Last week, the bodies of Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria, were discovered in the Rio Grande. At once, the tragic deaths of a father seeking a better life for his daughter were thrust into the national spotlight as partisan evidence against the current administration. How unfortunate.
Response to such a tragedy should be a measure of one’s humanity, not of one’s political bias. As a father with three very young daughters and a 9-month-old son myself, I couldn’t help but see the bodies of my own little ones when I saw the photo and my eyes filled with tears of empathy for the Ramirez family.
The most compassionate response is to find a way to prevent it from happening again. When asked about the tragedy, President Trump replied, “I hate it, and it could stop immediately if the Democrats change the laws.”
He’s right. Demand to enter the United States is vast at the moment, and there absolutely must be a better system of lawful immigration. Meanwhile, unlawful or illegal immigration must be discouraged.
Trump has proposed one such solution: a secure southern border, including a wall. I won’t address the fact that walls work, because Federal Border Agents charged with protecting our southern border have made that clear already. Instead, I want to highlight that the reluctance of many Democrats to secure our border once and for all is only going to increase the probability of more deaths like those of Oscar and Valeria Ramirez.
A solid and secure border (including a wall) dashes all hopes of people hoping to cross our borders illegally. It forces immigrants to accept the “brutal facts” of America’s lawful immigration process. Given the right incentives, they will understand that there are only two ways to immigrate to the U.S. — the rightful, legal way, or not at all.
Democrats publicly condemn any talk of securing our border as “inhumane,” while at the same time allocating billions of dollars not to fund long-term solutions, but to treat symptoms. They want to provide better short-term living conditions for migrant detention centers, but those centers wouldn’t be full the way they are if our border was secure in the first place. I agree that conditions of those centers must be improved, but we need permanent solutions, not debate one-liners written for maximum applause.
Promising a warm reception for illegal immigrants isn’t compassion. It’s a cruel invitation that’s guaranteed to cause deaths. It gives false hope to millions of people and leads them to take ridiculous and unnecessary risks with their own lives and those of their own (and others’) children.
Real compassion, in contrast, would entail proving once and for all that our border is absolutely secure; that no one is coming in illegally, that any dangerous attempts to cross the border are futile.
Had Oscar Ramirez been confronted with the hard facts and with American determination to guarantee a lawful, orderly system of migration, he and his daughter might still be alive today.
Daryl Austin is a writer and small-business owner.
