Buddhists for Immigrants and Refugees

 or How to Prevent a Genocide

At the start of my Recovery Dharma zoom group every morning, we say our names and where we’re from. Some of us give a land acknowledgment and say the name of the Native American tribes who were the original inhabitants of the land. 

Worcester, Massachusetts, where I live, the land of the Nipmuc Nation, has the highest number and percentage of recent immigrants and refugees in all New England.

So today, I said, “I’m Shaun from Worcester, Massachusetts, the land of immigrants and refugees.”

Because what’s happening in this country is that immigrants and refugees are being vilified, criminalized, threatened with violent expulsion from this country. Donald Trump promises to expel ten million immigrants and refugees if he is reelected as President. Trump vows “the greatest mass deportation in the history of the world.” Immigrants and refugees, Trump has said, are “poisoning the blood of our country”—practically a direct quote from Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

That seems like a specious promise as well as a violently racist and fascist one. It doesn’t even seem logistically possible to expel ten million people. But as unbelievable as that sounds, we cannot forget that six million Jews were killed in the concentration camps, and many millions more were deported or escaped to countries around the world.

The racist vilification of Haitians in Springfield, Ohio is just the latest example of what’s going to happen in this country if Trump/Vance take over. The Haitians are here legally on work visas, but as Vance said, “I still call them illegal.” In other words, the ten million who will be expelled under their administration could very well be legal immigrants; they might have even been born here. But Trump/Vance will decide if they are ‘illegal’ or not. They will expel whomever they feel ‘doesn’t belong’ here—Hispanic, African, Asian, Arabic and Muslim people, including Palestinians—regardless of their legal status as immigrants, regardless of when their ancestors came here.

This morning as I was thinking about my city, Worcester, Massachusetts, I thought about the thousands of people who have immigrated to this city from around the world. Most recently, we’ve had refugees from Myanmar and Afghanistan. We have gay and transgender refugees from many countries. We have immigrants from all over Latin America, from Ghana and West Africa, from Ethiopia and East Africa; Jamaica and the Caribbean; from Korea and Viet Nam, from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. And because of Trump/Vance and MAGA, they are being made to feel that they don’t belong here.

As a transgender person in Worcester, I felt like “I don’t belong here either.” None of us ‘belong’ here in the MAGA nativist sense. But because none of us belong here, we all belong here, in a city of refugees.

When I took refuge as a Buddhist, I was taught what Chogyam Trungpa said about taking refuge: “When you take refuge, you become a refugee, with all the other refugees.” This was said by a man who spent his entire adult life as a refugee. Taking Refuge does not afford you protection or ‘safety’, it means that you gain the courage to continue your life as someone who doesn’t belong anywhere.

So how could I possibly vote for Kamala Harris when thousands of Palestinians are being killed and hundreds of thousands are being pushed out of their homeland in Gaza? I do not vote for her because of her ‘softer’ rhetoric on the genocide in Gaza. I vote for Kamala because I want to prevent a greater genocide in the United States, a genocide of ten million immigrants and refugees. 

I am voting to stop a genocide from happening while we still can.