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Our system is enough to make you believe in alchemy. The diviners of yore attempted to transform lead into gold, but our modern wizards have succeeded in converting a child into a political football.
The child is Elian Gonzalez, formerly of Cardenas, Cuba. Last November, his mother joined about a dozen people who got in an open boat and tried to get to Florida.
The boat fell apart. Elizabet Broton Rodriguez, the boy's mother, drowned. Six-year-old Elian survived a 48-hour ordeal to be picked up by fishermen and taken to Miami.
There he has some relatives who want to keep him. His Cuban father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, wants him back.
One analogy offered by some of our right-thinkers, who argue that Cuba is just one big forced-labor camp, is to imagine that this happened in 1858, and that a slave named Elizabeth fled from Virginia toward freedom and drowned while crossing the Ohio River. Her little son Elias survived and was rescued -- would it be right to send the boy back to his father in Virginia?
Of course it wouldn't be right, but it was the law then
-- it was known as the Fugitive Slave Act, and free states
couldn't do much about it, since the federal constitution
said that No person held to Service or Labour in one
State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another,
shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be
discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be
delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or
Labour may be due.
(Note how the word slave
is not used here, or
anywhere in the original Constitution, even though it's
obvious that slavery is the subject. Our Founding Fathers
could be pretty good at euphemism and dissembling when they
deemed it necessary.)
But try another analogous situation. Suppose that Elizabet Rodriguez had been trying to leave Mexico, and she drowned while crossing the Rio Grande with her son Elian, who was rescued. And there were relatives on this side of the border who would take him in, although he had a father in Chihuahua who wanted him.
Would Rep. Dan Burton still issue a congressional subpoena for the child, trying to delay the normal process of law? Would little Elian be getting lots of toys and trips to amusement parks, with his relatives telling us how much the boy wanted to stay in America?
Or would it be just another immigration case, to be
ignored unless it was part of a general denunciation of
aliens who sneak into our country and take jobs away
from Americans when they're not ripping off our welfare
system.
The counter argument to this is that the United States and Mexico have normal diplomatic relationships and relatively free travel between the nations; Elian could visit his relatives and they could visit him.
This seems to make an argument for establishing normal diplomatic relationships with Cuba. Granted, it's a Marxist dictatorship, but over the years we've managed it with the Soviet Union, China and Vietnam.
Or else it makes an argument for Mexico becoming a Marxist dictatorship, so that its emigrants who manage to get into the United States will get fawned over by politicians who need the votes of an exile bloc, rather than deported.
Neither of those is about to happen. The logical solution, send the boy to his father, is fraught with political complications, since Juan Gonzalez might be just a scripted puppet of Fidel Castro, the dictator of a police state.
And who, after all, would want to send an innocent child to a country where the police can just break into people's houses and kill them?
Where people's property can be seized by the government when they're just suspected of a crime, without due process, before they're convicted, and if they're somehow acquitted, they have to sue to get it back?
Where people with unpopular religious beliefs are assaulted with tanks and helicopters?
Where people can go to prison for having the wrong plants in their gardens?
Where a government ministry examines the scripts of television programs before they are broadcast and tells the producers how to adjust the dialogue and settings so as to further the government's propaganda goals?
Of course, nobody would want to put a six-year-old child in a country like that. Since the two countries where he has relatives have just been eliminated, where should Elian Gonzalez go?
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