Only white refugees welcome in America
By: Carlos Piovanetti, Esq.
In March 2020, the Trump administration enacted a variation of Title 42 which directed the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol to turn away anyone attempting entry without prior authorization. Citing a public health concern in response to the COVID 19 pandemic, the U.S borders were closed to non-essential. Title 42 is part of the Public Health Services Law, enacted in 1944, that gave the U.S. Surgeon General the authority to keep foreigners from entering the country if he concluded that a disease outside our borders can cause a serious threat to our peoples. This authority was expanded to include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Two years later, the Russian invasion of Ukraine caused an exodus of people, more than 3.2 million during its first month. The barbaric assault on Ukraine and its citizens by the Russian armed forces has numbed our collective senses, but not our welcoming spirit. Recently, Ukrainian refugees were seen entering the United States through the international airports of Chicago and New York. They entered because President Biden on March 21, 2022, authorized the admission of up to 100,000 Ukrainians through the conventional refugee program or the more expedient humanitarian parole.
Certainly, these refugees merit a safe home. They fled when conditions in Ukraine became unsafe and unlivable on account of the war. We have all seen multiple photographs of bombed-out buildings, theaters, and hospitals. Today's technological advances make us all witnesses to one of the greatest humanitarian crises of all time.
Similarly, however, there is an existential humanitarian crisis on our Southern border where more than 165,000 migrants were expelled in February 2022. And at the conclusion of 2021, over one million migrants were denied entry, citing Title 42 considerations. The mostly brown and black immigrants are told that they can wait in Mexico, indefinitely. Such double standards, it is respectfully submitted, are based and firmly grounded on this country’s racist attitudes towards brown and black peoples and in particular when they are immigrants. Not so long ago, former President Trump characterized immigrants entering through the southern border as people coming from “shithole countries.” And he lamented, why America cannot attract immigrants from “Norway.”
Mr. Trump is no longer President, yet the treatment of brown and black immigrants continues to be dictated by the forces of radical oppression who espouse the beliefs that brown and black immigrants are inferior to whites. Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s senior advisor on immigration policy, introduced and carried out some of the most repressive and racially-based discriminatory policies against black and brown immigrants ever witnessed in this country. For example, brown and black families who entered without proper documentation were separated at the border, the young and in some cases, infant children warehoused in cages, the parents deported, without proper record keeping. To this date, the current administration is unable to match the children to their parents.
This hypocrisy must end now. It is manifestly clear that the fears raised by COVID-19 and its variants no longer present an existential threat to the people or property of the United States. Accordingly, the Biden administration must end the indefinite application of Title 42, immediately. Likewise, it must begin the orderly processing of those waiting in Mexico, some more than two years to enter, as refugees. It can turn to other avenues available under the Immigration & Nationality Act, that are less taxing and burdensome than the conventional refugee program. What it needs to do, and must do now, is admit the millions of brown and black people awaiting at our southern border without delay. Once accomplished, the racial animus that exists today will recede and be replaced by a new spirit of equality and humanism for all.
However, if America fails to act, then the time has come for the poor and tired immigrants camped in border towns on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, to plan a mass exodus from Mexico and overrun the CBP agents guarding the border. To paraphrase a Russian dissident newscaster who recently asked her countrymen who oppose the Russian invasion of Ukraine to go out and protest, she said; “they can’t arrest all of us.” Yes, some immigrants will be apprehended and arrested, but the sheer number guarantees that most will enter unimpeded.