By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, June 25, 2019
If this is the way President Trump treats his prisoners,
he doesn’t deserve to have any.
The U.S. is lousy at excluding illegal immigrants — and
at treating them humanely once they’re here.
If this is the way President Trump treats his prisoners,
he doesn’t deserve to have any.
More than 350 children have been removed from a holding
facility in Texas designed to hold about 120. The children were filthy, many of
them sick, many of them hungry, with inadequate hygiene and care. Children
seven and eight years old were looking after infants. The children had been
held for weeks in contravention of the law, under which they may be held for no
more than 72 hours.
“Don’t blame us!” says the Border Patrol. “The Department
of Health and Human Services is supposed to be looking after those kids.” HHS
in turn pleads poverty: “Operating under a deficiency,” it says. No room at the
inn.
The United States is not good at incarceration — strange,
given that we get
so much practice at it. Whether it is roasting
homeless veterans to death in Rikers Island or the systematic rape and
abuse that characterizes our prison system, Americans are among the world’s
most incompetent and dangerous jailers.
Part of that is the familiar deficiency of American
public administration — American prisons are what happen when you create a
hermetically sealed society with the DMV lady as dictator-for-life — and part
of that is our sick culture: We view rape and abuse as a motivating, and at
least wincingly tolerated, part of the penitential mix. We
make feature-length comedy films that consist of little more than prison-rape
jokes. We think the answer to terrorism is electing the guy who promises to
be “very hard on the families.”
And very hard on the families is what we are.
The problem of illegal immigration is itself the result
of massive administrative failure in the United States. By systematically
failing — and refusing — to enforce our own immigration laws, we have created
the international equivalent of what the tort lawyers call an “attractive
nuisance.” There are jobs, homes, support, and (in spite of the law) benefits
to be had in the United States, with relatively little prospect of serious
consequences for those who are caught. If you are a poor Guatemalan without
much in the way of economic and social prospects, illegal immigration to the
United States is a perfectly rational choice. Guatemala has its own
deficiencies, to be sure, but the situation here is Washington’s creation, not
Guatemala City’s.
Rather than insisting that the government do its job and
secure the borders, Americans have since the Reagan amnesty been content to
watch the ideological–social pendulum swing remorselessly back and forth —
Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump — each of the two major tribes celebrating
when its man takes the conch and lamenting when it passes to the other side,
each tribe sure that this is the variable that matters to our national peace,
prosperity, and purpose. American politics is Lord of the Flies without
the boyish vigor.
Meanwhile, nothing of substance happens on illegal
immigration, and on many other issues.
And so rather than dealing with the problem proactively,
like a nation of 325 million or so free and self-governing citizens of a
republic, many of them grown adults, we attempt to use the same anemic and
fruitless methods that failed to address the problem in the first place to deal
with it retroactively — with the inhumane results we see before us.
Of course there is much to criticize on the other side of
the border, starting with the cynical “recycling”
of children, whom illegal immigrants use, with the quiet encouragement of their
home governments, as human shields. But we cannot govern Mexico for the
Mexicans or Guatemala for the Guatemalans. We can only make available such help
as we have to offer. Still, we can and must be responsible for our own
practices, beginning with our own law enforcement.
The problem is not the so-called child-separation policy
per se. Separating children from their parents is an inevitable consequence of
enforcing not only immigration law but many other laws as well. The problem is
our inability — and maybe our vindictive unwillingness — to see to it that our
procedures are administered and implemented decently and humanely — and
effectively, which is of consequence for the other two criteria. That means
ensuring that the preventative measures are enforced in a way that is actually
preventative. Instead, we have opened the floodgates and then been surprised by
the flood. That is foolish and counterproductive.
It is also, in practice, indecent.
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