The following is a comment I wrote in response to some friends who commented on a post I shared. The friends were expressing concerns about crime and illegal immigration. (The OP I shared was by a youth shelter manager standing up to ICE.)
We are living in times where we everyday people are encountering huge amounts of information and opinion from diverse sources, and we are tasked with assessing what the worst threats are. It’s not an easy task. And there are many real threats out there.
No one would argue that human trafficking is a good thing.
No one wants more crime.
And people will differ in their assessments of the relative severity of various threats.
As just one example. I’ve heard people at neighborhood meetings go on about apartment complexes being taken over by immigrant gangs.
I’m not saying this doesn’t exist, I really don’t know; just because I’ve never seen it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
But from where I sit, the bigger and more imminent threat is the housing crisis. The difficulty that people are having with finding a place to live and keeping a roof over their heads. So I am involved in various efforts to increase the supply of accessible housing, and fight vacancy blight, in my neighborhood and community.
But my feeling for a long time has been that the human trafficking and other crime stuff has been emphasized in order to whip up xenophobic / anti-immigrant sentiment. It started after 911 but in recent years has picked up speed in a big way.
I think our own xenophobia, which is getting whipped up by politicians and the media, is a far greater threat to us than whatever crimes are being committed by immigrants. It does something to one’s brain, one’s critical thinking. Everyone who looks different starts to get labeled a potential terrorist. It’s no way to live.
We’ve gotten really classist as well. Our society has always had classism under the surface but now it’s becoming a lot more out in the open. So every poor person starts to get labeled undesirable etc.
Letting our minds get hijacked by fear is never a good recipe for creating the world we want to see.
Human trafficking is a serious problem worldwide. This particular issue isn’t one that I feel called to work on (Not that I don’t care, but we each only have so much time and energy for what we are called to work on). But if I did, I’d be looking to get involved with organizations that are helping people get out of those situations, and shutting down the traffickers.
As far as people being here illegally, I just haven’t seen them as being more likely to commit crimes than people who are here legally and / or those of us who are born here. Not saying it’s not a problem, but I think we are being encouraged to think of it as a bigger problem than it is.
Who benefits from xenophobia? (And who benefits from classism?) That’s a question we should ask. Generally the list seems to include, for example: sensationalist media, advertisers, manufacturers of home security systems and porch cameras (unbelievable how we everyday people have been so easily persuaded to spy on each other), law enforcement / big government institutions with big guns.
We have devolved to a low-trust society, and there is big bucks in that for certain people and companies and institutions.
In my lifetime, we have come to a place where the norm is you don’t answer your door to any stranger. Period. A default that we don’t answer our doors. If I hadn’t been born in this country, and have family here, and feel responsibility for helping to make things better and help redeem the bad things we’ve done in the world, I would not be living here. It’s just too harsh a place. (Our brutal landscaping and urban-planning defaults just add to the environment of harshness.)
After 9/11, we really started down a road of trading liberty for what we perceived as security. I don’t think the results have been good. We have more surveillance and more big guys in the government running around with big guns. I don’t particularly feel safer.
Regarding ICE and the OP that started this thread: what business does ICE have walking into a children’s shelter (and schools etc) and engaging directly with children. I would say none but that’s just my opinion.