those who make them.Neither Oberman’s nor Fine’s lines of thought are arguments for open borders, though perhaps they should be. And, contrary to official declarations, opposition to Trump’s war on immigrants does not rest on the defense of open borders. But thoughtful opposition should include at least questioning the facile dichotomies and the unchallenged premises that undergird the current immigration conversation.
The idea behind the June 30 “Families Belong Together” protests relies on the use of children and of families as pawns . . . while denying that is what they are doing.
Yet the focus of the planned protest is only nominally about the children and not at all about keeping families together—unless they are “free.”
“Families Belong Together” provides some nifty graphics for use on social media and on posters including “Defund ICE” and “Defund Border Patrol.”
How does a protest of a single aspect of immigration law and policy (family separation) morph into defunding the Border Patrol and ICE? It doesn’t . . . unless the goal is open borders.
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