By Rickey Singh, From Barbados Nation News
POPE FRANCIS, who concluded on Sunday a most memorable, people-focused six-day visit to the United States – preceded by a historic first-time ecumenical open-air mass at Cuba’s Revolutionary Square in Havana – has left governments, lawmakers and millions of citizens across the world with quite a challenging message.
Join hearts and actions for “protection of the human rights and dignity of all immigrants”, he pleaded before flying back to The Vatican.
This plea from the 78-year-old supreme leader of the vast Roman Catholic world is all the more timely and relevant amid the horrendous, gut-wrenching plight of many thousands of refugees and migrants seeking refuge in Europe amid deaths of parents and children/grandchildren, desperate for a place of survival with the dignity they are increasingly being denied.
Taking such a challenging message to a joint session of all places, the United States Congress – currently locked in acrimonious debates as electioneering campaigns intensify by would-be presidential candidates – could hardly have been a surprise for those familiar with the theology, personality and commitment “for a better life” for humankind by the first pope from Latin America, the Argentine-born Francis.
The pope reminded millions of television viewers and listeners that he too was also “the son of immigrants”.
His appeal for the much-maligned immigrant communities in America – the legendary “home of the brave and land of the free” – was therefore not to ridicule or engage in any kind of finger-pointing.
Deep-rooted prejudices
No, neither by the lawmakers of the United States Congress or, at worse, the irascible, pompous billionaire Donald Trump, currently seeking the Republican Party’s endorsement as a 2016 presidental candidate, with his passionate advocacy to halt the influx of immigrants and, by so doing, “help make America great again”.
I can understand why a pugnacious Trump, floating on his wealth, would glorify his notoriety as an assumed “liberator-in-waiting” to free Americans from a perceived hateful “bondage” for immigrants with a promise to “make America great again”.
For a start, a billionaire like Trump, with his own deep-rooted social prejudices, may not even be familiar with how successive administrations in Washington had facilitated the economic plundering of Latin America to “make America great” in the first place.
Back in 2009, during the Fifth Summit of the Americas, hosted by the then government of Trinidad and Tobago, President Obama was surprisingly, and dramatically, presented by then President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, with a copy of Eduardo Galleano’s Open Veins of Latin America – a revelation of five centuries of “the pillage of a continent” to help make “America great again”.
I do not know how many of today’s heads of Caribbean governments are familiar with Open Veins of Latin America, or the extent of their preparedness to be on the alert over Trump’s obsession with “making America great again”.
Deafening silence
That promise by Trump involves closing the door to incoming immigrants – including the building of a massive wall against Mexicans – while uprooting residing immigrant families in the United States by separating mothers and/or fathers from their undocumented children born in America.
Those are the kind of families Pope Francis would also have had in mind when he made his historic plea for respect of the “human rights and dignity of immigrants” in his address to Congress.
In the circumstances, I confess personal disappointment over the deafening silence, to date, or the absence of a relevant initiative by any of our government “leaders” across the Caribbean to at least welcome the pope’s enlightened plea for respect of “the human rights and dignity” of all immigrants in the United States.
Lest anyone conveniently suffers memory loss on this human rights issue, there are hundreds of thousands of Caribbean nationals among the estimated four million immigrants in the so-called American diaspora.
A question of relevance is why no head of government has lamented the injustices so often complained against American immigration authorities, while they otherwise engage in their ritualistic public addresses at the annual ceremonial new session the United Nations General Assembly.
Whatever the variations in their agenda of priorities, it would be useful to have a collective CARICOM response to Pope Francis’ seminal stand.
Rickey Singh is a noted Caribbean journalist.
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