Many, many years ago, (I was just a kid), I read a story in the Reader’s Digest about how thousands of Haitians were fleeing their country and rushing across the border they shared with the Dominican Republic. There had been some kind of natural disaster or a famine in Haiti and conditions were terrible there. The DR, with which Haiti shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, is a comparatively richer and less densely populated country, and the Haitians felt they had a better chance of surviving there.
I don’t remember all the details about this story, and I can’t give you any references or footnotes, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make here. What got to me about this incident was that (according to the story I was reading in the RD) the Dominicans had sent their army to the border to stop the refugees, and that they were firing on them as they crossed over from Haiti. Men and women, old and young, little children, were being mowed down by rifle and machine gun fire as they crossed the frontier. I can’t recall the numbers involved, but I remember the impression that hundreds, perhaps thousands were killed. I vividly recall an illustration in the article, a sketch of infantrymen dressed in uniforms and helmets just like our army wore, raising their rifles at distant targets out of frame.
To this day, I don’t recall anything about this historical incident, or come across any other accounts of it. I know nothing about why the Haitians had to leave their country, or why the Dominicans felt so compelled to stop them by any means necessary. I’m sure there were very good reasons on both sides. But that’s not the point. What really stuck with me as a kid was what a horror this was, how could anyone let this happen? No, I have no solutions to the problem, I certainly didn’t then, I just recoiled that such a thing could happen, had happened.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that childhood memory lately, in this time of mass migrations across international borders as helpless, wretched people flee persecution and death in their countries through no fault of their own, and how their neighbor nations (through no fault of their own) find it impossible (or too expensive or inconvenient) to shelter them and try to ebb the flow. I think of the Jews trying to escape Hitler’s Europe, and the resistance they experienced from the Liberal Democracies around them–including our own.
And I’ve been thinking a lot about how people could countenance simply shooting them down as they struggled in the barbed wire, marched blindly in the plains, swam the rivers, or rafted ashore from the sea. And I think about those who, even if they would never admit it out loud, think such a slaughter is perfectly justified, because “those people” are “breaking the law” or “every country has the right to protect its borders”, or “we can’t be expected to take care of the rest of the world”.
No, I don’t have an answer to this problem. But I do believe we have an obligation to be looking for one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyD_67t7mI0