As the nation vigorously debates the fate of children detained at the southern U.S. border, it is no surprise that former first lady Laura Bush — a doting mother and grandmother — felt the need to wade into the national immigration debate.
There is just one problem: The former librarian should have checked out a history book first.
It was her own husband, President George W. Bush, who signed into law in 2008 a comprehensive immigration reform package including a policy pertaining to unaccompanied minors at the border.
Bush’s law, in conjunction with later federal litigation, resulted in the prohibition of the detention of families together as one unit as they awaited their fate at the border.
For the former first lady to critique the Trump administration over a policy that her husband approved is the epitome of hypocrisy.
In fact, it is the kind of hypocrisy that the American people hate most about “the swamp.”
However, she didn’t stop there.
Not only did the former first lady critique President Donald Trump for something her own husband signed into law, she made an outrageous claim to boot — that the current border situation is morally equivalent to the shameful internment of Japanese-Americans in the wake of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.
Her comparison is not only outrageous, it is one of apples to oranges.
The internment camps of the 1940s were perpetrated against actual citizens of the United States, who were rounded up from their private homes, arrested, and thrown into concentration camps. Contrast this to the border crisis today which pertains to actors who aren’t citizens of this country and, therefore, have no claim to be on American soil in the first place.
That is a big difference.
The act of imprisoning its own people according to race-based blocs of Japanese-Americans, Italian-Americans and German-Americans undoubtedly left a mark on American history, and it is an act for which the United States has since apologized.
However, a sovereign nation acting well within its rights to maintain its borders and uphold immigration law as it pertains to foreigners attempting to unlawfully enter and in some cases, do harm, is quite another matter.
Any attempt to equate the two is not only an historically inaccurate comparison, but an outrageous claim of the sort that is beneath a former first lady.
Sadly, the Republican former first lady’s rhetoric is no different than the attempts by Democrats to suggest that today’s border crisis is just like the Jewish Holocaust and compare the Trump administration to Nazis in 1940s Germany.
Never mind that the perpetrators of the referenced incidents were left-wing leaders — President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the case of U.S. internments, Adolf Hitler regarding the Holocaust — or that, in the case of the latter, millions of people were gassed and murdered in other ways.
To suggest that the American government is conducting itself in a manner anywhere near that is simply irresponsible.
The cavalcade of former politicians need to do the rest of the nation a favor and ask themselves before they speak if they are adding constructively to the discussion. In this particular case, the addition of the former first lady’s voice did nothing but increase the outlandish, racially-charged rhetoric and give cover to those who erroneously seek to equate President Trump to a genocidal leader such as Hitler.
If lifelong politicians like the Bushes were serious about solving the problem at the border, instead of berating President Trump, they would encourage Democrats to support the common-sense legislation already in the U.S. Senate and to close the loopholes once and for all in the Trafficking Victims Reauthorization Act and other tenets of Bush’s failed immigration policy.
