The Republicans are not sincere when they address the issue of immigration.

This is easy to tell because they want to perform a wholesale deportment of all our current immigrants even though many of those fall into the category of “good propaganda for the Right.”

The Right has historically supported folk from the various “captive nations” around the world. In years past, we promoted saving political prisoners and their families because some left-wing government somewhere wanted to punish those who refuse to toe the left-wing party line.

While they gathered cobwebs in their prisons, non-governmental organizations and others tried to alert the world to their fate and get them out. In the 1970s and 1970s, the old Soviet Union tried, and ultimately failed, to stop the outward migration movement of Russian Jews called “Let My People Go!”

When the Soviet Union fell, there was a sudden exodus of Jews to Israel, where they were welcomed with open arms, open minds and open wallets and are now part of a great nation, housed mostly on the West Bank. Some came to America and got in easily.

In 1980, there was the famous Mariel boat lift during which a 100,000 oppressed Cubans gained entry, permanent status, and, eventually, citizenship.

Republicans, especially in Florida, embraced the newcomers because they joined almost a million former refugees from that unhappy island nation. After this great success immigration laws were changed by the Republicans to enable future escapees from Cuba to enter America very easily. The law was altered so that people who entered our country illegally merely had to set foot on dry land (or sand) and they were in forever even if they illegally came by leaky boat and swam to shore to achieve the dry foot exception.

But our legal system must treat all people equally and so many from below our southern border used this same “dry foot” doctrine to cross the Rio Grande. U.S. Sen. Rubio of Florida is especially eager for the doctrine to continue to succeed but his fellow Republicans have gotten uneasy over the numbers involved.

Today, Republicans refuse to admit such things are still going on. They just want to stop ALL immigration because they hate all people who are unlike themselves and get votes while doing so.

Now they are threatening internment camps for the political refugees before they are deported. The Republicans obviously have no idea about what these people have been through and don’t care. They completely ignore the Bible and the teachings of Jesus that cover such things.

Republicans do not want to think about what Christians do because Christians believe in Biblical sayings that mean something, like, “The love of money is the root of all evil” and “the meek will inherit the earth” and the assertion of Jesus himself that “it would be easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to attain the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Today Republicans are hiding from their own former ideals and instead are protecting the rich from paying their fair share and voting for servants of the rich who want to destroy the teachings of Christianity.

Their collective heads are buried so deep in the sand, they have no conception that they are now capable of saving, literally, a million victims of authoritarian governments south of us.

Right now the left-wing dictators of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela have opened the political prisons and freed their conservative “trouble-makers” by sending them to America where they encounter hatred and derision, instead of love and laurels for their spunk and heroism. The Right-wing dictators of the region do the same to their political dissidents but Republicans refuse to open their hearts for them as well.

To Republicans, ALL foreigners are bad.

Now, the Republicans lie constantly about everything and claim that ALL the refugees have been released NOT from political prisons but from internment for actual crimes and insanity and cannot be trusted among decent Americans. They are giving up all claims to decency that the Republicans once enjoyed.

(Ricky Gombas lives in Saranac Lake.)