JSランゲージスクールブログ | Separating families on the border
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Today I would like to talk about a topic that has been causing a stir in the US recently. A month or so ago, Trump decided that immigrant families coming into the US would be separated and detained. This caused a huge problem, because many children who are very young were separated from their families and put into camps. This was reminiscent of Japanese internment camps in the past, which were a very bad thing. Japanese internment camps were in place during World War 2, when the president did not trust Japanese people living in the US. Innocent people were rounded up and forced to live in camps that were not in very good condition. It is considered to be one of the 3 big shameful acts that America has committed (the other two being slavery and the treatment of Native Americans).
Many people were outraged at this clear violation of human rights. These children had no idea what was happening. They were just trying to get to the safety of the US with their families so they could apply for asylum. Asylum means a safe place. When people apply for asylum to a country, they have to come from a dangerous place. They have to show that their home is too dangerous for them to live there and they must come to the new country for their safety. Most of the immigrants who were detained were trying to do this. Some of them crossed the border to the US illegally. In this case, they have to be detained. It is the law. For many, this is the only choice they have, since you cannot apply for asylum from your home country.
There were many pictures from the camps showing crying children and children who could not speak any English to explain what they were feeling. They were basically in big cages. It was a very sad experience for me to see my country, where many people believe they can find freedom and hope, committing such an atrocity. They were treating those children like animals. The children also had to go to court and apply for asylum themselves. Remember that most of these children are very young and also do not speak English. They cannot be expected to tell a judge why they have to escape their country.
After hearing all of this news, America was split. A majority of Americans were very upset at children being taken from their parents. However, there was also a group of people who did not care. They said that if those families didn’t want to be torn apart they should not have tried to come to the US. This thinking is very dangerous. Many people did not care about these children because they were “foreign” children, not “our” children. When we start thinking about people from different countries as “other”, we also start seeing them as less. This makes it easier to justify the bad treatment of them. This was a tactic used by many bad rulers in history, especially people like Hitler. It makes me scared for America. America is a country of many kinds of people with many skin colors and belief systems, but recently the Christian, white male is taking over more than before.
