5 - Boston
Three weeks after the Tel Aviv and Damascus bombs, the anchorage area in Boston Harbor next to Logan Airport’s runway 4R/22L was empty as Boston went to bed. By dawn two elderly freighters, Greek-owned but flying the Israeli flag, the “Iliad” and the “Ionian Star,” swung from their anchors a thousand yards from downtown Boston.
The ships arrived with between 1,500 and 2,000 passengers each. Their vast cargo holds, ventilated only when the overhead hatches were left open to the rain and spray, were filled with miserable people, cold, wet, hungry, using buckets for latrines and seawater for washing. The decks, too, were crammed with people lying on every horizontal surface, crowding the railings for fresh air and a place from which to vomit from seasickness, bad water or spoiled food.
The captains of these ships had listened to radio reports of countries throughout the Mediterranean blocking their harbors to Israeli refugees. After consultations with “certain persons” aboard the ships, they’d decided to head directly for the United States, one country where they could be sure of finding a welcome.
The ships were immediately quarantined, supposedly for health reasons, in the anchorage area adjacent to the busy runways of Logan International Airport. They sat at anchor, the miserable, exhausted people on board not understanding why America - AMERICA, after all - barred its door to them.
The ships presented a problem, not because America could not absorb three or four thousand refugees, but because it did not know if it wanted to.
The economic collapse of 2018 had been caused, depending on who was pointing fingers of blame, by years of record high budget deficits, record high oil prices, record high illegal immigration, the humiliating civil war that followed America's withdrawal from Iraq, out of control health care costs, outsourcing of most high paying work or by global warming. Congress’ response was to pull in America’s welcome mat and give the boot to the millions of people who were in the country illegally.
Congress’ key tool was the American Pride Identification and Display Act, a law that created a national identification card program, a law aimed at identifying the millions upon millions of Mexicans, Haitians, Salvadorians, Nicaraguans, Thais, Chinese, Nigerians, Somalis, Cambodians, Vietnamese, and other people of various nationalities who had come to this country by one means or another, virtually unimpeded, for thirty years.
Identification cards - “Americards” - were issued to every person who could show proof of citizenship: a birth certificate, a passport, naturalization papers. The process was simple, with a one-week moratorium on mail deliveries so all Post Office employees could instead work at assigning numbers and processing Americards. A central computer assigned registration numbers, using Social Security numbers with an additional three numbers added as proof of registration.
Within a month, some 275 million Americans were registered. At least 30 million other people – people who could not prove citizenship or legal residency – were not and could not be registered. Just like credit cards, the Americards included a black magnetic stripe. This stripe encoded the person’s name and Social Security number, plus physical identifying data such as height, weight, eye and hair color and, most powerfully of all, a digitized photograph, fingerprints and a retina scan.
The enforcement phase took longer, but the public was behind that effort, too. Employers were required to print workers’ registration numbers on their paychecks. Paying workers in cash was prohibited. Employees with no registration number were not allowed to be paid. Payroll checks with no numbers could not be cashed. Employers hiring unregistered workers were fined, and fined again when they were caught again. It soon did not pay to employ unregistered people.
Welfare workers were required to verify that recipients were registered, No Americard, no welfare.
Schools checked students’ registration, with the threat of having federal subsidies cut off if they refused. Unregistered students could not attend school.
Spot checks at public gatherings, at ball games and concerts, in shopping malls and at roadblocks, completed the all-pervasive scrutiny. It became fashionable for people to wear their Americards on necklaces, hanging outside their clothing, as office workers wore their building ID cards when security was temporarily heightened after September 11. The inquiry, “Americard, please,” entered the public perception as a way of life. Americans laughed at television comedies in which actors mixed up their Americards. Pop singers wailed about “I scanned your card, saw your picture and I got hard.”
Americans, who had accepted drunk driving roadblocks, X-ray examination of bags at airports, metal detectors at public buildings and surveillance television cameras in banks, public buildings and on the street, saw the Americard scheme as a further protection, not an intrusion. After all, if you really were an American, what did you have to hide? Why not be proud to be able to prove it?
The system worked. The cards were issued in January. By May the nation’s workplaces, schools, welfare rolls and most public places were purged of illegal aliens.
The backlash stunned people. News stories told of immigrant families hiding in their apartments, of mothers, fathers and children slowly starving to death; of mothers walking the streets as prostitutes because that profession still did not require registration cards; of shoplifting arrests in supermarkets and groceries. Crime, always an alternative way to get by, became the only way for millions of people locked out of the American dream to feed themselves and their children.
That wave of crime, of course, created yet one more backlash. Get these people out, send them back where they came from, was the cry. The deportation planes and ships left New York, Miami and Los Angeles daily. The overcrowded, impoverished countries these people fled from in the first place were forced to absorb them into their already jammed slums.
