The American Interest

Columnists
Features ReviewsNews Blogs
Search... Podcast
Analysis

Bobbie DeHerrera/Getty Images

IMMIGRATION IN AMERICA

Suffer the Little Children:

The View from El Paso
NEAL M. ROSENDORF

A visit to the El Paso-Juarez

“borderplex” points to the difficulties
involved in recovering the sensible
center on immigration policy.

A s one gazes down a thousand feet from the

highest point on El Paso’s Scenic Drive, it’s
almost impossible to discern any frontier separating
this sprawling, dun-colored westernmost Texas city
from its Mexican neighbor, Juárez. From this
vantage, the two metropolises are an identical and
unbroken whole, save for Juárez’s tiny, gaily painted
homes and a colossal vermilion X-shaped steel
sculpture by the renowned Mexican artist Sebastián
that is visible for miles. But altitude and distance
obscure the formidable boundary one readily
apprehends from close up—a 20 foot-high steel
fence version of the border wall that Donald Trump
has incessantly called for is already in place here,
vigilantly guarded by hundreds of border and
immigration control agents.

It wasn’t always thus. Between 1902 and 1974 an

electric streetcar regularly ran between El Paso and
Juárez, facilitating the easy passage of workers and
shoppers in both directions (so much so that
beleaguered Juárez retailers, losing local customers
to rival American stores across the Rio Grande,
eventually pressured their city government to shut
down the line). Yet even when the modern Paso del
Norte border was at its most porous, it was never
completely open, given the various restrictions and
quotas in place throughout most of the 20th century.

To be sure, thousands of people still cross in both

directions every week for commercial and personal
reasons. Even with a border fence/wall whose rusted
steel plates look in some places like Utah Beach on
D-Day, the El Paso-Juarez-Las Cruces area is in
many ways an economically, culturally, and socially
integrated “Borderplex” featuring the daily
movement of a huge number of goods and people
every day. But as Veronica Escobar, the Democratic
congressional candidate for Texas’s 16th District,
observed recently in the New York Times, “[E]ven as
El Pasoans and our southern neighbors have built
up a vibrant economy, politicians from Washington
and other places far from the border have made our
region the centerpiece of their efforts to restrict
immigration.” Since the militarization of the local
border commenced in 1993 with “Operation Hold
the Line,” the El Paso-Juárez boundary has steadily
and inexorably become a moat, into which
traumatized Mesoamerican children, along with the
parents from whom they have been snatched, are
currently tumbling.

The Museum of Immigration Restriction

A fter driving through the sere brown mountains

that rise in the midst of El Paso, one arrives at
the modest, isolated building that is the U.S. Border
Patrol Museum. It is at once an informative and
disquieting institution, with its uncritical placards
describing and at times implicitly lauding the
discriminatory immigration codes the Border Patrol
has been called on to enforce over its century of
existence, such as the self-explanatory 1882 Chinese
Exclusion Act and the mid-1950s “Operation
Wetback,” which saw the arrest and deportation of
more than a million illegal Mexican laborers (the
anti-Mexican slur for an illegal immigrant who
crosses the Rio Grande is repeatedly rendered
without comment).

When I visited recently, at least half of the

museum’s visitors were Hispanic and conversing in
Spanish among themselves. The two staff members
on duty were Latina as well. They were pleasant and
spoke Mexican-accented English. I wondered what
they thought of a prominently displayed 1929
photograph of two armed, crisply uniformed officers
triumphantly looming over a tiny, sad-faced
Mexican boy perhaps six years old apprehended in
El Paso, accompanied by what was meant to be a
humorous caption: “The Border Patrol’s ‘smallest’
catch.” It is almost too obvious to note the
continuity between this nine decade-old photo and
the recent similar images of Hispanic children who
have been taken from their parents to be deposited
at far-flung detention centers.

As the museum proudly notes, the U.S. Bureau of

Immigration established the embryonic “Mounted
Guards” in 1904 to interdict illegal immigrants from
China who were attempting to enter the United
States at the Texas-Mexico border. Headquartered in
El Paso, the Mounted Guards slowly expanded over
the next two decades as additional exclusionary
statutes were enacted. Congress passed a 1917 law
that barred entry of virtually all Asians, a 1921
statute that capped total immigration at 350,000—
the previous year the number had exceeded 800,000
—and finally the Immigration Restriction Act of
1924 (at which point the agency was formally
dubbed the United States Border Patrol), which
almost completely shut out Southern and East
Europeans, who since the 1880s had been coming to
America by the millions.

