What if Mary and Joseph Came to Today’s Washington?
Whether she meant to, her comment echoes the title of a 2021 book by writer Adam Serwer of The Atlantic magazine: “The Cruelty is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America.” That sounds about right to me.
Yet a spokesperson for Abbott fired back: “The White House is full of a bunch of hypocrites” whose immigration policies have overwhelmed Texas border towns.
Unfortunately, that’s not entirely wrong, either, as evidenced by the visible — and growing — presence of scores of migrant children and families sleeping on the streets in El Paso, Texas, and other border towns.
Abbott and other border policy critics caught a break from the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday. Justices voted 5-4 to allow Title 42 to remain in effect for now, putting a judge’s ruling that would have ended it on hold.
Title 42, strongly backed by Republicans alarmed by the number of people crossing the southern border and opposed by immigrant rights groups who call it inhumane, is a Trump-era COVID-19-related immigration policy to quickly expel asylum-seekers at the border.
That debate will go on — as immigration debates historically have a habit of doing. At this time of year, it reminds me of a classic column by the late, great Tribune columnist Mike Royko.
Often headlined “Mary and Joseph in Chicago,” the 1967 column had the unique distinction of being reprinted for years by all three Chicago newspapers for which Royko worked, including this one.
It describes how the parents of Jesus might have been treated by our police and social services system if they had arrived “flat broke” and expecting a child in modern-day Chicago instead of biblical Bethlehem.
The Buffalo folks who welcomed the strangers into their home, rescuing them from the storm, illustrate how we Americans like to think of ourselves at our best.
Abbott’s treatment of asylum-seekers does not.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
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