Human Rights and Immigrants

So tell me why a human being deserves rights? What’s the answer in your gut? Is it because we have community and institutions that are set up to protect our rights? We deserve them because we were granted them by the rest of humanity? What if the world wasn’t so kind? Would we still deserve the human rights if we didn’t have the institutions to make them possible?

When you’re finished doing so, explain why those rights might be different if they’re born on one side of an imaginary line between two countries and the other side of that imaginary line. Maybe you said what rights were different, but did you say why? Was your reason about what institution or community respected your rights? Is that consistent with your answer to the first paragraph?

How does that imaginary line in the earth between countries that says this is where Greece ends and Turkey begins, how does that affect human rights? Did your first answer relate to a government or a country or did you just feel a human being deserves rights based on being a human being?

Now explain to me why a person in Greece or Turkey should have different rights based on whether they were born in the country they’re currently in to a citizen or not. But explaining it without saying “someone else’s problem” because a human being isn’t a “problem”. It’s bad enough people can describe them as a “resource” which makes it sound like they are something that can be judged on how valuable it is.

If you feel immigrants should not be allowed in this country, let’s do a thought experiment, start questioning why you should be allowed in this country. Like the immigrant you were born in a place and you didn’t do anything to deserve to be born there, you weren’t born yet when the place of your birth was selected. You might have contributed to taxes but you have also had access to school, police, law, health services and possibly benefits and/or student loan options. If you are young or poorly paid so far you have probably cost this country more than you have paid in income tax, so I ask again why do you deserve to be here? Does that immigrant deserve to be here more or less than you? Is it scary to question whether you deserve to be here? Is it scary that you might have rights you deserve taken away? You won’t. An immigrant probably will. Did you take a risk and brave an ocean on a tiny boat to be here or did you just pop out helpless through no effort of your own?

If you don’t think your right to be here should be questioned, then don’t question someone else’s right to be here. In the end we are all human beings and we are all the result of our circumstances.