Summing up the eugenically inspired sense of

national peril (indeed, Congressman Albert Johnson,
co-sponsor of the 1924 bill, was the honorary
president of the Eugenics Research Association),
Calvin Coolidge warned, “There are racial
considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any
sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that
certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The
Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With
other races the outcome shows deterioration on
both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that
observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a
nation as immigration law.”

The Border Patrol was vigilant in stopping the

newly forbidden ethnic groups, including (mostly
East) European Jews. In fact, during the 1920s
enough illegal Jewish immigrants came up through
Mexico, sought to slip illegally past the El Paso
border, and were apprehended by U.S. authorities
that Rabbi Martin Zielonka of the city’s Temple
Mount Sinai attempted, with only modest success,
to encourage large-scale permanent Jewish
settlement in Mexico. But by the end of the 1920s,
the Border Patrol’s energies refocused primarily on
illegal Mexican immigration as well as south-of-
the-border smuggling. This focus remains to the
current day, as the bulk of the museum’s exhibits
emphasize—makeshift, weather-beaten ladders,
rafts, motorcycles, and even gliders confiscated in
various regional arrests.

The Border Patrol Museum includes a gift shop that

sells insignia hats, t-shirts commemorative coins
and keychains, as well as uniformed teddy bears,
each adorned with an official badge. Across from the
shop entrance stands a ten foot-tall replica of the
Statue of Liberty, next to a poster proclaiming
“Never Forget” in honor of the victims of the 9/11
terrorist attacks. There is no reference whatsoever
to “The New Colossus,” the 1883 poem Emma
Lazarus dedicated to the then-uncompleted statue
and to the “huddled masses yearning to breathe
free.” But the omission is unsurprising, as the
poem’s theme—certainly as it has come to be
understood over the years—runs diametrically
counter to the Border Patrol’s interdictory vocation.
[1]

The Internment Camp

A bout an hour’s drive east of the Border Patrol

Museum sits the remote and expansive Tornillo
Port of Entry. The crossing gets little traffic going in
either direction—a source of deep disappointment
after some $133 million was spent on its
construction—but its isolated location adjacent to
farmers’ fields, at present verdantly carpeted with
alfalfa, is precisely the reason why the U.S.
Department of Homeland has situated a prison-like
tent city there to confine hundreds of adolescent
Latino boys whom immigration agents have
apprehended traveling solo or separated from their
families.

It is around 100 degrees Fahrenheit and blindingly

sunny, typical for this time of year, as I park my car
and begin walking around the Port’s perimeter,
which is demarcated by a 12 foot-high chain-link
fence topped with barbed wire. Guards are not
readily in evidence; indeed, much of the fenced-in
expanse has an eerily deserted look from the
outside. It is hardly the approximation of a “summer
camp” as claimed by a high-ranking immigration
official in recent congressional testimony. Rather,
the overall appearance is reminiscent of a Boer War-
era internment camp—what the British, like the
Spanish before them in rebellious Cuba, called a
“concentration camp”—and as late as 1936
President Franklin D. Roosevelt would candidly
employ this term in suggesting that his staff draw
up contingency plans to deal with Hawaii’s ethnic
Japanese in the event of U.S.-Japanese hostilities.

FDR’s dark suggestion came to fruition six years

later with Executive Order 9066. The term
Konzentrationslager was by then already widely
associated with Nazi Germany, so most of the
Japanese residents and citizens who were rounded
up were detained in what were called “internment
camps.” While there were some true “enemy aliens,”
most were incarcerated out of paranoia spiced
liberally with racism. One of several camps was set
up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in an area that today
includes a pleasant residential neighborhood and a
large community pool where my children learned to
swim a decade ago. Only a modest marker in a
nearby public park acknowledges the wartime
travesty.

