There wasn’t enough oomph in the sound system at the Rochester ‘s Families Belong Together rally last week, so it was very difficult for my wife and me to hear the orators amidst the other city sounds at Washington Square Park. But we knew the big picture, the horrific intolerance of the Trump administration’s policies towards those desperately trying to find sanctuary from the violence, economic strife, and Climate Change compelling them to flee to our door. What we couldn’t hear well were the local stories of those trying to keep themselves and their families together while our country gives way to xenophobia.  

Rochester responds to Trump immigration moves Saturday's Washington Square Park rally was part of a national day of action organized by Families Belong Together (Familias Unidas, No Divididas), a group that began holding events and rallies around the country in early June. Some 750 protests took place, bringing out hundreds of thousands of protesters calling for the reunification of families separated at the southern border. Despite the day's heat, hundreds of Rochesterians turned out to hear speakers who included farmworkers, local immigrant-rights advocates, and members of religious organizations. (July 2, 2018 - Rochester City Newspaper)

Given that most of us are immigrants to this country (I descend from potato-famine Irish), the hypocrisy of Trump’s moves to separate families at our borders is hard to stomach. Trying to appease his political base by terrorizing those who help make our country work, who actually make the US the US, only puts everyone else, including our friends around the world, on edge. Many are probably wondering why the Statue of Liberty still stands. Would you leave your ‘No Pesticides’ signs on your lawn if you started to use pesticides?    

The heat at the rally was oppressive. As I write many days later, the heatwave is still going on. It is part of a worldwide, record-breaking string of heatwaves that all but the most indifferent see as another sign that our planet is quickly warming.  [See Red-hot planet: All-time heat records have been set all over the world during the past week, July 4th The Washington Post)

The connection between the heat at our local rally (which was but one around the country) and Trump’s hypocrisy is clear, for it is hard not to see the selfish hypocrisy that our present US attitude towards migration has now taken: We put most of the greenhouse gas emissions into our climate system, which  this system is presently responding to, but we refuse to stop the burning of fossil fuels for energy, refuse to help other nations adapt, and then refuse to let them into our country when climate change makes them desperate.

Migrants Are on the Rise Around the World, and Myths About Them Are Shaping Attitudes Immigration is reshaping societies around the globe. Barriers erected by wealthier nations have been unable to keep out those from the global South — typically poor, and often desperate — who come searching for work and a better life. While immigrants have often delivered economic benefits to the countries taking them in, they have also shaken the prevailing order and upended the politics of the industrialized world — where the native-born often exaggerate both their numbers and their needs. (June 20, 2018) The New York Times [more on Climate Change in our area]

Then, in the same article:

Global warming is driving migration | Rising average temperatures are already pushing people from their homes in many middle-income countries, according to research by Cristina Cattaneo and Giovanni Peri, increasing migration from rural areas to urban centers and across borders to other nations. As warming continues in the coming decades, it will probably push people from agricultural areas to urban areas and from the global South to the richer global North. (ibid)

Morally, this is despicable, and you don’t have to be a bleeding-heart liberal to understand it.
Practically, it’s insane. We are trying to shut the door on people whose building we have set afire—forgetting somehow that we live in the same building.

The present reign of xenophobic isolationism, trying to pull out of the Paris Agreement, refusing to help the Climate Fund, and slamming our doors shut to the victims of our self-induced conflagration, is not going to make America great or safe again. It’s going to cook us all in a boiling vat of hate.


Time passes.