Politicians should step up and welcome some of the children at the border to Connecticut
Child migrants continue to reveal the nature of our leaders. Their plight casts a searing light, and it is often unflattering. Connecticut politicians have been among the exposed.
We know the manifold failures and brutal tactics of former President Donald Trump’s administration. Its officials mocked the public’s intelligence with declarations that the law required them to separate parents from children.
A 2014 surge in child migrants overwhelmed the Obama administration. When former President Barack Obama asked states to help in providing shelter and care for the Central American children, the response was not what you might expect. Dannel P. Malloy, in a tight race for a second term as governor, refused Obama’s request. The New Haven Register pointed out at the time that Malloy would have been quick to accommodate affluent shoreline children in an emergency but not bereft Spanish-speaking ones with dark skin.
The same Connecticut leaders who remained silent at Malloy’s cruelty were incensed by Trump’s outrages. Now President Biden is wrestling with the challenge of child migrants at the border. The law requires, as it should, that we care for unaccompanied children at our border. Most of the children who make it that far have been accompanied by adults for much of the journey. Most also have relatives in the United States.
The time-consuming task is to find places for the children while authorities vet their family members who are here. Some children have ended up in the clutches of unscrupulous relatives in the absence of proper placement protocols. Some have no family members in the United States. Finding a permanent home for them is more complicated.
Enter U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy. He’s the new chairman of the Homeland Security subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee. The second term Democrat visited a migrant processing center last week. As reported in The Hill, Murphy tweeted to his million followers, “In a corner, I fought back tears as a 13 yr old girl sobbbed [sic] uncontrollably explaining thru [sic] a translator how terrified she was, having been separated from her grandmother and without her parents.”
The “memory of that 13 yr old girl will be w [with] me forever,” Murphy continued on social media posts. In the battle between Murphy and his tears, those tears never stood a chance. “Forever” is a short, short time in the lives of Connecticut politicians and child migrants. A few days later, Murphy was in Connecticut and the plight of that sobbing child had some competition on his humanitarian to-do list. “I’m going to still spend the vast majority of my time working on the crises that matter most to people here in Connecticut. And that’s the jobs crisis and the health care crisis,” Murphy declared, according to the CTmirror.org.
Gov. Ned Lamont and Murphy are close allies and, in the constrained definition politics imposes, friends. Their conversations are said to range along a wide spectrum of topics and tittle tattle. This is a moment to put their relationship to work for the children who face a lonely future. This time, find a place for some of them. Connecticut can cope. There were empty places for them in 2014. They are available seven years later. Remind us once more that Lamont, mercifully, is not Malloy. Be like Vermont Gov. Phil Scott. The popular Republican this month asked the federal government to triple the number of refugees resettled in his state.
Keep your bitcoins. Kindness has been Connecticut’s currency in the last year of fear and sorrow. Those Park Avenue toffs who fled New York for Connecticut last year may not stay. But care offered a child alone in a strange land will be returned for decades. Think of your own immigrant ancestors.
If looking back fails to inspire you, think about today. We cannot — and should not — close our border. Americans suffering from a variety of chronic diseases count on an open border with Mexico. Each week, thousands of Mexicans with B1/B2 visas cross the border to provide their plasma to drug companies for small payments. The supply of plasma keeps untold thousands of Americans alive.
During the height of the pandemic thousands more came from Mexico to donate convalescent plasma for coronavirus patients.
Our erratic immigration policies continue to vex policymakers. Its baffling contradictions cannot obscure an eternal truth: We must welcome children to America — and Connecticut.