6/28/2018 - Victor Davis Hanson Townhall.com
There are lots of
short-term solutions to address the wave of immigrants who have swarmed the
border in an effort to enter the U.S. illegally.
Why not use the
thousands of currently half-empty residence halls at American colleges and
universities to help house families from Central America and Mexico who await
adjudication of their asylum claims?
The federal government
could contract out to universities such as UCLA, Stanford, Cal-Berkeley and
large public universities in Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico to offer migrants
temporary summertime shelter and sustenance. Law schools could offer pro bono
legal counseling, and medical schools could offer health services.
Such multifaceted help
from institutes of higher education would be particularly apt -- and far better
than using military bases. The vast housing, recreational and meal-service
infrastructures of colleges are often under-utilized in summer. Campuses are
also bastions of liberal activism, proud both of their diversity and their
expertise in dealing with sensitive matters of acculturation.
What better first
glimpse of America could be offered to immigrants than the energy, pastoral
beauty and hospitality of a quiet college quad or well-maintained residence
hall?
It also makes no sense
for college students to venture far and wide for internships when they could be
enlisted on campus over the summer to tutor children from Central America and
to monitor their safety and treatment.
If progressives believe
that sovereignty and border enforcement are passe notions, then they should at
least match their rhetoric with concrete solutions. In California, there are
ongoing existential crises with homelessness, unaffordable housing and dismal
public schools that rate near bottom of national surveys.
How could California
square its present circle of being both the most impoverished and affluent of
states -- the most callous in fact, the most caring in theory?
Why not cease the
current stampede to private academies that has left the public schools of the
greater coastal corridor non-diverse and near-apartheid?
The huge Los Angeles
Unified School District is now over 70 percent Latino, as whites and Asians
have fled the arrival of immigrant children. It's much the same in Silicon
Valley, where private prep schools are expanding enrollments to meet the demand
from the affluent members of the tech industry.
Yet scholarly studies
show that immigration works best when new arrivals are fully ingratiated into
diverse schools, neighborhoods and social activities.
The huge,
multibillion-dollar market capitalizations of West Coast giants such as Amazon,
Apple, Google, Facebook and Yahoo have so far not led to more affordable
housing, more diverse top-flight public K-12 schools, or a growing middle class
energized by new arrivals from Mexico and Central America.
Instead, despite the
rhetoric of inclusion, and televised and tweeted fury at U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement, the progressive left coast is among the most exclusionary of all
American communities.
Zoning and
environmental laws drive immigrants into enclaves and ghettoes. Gentrification
ends up in the eviction of the first-generation immigrant poor from already
overpriced rental units.
It is almost as if the
louder one rails about unfair border enforcement, the more likely one is to
avoid encounters with illegal immigrants. Outrage has become a safe way for
elites to signal their virtue, acting out in theory what they are uncomfortable
doing in fact.
One of the strangest
scenes in impoverished rural Fresno County, where I live, is the epidemic of
substandard housing. Almost every small old farmhouse now has trailers and
shacks tacked on to them -- all substandard and not meeting codes -- to
accommodate recent waves of new immigrants from Mexico and Central America.
Yet the media often
showcase the huge gated homes and enclaves of Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the
journalistic elite. Surely some of all that unused square footage and those
guest houses could be used to offer at least temporary hospitality to those in
need.
Actor Peter Fonda could
do far better to help immigrants than by tweeting threats to 12-year-old Barron
Trump from his most non-diverse ranch in Paradise Valley, Montana. Instead,
Fonda might advocate that Hollywood actors live among newly arrived immigrants,
associate with them as equals rather than as the help, and promote public
schools by ensuring that their own children and grandchildren attend them.
Better yet, why doesn't
Fonda invite a few of the immigrant families awaiting word on their legal
status to the open spaces of his Montana ranch? Media accounts of his expansive
and tasteful digs show an infrastructure that easily could accommodate a few
needy immigrant families.
It is easy to invoke
the Nazis and the Holocaust to express anger at the temporary detention of
children and their families who have entered the U.S. illegally. It would be
far more meaningful if marquee journalists, actors, academics and activists
knew immigrants not just as a distant abstract cause, or as nannies and
landscapers, but as their neighbors, their children's school friends -- and as
their social equals.
No comments:
Post a Comment