By David Brooks on December 19, 2022
photo: Garry Knight
There are an unprecedented number of pilgrims in the world – refugees, migrants, exiles – who have been forced to say goodbye to their homes, their families, their loved ones, and their worlds, to seek lodging, many in countries that share responsibility in provoking the exodus through economic policies, wars, their contribution to climate change and more.
John Berger had said that the 21st century was the century where never before have so many people had to say goodbye, that it is “the century of disappearances. The century of people helplessly watching others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.” The 21st century continues to be marked by a long goodbye with the UN estimating that over 100 million people were forcibly displaced from their homes (https://www.acnur.org/datos-basicos.html).
In the United States, which is now caught between its identity as a “country of immigrants” and a country poisoned with historic xenophobia and racism that have been raised to alarming levels by neo-fascist forces in recent years.
Meanwhile, there is a scramble to see how to continue to limit the right to asylum, a success of the Trump administration that almost succeeded in overturning it altogether. Politicians, with their notable exceptions, continue to use migrants as pawns in their obscene chess game, some building new walls or kidnapping them to send them to other states, while “advocates” express their “concern” for migrants and offer proposals to “handle” this human flow “responsibly,” including what they say is a gift for the so-called “dreamers,” but so far, they have only managed to lengthen a nightmare for the inn seekers.
The Biden administration’s grand initiative to identify and address some of the “root causes” continues to avoid one of the main causes: the United States itself has nurtured the exodus for decades as a result of its interventions and wars, its failed war on drugs, its promotion of neoliberal policies, and its historic contribution to climate change.
All this, while human beings -perhaps up to a third of them minors- look for ways to survive one more night, one more kidnapping, one more threat, one more cold day in the border zone and on their way to the country of the statue that says it welcomes the homeless of the world.
Not to mention the displaced and homeless inside the country. It is worth remembering that part of the history of this nation was the displacement and internal exile of millions of indigenous people by European settlers -the first undocumented migrants- and their descendants. American Indians still live on reservations that in some cases could be characterized as refugee camps. And in the world’s richest country, there are also at least 580,000 homeless people in constant search of shelter. Among them are thousands of military veterans who participated in the interventions and invasions of other countries, provoking displacements and exoduses in various parts of the world.
(https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness/)
From the refugee camps on the other side of the river, from inside this country where more than 11 million live in the shadows for not having “papers”, from the streets under cardboard boxes or in the Metro, where hundreds of thousands of citizens sleep, you can see the Christmas trees and other decorations in homes, stores, churches and offices recalling the search for an inn by some migrants/refugees for the birth of their son who would later be a persecuted worker (carpenter) branded as illegal.
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US