By DONALD DeMARCO
Abortion is a wall that prevents immigrating unborn children from entering the world. It has the approbation of Hollywood, the media, and all those who baptize themselves as “liberal.”
Nowhere in the world is border security so tight. Approximately one million such potential immigrants are killed each year in America alone. Opposition to this procedure is widely condemned as “anti-choice,” “backward thinking,” and “ultra-conservative.” Immigrants from foreign countries can be documented; the unborn cannot. Compassion is restricted to the outsider.
On the other hand, loosening border security to allow a flood of immigrants from other countries to enter the United States is regarded as respectful of their dignity and a sterling example of social justice. Blogger Matt Walsh has called attention to the inverted morality that this double standard represents:
“It’s striking that so many people on the left appear to have limitless compassion for refugees and illegal immigrants yet none at all for babies. I wonder if they might suddenly discover at least an ounce of humanity for the unborn if we started describing them as ‘fetal refugees’ or perhaps ‘immigrants from the uterus’” (February 3, 2017).
Walsh surely has a point. And though it may not be popular or politically correct, it is certainly worth contemplating. Yet, there seems to be another wall, one that makes it difficult for liberals to see exactly what is and what is not transpiring.
The current furor over President Trump’s proposed immigration policies, combined with liberal society’s unbending pro-abortion stance, is difficult to comprehend in rational terms.
How is it possible for any thinking person to believe that an enlightened American citizen has a greater moral responsibility toward an immigrant from Mexico or a refugee from Syria than a mother has toward her own child in the womb? Why should the stranger from a foreign country be more welcomed than a child who awaits his birth?
The issue becomes even more puzzling when judges rule that the unborn child of an immigrant has greater status than the unborn child of a citizen. In a 2016 decision, Canadian Federal Court Judge Michel Shore ruled that an unborn child’s “best interests” must be considered equal to those of a child already born when assessing immigration claims.
Lawyer Gwen Landolt has pointed out that the ruling conforms to “the reality that the child before birth is, in fact, the child after birth…and that will be used, undoubtedly, to indicate that you can’t deal with the myth that there’s nobody there.” In a roundabout way, the immigration issue may ultimately serve the interests of a citizen’s unborn child.
Contradictory attitudes abound. In 1995 President Clinton told Congress that “we are a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years and we must do more to stop it.”
Clinton went on to state that the United States should concentrate more heavily on deporting criminal aliens who pose a threat to America and complained that illegal aliens are taking jobs away from unemployed Americans and that legal immigrants were urging more border security, calling for a doubling of deportations. The president’s remarks did not provoke condemnation or national outrage, but were met with a congressional standing ovation.
On November 20, 2014, President Barack Obama stated that his first priority was “to build on our progress at the border with additional resources for our law enforcement personnel so that they can stem the flow of illegal crossings and speed the return of those who do cross over” (The Washington Post, November 20, 2014).
He went to make the following admission:
“When I took office, I committed to fixing this broken immigration system. And I began by doing what I could to secure our borders. Today, we have more agents and technology deployed to secure our southern border than at any time in our history. And over the past six years, illegal border crossings have been cut by more than half.”
Again, his remarks did not incite riots, protests, or liberal indignation. It ignited hardly a murmur of discontent. The problem seems to be not what is said, but who said it.
Confusion about critical moral issues is widespread in America today. An immigration of a slightly different kind is urgently needed. This is the one that Plato discusses in the seventh Book of his Republic. It is his famous Analogy of the Cave in which he depicts prisoners who are chained to the wall of a cave and forced to face a blank wall, their only channel of information. They spend their dreary lives looking at shadows, but never at reality itself.
Since education, for Plato, is the passage from darkness to light, the prisoners need to make their transition out of the dark cave and into the light of day.
In other words, they need to become immigrants, leaving behind a world of illusions and entering into a world of truth. For Plato, however, the prisoners have been so accustomed to the cave that they stubbornly refuse to leave it, not being able to trust anyone who wants to liberate them.
Let there be immigrations from one country to another, as long as reasonable security regulations are in place. But also let the unborn be immigrants from the womb to the world; and let the uneducated be immigrants from darkness to light.
We have not yet, to our great misfortune, begun to consider all of the ramifications of immigration.
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest works, How to Remain Sane in a World That Is Going Mad; Poetry That Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart; How to Flourish in a Fallen World, and Footprints on the Sands of Time: Personal Reflections on Life and Death are available through Amazon.com.
(Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth and Charity Forum. He is the 2015 Catholic Civil Rights League recipient of the prestigious Exner Award.)
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