Imagine me and my wife coming to the realization that we just can’t give our kids the safe, happy life in America all children deserve as a human right. The healthcare is lousy and expensive. The neighborhood school is full of drugs and gangs, and the kids don’t learn much there anyway. What can we do?
We’ve never been to Switzerland, but we’ve heard it offers opportunities. We just want a better life for our kids. So we hire someone who knows how to wrangle kids into Switzerland—a sleazy travel agent, coyote guide, human smuggler—and send our two off to enter there against the law and live with a paid third party, maybe with some distant relative, maybe on their own. They don’t speak any local languages, but some do-gooder enrolls them in a public school with free meals that then has to figure out what to do with them. We pay no taxes for all this, of course. Then Switzerland, under a new government, sends them home to live with their own parents in their home country, where they speak their native language and practice their native religion and culture in ways not easily accessible in Switzerland.
Sorry to single Switzerland out; immigration restrictions are not unique to the Swiss. All countries have borders and make decisions about who can enter or become a citizen. Anything else is a condition of state failure. Every border inherently puts a barrier in between those who are allowed in and those who are not. Some countries do not want immigrants. Some choose immigrants by job skills, some by religious beliefs, and some seemingly just because unaccompanied children still too young to work as drug mules or prostitutes were smuggled over the border by coyotes.
A new analysis by the Brookings Institution says that more than 100,000 children have been separated from their parents during the Trump administration. The findings point to family separations that far eclipse those of Trump I under its “zero tolerance” policy, when about 5,500 children were removed from their parents. The numbers get a little fuzzy; today’s 100,000 also includes American citizens scooped up accidentally when their illegal parents are arrested, while the 5,500 were foreign children taken into custody immediately after crossing the southern border and not technically deported. No matter, because the bottom line—that the U.S. takes children into temporary custody and punishes them for their parents’ actions as part of enforcing long-standing immigration law—remains valid.
Most of these kids are soon just set adrift in America when their parents get arrested. U.S. law gives illegal parents a choice of being removed with their children back to their old country, or placing their U.S.-born children with a designee in America. That can literally be anyone, and there is no oversight.
“We found that remarkably few end up in foster care—children stay with friends and family who don’t have a legal obligation to care for these children,” said one researcher studying the issue. Children are often left in the care of older siblings or other immigrant families already grappling with immigration status. These “guardians” usually lack any legal basis to make educational or medical decisions for the left-behinds, so those decisions are simply not made.
This is the on-the-ground immoral, unchristian system the Democrats blame on the cruel policies of the Trump administration. But the U.S. has practiced such a policy long before Trump. About 7,600 unaccompanied minors were deported between fiscal years 2012–2015 under the Obama administration. During that same period, Obama deported thousands of unaccompanied children at the border, most of whom arrived with smugglers, not parents.
The issue of what is best to do with children in our immigration system is complex. If your sense of right and wrong relies at all on the numbers, the numbers are likely lying to you. Nobody really wants the truth here, because it confuses their beliefs about what is right and wrong on immigration.
One thing is clear: there is no sense that parents bear any responsibility for what happens to their children once those kids cross illegally into the U.S. with a smuggler or are born in the U.S. to out-of-status parents who know they are subject to deportation at any time. There is no responsibility placed on employers who exploit illegal workers and act as a magnet to draw them and their families to the United States. There is no responsibility for the broken Biden asylum system (now on pause under Trump) that brought illegals to America knowing they could live here indefinitely while they waited for their mostly bogus cases to be heard. (“Wanting a better life” has never been grounds for an asylum claim.) And who is responsible for the children left behind to be taken in by nearly anyone—a sibling, a relative, or God help us all, a clever pedophile?
The morality of child deportation sits at the intersection of law, sovereignty, and human rights. When immigration enforcement involves children, many too young to understand the systems acting upon them, the moral questions become far more difficult than the legal ones. A society may have the legal right to deport children or deport families with children, but the deeper question is whether exercising that right is ethically justified, and under what circumstances. But if we just ignore immigration laws, basically America’s policy for the last few decades, the law itself becomes arbitrary and ultimately cannot reasonably be enforced against anyone. This leads to hundreds of thousands of kids being sent to the U.S. via human traffickers, a dangerous and immoral act in itself.
Legal immigration to America reached its peak in 1907. Your great-grandfather entered a rapidly industrializing nation desperate for workers of all ages, with no time to waste deporting kids. But a humane immigration system cannot be built solely on outrage over modern enforcement or nostalgia for Ellis Island. Enforcing the law harms children, but failing to enforce the law incentivizes more dangerous migration involving children. Any serious immigration policy must confront both realities at the same time. The United States does not merely need harsher enforcement. We need a 21st century asylum and immigration policy. The blame lies there, not on another new administration hoping something better just comes along.
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