America can’t shun this responsibility The U.S. has a moral role to provide child refugees at the border with protections and guarantees afforded by national and international laws BY ALBOR RUIZ NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, July 11, 2014, The National Guard, drones, troops, the border patrol, it seems all of them will be urgently dispatched to the Mexican border. No, it is not that the U.S. is about to wage war with that country’s armed forces or the drug cartels; this time, the war is against a legion of frightened children from Central America seeking to protect the most fundamental of all human rights — their right to live. It is hard to believe, but all this hysterical beating of the drums is geared to stop thousands of boys and girls who are fleeing murderous drug cartels and runaway gang violence from finding protection in the richest country in the world. It is a tragic exodus of the innocents that — all of a sudden — has confronted this nation with its own political, legal and moral contradictions. “I have no philosophical objections” to sending the National Guard to the border, or increasing the number of border patrol agents or even changing the laws so the Central American children can be expelled as quickly as their counterparts from Mexico, a very obliging President Obama said after his all-smiles meeting on Wednesday with Republican Texas governor Rick Perry. All these points to which Obama agreed were concerns expressed by Perry, one of the President’s most merciless critics, who now shares with him a burning desire to get rid of the humanitarian crisis at the border, no matter what the consequences for the children may be. No one has explained more clearly what this administration really thinks about the border-children situation than Cecilia Muñoz, the White House director of the Domestic Policy Council. “The bottom line is that the fact of violence in Central America cannot mean that folks get to come to the U.S.,” Muñoz declared. “Folks,” meaning, one supposes, the more than 50,000 innocents who took a desperate journey out of their countries, not to take advantage of their rich neighbors of the north, but to save their lives. Horrific brutality in countries with some of the highest murder rates in the world is no reason enough for this human-rights-proud nation to offer terrified children its protection, according to Muñoz. That the U.S., by financing devastating armed conflicts during the Cold War and supporting illegitimate and criminal governments has a huge historical responsibility in creating the conditions Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala find themselves in that are making their young people flee, doesnt seem to matter to Obama or his new Republican allies. That much of the current brutality in those countries is fueled by the existence of a multibillion-dollar illegal drug market in the U.S. is of no real concern to the administration either or that, as reported by The New York Times on Thursday, in June, 32 children were murdered in Honduras, bringing the number of youths under 18 killed since January 2013 to 409 — not to mention El Salvador and Guatemala. They can say what they will but this is not about border security, and sending the National Guard will not do anything to stop the influx of unaccompanied children. This is not just another act in the immigration reform theater of the absurd. These children —we have said it before — are not “illegal immigrants” but persecuted people whose lives are in danger and deserve all the protections and guarantees afforded by national and international laws to refugees and asylum seekers. To do otherwise would be for this nation to abdicate its moral responsibility and would leave in shambles its self-assigned role as a beacon for human rights in the world. albor.ruiz@aol
Posted on: Sat, 12 Jul 2014 08:42:29 +0000