USA Refugee Immigration Experience

Musings on dealing with ICE, Honduras and “The System”

It may be useful to consider that the (shameful, disgraceful, unnecessary) USA southern border detention centers are but an ugly symptom. Isn’t this worth considering? Isn’t there a fear underneath all this hurtful noise that we need to be honest about?

Social, economic, technical, global and environmental systems are changing at a very fast pace, maybe too fast for traditional adaptation. Private and public institutions and processes are left, it may seem, inadequate or irrelevant and the resultant fearful (and all too human) unconscious social psyche can be polemically charged and in some cases exploited by demagoguery. Why would an old pattern, an ages old story, have changed?

Having gone through a 3 year process costing $10,000 to successfully move an illegal refugee to safety — fully legal and in USA holding residence card and “welcomed home” by ICE (thanks to a great law and immigration firm) I can say from a hands on, very real, very visceral experience there is a tattered but somewhat working system.

Working ports of entry and refugee/immigration systems and associated codes or law are intrinsic to a stable state; such systems date back through recorded history and exist in simple tribes now and in the past. We decide to be adequate to the new challenge or not. Why not start with what is working and build?

As a digression to this story (having interacted over the last month with a deadly city, San Pedro Sula, Honduras) — — The United States has spent trillions and untold deaths in a 50 year war on drugs that has resulted in far, far more prohibited drugs being more available, of better quality and at a lower price. We consume increasingly massive amounts of illegal narcotics as home brew treatments and train the suppliers by the millions at public expense in our world’s largest penitentiary system. If this actual policy was portrayed as a conspiracy in a Hollywood movie it would be dismissed as too unrealistic and unbelievable. We decide to be positive and part of solution or alternately ignore and/or curse the darkness.

I don’t believe Jack Nicholson’s line, “You can’t handle the truth”. The question for me, and maybe you, is do we want the truth? Am I willing to do the truth? I guess I’ll have to answer that a moment at a time.