The Kids at the Border

Let me preface this by saying that, for me, there is no such thing as too many Hispanic immigrants. I’m hopelessly biased in favor of Hispanic cultures and it’s useless to try to convince me to change my mind. Hispanic immigrants are one of 3 immigrant communities that make the best neighbors (in the wider sense of the word) and who integrate extremely well into new socities.

However – and it breaks my heart even to write this – the immigrant children from Central America at the US border should be sent home.

I know that anybody who hears this feels an instinctive rejection of these words, which is only a sign that she or he is a good, normal person. And it would be great if an American passport were the cure for all ills. It isn’t, though. These children have experienced the worst trauma and betrayal a human psyche can encounter. Their own parents threw them out to be raped or killed. You can’t cure this with all the passports in the world. 

Bill Ayers tells, in his recent book, the story of a boy he and his wife adopted. The boy’s parents decided that murdering people was so much fun that it was worth abandoning their infant boy to engage in that lofty pursuit. Obviously, the boy started exhibiting symptoms of a range of severe psychiatric disorders from early childhood. He was lucky in that both his adoptive parents and his grandparents were extremely rich. They could afford to hire an army of psychoanalysts and pay for every expensive treatment under the sun. And only after 20 years of these efforts undertaken by a team of multimillionaires did the boy get better and became socialized.

It is still unclear why the parents of these immigrant kids throw them out so easily. Silly, overfed Westerners keep chirping about poverty or gang violence, which is an obvious sign they never experienced either. Poor people are not any less capable of loving their children than the rich folks. The very idea is offensive.

A single hint at what might be going on appeared in the newscast that said that many – if not most – of these kids don’t speak Spanish. I’m guessing they come from the pre-modern indigenous cultures where the concept of childhood has not developed. In the Western civilization, the concept is historically very new as well. The Spanish literary classic Lazarillo de Tormes illustrates this very clearly.

Giving these immigrant children American passports would turn them into de facto parents of the very parents who betrayed them so brutally. Their lives will be about doing slave-like labor or engaging in crime with the sole goal of supporting the abusive parents at home or even trying to bring them here. They will serve as sacrificial goats to the needs of some Westerners to wallow in pleasantly warm puddles of muddy guilt.

Unless we can find a family of billionaires willing to adopt each such child and organize its life around the child’s needs, there is absolutely no other help that will make a difference. Chest-thumping and screeching is of no actual assistance to anybody.

It would be great if we could discuss this issue without fits of pseudo-Liberal hysteria whose only purpose is to aggrandize the vociferating hysteric in his or her own eyes.