In his latest column for The Daily Beast, Mike Barnicle reflects on the current immigration crisis across the Mediterranean and Europe—embodied by the recent image of a three-year old boy from Syria lying dead on the beach—and questions whether the U.S. could still be considered a guiding light for the most persecuted and endangered people in today’s world. “In the United States, the calamity consuming Europe is so far just another clip… We have our own problems and our own politicians either trying to light fires or put out one blaze after another over the issue of our own recent immigrants, many here illegally for years without papers. The solutions range from the absurd to the impossible because our politics have become so damaged by fear, demagoguery and a fierce focus on ideology rather than the possibility of agreeing on something that works,” says Mike of the U.S. approach to immigration. Read his entire column here and Mike’s recollection of the hope and opportunity America used to symbolize to those who, also driven by wars and poverty, were forced to “risk death where they were born or risk death trying to escape.”
