One policy for one group of immigrants that we think is unconscionable is to deport people who have been in the United States since childhood and who are either contributing to American society or well on their way to contributing to it through their hard work and determination. We are talking about the children who were brought to the United States when they themselves were too young to choose where they would live. They were brought to our country by their parents or by a ‘coyote’. Most of these children have lived exemplary lives. In light of their good behavior, President Obama instituted by executive memorandum in 2012 the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA). According to DACA, as long as these children continue to lead good and productive lives, they are exempt from deportation, for two-year terms, subject to renewal.[3] They are illegal, but we offer them a safe haven so long as they live up to their ends of the bargain.

People opposed to the DACA program say that the children have no right to be here. No one can dispute this fact. DACA children have not entered the United States in accordance with the rules and regulations we have in place for lawful immigration. Nonetheless, if DACA children do not have a right to be here, it is also not right to deport them. In fact, in our view doing so would be cruel. The United States would be harming them when they are not culpable of any fault of their own. The fault lies with those who brought them here. To punish the children is to punish victims. This matter has been the subject of contentious debate within our national government and court system since Obama proposed it in June 2012. It will be reaching the Supreme Court in its next session, which begins in October 2019.[4]

We are looking for the right vocabulary to think about DACA children. The language of rights does not fit the bill. Neither does the dominant language in political theory for the last half-century, the language of justice, as derived from John Rawls’s book, A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, 1971). Talking about meting out justice to DACA children is no more appropriate than rights-talk. Why? Because justice applies to people in the same situation or “equally situated.” The DACA children are not in the same situation as other children.

The correct term to use here and the appropriate concept or notion, we suggest, is decency. It is indecent to deport these children. Allowing them to stay as long as they are leading lives worthy of respect is the only decent thing to do. And the idea that they can grow up and contribute positively to our society as a whole is grounded in our historical experience with all other immigrant groups in our history from the 1850s onward. The children, and grandchildren, of immigrants generally assimilate to what we consider American values and contribute positively to our economy, culture and society, despite the negative prejudices directed at their grandparents or parents. We will provide some examples of this process below.

If the children are illegal and they are not culpable, how should we think of them? They are victims of happenstance. They did not choose where they would be born or who their parents would be, or even whether they would be born at all. Think about it. These same conditions apply to all of us who were fortunate enough to be born as American citizens. No one chooses any of these things.

Human beings are thrown into the world. Birth is the outcome of a biological accident, the first of innumerable contingencies in life. Some of us are the results of unwanted or unexpected pregnancies. Tom Palaima’s mother, after two miscarriages and a child who died thirty minutes after birth, was under strict orders from her doctor not to become pregnant again. But Tom is here with us today co-writing this essay.

The ancient Hebrews knew about the accidents of birth. One of the Israelite patriarchs is named Isaac, son of Abraham. The name means ‘he laughs or will laugh’ because his mother was so old and clearly beyond child-bearing that her becoming pregnant was laughably out of the question. Even she laughed. And yet….

The ancient Greeks knew about the accidents of birth also. They devised a myth that explored the consequences of such contingencies. The Athenian playwright Sophocles wrote Oedipus Tyrannus or in English Oedipus the King in 429 bce, the same year it was performed. It is the story of the male newborn of the king and queen of Thebes who was fated by the prophetic god Apollo to kill his father and to marry his mother. When the Greek audience entered the Theater of Dionysus in Athens almost 2,500 years ago, they knew that no matter what Oedipus tried to do to escape fate, he would fail. The play would present one gripping account of how his fate came to pass and the horrors it brought into being. His parents, fearing the prophecy, tried to kill Oedipus by the common practice of infant exposure. They had his legs bound—one interpretation of the meaning of his name is ‘swollen foot’ from the physical trauma this caused—then entrusted him to a royal shepherd to expose out in the mountainous unsettled lands where he tended sheep and goats. The moral reasoning here was that by having the infant placed alive in the wilds, the king and queen were consigning him to his fate, not directly killing him. They were thus absolved of all guilt.

The Theban royal shepherd, however, took pity on Oedipus and handed him over to a shepherd tending the royal flocks of the neighboring big city of Corinth. Learning of his awful fate in late adolescence, Oedipus tried to do the right thing, to get far away from the people whom he believed to be his birth parents. He ends up on the road to Thebes, the place of his birth, where his fate befalls him. Although we may no longer believe in the pitiless mechanism of the cosmos, the tragedy continues to resonate because we intuit the truth behind the false name of fate. Most of our lives, including our births, are buffeted by contingency. Stuff happens.

