America: Shining city on a hill?

President Ronald Reagan, 40th United States President, was one of the great Presidents who believed in the divine supremacy of the US over the world. During his administration, America truly climbed to the highest of its pinnacle in the world. He weakened the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the greatest rival to America’s emergence as the undisputed, most powerful nation on earth, through his astute leadership, that resulted in the disintegration of USSR in 1991, just about three years after he left office, and under President George Bush, his protegee, who served as his Vice President when he was President. He challenged Mikhail Gorbachev, the then USSR leader, to tear down the Berlin Wall that separated Germany into East Germany and West Germany. The wall came crashing down in 1989, same year after he left office. His words were always authoritative, and prophetic.

Donald Trump

He was the President that popularised America as the shining city on a hill. Reagan, however, did not leave America in doubt how America became the most powerful nation on earth and how it can maintain such status. In his last speech as President, he recalled how a man wrote him and said, you can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany, Turkey, or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or Japanese. But anyone from any corner of the earth can come to live in America and become an American.

To Reagan, it’s the great life force of each generation of new Americans that guarantees that America’s triumph shall continue unsurpassed into the next century and beyond. In his words, “other countries may seek to compete with us, but in one vital area, as a beacon of freedom and opportunity, that draws the people of the world, no country on earth comes close. This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness. We lead the world because unique among nations, we draw our people, our strength, from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams, we create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow.”

Reagan gave thanks to each wave of new arrivals to America, the land of opportunity. He recognised that because of these immigrants America is a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. He warned that this quality is vital to the future of America as a nation, and if America ever closed its door to new Americans, its leadership in the world would soon be lost.

To him, “it is bold men and women, yearning for freedom and opportunity, who leave their homelands and come to a new country to start their lives over. They believe in the American dream, and over and over they make it come true for themselves, for their children, and for others.” Reagan gratefully recognised that the immigrants “give more than they receive, they labour and succeed, and often they are entrepreneurs. But their greatest contribution is more than economic, because they understand in a special way how glorious it is to be an American. They renew our pride and gratitude in the United States of America, the greatest, freest nation in the world, the last best hope of man on earth.” It’s obvious that Reagan’s final speech as president was a love letter to immigrants and a sincere warning that any ill treatment of immigrants in America may result in America’s loss of the leadership of the world.

Donald Trump is the 45th and 47th US President who has a complete opposite and negative view of immigrants in modern day America. I use the word “modern” instructively because America is a nation of immigrants, and Trump himself is a descendant of immigrants. In American history, Trump has displayed the greatest irritation to the presence of immigrants in America, more than any other president. The truth is that his irritation of immigrants stems from his general condescending attitude towards people of colour and blacks.

During the presidential campaign, he accused the Haitian immigrants in Ohio, without evidence, of eating the dogs, cats, and other pets of the citizens of America. The world knows that Haiti is a Caribbean country of predominantly blacks and other minority coloured people. The citizens of Haiti were actually descendants of black Americans who were sent from America to Haiti to depopulate America of blackmen after the liberation of blacks as slaves. So Trump didn’t hide his denigration of the blacks or people of colour during his campaign.

It’s important to note that every American, and even non-Americans alike agree, without reservations, that every illegal immigrant in America, who has been committing violent crimes in America, should be deported from America without wavering or waste of time. They are a risk to America and even to other peaceful, hardworking, non-documented immigrants.

However, Donald Trump has taken the issue of immigrants to an unprecedented level of impunity, marginalization, and mercilessness. He cancelled the legitimate processing of the immigrant refugees into America who were genuinely fleeing wars, famine, and gross abuse of their human rights in their home countries. The immediate reason he adduced for illegally cancelling the birthright citizenship in America is that he finds it unbelievable that any person can cross into America and give birth and the child will immediately acquire US citizenship with full birthrights like any other citizen even if the parents are undocumented immigrants.

He ordered, immediately after being sworn in, that immigrants should be rounded up everywhere and anywhere, even in churches and thrown back to their countries of origin. These include persons who have lived in America for years and have given birth to many American children who are citizens. The separation of parents and children will not be a deterrence for this inconsiderate deportation of new Americans as Reagan will aptly refer to them. Even persons who were brought into America at tender age, who grew up having America as the only country they know, speaking only the language of America, are under the threat of being removed forcefully from America back to their countries they do not know. Other previous presidents started a programme of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) to temporarily delay the deportation of people without documentation who came to the U.S. as children, to explore reasonable options of granting these innocent children a legitimate path to stay in the US, the only country they know, to pursue their dreams. This programme is at risk of collapse by the actions of the President against immigrants.

As warned by Reagan that such actions can hurt America, the actions of Trump have already started hurting America. Most of the jobs these undocumented immigrants undertake are the ones most American citizens are reluctant to undertake. Having scared them into hiding, American companies, especially the agro-based ones, are running short of the manpower for production. The cost of labour will soon increase and some of these companies will soon collapse.

The actions against immigrants is bringing internal divisions within America. There is nation-wide protest against the executive orders of Trump on immigrants and some governors have threatened non-cooperation in the full implementation of the indiscriminate orders to deport all undocumented immigrants. It’s always in these kinds of internal divisions that enemies of democratic countries, both within and without, strike them. HAMAS struck Israel when the entire country was protesting against their government on the parliamentary decision to interfere with the powers of the Supreme Court. America’s civil war also occurred when some states disagreed with some of the important policies of the Federal Government.

Even God made a case for immigrants in foreign countries, and Donald Trump, being a confessed admirer of evangelical beliefs, ought to be more lenient to strangers, being a descendant of strangers himself at one time in America. In God’s scriptures, “the stranger who resides with you shall be to you like someone native-born among you; and you shall love him as yourself” (Leviticus 19:34, Amplified version). Continuing, God admonished that you “shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him (Exodus 22:21, KJV), and God reminded everyone that at one time or the other, everyone was a stranger at some other places and should have the heart of a stranger. Hear God, “for you know the soul [the feelings, thoughts, and concerns] of a stranger, for you were strangers in Egypt.” (Exodus 23:9, Amplified version).

America engraved on their currency that “In God we trust”. They should be sensitive to God’s admonitions. God blessed America to become the most powerful nation on earth obviously partly because of the ways it treats strangers. Previous presidents before Trump, like Reagan, upheld this tradition and prospered. May the spirit of Reagan inhabit Trump to repent and become nice to immigrants so that America will continue to be a shining city on the hill with full compliments of God’s blessings.