Editor's Note: Immigrants Song

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In Every Day We Live Is the Future, a remarkable book that came out last year, Wisconsin author Douglas Haynes writes about the devastating impacts brought by worldwide economic and climate-related trends. He cites a United Nations prediction that “by 2050, three billion people might live in shantytowns and favelas—almost half of the world’s projected urban population.”

But Haynes’s focus is not on studies or statistics; it’s on the day-to-day lives of two neighboring families in Managua, Nicaragua. He takes us into their shanties and has us trudge through their mud.

That’s kind of what we’ve set out to do with this issue, to look at immigration in a way that highlights its human dimension. As the United States and other developed countries recklessly exact a brutal toll on poorer nations, spurring mass migration, we must choose how to respond: to punish those who come here, often out of pure necessity, or live up to our ideals.

Donald Trump deserves much of the blame for demonizing immigrants, for his own wretched political purposes. But he does not deserve all of it. As Maeve Higgins reminds us in her essay, “The Luck of the Irish,” U.S. immigration policy has long been driven by racial bias. Fairness has never been a fundamental goal. “It’s dumb luck that I was born white and Irish,” she writes, reflecting on her own easy path.

Jeff Abbott, writing from Central America, explores how developments in Honduras and Guatemala, in which the U.S. government is directly implicated, are generating new refugees, some now banging at our door. Maya Averbuch reports on one class of refugees, from Haiti, huddled in Tijuana, on the U.S.-Mexican border. Stephanie Hoo tells of Southeast Asians in our own country living in fear of deportation, sometimes to places where they have never lived, as the United States shrugs off what it once regarded as its moral obligation. And Ruth Conniff writes from Mexico about efforts to create economic opportunity as an alternative to leaving the country in search of work.

We have two stories on El Salvador. Anna Lekas Miller explores the chilling possibility that Salvadorans, including some of those who may return after being expelled from the United States, will end up working as virtual slaves in Qatar, preparing for the 2022 World Cup. And Esty Dinur reports on El Salvador’s historic—and replicable—ban on metallic mining.

This issue would not have happened without the energy and vision of Associate Editor Alexandra Tempus, who came up with ideas and pulled in writers. Her own contribution to the mix is a compelling article about Marshall Islanders who are building new lives for themselves in Dubuque, Iowa. Mrill Ingram, our online media editor, matches this with a moving piece about immigrants in North Dakota. We as a nation are at our best, and our strongest, when we see immigrants as assets, part of what makes our country already great.

There is much more: Sharon Johnson highlights the tremendous role played by U.S. community health centers. Reese Erlich takes us on a visit to Iran amid the Trump Administration’s efforts to sabotage the nuclear pact, a possibility made more real by Trump’s firing of Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State. Sarah Jaffe looks at what the American left can learn from the success of Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom. And our publisher, Norman Stockwell, sends a dispatch from Vietnam on the fiftieth anniversary of the My Lai massacre.

Plus we have a lovely excerpt from a new book by Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood, offerings by our regular columnists (Mike Ervin’s latest brush with danger will set your teeth on edge), and a reflection from longtime contributor and new regular online columnist Mark Anthony Rolo. It’s about what he has learned by going to church.

Remember to read us online, commend us to your friends, include us in your will, and throw a few dollars our way when you can. Our future is in good hands—yours.

Bill Lueders, Managing Editor