There is something startling and incongruous about inaugurating Donald Trump as president on the Martin Luther King commemorative holiday. The unsettling irony of these two events coalescing on the same day reflects where contemporary America stands on the continuum between King’s vision of the future and the ugly realism of today.
Dr. King was the prophet of love, unity, and respect for the dignity of everyone, particularly those oppressed and marginalized in America or by America. Donald Trump, on the other hand, campaigned against immigrants, demeaning them and conjuring up derisive false statements about them. Dr. King campaigned on a platform of love and justice; the other, on a platform of enmity and division.
Few people today would doubt where Martin Luther King would stand, and stand strongly, about immigrants. He helped pass federal immigration reform in 1965, ending racist nationality quotas. Donald Trump, however, scuttled compromise national immigration legislation last year so he could campaign against immigrants. King’s agenda was justice for all; the other, self-interest.
As has happened throughout our history, people migrate to this country, seeking freedom from persecution and acute economic depravity. Now is the added fear of cartels killing their kids if families don’t surrender them as pawns in the drug business.
Too often, we look at immigration only from the perspective north of the Río Grande, not from the perspective of what drives people here. No one gets up from their home and community and migrates thousands of miles unless driven by necessity.
The country is facing a set of executive orders on the MLK observance day that will do anything but assure the safety and respect the dignity of people who have had to flee.
The anti-immigrant presidential campaign reflected a chasm-deep fault line in American society. On one side is our one-time national ambition of building community. On the other, is the malaise that has moved us toward becoming a country of self-interested individualists The paramount political question has become what can I get for myself and not what is good for the entire community?
And in discerning what is good for the entire community how do we roll the immigrants into the community. We have already done it, of course, in that our country economically depends on migrants who will work for very low wages and in kinds of work no one else will do. They also pay taxes. In 2022, undocumented immigrants paid almost $100 billion in taxes. Undocumented Texans paid $5 billion, the second highest in state and local taxes nationwide
There’s no doubt that, given our wealth as a country, we can reasonably accommodate immigrants who have to flee from all kinds of countries worldwide. President Ronald Reagan worked on reform measures, recognizing the importance of immigrants and the industriousness and creativity they contribute to our country
At the end of the day, unfortunately, the argument is not driven by logic or problem-solving. Nor is it based on the religious belief that so many anti-immigrant folks profess. To the contrary.
Martin Luther King was fond of citing the parable of the Good Samaritan to describe how we should guide our society and ourselves: “I imagine that the first question the priest and Levite asked was: ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But by the very nature of his concern, the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’
The man left to die on Jericho Road was an Israelite, like the two passersby, co-religionists, who didn’t stop to help him. His rescuer, who happened to be in the country, was from a territorial region despised by Israelites.
As with the parable, those from foreign lands can help us be the best of ourselves or the worst. The Martin Luther King observance should pull us to be the best.
(Jim Harrington is a human rights lawyer in Austin and the retried founder of the Texas Civil Rights Project.)
