Remember the Faces

The year 2024 was always going to be a challenging one, with a high-stakes presidential election seemingly destined to feature the same two candidates as 2020, with the political banquet this time being warmed-up leftovers spiced with recriminations and contempt. We can’t even look forward to it being over in November — because, as recent history has shown, Election Day is no longer the end of a marathon, just the potential start of a new period of tension and crisis. Drop all the balloons you want — it’s still a gloomy enterprise.

Still, the electorate has some control over how this year will unfold. In one particular way, South Fork voters can try to seize some control over the debate.

Immigration is destined to be a hot-button issue once again in 2024, as it has been for many years and numerous election cycles, because it’s an intractable dilemma that has never been effectively addressed. It’s as much a problem today as it was a decade ago, if not more so.

Whatever your position on our country’s policies toward immigrants and those seeking asylum — and, let’s all acknowledge, there is a wide range of defensible positions, far beyond the most extreme at either end — it’s going to be up to voters to demand real, honest solutions. If we merely allow our passions to be inflamed, and the discussion ends there, we’re all damned to continue down a path where nobody benefits as they could — not families seeking opportunity, not the American economy in need of workers, not a national identity weaved from a quilt of foreign roots, not the American people who demand safety and affordable housing and fair-paying jobs for men and women already here. Instead, it will merely be used to scare and demonize and anger people into voting one way or another — a political accelerant, nothing more.

Elissa McLean and Andy Winter of Noyac provide some guidance for how we can change this stubborn mess we’re in, once and for all. They don’t offer any specific solutions to the thorny immigration crisis (nor do we). But they set a crucial example for how we need to have this conversation, and where the priorities must stay.

So much of the issue today surrounds asylum seekers. After the horrors of the Holocaust, many nations, including the United States, agreed in the years after World War II never to turn their backs on people fleeing persecution. Many of the men, women and children who are flocking to the southern U.S. border from many different nations are following a set process by which they seek asylum, which must be done on U.S. soil.

The process, as it stands today, clearly is not adequate; the system is being overwhelmed, daily, but the number of people fleeing crime, poverty and political persecution — or who, simply seeking a chance at a better life, have joined the flow of humanity. Whether there should be limits, how they should be imposed, how applicants awaiting a court ruling are handled — these are some of the many logistical details to be resolved.

But this is where McLean and Winter come in: Before we debate, before we experiment with solutions, before we legislate, we must protect the humanity of the people most affected. It’s easy, in debating the politics, to forget, or willfully ignore, the impact on human lives. That cannot happen.

The Noyac couple, in late January, visited LTV to discuss their experience on the southern border, in Arizona, in December. They went not for politics but merely to help in simple ways: food, water, Wi-Fi for families who have been unable to call home for long stretches, a friendly pet dog for the kids to snuggle. They’ve done this before and can offer reflections on how the circumstances have changed, how asylum means running toward Border Patrol instead of fleeing from them once over the border. But while the paperwork changes, the human cost is the same.

Let’s start with common ground: This is no way to handle the challenge. We must find better ways, workable solutions that offer hope but consider all the ways unchecked immigration can create pressure points in our society. But we cannot ever forget: The men, women and children at our borders are not the enemy, they’re not to be feared, they’re not “invaders,” they’re not worthy of insults. Most have paid a higher price to touch American soil than the vast majority of Americans ever will.

This isn’t Arizona, or Texas — but the South Fork has a stake in the immigration crisis in a way that few parts of America do. Our economy, and our culture, are dependent on newly minted Americans of all kinds. We can debate the matter reasonably — but we must never forget the faces, the lives, that are tangled up in our politics. And we must demand that our political candidates do the same.