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Health & Fitness

Halima Needed a More Humane Immigration Policy, Pt 2

Once upon a time Americans saw the practice of human smuggling as a virtuous endeavor.

In the antebellum South the Underground Railroad battled the immorality of slavery by smuggling slaves into northern states and Canada, in defiance of the law and at great personal risk.

During the Cold War, Americans saw human smuggling as an honorable practice, the need for which served as a feather in the cap of freer societies. Peter Dupre, a Briton who smuggled East Germans and Czechs to the West, served time in a Hungarian prison, and later wrote a book about his exploits, Caught in the Act.

But there's a difference between smuggling and trafficking. When someone is smuggled into a country he is generally free to go his own way, less the price of his passage.

Human trafficking, on the other hand, involves the virtual or sometimes the literal enslavement of human beings, sometimes for use in the sex trade and other times for slave labor. Halima, whose story was the subject of Part 1, is one of many tragic examples.

Human trafficking goes hand-in-hand with ill-liberal immigration policies.

From the end of the Mexican War in 1848 until about 1920, there was no border in any meaningful sense between the United States and Mexico. US cavalry patrols throughout the West were on the lookout for hostile Indians, not "illegal immigrants".

At the same time, tens of million of immigrants were coming into the country via East and West coast entry points. The United States enjoyed a virtually open-border immigration policy.* (A noteworthy exception was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.)

It is not surprising that so many people wanted to come here. In the period 1840-1915 the real wages of the average American worker actually tripled, while working hours declined. Though far from having streets of gold, the United States was by far the freest society on Earth, and its wealth and opportunities were a reflection of that freedom.

People left everything behind — turning their backs on country, history, language, religion, culture, even family — to make a better life for themselves here.

Sadly, the rise of nativism lead to the steady shutting off of our shores to those seeking a better life.

Our immigration laws today are as tangled as they are unjust. They're also completely unnecessary.

When someone wants to come to the United States, he must first ask permission, and delve into a world of byzantine rules and regulations that few could hope to understand and even fewer hope to navigate.

Depending on the conditions in his home country, there simply may not be time for the would-be immigrant to jump through years of legal hoops; an individual's life may well depend on getting here — or at least away — soon.

For example, the current civil war in Syria has cost over 100,000 lives, many of which could have been saved if groups like ILAP and the American Civil Liberties Union were devoting their resources to paying travel expenses instead of lobbying and legal expenses.

Not surprisingly, many people in dire circumstances turn to smugglers. Less surprising is that many such people end up being trafficked instead.

How?

Imagine the incredible power that the smuggler has over his cargo. It need not even be a smuggler. Any opportunist with knowledge and resources but lacking human decency can take advantage of an immigrant who has entered the country without legal documentation.

After reaching the US the immigrant could easily be told that he must indenture himself or enslave himself or, as is often the case with young girls, work as a sex slave, or else be turned in to the authorities.

This is a power that 19th century immigrants never had to worry about; without fear of deportation they just came here and lived their lives.

Moreover, those who had come before had already created, under the protection of the law rather than in its defiance, large communities — think of Chinatown or Little Italy or "Black Wall Street", or Portsmouth's old North End — that welcomed the immigrant with work and a sense of belonging. (Many of these same communities would later be destroyed by their governments.)

Now an immigrant may well have to hide from the law — to become part of a black market, underground society where the rule of fear is substituted for the protection of the law.

To defy one's "master" in this situation is to face violence and the threat of deportation. And, as was the case for Halima, deportation could well mean death. Some would prefer violence and maybe even death to going back to whatever Hell-hole they thought they'd escaped.

The tragedy of immigration restrictions is they can force people to endure Hell in the land of their salvation instead of Hell back home. That's a despicable choice.

Please come back tomorrow for more discussion on a humane immigration policy.


*Among the 27 complaints listed in the Declaration of Independence against the British government was the charge that it had "endeavoured to prevent the population of these States".

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