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A recent change to immigration policy set in motion by President Trump and Attorney General Sessions is to arrest illegal immigrants when they cross into the United States and put any children accompanying them, even young children under the age of 2, into the custody of Health and Human Services. The numbers of these children are so large that the facilities provided for them are running out of space. Housing them on army bases is currently being considered. Temporarily, some of these children are being kept in cages. Even so, these facilities have currently lost track of 1,500 children, some of whom, it is feared, have been lost to human traffickers. The reason for this new policy, of course, is to discourage illegal immigration. As Sessions put it, if these immigrants do not want to suffer the loss of their children, they should not come here and break our laws. In other words, they brought it on themselves. It is worth pointing out that in seeking asylum, they are not violating any laws.
I have no doubt that this Draconian policy will, indeed, deter many who would otherwise risk the long and dangerous trek to our southern border. My understanding is that Trump’s manifest disdain for Hispanic immigrants has already diminished the numbers of those crossing into the country illegally. At least at the beginning of the year. Their number has been growing consistently since then, perhaps in response to the need for seasonal workers that is currently going unmet, which is threatening the livelihood of a number of farmers in the South. The central problem with the program, of course, is that separating parents from young children strikes many Americans as cruel.
There are a number of other situations which pose a similar quandary:
Should the public be charged with the considerable expense of taking care of alcoholics? Alcoholism is a self-inflicted condition. If we choose not to treat it, it is conceivable that fewer people might drink. Maybe.
Similarly, should the public at large be required to pay the huge medical expenses of dealing with the consequences of smoking? If these patients had not chosen to smoke, they would not have become ill.
Are hospitals justified in turning patients away from their emergency rooms in those cases when the patients did not have the foresight to buy insurance? In the past, ambulances have been turned away from hospitals for just this reason. In most states now, refusing emergency patients is illegal, no matter what the expense to the hospital.
Should we feel obligated to treat everyone who is poisoning himself or herself with opioids or illicit drugs? Should we try to patch up women who have repeatedly become pregnant and suffered the complications of illegal abortions?
Actually, society is usually charged with the responsibility of protecting people from the consequences of self-destructive or foolish behavior. And who is to say that the immigrants streaming towards us are acting foolishly or recklessly?
I have a patient who came, legally, from the Dominican Republic. She has described to me life down there. She cannot send money home, because it is taken away immediately by street gangs, who also abuse her relatives in every way imaginable. It might very well be the case that things are so terrible that having a child taken away at the border will not deter a person from coming. In the same manner, mothers may throw infants out of a burning building, because they would otherwise burn to death.
These may seem like tortured examples of ethical questions that have been settled long ago, but each of these remarks has been addressed to me at one time or another.
There is an inherent conflict between our generosity to others and our wish to pursue our own interests, but there has to be a balance, lest we lose what makes us human beings. We cannot allow self-interest to lead us into rank cruelty. We are supposed to be kind to strangers in particular, and to care about them if they are suffering. Every religion, particularly Christianity, says so.
To understand cruelty, certain facts should be kept in mind:
Our empathy for others depends on how close we are to them. We are more sympathetic to family and to friends than to strangers. If those strangers are obviously different from us, in race or in some other way, we feel still less obligated to care for them. If we hear about their being treated cruelly, we are less likely to become outraged. This is natural. Other animals also show a similar heightened sensitivity to the pain of family members than to others.
There is considerable variation between individuals in their response to the suffering of others. At one extreme are some people I know who go on vacation and unwittingly and invariably find some reason to alleviate the distress of poor families. Or to do something about starving feral dogs. They seem to be genuinely unhappy knowing there are people in distress in other countries. One such person cannot drive past an animal that is lying in the road injured without taking the animal to a veterinarian. At the other extreme are some parents who burn and torture their own children without suffering remorse. Such extreme behavior is startling to us and abhorrent. Some psychologists have posited errors in brain function that might be at fault. But ordinary people may be unkind. A patient spoke to me recently of uninsured individuals, “I don’t give a damn if they live or die.”
Psychopathic individuals do not usually change over time. I evaluated a man in the army who had a history of torturing and killing small animals when he was a small child, then larger animals when he was adolescent. Finally, when he attacked a human being, he came to the attention of a judge, who gave him the choice of a prison sentence or joining the army. I was forced to discharge him from the service into unsupervised civilian life after he was discovered strangling a fellow soldier in the bathroom.
Finally, in contrast to such deviant individuals, it is possible to alter the moral sensibilities of whole groups of men and women. They can be made either more or less sensitive to the strife of others. When I lived with my wife and young daughter in Germany, we lived upstairs in a house built by a bus driver and his pregnant wife. Over the two years I knew him, he was attentive to my daughter especially. During the war, he had been a member of the Nazi Youth and spent time in Holland rousting Jews to be sent to concentration camps. I don’t think he was remorseful. He did what the people around him were doing. Without the organized cruelty of the Nazis, I cannot imagine him engaging in such behavior.
Similarly, historians have commented on the extreme inability of concentration camp guards to think emotionally about what they were doing every day, separating mothers and children prior to incinerating them in ovens. I think most people can be led into such monstrous behavior given exactly the wrong circumstances. It is in cases of state-sponsored cruelty that the effect is greatest.
On the other hand, there are many others, like Emil, my German landlord, who can be influenced to be kinder and, in general, more civilized. Here we leave the place of psychology and entered the realm of good and evil.
What can be done?
Contrary to our intuitions, there is a very long trend in human affairs to diminish cruelty — to animals, to children, and to others. Things are getting better. Despite the first half of the 20th century, there are fewer people dying in war or as the result of genocide. People being born today are much less likely to die violently than in any time in human history. What has happened?
I think the answer is simple. The world has grown smaller. Through literature and more recently visual media, strangers have become our neighbors, and our neighbors have become family. Once we see these people more clearly, they are like us, and we can feel their pain. A picture of a crying, naked girl running down a road in Vietnam can affect public opinion a continent away.
What we must do now is to examine the lives of these immigrants closely, and our government’s response to them closely. The administration will resist, but we need to see pictures of these crying children and the cages in which they are kept. We need to hear their voices. We need to see them. They need to become real to us.
I do not believe that in this nation of immigrants, the government will be able to sustain policies that are inherently cruel.
© Fredric Neuman
