The immigration reality on the ground in PA

A crucial point that has gotten submerged under the daily cascade of outrages and tragedies, hysteria and apprehension, is that the rights of asylum-seekers, as well as the due-process rights of many who already reside here, are being trampled by the rump administration, and there aren't enough ACLU's to keep up with the crimes.  

Now, two incredibly on-point articles appear today's Inquirer.  From totally different perspectives, they ground the conversation around this immigration balagan in the real lives of people in the broad Delaware Valley.  The rump nationalist stoking of hysterical fears and hatred, their strangulation of LEGAL immigration, and the admin's criminal defiance of asylum-seekers' rights, are all reflected in real-people stories told in these articles.  

While Jordan and European countries have been struggling on many levels to accommodate conflict-driven refugees from the Middle East and Africa, the U.S. has actually narrowed the opening of the golden door of refuge.  This administration and its maga-cult supporters see this as rump's flexing "America First" greatness.  This policy of constricting inflow echoes the same pernicious abdication of geopolitical leadership and responsibility for the welfare of humanity as is reflected in rump's pulling out of climate-change, Iran-nuclear and multilateral-trade accords.  

As a related aside, a study published yesterday in the journal Nature and summarized in the New York Times, says the data show the ocean is heating up 60% faster than was estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. " The new ocean temperature estimates, if proven accurate, could be another indication that the global warming of the past few decades has exceeded conservative estimates and has been more closely in line with scientists’ worst-case scenarios," writes Kendra Pierre-Louis. 

Thus American GOPlutocracy is not just responsible for insuring higher mortality and food-insecurity rates for Americans, but is exporting the impact of its pro-death policies to world-wide effect.  

So back on the immigration front, one Inqy article, by Mike Newhall, reports that HIAS-PA is serving half the number of refugees this year as in the past.  That's not the main thrust of the story, though. The story illustrates the HIAS resettlement mission with actual givers and recipients, to show refuge, struggle and reintegration on a human scale. The story also voices the resettling refugees' well-founded existential angst in a country run by a hateful demagogue whose demonization of immigrants has already lit the fuses of hate-obsessed maniacs. 

The other article describes how agricultural operations like the mushroom farmers of Kennett Square are unable to grow their businesses -- despite unmet demand in the market -- because the immigrant labor pool from which they've drawn essential harvest workers has been dried up like a global-warming-drought-starved reservoir reduced to a puddle.  As writer Claudia Vargas reports, these jobs go begging because American citizens won't do them, even though they pay as much as $14 an hour.

These real-life people's stories add the dimension of human faces and narratives to the analyses, the poetry and the diatribes.  They are only anecdotal evidence, but then again Squirrel Hill is only anecdotal evidence for rump's incitement of violence, regarding which rump's media sycophants are full of dung when they write op-eds denying any connection between rump's demagoguery and violent acts that obviously resonate with the hysteria and hate spewed from the mouth of evil (e.g., see repulsive Hugh Hewitt's WashPost "both-sides" apologia for the accessory-to-murder-in-chief, but that cat-scat I would not provide here).  Don't believe your eyes or your brain, says Hewitt and his ilchch [sic], all politicians encourage murderous rage; believe the dear leader!