With invective directed at refugees, where is Lady Liberty?

By O. Ricardo Pimentel

Wednesday, July 23, 2014 | 2:01 a.m.

The English language changes. I have no beef with that, generally. But I do have a problem with how the term “haters” has been mangled beyond recognition.

Criticize Beyoncé, question whether rockers Hall and Oates deserve newfound popularity, or opine that everyone sings Dylan better than Dylan? Well, you know, haters gotta hate.

That’s not hate. That’s critique — about decidedly fluffy, inconsequential stuff.

So, let’s talk about real hate — unremitting, unmistakable and of the type seemingly unquenchable through the ages. I’m talking about the way-over-the-top reactions to what everyone in charge acknowledges is a “humanitarian crisis,” but that a whole lot of rank-and-file folks are insisting is a corruption of our way of life.

This is about the current surge of Central American children and families into the United States.

This American way of life, by the way, has been heavily influenced by immigration, including the come-on-in-and-make-yourself-comfortable kind that characterized influx into this country before we got seriously anal about this in 1924.

That’s when our love affair with I’m-in, we-can-shut-the-door-now started kicking in, though the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1862 and a lot of enmity for immigrants throughout U.S. history offered a pretty good trial run.

You can have concerns about immigration and not be a hater, but look at the faces of those folks who stopped three buses filled with immigrant families July 1 in Murrieta, Calif. Listen to their words, then and at subsequent demonstrations. That was hate.

The message was “not in my backyard,” but not just that. These Murrieta folks pretty much characterize this “humanitarian crisis” as destruction of our culture and way of life.

“We’re losing our country. I don’t want to lose our community,” said one tearful woman at a packed Murrieta City Council meeting after that July 1 blockade.

Losing our country. Losing our community. Yes, there were loud, insistent counterdemonstrators. And if you can’t see the difference between folks who want to offer others in distress some refuge and those who say, not in my backyard — or anywhere — then you might want to take your compassion’s temperature.

I wonder how many of the folks blocking the buses were named Flannery, Genovese, Abramov or even Thompson (Scottish). And these protestors’ solutions? Not immigration reform apparently. That would be “amnesty.” Amnesty in their minds is a “free pass” — taking 13 years and fines to get — for people who have been working and living here for years, raising families (including U.S. citizen children) and paying taxes. That’s sweat equity. It deserves consideration.

These Central American children and mothers have sweated, and some have bled getting here. But Murrieta isn’t alone in its NIMBYism. League City, Texas, recently passed an ordinance banning any detention or processing of immigrants there.

These folks apparently would have these immigrants simply return home to violence and grinding poverty. These conditions are due considerably to U.S. policy that supported their repressive governments and the oligarchies’ running economies there purely for their — and our — benefit.

There is talk of rescinding a 2008 law — signed by a Republican president — that gives children sent here breathing room to make their case for sanctuary. Yes, the law was intended to aid trafficking victims. But not all victims are sex or labor slaves.

Leave the law alone. Fix the system — all of it — so we can more speedily determine who deserves to stay. That takes comprehensive immigration reform.

But contrast our policy toward Cuba and these particular Central Americans. Our policy for Cubans has essentially been: Get here and you’re in. There have been accommodations for Central Americans, but, according to these protestors, the policy for this new batch should be a kick in the butt home. Is lack of political freedom in Cuba more onerous than conscription into violent gangs or death, rape or beatings by them — and the police?

I know. We can’t take in everyone. We can, however, consider the totality of circumstances. As the saying goes, if every problem looks like a nail, your favorite tool is a hammer. We have other tools.

Then there are the people who are pledging to come with their guns to defend Texas’ international border as part of “Operation Secure Our Borders.”

“Commander” Chris Davis said that immigrants would be given food and water and the civilians would contact “ICE or Border Patrol and tell them we have these people here.” And if the immigrants just want to keep on traveling? Here’s what Davis said on YouTube: “You see an illegal. You point your gun dead at him, right between his eyes and you say, ‘Get back across the border or you will be shot.’ ”

Hate is precisely the right word. Please, no house break-in analogies. These people are not coming armed as home invaders, and they’re not burglars. They are refugees, many of them children.

These civilian militia types, some clearly anti-government, are decidedly fringe. But those Murrieta folks are not so fringe and obviously animated by many of the same emotions.

If they were truly fringe, the U.S. House wouldn’t be blocking immigration reform in their name.

Here’s what one House member, Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, said recently about conditions at the border. These people put “our continued existence at risk.”

If we’re honest, this kind of rhetoric is driven in part by the notion that some folks are so alien different that we are losing our country, losing our communities. I’ve been hearing this for as long as I’ve covered immigration.

I am bone-weary of the refrain. It doesn’t just defy history; it defies current events.

Many U.S. communities would be ghost towns were it not for immigrants. I’m from a town right near Murrieta. I’ve been stopped at a checkpoint at or near there many times.

I’m not a California-basher but have to say, California, I was ashamed.

O. Ricardo Pimentel is a columnist for the San Antonio Express-News.