Fear

Fear began, originally, as a survival mechanism - still can be when a large wild animal comes crashing through the woods at you, but more often in our modern world it is an emotion that makes us less, that causes us to fail to do the right thing, the kind thing.

Not acting when one should is as great a sin, violation, overt, crime, offense – whatever your culture or belief system calls it – as acting in a manner that harms another or others. We like to pretend as long as we don’t do anything bad we are good people, but when we see people hurting, in trouble, desperate, and we do nothing to help them because of fear . . . we are not good people. We lessen ourselves through inaction when we should act as thoroughly as we do by acting in ways that we should not. And if we become less, if we slowly fade away into a shell of what we could have been, what benefit has it been to us that we managed to preserve our own necks?

“So what’s your point, Deb,” you ask. I’m getting to it . . . and you just know it’s going to have something to do with immigration, don’t you! I won’t disappoint – that’s exactly where I’m heading with this. This country was founded and built by immigrants. If you are not Native American your family came here as immigrants (those of you who want to degrade my point with speculation on whether or not our indigenous people were actually immigrants too can stuff it – it’s not germane to this topic). Our whole system of government, everything we have as a nation, has been built on the belief in “Liberty and Justice for all.” We have lost our way from time to time – and we have always regretted it. No one brags about having a grandfather who served as a guard in one of the shameful camps we kept our Japanese population in during WWII. It is a point of shame that people keep to themselves and it happened because we were afraid.

Now we are rounding up immigrants and putting them in prison, sometimes for years. We are violating everything our country stands for, virtually spitting on our own Statue of Liberty because we are afraid. We are afraid of people who are different. We are afraid of terrorists. We are afraid we can’t compete with harder working immigrants or better educated immigrants . . . or perhaps we are simply afraid of facing our own demons that we see reflected in the eyes of societies most vulnerable. Whatever the cause – the fear exists.

What is the extent of our fear? What is the cost? We detained and/or deported over 400,000 immigrants from this country last year. Some of those people were violent felons and deserved to be deported, but most were honest, hard working people. A large number had citizen families who now live tortured lives because their loved one has been banished to another land. The majority of those are children traumatized by the loss of a parent – children who will grow up to be our neighbors – our friends. Let’s estimate around 200,000 - half of all imprisoned and/or deported immigrants fall into this category and each has an average of three family members emotionally and financially ruined by such actions. Add to that at least one more whose life has been put on hold in the form of fiancées or a very close friend (these are extremely conservative estimates). We now have a conservative figure of one million people whose lives have been ruined in one year by our immigration policies and 800,000 of those are citizens - and all for no reason beyond the fact that we are afraid.

This figure does not take into account any of the daily interaction that each one of these immigrants has had in this country. It does not figure in business, social and/or community relationships and contributions. If one fourth of those deported last year were in fact of no value to others around them, either because they did not work or they were criminals (and this is a very generous, even unlikely estimate), then at least three fourths had not only family, but friends, coworkers and communities that were negatively impacted by their loss. Again – a conservative estimate would be perhaps 4 extended family members, 3 friends, as well as 3 more coworkers and other community associates who feel the loss of that one person. Do remember, most of these people are American citizens and a majority of those have roots in the USA that are many generations deep. So last year we severely emotionally and financially handicapped close to a million of our own citizens and negatively impacted another 3 million citizens all for the sake of removing around 300,000 non-criminal, hard-working human beings from our midst. Extrapolate that out over a 5 year period, figuring that the numbers does not increase (and our government is building more “detention centers” and increasing the rate of imprisonment and deportation as I write this) and you are looking at approximately 20 million Americans harmed by government actions for the sake of removing one and a half million productive people from this country.

Again, that is a very conservative estimate . . . of the cost of fear. But those figures are figures of action, not inaction. They are easy to see. What I am concerned with here is the other cost, the hidden price paid every day. For every immigrant unfairly detained and cruelly deported from family and friends there are at least 20 more people that knew about it and knew that that action was wrong. Of those, only a handful did anything to protest what was being done to that person and even fewer actually stepped up and took action to try and stop the abuse. Let’s underestimate our figures to a point of being ridiculous. Lets say only half of the human beings imprisoned and eventually deported by ICE were good people with close family ties to this country – hard working and much loved people who are greatly missed. Even then we are looking at over 4 million people walking around this country who know that they witnessed a fellow human being in trouble and did nothing to stop it. That is 4 million people who are now more afraid of this world, who are now less sure of themselves, who are now started on or moved further along that path to apathy and nothingness. And for what?! What are we afraid of? Looking at those figures, perhaps we should fear ourselves.