August 28, 2025
Robert Kohl begins his letter by calling me “Sonja,” and maybe that slip is the best evidence of his whole approach. He doesn’t pay attention. Not to names, not to people, not to lived realities. He prefers his “objective standards” and abstract theories, while actual human beings are reduced to numbers on a ledger.
He talks about immigrants like they’re inventory, as though Ellis Island were an assembly line and people were raw materials to be accepted or rejected based on “net economic value.” Let’s be clear: Ellis Island wasn’t some utopian balance sheet. It was the front door to a nation built on labor exploitation from the railroads to the fields, mines and factories. Immigrants were admitted precisely because this country wanted their sweat and their blood, even while telling them they were “less than.”
Kohl writes that his policy would measure immigrants by “total value created versus total value consumed.” What arrogance. What cruelty. What hypocrisy. Americans born here aren’t subject to that test. Our prisons are full, our opioid crisis was fueled by corporations, our welfare rolls include plenty of “native-born” families. Do we deport them for being a “net burden”? Or does that cruelty only apply to brown and black immigrants who weren’t lucky enough to be born in Robert Kohl’s zip code?
And let’s talk about this obsession with “emotion.” Kohl sneers at empathy as if it’s a weakness. But empathy is what makes us human. It’s what built the Statue of Liberty’s promise, the one he dismisses as sentimental fluff. Emotion is why abolitionists fought slavery. Emotion is why civil rights leaders marched. Emotion is why decent people still stand up against injustice today. Without empathy, all you’re left with is the cold machinery of profit — people as widgets, souls as statistics.
So no, Robert, my name is Sonya, not “Sonja.” And no, compassion is not the opposite of common sense. It is common sense. Because a nation that forgets its humanity in favor of bean-counting who “deserves” to be here is a nation already rotting from within.
Sonya Mavis
Farmer
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