The Deportation Theater of the Absurd

To those who shrug and say, “They broke the law,” I suggest they revisit the purpose of law in a republic that also prides itself on due process, proportionality, and, dare I say, decency. True law steers a society towards prosperity and security — it does not batter it into submission.

Likewise, violent protests in response to these raids — smashing windows, lighting cars on fire and destroying property, or assaulting officers — do nothing to advance justice and everything to erode credibility. Such actions betray the very ideals protesters claim to defend. How is looting the business that another immigrant built up with the sweat of their own brow advancing the cause of immigration reform or justice? And ironically, both agents and agitators wear masks.  No one should hide behind masks — literal or figurative — if what they are doing is just and honorable. Moral clarity cannot be obscured by darkness or disguise.

A few years ago, I revisited a novel penned by one of my favorite writers and a native son of our great state — John Steinbeck — who chronicled the migrant experience during an earlier, dust-choked chapter of the American history. In his seminal work, The Grapes of Wrath, he captured the chaos of Dust Bowl during the 1930s, chronicling the struggle of working folks: families from Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas — Americans all — fleeing drought and despair, seeking a better future for their children, only to be greeted in California with police lines, barbed wire, and violence. Steinbeck showed how fear turns neighbors into pariahs and hardship into a pretext for cruelty.  A haunting episode of cruelty unravelling before our eyes in the form of yet another Hollywood reboot.

The famous folk singer Woody Guthrie sang the same warning in 1940, leveling his guitar like a moral compass against the immorality of excess and greed in our Golden State: “California is a Garden of Eden, A paradise to live in or see; But believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot If you ain’t got the do re mi.”

Then, as now, the promise of Eden collided with the price of admission. We have merely swapped “Okies” for Hondurans, Guatemalans, and Mexicans, Hoovervilles for detention centers, and shotgun-wielding gatekeepers for federally badged agents. What endures is the reflex to brand newcomers as economic threats, strains on public coffers, or cultural contagions. Human beings — then and now — are reduced to ledger entries rather than embraced as fellow travelers seeking dignity.

The accents change; the scapegoating stays the same. The question before us, unchanged since Steinbeck’s and Guthrie’s day, is not whether migrants will come — they always do — but whether we, in our supposed wisdom, will remember who we once were and choose empathy over expediency.