Us and Them-The Illegal Immigrants

This post is not about the NRC or the CAA or the wall at the Mexico border. It is a conversation to understand why would anyone choose to be an immigrant.

That too an illegal one?

Have you known any of the boat people, the Rohingya or the dreaded Bangladeshis?

The family of the Syrian boy whose body floated on to the seashore? 

(I could not bring myself to use that photo)

Why would any parent take that risk with their child?

To escape a fate worse than that.

To escape death and torture or starvation or worse if they did not take the risk. Or maybe because they do not have a choice. Like the Rohingyas and the boat people they are just forced out of the country where their grandparents lived and worked and now have no home to go back to.

What makes them different from us?

Chance or Luck

It is sheer chance that we were born on one side of the border, into a religion or nationality or economic class which keeps us out of that cage (for now). Privilege that has come to us by chance. It is privilege that lets us move through cities and countries with dignity, to go abroad and work, to send our children to another country for education, for a job, for business. We have the means, they do not. That’s the only difference.

But we don’t have enough resources for our own. How can we take care of them? If their own country cannot take care of them, why should we have to bear the burden?

Why should Europe open their borders to fleeing Syrians? Why does America have to let the Mexicans in? Why does Assam have to accept the Bangladeshis?

What is the solution? Put them in cages and force them back in to whatever hell they came from?

Look into the eyes of a fleeing immigrant child and her hopeless mother and then answer. Think of what your own exalted religion, your humanity says and then answer.

I honestly don’t know the answer to that. What I know is that separating families, putting people in concentration camps and pushing them back across the border for something anyone of us would have done in their place is not the answer either.

Does any of you have the answer?