The nation’s hearts hardened at the sights of boatloads of wretched families, of, as one commentator sadly pointed out, “the tired, the poor and the weak, the huddled masses” being sent back where they came from, getting the boot from the Statue of Liberty. The nation was just forgetting this trauma, had just pushed aside these images that made people a bit less proud of their country, when the “Iliad” and the “Ionian Star” limped into Boston Harbor with three to four thousand people knocking on America’s door, asking to come in.
The two ships sitting in Boston Harbor instantly became the focus of national debate.
These people are different, they are victims of war, some said.
As were the Salvadorians, as were the poor Nicaraguans, as were the Vietnamese and the Cambodians, their families said. You sent them back to their cratered homes and burned fields. Don’t tell us we have to shelter Jewish victims of war.
These people are different; they are our brothers, our family, cried American Jews.
As were the 10 million Mexicans we trucked to the border and herded to the other side, answered Mexican-Americans. They were literally our brothers and sisters, our aunts and uncles, arriving here just a little later than we did.
These people are different; they have no homeland to return to.
The Vietnamese - whose country we ravaged, then abandoned to the Communists, what homeland did they have to return to? And the Somalis, whose country was wracked by Muslim rebels, did they have a homeland to return to, a homeland where they would survive?
These people are different, people still said.
These people are ... white. And Americans whispered and nodded their heads in agreement.
Ah hah, cried the Africans.
Ah hah, cried the Chicanos.
Ah hah, cried the Asians.
Now we come to the real reason.
We won’t let you get away with this, not now, not after we went along with the identification checks and the detention centers and the airplanes, the deportation planes, the starving children and the crying mothers and fathers. No. No. No hypocrisy.
The same treatment for white refugees as for black, for brown, for yellow.
And the liberals, those who weren’t Jewish, joined in. No special treatment for white people. That would be wrong, they said. Especially wrong for the murderers of Damascus. Nobody knew which Israeli officer had ordered the bombing of Syria’s capital. Chances of ever finding out were small. But imposing collective guilt on Jews was nothing new. Whoever it was who’d killed innocent Syrian grandmothers, who’d incinerated the children of Damascus, whoever that was, he, or she, was a Jew, an Israeli Jew. Just like the people on the ships.
So the ships sat in Boston Harbor. Surrounded by America, floating in American water, watching Americans cruise the harbor in their sailboats, watching American airplanes thundering over their heads to land at the nearby American airport, watching American cars drive on American streets. Surrounded by America but not allowed in.
The last time Boston Harbor was used as a prison was in the Civil War, when Fort Warren, sprawled across Georges Island in the middle of the harbor, was a prison for captured Confederate officers. The young ladies of Boston brought picnic lunches to the Southern gentlemen on Sunday afternoons, early in the war, before the maimed and bloodied young men of Boston returned home from Antietam and Bull Run. Even then, though, the harbor was too small, and the shoreline too accessible for even a full garrison of troops to confine determined men to the island.
The aborted landing and near crash of the 9:00 p.m. Delta Shuttle as the pilot shoved in full throttle when he almost dropped his aircraft onto a soaking, freezing family that swam ashore from the “Iliad” to the nearby airport and wandered onto the runway caused the Coast Guard to station two 38-foot launches in the anchorage area. The patrol boats slowly chased each other in circles around the two ships, sweeping their searchlights on the water throughout the night.
Jewish pressure to allow the people to leave the ships, to at least come ashore and be cared for, increased. The Greater Boston Jewish Council organized a hunger strike at City Hall Plaza, in front of the John F. Kennedy Federal Building, with a hundred men and women taking only matzah and water until the people on the ships were allowed ashore.
The first night of the hunger strike, police arrested dozens of young black men who attacked the hunger strikers with rocks and pipes, shouting “Haitians were people, too” and “Starve the Jews.” After three days of fasting, as the first dozen or so of the hunger strikers gave up and went home, counter-demonstrators outnumbered the tired, hungry Jews sitting in the rain in front of City Hall. Friends, relatives, supporters of the thousands of people deported in the previous year surrounded the hunger strikers, carrying signs urging their government not to treat Jewish immigrants differently than their families were treated.
At the end of a week, barely a dozen strikers remained, lying on cots, covered in blankets. When both Massachusetts Senators, themselves recipients of hundreds of thousands of dollars of campaign contributions from Jewish supporters over the years, visited the strikers and urged them to seek a middle ground and to go home, their resolve evaporated and the hunger strike ended.
Jewish leaders searched for some other solution, vowing that no matter what, the ships would not leave Boston with Jews on them.