Among those in the Southwest who were

traumatized by the Roosevelt Administration’s
policy, which also touched German- and Italian-
origin immigrants, was the late Senator Pete
Domenici (R-NM), who grew up in Albuquerque as
the son of Italians who had arrived in America
decades earlier. Domenici’s mother came as a
toddler but was never properly naturalized as a U.S.
citizen—which made her an illegal alien and was
enough to get her arrested and detained by Federal
agents in front of her terrified young son. In 2006,
Domenici told the story in an impassioned speech
to his surprised fellow Senators, in which he
advocated passage of a humane comprehensive
immigration policy reform bill. The bill was
ultimately defeated, with opposition pressure
growing so great that Domenici and 18 other
Republicans and Democrats who had initially
supported the bill switched their votes at the last
minute from yea to nay.

On the day I visited the Tornillo camp the

temperatures were so sky-high that no amount of
water consumed would adequately ameliorate the
physical effects. Nonetheless, a group of boys
energetically played football in a dusty field near
their khaki-colored tent barracks, seemingly
oblivious to the scorching heat. The scene was
poignantly reminiscent of World War II photographs
of British prisoners of war disporting themselves in
the Stalag. Many industrial-size air-conditioning
units and huge portable generators rest in the open
air on wooden pallets, waiting to be deployed. They
serve as silent confirmation of recent news reports
that the facility, which was ostensibly slated to be
closed down by July 14, is not soon going away.

The Sanctuary

B ack in the heart of El Paso I paid a visit to

Annunciation House, a private, Catholic-
inflected non-profit refugee shelter that has been
operating since 1978, located about a half-mile from
the Good Neighbor International Bridge. The
organization inhabits a century-old, roughly
rectangular two-story brick building that, like
Doctor Who’s time-traveling police callbox, seems
considerably larger on the inside than on the
outside. With its energetic response to the Trump
Administration’s immigration crackdown,
Annunciation House has of late achieved national
and even international coverage of its efforts to
provide food, shelter, legal aid, and other services to
those who manage to make it over the border into
the United States. Founding director Ruben Garcia
has become an unlikely celebrity with his fearless
and persistent efforts to escort on foot across the
Paso del Norte bridge refugees seeking asylum who
are being physically restrained by armed officers
from touching U.S. soil.

I first learned of Annunciation House through a

Temple Mount Sinai service project. Visitors are
greeted by enthusiastic bilingual staffers, all unpaid
volunteers, who bustle about in the controlled chaos
of the shelter’s receiving room-cum-office and the
adjoining walk-in food pantry. They efficiently
organize donated goods, including at least a dozen
large boxes brimming with fresh white mushrooms,
to which I add a sack of potatoes and some
chocolate cookies.

Volunteers reside in Annunciation House alongside

the refugees who cycle through the shelter; it is
integral to the organization’s philosophy of living in
solidarity with those they serve. Two of them pause
briefly from their work to rest and chat. Kevin is a
lanky young Midwesterner who has just graduated
from college and will be entering law school this
coming autumn, where he intends to focus,
unsurprisingly, on immigration law. He has been a
full-time volunteer since May. James, a wiry, quietly
intense professor of sociology at a small Catholic
college in northern Kentucky, was a full-time
volunteer for years but now comes down to El Paso
whenever there’s a refugee crisis. They are both
friendly and self-effacing, but their seemingly
nonchalant talk about their strenuous daily effort
hints at a deep, spiritually grounded commitment,
as per Annunciation House’s mission statement, to
live out “a Gospel spirit of service and solidarity,”
accompanying “the migrant, homeless, and
economically vulnerable peoples of the border
region.”

Their credo and comportment provide a powerful

echo of the American Settlement House movement
more than a century ago, with its grounding in the
Social Gospel’s admonition to aid the vulnerable in
emulation of Jesus’ words and deeds. This call
inspired Jane Addams to found Hull House in a poor
Chicago neighborhood as a place of refuge,
education, and counsel: “easily accessible, ample in
space, hospitable and tolerant in spirit, situated in
the midst of the large foreign colonies which so
easily isolate themselves in American cities,” as she
put it in 1892. In fact, Mexican immigrants who had
taken up residence in Chicago in increasing
numbers began frequenting Hull House in the
aftermath of World War; by the 1930s Hull House
was holding an annual “Festival of Mexican
Culture.”

