Let’s be clear about the Trump dragnet to round up and deport undocumented workers or others in the United States who arrived without proper clearance: it could have been avoided had Congress done its job, had our leaders not been so interested in their personal bank balances and getting elected, and had we as a people been more concerned about the plight of the undocumented and less about keeping the cost of a Happy Meal low.

For years, Congress has refused to come up with a comprehensive immigration law because it’s much easier and much more profitable for the members to rail against illegal immigration while at the same time being paid by companies that benefit from it.

For years, our leaders in the executive and legislative branches have been content, as long as they got paid and got re-elected, to listen to big business and its efforts to find ever cheaper sources of labor, in the process screwing the American worker and the workers in the foreign lands where the jobs went where the wages paid are so low that no one can live on them.

For years, we as citizens of the richest nation in the world have turned a blind eye to the exploitation of those who pick our fruit, bus our tables, prepare our Happy Meals, build our houses, clean up our hotel rooms, and clean up after us and our children because we wanted our creature comforts cheap.

In truth, there is enough blame to go around for what Trump is doing now. He’s just the latest leader of our land to show no mercy, no compassion for the least among us and to profit off an exploitative system. We sat back while President Clinton signed the NAFTA pact, which took as many jobs as it provided in Mexico, which transferred jobs from here to Mexico at less than livable wages, devastating whole communities in the United States, but filled the coffers of the corporations and the executives running them that lobbied hard for NAFTA. We sat back and watched without uttering a sound in disaccord while leaders of Mexico got rich off the American corporations setting up shop there and did nothing to help their people.

So, what happened? Their people came here. There were jobs here, not good paying jobs by our standards, but good in comparison to what they could get in Mexico if at all. They had no choice. It was either risk life and limb and pay exorbitant fees to human traffickers or starve. What would you do? And now Donald Trump, who has spent his adult life exploiting people for his personal gain, is now deporting the same people he has exploited himself. Should we be surprised?

What about those people who now face deportation who came to this country from other countries than Mexico, such as Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and the list goes on, who fled from persecution and mayhem and murder? Were we unaware of them and their plight and the role of our government and our businesses in their persecution and murder, or did we just turn a blind eye to their situation because it was too much trouble to concern ourselves with “those” people?

Finally, Donald Trump has said that his deportations are to get rid of the “bad hombres,” the drug dealers and murderers and rapists that he claims have streamed across our border and infested our land. These are the same people who are wreaking havoc in many parts of Mexico, Central and South America, the “El Chapo’s,” the “Pablo Escobars,” and the list goes on. How did they come to operate in the United States? Did they just slip across the border in the middle of the desert? Hardly. We invited them here, businessmen  looking for a profit partnered with them, government officials who took money from them, and we, the great American consumers, who thought nothing of the mayhem created by our insatiable ingestion of the poison they were selling. There can be no market for a product without buyers. Should Donald Trump also start deporting those complicit in the drug trade, the American business persons who partnered with the drug dealers, the government officials who took payoffs from the drug dealers to turn a blind eye, the gun manufacturers who sold weapons enabling the mayhem and murder, our government leaders who adopted policies facilitating the trade, and finally anyone who purchased the contraband?

The truth is it is always the least in a society, those who cannot easily defend themselves who get targeted as the culprits for some perceived societal problem. It is also a truism, however, that we scapegoat the defenseless for our own complicity in the problem. “Surely,” we say, “we can’t be at fault for what happens elsewhere.”

Yes, condemn Donald Trump and his administration for their lack of compassion toward those whose only crime, if one wants to call it that, is the mistake of seeking refuge from harm or seeking employment. Also, however, look in the mirror for we all are responsible for creating the situations that force people to seek refuge from those who would do them harm or who are forced to seek employment here because there is none where they come from.

We live in a connected world. What we do personally, in business, and in government has repercussions far beyond our immediate selves, and it is time we wake up to that fact and that we are responsible for our fellow man, not just here but everywhere.

If we are indeed a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, then, what our government does, it does in our name; we do it. We drop the bombs, we enter into pacts that benefit a few at the expense of the many, we enact legislation or take away regulations that govern how we treat certain industries, which have effects on our water and air, but that water and air does not just stay in one place; it travels and affects others far from here. When we allow industries to create products that kill, those products travel either directly or indirectly elsewhere. When we elect a president who acts like a child, who advocates and pushes harmful policies simply because he can, he does those things not just to us but in our name to everyone all over the world. To them he is us. When acts of terror are committed against us because of our government policies toward other lands and other people, or even laws or policies carried out domestically but having international effects, those acts of terror are directed not at our government, but at us; we are the government. It is time we start recognizing that fact and act accordingly.