Letter: A Different View Of The Border Crisis

A DIFFERENT VIEW

OF THE BORDER CRISIS

To the Editor:

I was a little impressed with U.S. Representative Jason Smith’s decision to go to our southern border to see for himself what was going on there.

However, I was soon disappointed to find out that he came back condemning the people seeking asylum without any evidence backing up what he heard from some “senior agents”  whose jobs I presume depend on their repeating the propaganda. Even the 19 people who did it right, went directly to U.S. agents instead of “sneaking in,” condemned for knowing how to “game the system.” So does that mean any time we follow the rules (getting a drivers license, paying taxes, etc.) we are “gaming the system?”

I’m stunned that Jason would think that parents would allow their children to be “recycled” as a ruse to get into this country. How many of us would allow such a thing to happen to our own children? Perhaps a very few, but such a practice would be unthinkable to most people. To simply repeat what another tells one, especially when they are sweeping generalizations about any group of people, is pure ignorance.

Scapegoating a group of people for some social or economic  “problems” has been a fear tactic used by many so-called leaders. Throughout history, minorities were often blamed as a way of keeping the populace compliant and distracted from the real sources of their problems. Corporations may be screwing us, but if we are led to believe it is because of “those people” that our jobs are disappearing and our wages are inadequate, we focus our fear, hate, and paranoia on the minorities instead of seeing the real culprits.

Perhaps the most notorious example of scapegoating was the Nazi regime. That scapegoating ended  with the extermination of 6 million Jews. I hope we are not going down that path.

Joan Burds,

Ste. Genevieve