Today, I want to discuss the rationale of Trump supporters; I want to talk about the rhetoric of the arguments they gave to support Trump as he flip-flopped between keeping families together at the border.
However, I think it is crucial to have the facts down before I raise my questions.
To be clear, regardless of Trump signing the executive order, the zero-tolerance policy will still remain. What this means is, it is illegal for people (coming from a number of nations) to immigrate into America. And hence, it will continue to be illegal.
There was a time where our policies tolerated desperate forms of immigration yet we currently have a zero tolerance policy against immigrants. As soon as they cross American borders they are taken into custody by law enforcement.
Often immigrants would get sent back to the nations they sought refuge from; yet, their children were able to stay.
As a direct consequence of staying in the U.S these children would get separated from their parents.
Now, Trump has signed an executive order to make it such that these children will not be separated from their parents. However, it is not clear what this will mean. Trump has made it clear that zero-tolerance policy will remain and hence immigration is still illegal. Yet, it seems like if parents are being detained and sent back to their native nations, then if we do not separate them, their children will have the same fate.
Before I go any further, I would like to distinguish between the moral and political dimensions of this predicament.
It is not hard to imagine the moral problem here: people are coming to America as a last resort and are being detained on entry. They are leaving places where they are being persecuted by their government and are no longer safe in the nations they are citizens of. Believe it or not, no one wants to drop their life to become an immigrant. Hence, when someone makes such a drastic decision, it should be easy to imagine that things were not rainbows and daisies.
I think the first moral problem is clear: American officials are arresting people for running to America out of desperation.
Now, some people want to call these immigrants, criminals; for, in breaking the law they are by definition a criminal. Yet, I highly urge you to consider the forgoing information. That is, these people are desperate. They are not willingly choosing to immigrate into America; they are not hoping to break the law, it is probably their absolute final option. I understand there is principle involved in following the law. Yet, in the same sense that you may run a red light if your father is having a heart attack and you are driving him to the hospital, it is sometimes necessary to break the law for the sake of survival.
A lot of people will reject my suggestions and still take these immigrants to be be criminals.
Now, before Trump signed his executive order to ban the separation of children from their families, there was still an additional moral issue. Namely, and as stated, the separation of children from their families.
Political problems speaks to both moral problems pretty directly. That is, the political issue is that Americans put this policy in place to curb immigration and keep American borders safe. Government officials want American boarders as closed as possible. Thus, it is pretty much in line with their agenda to kick people out and to discourage them from coming due to the possibility of being separated from their children.
Personally, that again, turns into a third moral problem. Namely, shouldn't we have more empathy for these people? Should we not care that they are fleeing war-torn communities where their governments have collapsed? People will disagree on how they answer this question and that is okay. All that matters is that they reason through the different possibilities that their answers depend on.
In this article I provided some different ways you could reason what has happened.
However, none of these reasons were one's I saw Trump supporters reason with. That is, all week Trump supporters have been pushing the rhetoric that child separation should be justified if parents are breaking the law.
Therefore, my question for Trump supporters is, what justifies his executive order? Trump argued that we must keep the zero-tolerance policy. Yet, we must also keep families together. What is the reasoning for that?
