Humanitarian crisis at the border is a test of America’s soul. We’re flunking it.

The latest photos coming out of Eagle Pass, Texas — the once-obscure small town on the Rio Grande that has become the epicenter of a growing humanitarian crisis on America’s southern border — shock the conscience.

At least, they ought to.

Mothers holding toddlers — some of them still bleeding from their legs after encounters with the razor wire that lines the banks of the river — trying desperately to push aside the sharp metal barrier. Soggy, huddled masses of hundreds of migrants trapped after reaching the U.S. side of the river. Brigades of camouflage-wearing members of the Texas National Guard cruelly throwing up even more of the concertina wire, seemingly oblivious to the cries of desperate people on the other side.

Despite the abject misery, thousands more — many from the ravaged, destitute nation of Venezuela — want to come to Eagle Pass, or America’s other overloaded border crossings. Williams Añez, 42, says he has no choice but to risk the dangerous migration, for the future of his five children. “Every day I get older and I have still not secured anything for them,” Añez told the New York Times from a staging area in northern Colombia, near the start of the perilous journey.

What U.S. mom or dad couldn’t sympathize with what might be the epitome of Americans’ beliefs around raising a child — that a parent must do everything humanly possible to get their child out of harm’s way and on the path to a better life? I think that’s why you almost never see interviews with actual refugees like Añez in the U.S. media. Putting a human face on North America’s migration crisis might spoil the bitter politics of national identity driving America ever downward.

Taking about migrants as human beings — with names and stories of trying to flee abject poverty and political or gang violence — certainly would have spoiled the demagoguery at Wednesday night’s second Republican presidential debate. At California’s Reagan Library, the gaggle of Donald Trump wannabes engaged in what one outlet called ”a bidding war” over who’d be toughest in repelling refugees rebranded as invaders.

The GOP White House hopefuls live in a fantasy world where the border crisis is all about drugs or terrorism or cartels, making it easy for Vivek Ramaswamy to boast that he would “militarize” the border and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — who’d previously said that he’d have drug dealers summarily executed — promising to send the troops into Mexico to wage war on cartels. Or course, none of these folks have a snowball’s chance in the Arizona desert of getting anywhere near the Oval Office, but the Republican who does would be 10 times worse.

Trump’s immigration henchman Stephen Miller (remember him?) told Axios recently that a Trump 47 presidency would include steps like screening would-be arrivals for “Marxist” tendencies, employing the Navy in a blockade targeting drug smugglers, expanding the so-called “Muslim ban” to even more countries, and opening a door to possible military adventures in Mexico. Based on the dismal border record of Trump 45, I fear it would be far worse.

So voters in 2024 will face a choice between the thinly veiled fascism of Republican policies, or the flawed approaches employed so far by President Joe Biden — whose road to naked political expediency has been paved with good intentions. Biden’s dilemma has been trying to uphold the law — migrants are entitled to make a case for political asylum in the United States — while somehow trying to reduce the number of Central Americans and others so desperate to make that plea. In reality, that has meant continuing some of the more noxious policies of the Trump administration, and keeping refugees in squalid conditions in Mexico.

But the humanitarian crisis won’t end as long as we keep throwing the dismal sandbag of xenophobic nationalism against a human flood caused by sins that have been decades in the making — the endless meddling of U.S. imperialism in Central and South American politics, the gross income inequality that motivates millions to leave their homeland, and, increasingly, the ravages of climate change caused disproportionately by American pollution.

“If we don’t want to see those images on TV of people huddled at the border in Texas or Arizona, think hard about how to change immigration policy so that people don’t need to cross in that inhumane way,” Elizabeth Oglesby, associate professor in the University of Arizona’s Center for Latin American Studies, told me this week. She noted that the biggest problems have come less from White House policy than from Congress’ longstanding failure to pass immigration reform, which could open new pathways, especially for guest workers who could help with the current wave of U.S. job openings.

» READ MORE: The young Honduran drowned in Greg Abbott’s Texas had a name: Norlan Bayardo Herrera

In this fall’s surge of crossings at the southern border, it’s a safe bet that most Americans — especially the ones on the couch getting their blood pressure raised by Fox News — know that most of the refugees at Eagle Pass are coming from Venezuela, the once-oil-rich nation that has been ravaged by the disastrous regime now led by President Nicolás Maduro. United Nations experts say that the refugee crisis from Venezuela — with as many as 7 million people fleeing in recent years — is equivalent to the crisis in Ukraine, a situation that attracts billions of dollars in U.S. aid, not scorn.

Why would a young mother and her kids risk drowning in the Rio Grande, or getting sliced by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s razor wire and buoys interspersed with circular-saw blades? Maybe Americans would know the answer if there was any attention at all paid to the conditions those millions are fleeing. In Venezuela, it costs $372 a month to feed a family of four, but a public school teacher earns only $3 a month. People are dying from treatable diseases because the health system has imploded.

Most experts agree that Venezuela’s economic crisis has been exacerbated — at least by a little, and probably by a lot — by harsh U.S. economic sanctions targeting the Maduro regime that were imposed in 2019, by the same Donald Trump who gets so much political mileage from demagoguing the border crisis. Yet any U.S. politician like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who states the obvious — telling CBS’ Face the Nation that U.S. sanctions “certainly took a large part in the driving of populations to our southern border” — gets ripped by our jingoistic media.

A smarter sanctions policy would help — certainly much more so than the GOP’s proposed Pancho Villa-era solution of sending Marines to Vera Cruz. So would American aid and policies aimed at improving conditions in Central and South America so their residents would not be so desperate to leave (the Biden administration knows this, yet the problems are overwhelming). Radically reducing our carbon pollution could mitigate the prolonged droughts in so many Latin American nations that are forcing farmers to join the mass migration.

In a twist on the famous Ike and Tina Turner riff, we never, ever do immigration policy nice, or complicated. We like to do things easy, and rough. Confronting a refugee crisis that’s not halfway around the world but surging across our own border has brought out the absolute worst in us.

You see that in a place like Eagle Pass, where a Border Patrol agent can reportedly watch a migrant drown in the Rio Grande and do nothing, or where the armed goons employed by Governor Abbott experiment with various saw blades or types of razor wire like a World War II torture doctor. But you also see it 1,500 miles to the north on the streets of Staten Island, where protesters have blocked buses of migrants while screaming, “You’re not welcome!” And politicians from New York’s Democratic mayor Eric Adams to Ramaswamy, the son of immigrants, pander to these baser instincts. How America responds to refugees is a test of the nation’s soul, and we are failing.

There are much better ways to do this than slicing open the legs of toddlers — funding more immigration judges and more humane processing facilities instead of squandering billions on Abbott’s tin soldiers and other wasteful policies, or figuring out how to accommodate more of these potential workers, who would boost the economy. But we’re not going to do those things until our political leaders and the media stop treating these human beings as alien invaders from Mars, instead of as our brothers and sisters who share the same planet.

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