More stuff happens to the poor and oppressed than to the materially well off and powerful. In order to understand what to do for those who are the worst off, we have to imagine their lives and feel them deeply. Texas songstress Eliza Gilkyson helps us do this in her recent song “Reunion” about desperate young women escaping abject poverty and brutality in Somalia and Ethiopia.[5] Crammed into small crafts on the sea, their sole intent is to escape:[6]

On the grey blue seas
Neath unforgiving skies
You can see them there
See the fall and rise
On their pitiful boat
Drifting on the tides
Towards anywhere

See the trembling girls,
Hear their desperate cries
On the sickening swells,
Look into their eyes
But they can’t go back
To what they’ve left behind
Going anywhere

And they cry to us
On our distant shore
And we cover our ears
Til they cry no more
And we don’t even know
We were longing for
Reunion
Reunion

The girls flee from crushing poverty, from ignorance, from obstacles imposed to prevent them from using their minds and bodies freely in pursuit of happiness. They flee from societies where the haves at the pinnacles of tall towers abandon the have-nots who are scattered like crushed stones as the broad base.

If they survive their perilous passages in overcrowded boats controlled by mercenary human traffickers, they arrive in a new land where they are likely to be exploited as menial laborers or as sex slaves. This is not a new problem for the world or the United States to confront. Newspaper accounts and photographs in Michael Lesy’s remarkable Wisconsin Death Trip (1973) depict the desperate lives of mainly Northern European immigrant families in Black River Falls, Wisconsin between 1890 and 1910 (Figures 1 – 3).[7] They came to our country legally with dreams of freedom and good lives. Profiteers in immigrant trafficking lured the poor with sugarplum fantasies of respectable lives on their own fertile farms and raising their children as healthy God-fearing Christians, like those in Little House on the Prairie. Sadly, even if their hopes had been fulfilled, they may not have been accepted into “decent society.” Instead, they endured cold poverty, social isolation, and sheer despair.

Men working in iron mines were tantamount to underground slaves—if they were lucky enough to be employed at all. Child mortality from diphtheria and influenza epidemics and generally miserable sanitary conditions left mothers of many children childless. Local newspapers published many obituaries and accounts of funeral services. Professional photographers took memento photographs of dead children in fine clothes and handsome coffins. These children may never have been photographed or so well-dressed while they were alive. For some families, dressing up or photographing a living child would have been an unimaginable extravagance. The regularity of such ritual actions allowed for the public expression and public acknowledgment of parental grief; but, as Lesy explains, “Although it could comfort, it could not cure. … The regularity of such newspaper obituaries, accounts, and reports may even have created a greater sense of doom.”[8]

At the National Ranching Heritage Center in Lubbock, Texas, a Victorian-era family cemetery plot has five headstones of the D. C. & I. V. Brooks family (Figure 4). All five children born between 1870 and 1882 were dead by 1889. The longest-lived died before her tenth birthday. Their first child died at the age of three, one month after their second child was born.[9]

Other sources that might sensitize us to act decently may be found in novels, such as Martin Andersen Nexø’s Pelle the Conqueror (1906), the story of an aged Swedish itinerant farmhand who emigrates to nearby Denmark with his eight-year-old son Pelle Karlsson. [10] Both take up bleak lives at the bottom of the farmhand economic ladder. Subsequent novels in the tetralogy follow Pelle as he grows up, struggling against deplorable labor conditions that keep him and others in subhuman poverty. The world is full of hopeless and forlorn immigrants driven from home by starvation-level necessity, extreme poverty, and other factors like war and many types of persecution. And it has ever been so.[11]

During the Irish potato famine between 1846 and 1851, an estimated one million people died of starvation and epidemic disease. Another two million emigrated from Ireland between 1845 and 1855.[12] Those who made it to new worlds were greeted with cold welcomes and vicious expressions of anti-Catholic sentiments, some from icons of American culture like Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph, and Lyman Beecher, father of Harriet Beecher Stowe and the abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants at the top of the social and economic ladders of our country and Great Britain considered poor immigrants from Ireland to be “the very scum and dregs of Human nature” or “white chimpanzees” (Charles Kingsley, the author of Water Babies). The country they came from was “a human dog kennel” (Thomas Carlyle).[13] The great humanist Ralph Waldo Emerson distilled the hateful anxieties in an 1851 journal entry:

