Fun with Hawaii

Here are some cool things to know about Hawaii:

•         Captain James Cook is credited as its first European visitor, having found it in 1778.
•         Its patron saint is St. Damien of Molokai, a Catholic missionary to a leper colony who died of leprosy after 16 years of caring for the sick with his bare hands.
•         Hawaii went from being a monarchy to a republic to a US territory in only five years (1893 – 1898), and then took another 60 years to become a state.

Last but not least: yesterday it became the first state to successfully sue the US government over President Trump’s second travel ban. The case is still ongoing – and could well go up to SCOTUS – but a federal judge saw enough merit in the complaint to issue an injunction preventing the implementation of the order until it has been litigated. As someone who has been on tenterhooks about immigration policy since last October, I am very proud of Hawaii today.

I am not an immigrant. I am, in fact, the great-great-granddaughter of immigrants. The most recent branch of my family came from Italy, yet my Italian is so terrible that yesterday I ordered the completely wrong type of pastry at a Sicilian bakery. (We wanted sfingi San Giuseppe and I got zeppoli San Giuseppe, if you can imagine such horrors.)

Why, then, have I spent nights awake and days in tears over the future of American immigration? Simple: I love my job.

I manage volunteers for a living. (Yes, that's an actual job!) I create and organize volunteer-led programs that teach immigrants English, prepare them for US citizenship, prepare them for a high school equivalency exam if needed, help them get driver's permits, and broker the culture for them until they're comfortable with life in New York. My volunteers served over 2,000 times last month alone.

Most of our clients are refugees. They come from Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Dominican Republic, Haiti, China, and everywhere in between. They are men and women, doctors and bricklayers, teenagers and grandparents.

They are the people against whom President Trump wants to slam and lock the Golden Door, by which the Mother of Exiles lifts her lamp. 

If my job was a juggling act before the inauguration, then the past 6 weeks have been the equivalent of an audience member tossing me chainsaws. My organization fights to remain impartial, yet suddenly teaching English is a political statement. My communications with volunteers used to be about best practices and scheduling. Now I've had to add updates on which types of immigrants the US is admitting and deporting and what resources to share with students. At first I thought a monthly update was enough. After the first five weeks of emergency updates, I gave up and started scheduling them for every Friday.

While I disagree with our President on a great many issues, his repeated attempts to ban refugees make me feel physically ill. Claiming that refugees aren't vetted enough is a lie. Abandoning women and children to war zones is morally evil. Turning our backs creates mortal enemies where we could be making firm allies. A refugee ban is both stupid and wrong.

There is precedent for denying entry to refugees on the basis of national origin, but it's the type of terrible, shameful precedent that ends with the people we reject dying in Nazi camps. Otto Frank spent nine agonizing months trying to get a visa from the US for the sake of his daughters, Margot and Anne. The Coast Guard literally forced 900 desperate Jews to go back to Europe, where a third of them died in the Holocaust. I do not want my country to go back to that type of hate-based blindness to human suffering. I do not want my students to live in fear of the US government, when they're still trying to heal from the terrors committed by their native governments. My most fervent prayer is for us to live up to our promise as a home for the huddled masses who yearn to breathe free.

I still have some faith that we will. But we'll see how the next month goes.