The U.S. Immigration System Is a Dehumanizing Mess

U.S. Immigration System

The U.S. Immigration System Is a Dehumanizing Mess

Out of incompetence, corruption, and expediency, both parties have failed to establish the kind of long-term, structural changes needed to protect the dignity and safety of foreign nationals and American citizens alike. Thus far, President Joe Biden seems intent on exacerbating the problem. 

The nineteenth-century social reformer Frederick Douglass once remarked that slaveholding is harmful to both the master and the slave. In the latter, because it corrupts; in the former because it makes dependent. That observation applies aptly to our immigration system, and it would likely take a moratorium to break the chains. But don't count on that anytime soon.

Pedro L. Gonzalez is assistant editor of American Greatness and a contributor at Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Image: Reuters