Too much guano. The German and Irish nations, like the Negro, have a deal of guano in their destiny. They are … ferried over the Atlantic, & carted over America to ditch & to drudge, to make the land fertile, & corn cheap, and then to lie down prematurely to make … a spot of greener grass on the prairie.[14]

Viewing such attitudes as these in the history of American society charitably, we can speak of a kind of prevailing ‘double bind’ in our culture.[15] As Howard A. Doughty puts it, “[American] thinkers and doers frequently try to maintain two contradictory ideas at the same time. The US purports to be the ‘land of the free’, yet it clung to the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery and fought a hideous civil war over the matter so recently that I vividly recall a news broadcast announcing the death (of natural causes) of the last registered civil war soldier.”[16]

Put another way, the inscribed bronze plaque put on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in 1903 gives us in visible speech the words of Emma Lazarus’s “New Colossus”: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to be free.” But it does not, strictly speaking, specify what we are going to do with them or what will become of them. That bronze plaque was erected right in the midst of the period of the Wisconsin death trip and a national hysteria surrounding yet another wave of immigrants, the Eastern Europeans, the Slavs, whose name is connected at least in popular historical etymology with our word ‘slave’ (Figures 5 and 6).

How was this second flood of legal immigrants received? A look at the views of Tenney Frank, a prominent establishment-trained classical historian who taught at bastions of eastern White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, Bryn Mawr College and The Johns Hopkins University, gives one answer. The title of his study of personal names in Roman imperial inscriptions voiced a concern that preoccupied Americans in 1916: “Race Mixture in the Roman Empire.” Frank’s article appeared in American Historical Review, published by Oxford University Press.[17]  In it, Frank brought Roman history to bear explicitly upon the American immigration problem. He noted an alarming parallel. The good old names (the traditional tria nomina) that school boys read about in Livy and Cicero are scarce in Latin inscriptions along the Appian Way. They are replaced by foreign names. To Frank this raised a burning question: “Do these names imply that the Roman stock was completely changed after Cicero’s day, and was the satirist recording a fact when he wailed that the Tiber [the main river of Rome] had captured the waters of the Syrian Orontes?” Frank viewed the peoples from all over the empire immigrating to Rome as pollutants and asserted that the underlying cause “of Rome’s disintegration was, after all, to a considerable extent, the fact that the people who built Rome had given way to a different race.” To the immigrants who caused the “gradual diminution of the [old] stock” Frank attributed “lack of energy and enterprise, the failure of foresight and common sense, the weakening of moral and political stamina.” Those are nice ways to describe the attitudes that prevail today about the ‘character’ of immigrants who cross our southern border. Frank also deplores the popularity of public monuments erected to please this ancient foreign ‘rabble’ “in much the same way that our cities are lining their park drives with tributes to Garibaldi, Pulaski, and who knows what –vitch.” This kind of immigrant radioactivity has had a strong afterlife. Lesy, comparing the attitudes of this period with those in our own times, speaks of “stereotypes that … linked progress and poverty, respectively, with people who were ‘us’ and other people who were ‘them’. Explicitly and implicitly, ethnocentrism, condescension, and contempt for others” persist and are pervasive.[18] Yet we now even have Irish names like Kennedy and we know what -ama on our list of presidents.

If Frank were still around today, we would encourage him to look at a few other inscriptions. On the bronze plaques inside the pedestal of the Civil War Soldiers and Sailors monument in Cleveland, there are inscribed lists of names of the Civil War dead in regiments mustered in Ohio. On these mournful lists we read the kinds of English, German, Scottish and Welsh names that Tenney Frank would have found at least tolerable: McCanna, McClain, McDowell, Miller, Mills, Morgan, Ott, Parsons, Powell, Pratt, Randall, Rhodes, Rockefeller, Ryan, Sherwood, Smith. By World War II, the pollutants had triumphed. Alongside 18 Millers and 17 Smiths from Ohio who died in our good war against Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and imperial Japan are the names of other Ohioans: Miglionico, Migliore, Mignona, Mihalik, Miklich, Mikloc, Milczewski, Principio, Prochazka, Przewdziekowski, Ptaszek, Pusanski, Slusarczyk, Smolinski, Soltys, Stamatis, and, yes, Starcevich.

