Imagine my wife and me coming to the realization we just can’t give our kids the safe, happy life in America all children deserve as a human right. The health care is lousy and expensive. The neighborhood school is full of drugs and gangs, and the kids don’t learn much there anyway. What can we do?
Though we’ve never visited Switzerland, we’ve heard it provides opportunities. Our sole aim is to secure a better future for our children. So, we hire someone experienced in smuggling kids into Switzerland, be it a shady travel agent, a coyote guide, or a human smuggler, and send our two children to enter unlawfully, placing them with a paid third party—maybe a distant relative or even alone. Without knowledge of the local languages, some well-meaning person enrolls them in a public school offering free meals, tasked with handling their situation. We naturally pay no taxes for any of this. Eventually, Switzerland, now with a new government, repatriates them to live with their own parents in their homeland, where their native tongue, religion, and customs are more readily accessible than in Switzerland.
No offense to Switzerland, since immigration controls are widespread. Borders exist in all nations, allowing them to determine who may enter and who may not. Not a single stable state permits unrestricted migration. Every border worldwide serves to separate those permitted entrance from those barred. Some countries reject immigrants outright, others select them based on skills or religion, while some admit unaccompanied minors, often too young to work as drug mules or prostitutes, who were smuggled in by coyotes.
A recent Brookings Institution analysis reveals that over 100,000 children were separated from their parents during the Trump administration. This greatly surpasses the roughly 5,500 children removed during Trump I’s “zero tolerance” policy. The figures are somewhat blurred; today’s total includes American citizen children accidentally caught when their undocumented parents are detained, whereas the 5,000 figure refers exclusively to foreign children taken into custody immediately after crossing the southern border without formal deportation. Regardless, the essential reality remains: the U.S. places children in temporary custody and punishes them for their parents’ actions as part of longstanding immigration enforcement.
Most of these children end up effectively abandoned in the U.S. once their parents are arrested. U.S. law offers illegal parents a choice: return to their home country with their children or leave their U.S.-born children with a designated guardian in America—who can literally be anyone, with no oversight.
“We found that remarkably few end up in foster care — children stay with friends and family who don’t have a legal obligation to care for these children,” said one study. Often, children are left in the hands of older siblings or other immigrant households already struggling with their own immigration issues. These “guardians” typically lack legal authority to make medical or educational decisions, so such choices frequently go unattended. This is the harsh, unChristian reality Democrats attribute to Trump’s harsh policies. Yet the truth is the U.S. has enforced such measures long before Trump. Under the Obama administration, approximately 7,600 unaccompanied minors were deported between fiscal years 2012–2015. During the same period, Obama deported about 171,000 unaccompanied children at the border, many arriving with smugglers, not parents.
The dilemma surrounding children’s treatment in immigration is intricate. If you base your moral judgment on raw statistics, those numbers will likely be misleading. Few truly desire the full truth, as it complicates their preconceived notions about what is right and wrong in immigration debates.
One certainty is that parents are rarely held accountable once children enter the U.S. illegally with smugglers or are born here to undocumented parents aware they could be deported at any moment. Employers who exploit undocumented workers, thus attracting families to the U.S., face no responsibility. The broken Biden asylum system (currently paused under Trump) has allowed illegals to remain in the country indefinitely while awaiting mostly meritless asylum cases (“Wanting a better life” is not grounds for asylum). Meanwhile, who is to blame for children left behind to be cared for by nearly anyone—whether a sibling, relative, or, God forbid, a crafty predator?
Morality around deporting children lies at the crossroads of legal authority, national sovereignty, and human rights. When children, many too young to grasp what’s happening, are involved in enforcement actions, ethical questions become more challenging than legal ones. Though the law permits deporting children or families with children, the crucial issue is whether applying that authority is ethically sound, and under what situations. Ignoring immigration laws, which has essentially been U.S. policy for decades, renders the law arbitrary and unenforceable. This results in hundreds of thousands of children being brought into the U.S. through human trafficking, an act both dangerous and unethical.
The peak year for legal immigration to America was 1907. Your great-grandfather came to a nation undergoing rapid industrialization, in need of workers with no time to deport children. Yet, a compassionate immigration system can’t be built solely on outrage about modern enforcement or nostalgia for Ellis Island. While enforcing laws harms children, failing to do so encourages perilous child migration. Any effective immigration approach must address both realities simultaneously. The U.S. requires not just harsher enforcement, but a modernized asylum and immigration framework. The responsibility lies with policy reform, not with any incoming administration hoping for something better to miraculously appear.
Original article: wemeantwell.com
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