"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."
Ah, sweet Lady Liberty, first thing many migrants saw before arriving in the Great Apple, ripe of the American dream. That vision of the American dream still radiates across the world, especially in countries in our geographic neighborhood.
It could come as no surprise that huddled masses, especially the poor, from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras are doing whatever it takes to get to America. As one who follows things in Americanos Latinos, those countries do ring a bell from our own country's activities not long ago.
It is as if though well-meaning, but incredibly short-sighted, intervention, we helped create the current social climate in these countries that caused over 50,000 minors to attempt to achieve the American dream since last October.
50,000 children.
Border Centers Struggle to Handle Onslaught of Young Migrants
By FERNANDA SANTOS, New York Times, JUNE 18, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Since October 2013, about 50,000 unaccompanied children have been apprehended on the Mexican border, most of them in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Agents there have been sending many of them to the Border Patrol station in Brownsville, intended as a hub for processing young people.
On Wednesday, more than 400 children caught in the past few days were being held in chilly, crowded cells that had concrete benches along the walls, but no beds. The station also housed some adult mothers and their children, swelling the population well above its normal capacity of 250 detainees.
Over 50,000 children have arrived in our republic only to find a Steinbeckian wrath that borderlines on daycares from 1984.
Children.
Again, Children.
It is against these children, these huddled masses, some as young as toddlers, that the GOP wants to hunt with gunships in some apocalypse now throwback fantasy.
These children, these children right here, Rick Perry wants to hunt with a gunboat.
These are the children for which the GOP is full-throated calling for the National Guard to come defend our nation against.
Against children.
Against children reaching out for the American Dream, our republic, our shining city on a hill, our light of liberty and justice in the darkness of these children's night.
Children, who against incredible odds, left everything they knew and loved to embrace freedom. Children who come from lands our country dealt with with hidden hand now exposed by history.
If our country was truly just, we would make ensure that for these huddled masses, Lady Liberty's oath stays true.