Annunciation House has traditionally kept a low

public profile while carrying out its work, which
enables the organization to operate without
sparking political controversy. As a result, over the
decades U.S. immigration authorities have quietly
reached out to the shelter and transferred
immigrants whom they have detained and
preliminarily processed, since it’s far less costly to
house them there than in official facilities while
they are being prepared to be sent off to sponsoring
families around America. To the staff’s relief, the
current rash of unsought publicity has not caused
any political blowback, so far. It has greatly
increased donations of food, clothes, hygiene
supplies, and money.

Ordinarily, many families with children make their

way through the facility, but this came to a virtual
halt when the Trump Administration began carrying
out its child-separation policy. Now that a
combination of political pressure and judicial
rulings have ended the separations (for the time
being), the staff are expecting at least 500 people to
arrive at Annunciation House via ICE (U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in the near
future, as immigration officers complete the process
of transporting children from their detention sites
all around the United States, save for the several
hundred families dubiously declared ineligible.

During my early afternoon visit there were about a

dozen refugees, a mix of neatly if unassumingly
dressed men and women in their mid-30s,
conversing in Spanish in low voices as they sit on
sagging couches in the common room. They
responded with understandably weary smiles when I
bid them “buenas tardes.” It was the proverbial calm
before the storm, as James and Kevin expected a
substantial influx of guests within the hour, with
more slated to arrive during the night. This pattern
became routine at Annunciation House for the next
several weeks.

L et me be clear: Every state has the right to

control its borders and to decide who, how many,
and on what schedule they should be admitted. This
is as true for the United States as it is for any other
country. At the same time, America’s history as a
land of opportunity and a haven for refugees puts it
on a different moral-historical plane than other
states, at least for those of us who still embrace the
notion of American exceptionalism and Ronald
Reagan’s vision of “a tall, proud city built on rocks
stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and
teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony
and peace.” But the basic, indeed defining, concept
of a viable state having the capacity to maintain
secure borders and exercise discretion over entrants
is incontrovertible.

The central question is: How do we decide what

constitutes how many, and on what schedule? And
then how should we carry out that policy? It is here
that things get particularly sticky, given the noxious
molasses of racism and xenophobia coursing
throughout American history and the difficulty of
separating it out, both intellectually and
instrumentally, from the necessary task of making
and enforcing rational immigration policies.

I have always maintained, including in classrooms

full of Hispanic immigrants and their children at
New Mexico State University where I teach, that
completely defensible arguments concerning the
devising and implementation of immigration quotas
—including reducing as necessary the number of
legally admitted immigrants per year—can be made
on the basis of economics, costs of social service
provision, infrastructure and environmental
stresses, preservation of respect for the rule of law,
and national security. Furthermore, circumstances
change so that potential immigrant cohorts who are
an asset at one juncture can legitimately be
perceived as a liability at another. The devil is in the
criteria, the fraught historical context, and,
crucially, the tone.

Moreover, cavils aside, George Borjas makes a

serious, micro-economics-based argument that a
constant, unregulated influx of unskilled, low-
skilled, and even skilled workers willing to accept
rock-bottom wages hurts the job prospects and
salaries of unskilled, low-skilled, and skilled blue-
collar U.S. citizens and permanent residents. We can
argue numbers and weigh macro- versus micro-
economic benefits and liabilities to various
constituencies, but a good-faith immigration policy
debate must be conducted with a maximum of
analytical rigor, humility, and mutual respect on all
sides: It is not a morality play with only saints and
devils.

Borjas isn’t the only one to have made this

argument. For example, American Federation of
Labor founder Samuel Gompers, himself an
Austrian-Jewish immigrant, inveighed against
Chinese immigration to the United States on
precisely these grounds: “[I]t is of the utmost
importance that the American workman,” he
declared, “should do all in his power to prohibit the
importation of those who would still further press
him down.”