These American soldiers were following in a tradition documented as far back as the Greek Bronze Age and continuing through folk songs like “Arthur McBride,” which sings of the deceptive enticements British recruiters used during the Great Potato Famine to get starving young Irishmen to sign away their freedom and serve the cause of imperial England. As William Faulkner saw things, “[t]he lowly and invincible of the earth endure and endure and then endure, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”[19] And often their endurance takes the form of proudly volunteering to die for the countries into which they have immigrated. It is now established that the first American soldier to die in Operation Iraqi Freedom, Marine Lance Cpl. José Antonio Gutierrez, was born and grew up in Guatemala City.[20] Gutierrez, an orphan, entered our country illegally claiming he was sixteen years of age.[21]

But we are concerned here with innocent children right now. The word “innocent” literally means “doing no harm.” In earlier periods, these are the conditions that prevailed for the children of poor immigrants. Pauline Newman immigrated from Lithuania to the United States in 1901 at the age of seven.[22] Fatherless, she joined her mother, brother, and three sisters. In October of the same year, she got a job at the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where 146 mainly immigrant women and children were killed in a fire on March 25, 1911.

Work started for these women and children at 7:30 in the morning and, during the many busy periods, lasted until 9:00 at night. Girls Pauline’s age received $1.50 per week ($44.61 in today’s money) to cut threads off finished fabrics with “kindergarten scissors.” During these long days workers were not permitted to sing or even to talk with one another. They needed to concentrate every moment on their work. She said: “You were not allowed to have your lunch on the fire escape in the summertime. The door was locked to keep us in. That’s why so many people were trapped when the fire broke out.”

Her older sisters made $6 per week (today $180). Again, this was for 80-hour work weeks. Workers were expected to work seven days a week. The highly experienced cutters made $12 ($360 today, or about $4.50 an hour without benefits or social security of any kind). The trial that followed the catastrophic fire was an exercise in the kind of story of justice diverted or perverted that gives rise to songs like Woody Guthrie’s “Ludlow Massacre” and is typical of the age of robber barons.[23]

Our point is that the poorest and lowliest immigrants, legal or illegal, have been exploited mercilessly and looked upon with fear and contempt during our nation’s history. If we view what we call our immigration problem without any grasp of what immigration has done for the economic and even military security of our country and without taking to heart how American citizens have had their lives improved by the exploitation of cheap labor, legal or illegal, we lose our chance to develop feelings of decency and use those feelings when deciding what to do about DACA children.

Shortly after President Obama’s executive order in 2012, DACA children faded from view. This happened because the program works. They became conspicuous again when President Trump rescinded the DACA program in 2017, until a federal court blocked the rescission. In January 2019, he used the children as a bargaining chip in negotiations to fund a wall along the Mexican border. Democratic representatives rejected the offer. DACA participants have again disappeared from the news. Sad to say, some politician may use them again as “bargaining chips,” probably offering to trade them for money. That’s what kidnappers do. They trade people for money.

It would be indecent to deport DACA children, to make them strangers in a strange land. The country of their birth is not the country of their allegiance. The United States of America is. It is the only homeland that most of them know, the only country that can give them a reasonable chance to live free human lives. Letting them remain in the U.S. will be little or no burden to taxpayers because they are well on the road to becoming productive Americans. To repeat, the fate of the DACA kids is a matter of decency, not justice. Justice was on the side of the Merchant of Venice in Shakespeare’s play when he demanded a pound of flesh from Antonio. But what justice would have prescribed would have been repugnant to decent people. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the quality of decency should not be strained. Decency twice blesses: once the persons who are decently treated and once the persons who treat them decently.

The U.S. has the space and resources to embrace the DACA kids. It does not have the space and resources to embrace all deprived and oppressed people in the world. But it can embrace more than it is currently willing to embrace. How many more? Not more than it can afford, but not less than it is decent to accept.

Postscript: The practice of keeping immigrant children, in the custody of the Federal Government, in squalid and emotionally deprived conditions during the spring and early summer of 2019 is as indecent as anything we described here above in our essay.