The Borders Within Us
It’s hard to understand the coldness I see in so many of my fellow citizens. People speak of deportation as though it were housekeeping, as if families could simply be swept away without consequence. They call them lawbreakers. They use the word illegal like a period at the end of empathy. Yet many of these people have lived here for decades. They’ve worked, paid taxes, built lives. Their children are citizens. Their roots are deep. But to so many Americans, none of that matters. What matters is that, at some distant point in time, they crossed a border unlawfully.
What do we gain by being right if it costs us our compassion?
Somewhere along the way, we became a nation more comfortable with punishment than understanding. We’ve learned to confuse legality with morality, as if the two were interchangeable. But they never have been. The law once defended slavery. It once denied women the right to vote. It once barred Chinese immigrants from entry and placed Japanese Americans behind barbed wire. At every turning point in our history, the law lagged behind the conscience of those willing to see people first.
The law can tell us what is permitted. It cannot tell us what is right.
It’s easy to condemn someone you’ve never met. Harder to imagine the life behind the label. Some of those here without citizenship came as children, too young to understand what “lawful” or “unlawful” meant. Others arrived in desperation, chasing the same story their ancestors once believed, that America was a place where effort could shape destiny. Few imagined how long and costly the path to citizenship would be, or how fragile their standing would remain even after decades of contribution.
To belong here, it seems, is not a matter of work or character but of paperwork.
There are people in this country who are not citizens yet live here lawfully: permanent residents, visa holders, refugees, DACA recipients, and those under temporary protected status. Each of these categories carries its own rules, renewals, and risks. A missed form, a processing delay, or a shift in policy can unravel years of stability. Yet to the casual observer, they are all seen the same way. The public imagination has collapsed every form of legal presence into one label: immigrant. As if legality were a single border rather than a maze of thresholds.
And yet, what is citizenship if not a recognition of shared humanity? We treat it now as a wall around our compassion. We decide who deserves dignity not by conduct but by circumstance, where they were born, how they arrived, whether a form was stamped. In doing so, we forget how arbitrary our own security is.
Every one of us descends from someone who crossed a border. Maybe not of geography, but of circumstance, poverty, fear, limitation, or hope. The story of coming here is the story of wanting a life that feels possible. Those who risk everything to reach it are not so different from those who were born into it. The difference is luck, not virtue.
So when I hear people say, “They broke the law,” I wonder if that is really what they mean. Or if what they mean is, “Their struggle is not my concern.”
We like to believe that our values are exceptional. That we are a moral people. But morality means more than obedience. It asks us to see ourselves in others. To remember that justice without empathy is only order. And order alone has never made a nation great.
The question is not who deserves to be here.
The question is who we become when we stop caring why they came.
If we cannot find mercy for those who dream as we once did, then maybe the dream itself has already died.