Federal officials say 711 children remain separated from their parents, despite Thursday’s court-imposed deadline for the Trump administration to reunite all migrate children separated from their parents by immigration officials at the border. More than 400 of the children have parents who have already been deported from the United States.
Noam Chomsky talking:
Trump administration’s family separation policy is a major scandal, of course, and properly condemned throughout the world. Taking children away from their parents, sending them off somewhere, losing track of them, you know, it’s hard to think of a more brutal and sadistic policy. Here in Tucson, there’s a lot of—there’s a good deal of activism concerned with immigrants. There are groups that set up camps in the desert to try to help people fleeing. And, of course, it’s a very live issue. It’s not very far from the border. In fact, when I give talks here, I often refer to the area as “occupied Mexico,” which actually is a good designation. But the immigration policy altogether is a grotesque moral scandal here, and in Europe, I should say.
actually, these people are fleeing from the wreckage and horrors of U.S. policies. So, take Guatemala. No need to go through the whole history, but back in 1954, the U.S. intervened, sponsored a military coup, overthrew a mildly reformist elected government. Since then, the country has been a complete horror story—hundreds of thousands of people killed, all kinds of atrocities, every imaginable sort of torture. It peaked in the 1980s under Reagan. In fact, some of the places where people are fleeing from, the Mayan areas, there was literal genocide going on, carried out by the man who Reagan called a stellar exponent of democracy, a really good guy. When Congress imposed some limits on direct U.S. military aid to this—to Ríos Montt, the person who was—general who was implementing the genocidal attacks, Reagan set up an international terrorist network.
The U.S. does not hire terrorists, it hires terror states—it’s much more effective—so, Taiwan, Israel, Argentina—as long as it was under the rule of the neo-Nazi generals. Unfortunately, they were overthrown. They had the good news, Argentina. The people are still fleeing from the destruction there. It’s been a horror story ever since. Same with El Salvador, where about 70,000 people were killed during the 1980s, almost all by the security forces, armed, trained, directed by the United States. Again, horror story since.
In Honduras, which not long ago had the plurality of refugees, the refugee flow started to peak after a military coup threw out the elected government, the Zelaya government, condemned by the entire hemisphere and the world, with the usual exception of President Obama. Hillary Clinton refused to call it a military coup, because that would have meant terminating military aid to the junta, which the U.S. continued to do. There had always been a severe repression and atrocities. They mounted sharply. Honduras became maybe the homicide capital of the world, and refugees started fleeing. There were so-called elections, which were mocked by almost everyone except the United States. It continues.
You’ll notice there’s one—there’s two countries in the region from which there haven’t been refugee flows. One is Costa Rica, which happens to be the one country that sort of functions, and not by accident, the one country that the United States has not—in which the United States does not intervene militarily to overthrow the government and run a military regime. The other is Nicaragua, which differed, which also suffered severely in the 1980s from Reagan’s assaults. But Nicaragua was unlike the other countries of the region: It had an army to defend it. In the other countries, the army were the terrorists. In Nicaragua, the army could, to some extent, defend the population from Reagan’s terrorist forces. And though there’s plenty of problems in Nicaragua, it hasn’t been the source of refugee flow.
So, essentially, what President Trump is saying is, we’ll destroy your countries, slaughter you, impose brutal regimes, but if you try to get out, you’re not going to come here, because America is full.
going back to the immigration crisis, which is actually a moral crisis in the United States, and comparably in Europe, we should bear in mind that the immigrants do not want to leave their countries. They would be very happy to stay in their own countries instead of coming here to unpleasant and harsh situations. They can’t, because we have ruined their countries. So, the first step in dealing with the immigration crisis should be to help reconstruct and rebuild what we have destroyed, so they won’t be fleeing from the homes where they would like to live. Now, that’s certainly within the means of a super-rich country like the United States with incomparable advantages. That’s step one in dealing with the immigration crisis—again, a moral crisis, not an immigration crisis.
Secondly, conditions should be established so that legal—what’s called legal immigration—I don’t like the term, but what’s technically called that—would be facilitated, with decent conditions, plenty of entry points, lawyers provided pro bono with U.S. support for immigrants so they could plead their cases, and decent conditions for the applicants to survive—nothing like putting them in camps and stealing their children away from them—and facilitating the kind of appeals for asylum that are granted under international law. That should be automatically assumed in a—certainly in a rich country like ours. That’s the second step.
We might also recognize that there are countries that have somehow managed to deal with the huge flood of immigrants, poor countries. So, take Lebanon, poor country. Probably 40 percent of the population are refugees at this point, driven out from Israel by the Israeli—several Israeli wars, ’48, ’67, Syrian refugees, Iraqi refugees fleeing from the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It’s a poor country, and there are plenty of internal problems, but they’re somehow surviving with 40 percent of the population refugees. The same is true of Jordan, another poor country. Kenya, Africa, another poor country, has a huge number of refugees. Bangladesh has taken in huge numbers of refugees fleeing from Burma. But the rich countries of the world—the United States, European Union—the ones who have an overwhelming responsibility for the circumstances from which the refugees are fleeing, they can’t help with it. They can’t deal with it. Too much for us. Go somewhere else. Go to a poor country, but not go to the countries of the perpetrators of the conditions from which you’re fleeing. I mean, it’s a grotesque moral crisis throughout the industrial world.
We should be considering why people are fleeing from their homes. Not because they want to live in slums in New York. They’re fleeing from their homes because their homes are unlivable, and they’re unlivable, largely, because of things that we have done. Overwhelmingly, that’s the reason. That tells you right away what the solution to the crisis is: rebuild what we’ve destroyed, compensate for the atrocities that we’ve carried out. Then the flow of refugees will decline. And for those who come with asylum pleas, they should be accommodated in a humane and civilized way. Maybe it’s impossible to imagine that we can reach the level of civilization of the poor countries that are absorbing refugees. But it doesn’t—it shouldn’t seem entirely out of reach.
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Noam Chomsky
world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author. He is a laureate professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught for more than 50 years.
— source democracynow.org