To Deport Immigrants to Congo and South Sudan Is To Kill Them
“Please, Mr. Tim. I have a huge favour to ask. My son, my four-year-old, has no future here…Please will you take him with you to South Africa and give him a new life.” That was Oggi, a Congolese guide, to Tim Butcher, a Daily Telegraph reporter based in South Africa, and who was coming to the end of his journey down the Congo River.
What you’ve read is from Butcher’s remarkable (my review here) 2008 book, Blood River. Sadly, moving Oggi’s son was an impossibility rooted in an inability to smuggle him onto the UN boat taking him back to the relative normalcy of South Africa. Which means Oggi’s son would lose his life even if he lived. As Butcher described the Congo, it’s “the most daunting, backward country on earth.”
Butcher’s memories rate thought in consideration of how conservatives view abortion. In their disdain for it, conservatives are making a case for life, that in terminating a pregnancy people are terminating a life. There will be no debate here about abortion.
Instead, the conservative definition of abortion will be applied to deportation. It will then be asked why the disdain for the arrival of immigrants? Much more pertinent, why the support for armed officials of the federal government rounding up these immigrants to send them out of the United States?
The frequent answer given in response to the above question is that immigration isn’t the problem, but the existence of the welfare state is. For now, let’s accept the argument as valid. If so, conservatives should still be in favor of immigration and against deportation based on their pro-life stances.
That’s because as conservatives well know, the backwards, socialist, and sometimes communist countries the immigrants are exiting are frequently murderous in their suffocation of personal and economic freedom. And then as the still unfolding earthqualke tragedy in Venezuela reveals, poverty itself kills. As conservatives have rightly pointed out for decades, collectivism has a death count that can be measured north of 100 million.
Of course, and as is well known, immigrants aren’t coming for handouts. Evidence supporting this claim isn’t just found in laws that disallow even naturalized citizens from taking welfare for at least five years, it can also be found in where ICE agents continue to round up immigrants: private businesses where the illegals are working.
Said another way, individuals working inside private businesses face the risk of deportation. Yes, individuals aggressively trying to improve their lives and give their families life face separation from their families and deportation for doing so. Only for the story to get worse.
As has been reported about the deportation of Cubans, Venezuelans and other migrants from countries known to suffocate life literally and figuratively, the Trump administration has for instance sent “6,000 Cubans to Mexico, where many are struggling to find work. And then in the abjectly inhumane category “It has also sent Cuban migrants to Africa, including to Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, and war-ravaged South Sudan, where the migrants have been kept in detention centers.”
Keep in mind that South Sudan is the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s only peer for most desperate and backward African nation. Tim Butcher could confirm just that. People with nothing after having escaped communism and socialism have been sent to these certifiable hellholes by the United States.
Sorry, but they’re being sent to their death regardless of whether they live. More than most will ever admit, deportation is about the termination of life even if the “life” isn’t terminated. See Oggi’s 4-year-old, then wonder about the lack of pro-life outrage.
Originally published on Real Clear Markets.