Opinion/Brown: Immigration — a national problem comes to Cape Cod

When I was a boy in Philadelphia, we had an institution called “mischief night.” On the night before Halloween, kids would go out and do pranks on their neighbors. I'm not sure how much damage actually got done but there was a lot of talk — and one of the favorite pranks the boys talked about involved filling a small paper bag with dog poop, setting it on fire on some guy's front porch, and waiting for the homeowner to rush out and stamp out the fire.

The governor of Florida recently tried much the same thing on the residents of Martha’s Vineyard. His supporters in the media chuckled over the mental picture of liberal Yankees going crazy trying to figure out what to do. Actually, despite their surprise having chartered aircraft touch down with a small mob of assorted men, women and children mainly from Venezuela, the residents mobilized themselves, opened their homes and treated their stunned arrivals like human beings.

That’s more than you can say about Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis who treated migrant families like a flaming bag of, well, you know. More immigrants were delivered by bus to the address of Kamala Harris, vice president of the United States. More and more, Republican governors of southern border states are finding this a satisfying strategy for punishing Democrats.

“Well,” they’re saying, “if you have such a soft touch for immigrants, we have lots to spare.”

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Actually, the number of liberals I know who support the idea of “open borders” is few to none. Meanwhile, Americans continue to create a self-polarizing society. We scare each other to death and then take extreme positions to balance the damage we expect our opponents to cause.

When our previous president announced his candidacy, he made immigration his central concern. Trump described the people showing up along our southern border as criminals, rapists, and possible carriers of disease. He thought a wall would stop them. Then, let's remember the deliberate policy of separating migrant children from their parents. This was done, we were told, as a deterrent.

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Over 100 years ago, Black abolitionist and escaped slave Frederick Douglass addressed a white congregation on Martha's Vineyard, where the recent batch of immigrants recently landed.

“Now I don't know what you might think of slavery,” Douglass told them, “but I know one thing. You'd think it was wrong for you.”

I think the United States could apply the same moral standards to ripping screaming children from the arms of their parents. We'd think it was wrong for us.

Over the years, there has been little coherence to our thinking about immigration. Even our political parties have been divided. One wing of the Democratic Party is sympathetic to anyone struggling to free themselves and their children from endemic crime, poverty, and persecution. Meanwhile, the labor union wing of the Democrats is threatened by any influx of cheap, competitive labor.

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The Republicans have been similarly divided. The corporate, investor side of the Republican Party has profited from cheap labor and has often turned a blind eye to where it comes from. But the nativist side of the GOP has been uncomfortable with any influx of people whose language, culture, or faith has been outside the American mainstream.

Figure in the cynical tendency of both parties to keep burning issues aflame, even when reasonable compromises might have been reached. Keep immigration, abortion and issues such as gay marriage unresolved and they all become useful “wedge issues” to keep partisans angry, frightened and to keep those checks rolling in.

So factor in with immigration that both parties have been internally divided as well as at odds with each other and you have a problem that we've been debating — without resolution — for well over a generation. And remember, the further you go back, the uglier America's immigration policies have often been.

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With birth rates in most of the industrial world declining, and employers screaming for more workers, you'd think Americans would be more welcoming to new immigrants than we are. Crime statistics tell us that native-born Americans are more apt to commit crimes than immigrants — and undocumented immigrants, who have to keep their heads down, tend to commit the fewest crimes of all. Having said that, our border states are wrestling with problems the rest of the country doesn't have … that Martha's Vineyard, for example, doesn't have.

Without a bipartisan immigration policy, the injustices and inhumanities large and small will continue to happen — and of course, each half of the country will continue to blame the other half for everything that goes wrong. Or, to put it another way, it will be business as usual.

Lawrence Brown is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. E-mail him at column response@gmail.com.

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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Martha's Vineyard migrants brought U.S. immigration issue to Cape Cod