But Gompers also illustrates the perils of blending

the rational with the xenophobic. He added in the
same presentation—a spirited debate with Harvard
president Charles Eliot in early December 1905 at
Madison Square Garden—that he favored the
exclusion of the Chinese because “his ideas and his
civilization are absolutely opposed to the ideals and
civilization of the American people. Never in the
history of the world have the Chinese been admitted
into a land save to dominate or to be driven out. The
Chinaman is a cheap man.” Gompers underlined the
vehemence of his Sino-xenophobia on another
occasion, averring that “[r]acial differences between
American whites and Asiatics would never be
overcome. The superior whites had to exclude the
inferior Asiatics, by law, or if necessary, by force of
arms.” There is, of course, an obvious irony in the
Jewish Gompers proffering a racist anti-Chinese
immigration argument that is essentially identical
to that made against Jews by Madison Grant and
Lothrop Stoddard just a few years later (not to
mention Henry Ford as well as Hitler, a fan of both
American writers—Godwin’s Law does not always
apply).

The rational-xenophobic intermixing that vitiated

Gompers’ immigration restriction arguments still
occurs in our own time, as demonstrated by the
imbroglio several years back over right-wing
political economist Jason Richwine’s tendentious
assertions in his doctoral dissertation that non-
Caucasian (except Asian) immigrants’ average IQs
are “substantially lower than that of the white
native population” in the United States, and that
“the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will
have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult
to argue against.” Adverse publicity over Richwine’s
questionable scholarship ultimately led to his
resignation from the Heritage Foundation, which
pointedly disavowed his ideas. George Borjas, it
must be noted, was on Richwine’s Ph.D. committee
at the Kennedy School of Government (my former
employer), although he dismissively stated after the
fact that his advisee’s “focus on IQ is a bit
misguided.”

The bottom line is that there has been and

continues to be a segment of the population—today
especially it is white, working-class, less-educated,
and older—that has been driven into the waiting
arms of Donald Trump over, at least in part, an
overpowering sense of encroachment and even
existential threat over the arrival of new cohorts of
immigrants, whether economic migrants or
refugees. It didn’t have to be that way, but,
unfortunately, as Thomas Edsall puts it, quoting
pollster Stanley Greenberg, “The Democrats have
moved from seeking to manage and champion the
nation’s growing immigrant diversity to seeming to
champion immigrant rights over those of American
citizens.” Trump moved opportunistically and
ruthlessly to fill the vacuum of responsible
policymaking that this has created.

I have severely limited sympathy with the cultural

displacement anxieties of the cohort that
conservative writer Kevin Williamson has
taxonomically described as the latter-day version of
peasants (to be sure, he used the same term, in a
less flattering context, in relation to Mexican
immigrants). One can be deeply sympathetic over
the dreadful state into which much of rural as well
as urban blue-collar America has collapsed without
indulging the prejudices that many of its residents
hold.

Again, tone matters greatly. President Obama’s

immigration and expulsion enforcement policies
were vigorous to the point that liberal immigration
advocates denounced even him. But even as they did
so, no one believed that the President of the United
States harbored racial animosity toward
Mesoamericans or countenanced it in others, much
less that he had made it a central plank in his appeal
for support. But from the moment Donald Trump
rode down the escalator of Trump Tower in June
2015 to vilify Mexicans coming illegally into
America as “people that have lots of problems, and
they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re
bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re
rapists,” he drew a blood-red line between his
predecessor’s policy and his own.

The fact that so many of Trump’s assertions are

easily proved to be factually wrong and are, from the
vantage point of almost any longtime resident of
the Southwest, risibly preposterous underscores the
racism and xenophobia underlying Trump’s appeal
for votes. Once in office, his repetition of these lies
became a core element of ginning up support from
his political base and so have continued to do even
more harm as time has passed. It has clearly
energized and, at least up to a point, legitimized
some of the most vicious historic tendencies in
American politics, society, and culture. A pitch-
black straight line runs from Trump Tower in June
2015 through Charlottesville in August 2017 and
back to the White House thereafter.

P ope Francis’s emissary from the Vatican’s

Migrant and Refugees Section, visiting El Paso
as I composed this brief eyes-on account, declared
in the Pontiff’s name that it is “immoral to
criminalize people seeking refuge and asylum and
separate their families.” His message found a
welcome audience, as did a video message from
Pope Francis to El Paso that is prominently posted
on the website of the city’s main newspaper: “A
responsible and dignified welcome of our brothers
and sisters begins by offering them decent and
appropriate shelter. . . . Defending their inalienable
rights, ensuring their fundamental freedoms, and
respecting their dignity are duties which compel
one and all.”

