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Find moral center

I believe a great nation’s moral center is affirmed — actually affixed — not during the best of times but rather at its most trying. No wonder so many Americans oppose the sudden influx at our southern border of children from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. It’s because we seem yet not to have found our moral compass.

In light of the refugee crisis, recent legislation has been introduced in Congress to speed up deportation of unaccompanied children back to Central America; however, the so-called Humane Act isn’t a himane act at all, as it doesn’t allow sufficient time to prove asylum cases in court.

Condemning male youths to certain gang-riddled death and susceptible females to sexual servitude, the speedy deportation of children is not the answer to bona fide, humanitarian disaster.

It’s not surprising that Americans are moved upon hearing heart-wrenching narratives about family-reunification failures: A detained, 7-year old, Honduran girl, risking kidnapping or worse in search of her undocumented mother in North Carolina, or a 15-year-old Guatemalan, dead from heat stroke, never reaching his Chicago brother.

However, it’s too simplistic to view America’s refugee problem merely as illegal immigration. “We need to secure our border,” headline-seeking politicians keep clamoring ad nauseam on TV. But when desperate women and children surrender en masse to border authorities, they become refugees — asylum seekers fleeing a profound fear of something back home.

America has dealt with similar newcomer fiascos before, the most memorable being the Cuban Exodus to Florida after Castro’s communist revolution of 1959. More than 1 million Cuban refugees left the Caribbean island in fear of the coup’s violent aftermath, as well as in search of a better life. But does anybody recall any massive repatriation to Havana’s shore?

Also, I get very disjointed with the continued construction of a high-priced, “Berlin-style” wall between the United States and Latin America. If juveniles can trek 1,200 miles to America, do you think a mere steel-reinforced fence will keep them out?

Besides, walls not only send out the wrong global message but also fly in the face of Emma Lazarus’ prophetic script on the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

By combining moral conscience and superpower status, America easily could again become the world’s model of humane treatment, compassion and empathy to those “wretched refuse of your teeming shore,” encouraging the world to “send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me.”

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