Candidates for an open at-large seat on the Northampton City Council expressed support Monday for a plan to help as many as 50 refugees resettle in the city. Their views knit with a council resolution last year to welcome refugees.
At the community level, this is what we so often see: Support for people in trouble, whether they come from Syria and Somalia, or whether, like Chhum Nget of Belchertown, they fled genocide more than three decades ago.
Unfortunately, goodwill doesn’t always carry the day. Last Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 4-4 tie, upheld an appeals court ruling that halted an executive action by President Obama to shield as many as 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation.
The court issued a nine-word ruling that brought this reaction from a former acting solicitor general: “Seldom have the hopes of so many been crushed by so few words.”
President Obama acted after trying for years to shape a new national policy on immigration — a goal once embraced by both major political parties. The Senate passed a bipartisan bill in 2013 but House leaders refused to take it up.
In 2014, Obama ordered that a certain class of undocumented parents not face deportation and be able to work legally.
This program, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, applied to parents in the country since Jan. 1, 2010, whose children are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents.
After the court ruled, the presumptive Republican and Democratic presidential nominees did something they rarely do — agree.
Both candidates said the next election will decide the matter. It will determine, as Donald J. Trump put it, “whether or not we have a border and, hence, a country.”
Or as Hillary Clinton said last week, whether Trump, if elected, will be able to create “a deportation force to tear 11 million people away from their families and their homes.”
For now, millions of new Americans who had hoped to achieve a sense of normalcy in their lives — the acceptance of a nation formed by wave after wave of immigrant arrivals — must wait.
As rhetoric in the presidential campaign intensifies, they should prepare to hear themselves vilified, as our nation goes through one of its periodic cycles of nativism and xenophobia.
It is not the best we can do. Our nation does not need a wall. It needs a path to reason on immigration that keeps step with our pride in being a country that accepts immigrants and refugees and renews its strength through their participation in our civic life.
Meantime, decent Americans try to make a difference for innocents who suffered abroad. A story June 20 in the Gazette documented work by a local mothers’ group to assist a Somali couple who resettled in Springfield last September.
The couple, Asha Muhumed and Hussein Ali, fled Somalia’s civil war 25 years ago. Until they were aided by the Jewish Family Service of Western Massachusetts, they lived in an Ethiopian refugee camp with their nine children.
Four months ago, after first thinking she carried twins, a pregnant Asha delivered triplets. New mothers in the Amherst area heard of the family’s plight and donated items to help with the infants’ care.
“Their hearts just opened,” Deborah Roth-Howe of Leverett said of donors, whom she and her daughter Leah helped mobilize.
A closed heart should not be national policy.
On Independence Day next week, a naturalization ceremony here in the Valley will again celebrate the diversity and talents brought by people born elsewhere.
That is the sentiment expressed in the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed in a plaque at the Statue of Liberty. The writer channeled Lady Liberty herself in these words: “Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she / With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”