Almost 70 percent of Americans agree with the

Pope’s admonition, including of course most El
Pasoans (immigrants make up one fourth of the
city’s population, which in turn is some 80 percent
Hispanic). The problem for El Paso, for America, and
of course for the immigrants themselves, is two-
fold. The first problem is the simplistic “Passion
Play” depiction of a complex issue amenable to
reasoned if vigorous debate by analysts of good will,
which has encouraged more than a few people to
fall in line behind blatant bigots. But the second,
considerably greater problem is that the most
prominent and vociferous member of the minority
that disagrees with the Pope’s exhortation happens
to be a blatant bigot: the current President of the
United States.

[1]When Emma Lazarus wrote The New Colossus,

about eighteen months after the anti-Semitic May
Laws were promulgated in Russia, she specifically
had Jewish refugees in mind. However, as Esther
Schor points out in her biography of Lazarus, her
poem’s original meaning eventually migrated in the
hands of others. Schor along with Paul Auster notes
that the placement in 1903 of a plaque bearing the
sonnet on the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal enlarged
and universalized the scope of the “huddled masses”
to encompass all immigrants. The result was to
reframe and generalize both the Statue—which had
originally been intended to symbolize shared
American and French republicanism—and Lazarus’s
subtly ethnically particularist poem. Another three
decades on, The New Colossus reverted back toward
its original Jewish-centric theme, as “a Slovenian-
American immigrant named Louis Adamic….seized
upon the sonnet” as well as Lady Liberty to serve as
an exhortation to an American “generation poised to
receive thousands of refugees from Hitler’s Europe”.
After World War II, the context changed yet again.
Schor notes that the plaque bearing the sonnet was
given a more prominent place at the entrance to the
Statue; and then a series of shifts, marked by the
1949 Broadway debut of Miss Liberty, with music
composed by Irving Berlin, re-generalized the
meaning of both poem and statue, thus blurring the
distinction between refugees and economic migrants
simply seeking the American Dream. That blurring
remains today. See Schor, Emma Lazarus (Knopf,
2017 [orig. ed. 2006]), pp. IX-XI, 186, 254–5.

Published on: August 9, 2018

Neal M. Rosendorf is an associate professor of politics and

international relations at New Mexico State University. A
shorter version of this article was published in German in the
Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel.

HIDE COMMENTS

Comments Community !
1 Login

$ Recommend Sort by Best

Join the discussion…

LOG IN WITH

OR SIGN UP WITH DISQUS ?

Name

QET
− ⚑
a month ago
I spent part of my childhood in El Paso. My brother was
born there. That is apropos of nothing other than that I
have a personal connection to the place and also to
certain Mexican immigrants from Juarez.

Rosendorf's piece exemplifies the impossibility of rational

immigration politics. He insists on the absolute
unequivocal incontrovertible right of every state to
control its borders, then insists that such right be
subordinated to "analytical rigor." In other words--yes,
you can keep people out, but only for reasons expressible
as variables in a utilitarian calculus. Thus are absolute
rights made contingent. Then Rosendorf rejects, almost
indignantly, analytical rigor of a sort he personally finds
awkward.

Like the IQ issue. I haven't read the author he cited but I

have read some of Murray's notorious work. Murray, and
I suspect the cited author as well, rigorously applies the
see more that other social
very same social science methods
scientists are trained to and apply every day on all kinds
3 △ ▽ Reply
of issues. But the rational inference from the IQ data is
something D4xthat
>Rosendorf
QET and others are pre-committed
to rejecting, on the − ⚑
a month agobasis not of analytical rigor but of
some other criterion.
Associate professor(The
Nealbest Rosendorf should
M. Rosendorf can manage
be is
to charge
teaching it with being "tendentious."
post-modern If tendentiousness
creative writing, specialty: using
werethea wrong
disqualification
historical of analyticale.g.
metaphor, rigor,
the no social
boys playing
scientist
socceranywhere
in Tornillo would be published).
somehow But if
is poignantly you are
reminiscent
going to create
of World War a utilitarian algorithm
II photographs in your
of British analytical
prisoners of
rigor,
waryou can't simply
disporting decide, in
themselves at least not without being
the Stalag.
irrational about it, to reject out of hand data for the