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The Unfortunate Timelessness of Inspector Javert

©Mo, via CreativeCommons.org and Flickr.com Inspector Javert imprisoning Fantine. Gustave Brion’s illustration for the 1862 first edition.

Lundy Khoy’s recent New York Times piece, “Mr. Trump: I Am an Immigrant With a Criminal Record,” touched me. It also frightened me because in Ms. Khoy’s experience, I saw the shadow of Victor Hugo’s Inspector Javert.

As all Les Misérables fans know, Javert relentlessly pursues the ex-convict Jean Valjean throughout the novel and the Boublil-Schönberg musical.  Lundy Khoy is in much the same boat. She is, by the letter of the law, “an illegal immigrant with a criminal record,” which some people seem to interpret as “a criminal immigrant.” But let’s take a minute to consider the whole story.

Ms. Khoy, I read, came to America as a one-year-old with her parents when they fled the Pol Pot genocide in Cambodia. Raised along with her U.S.-born brother and sister, she is American in experience and perspective, even though she officially remains an immigrant. Today, in her mid-thirties and married, she has a steady job and pays taxes.

But she made a pretty common mistake as a nineteen-year-old college student: hanging out with a friend with drugs in her pocket. After her arrest, she followed her attorney’s advice and pled guilty to the felony charge of possession with intent to sell. Whether she intended to sell or not is beside the point. She served the sentence imposed by the court and has led a law-abiding life since.

Like Jean Valjean, though, Lundy Khoy can be legally arrested at any moment, as her nearly nine-month detention by the Immigration and Customs Service in 2004 showed. Even with Virginia Governor McAuliffe’s pardon for “commitment to good citizenship” in hand, her criminal record remains. And immigration law is separate from criminal law. So while raising her son, she lives under the threat of deportation to a country she’s never known. Not quite the inherent death sentence that Valjean faced if Inspector Javert ever sent him back to hard labor, but near enough.

Now, post-election, I fear for law-abiding people with criminal records, especially those who were born elsewhere but grew up in the U.S. Yes, we need to prosecute those who commit crimes. They need to pay the penalty, whether it be community service, prison time, or deportation. In Hugo’s novel, the Thénardiers and their criminal band go to prison for their many crimes. Yet Hugo knew—and shows us—the difference between a Thénardier and a Valjean.

Not everyone who commits a crime is permanently criminal. Why do we have prisons and reform schools and probation if we’re not trying to help people return as contributing citizens? Why do we have the phrase “paid for their crime” if we won’t acknowledge that former offenses are, by definition, in the past? Criminal records can keep ex-offenders from voting and from getting a job—and can get childhood immigrants deported—even when they have reformed. Despite Victor Hugo’s urging, sometimes it seems that we have not learned much in the 200 years since Jean Valjean’s yellow passport—which identified him as an ex-convict—kept him from getting a job or even a room at the inn. That passport implicitly stated that he would never change, and everyone who looked at it accepted that implication.

Inspector Javert, too, epitomizes the sort of mind that cannot envision change. Hugo doesn’t mince words in describing the “absolute” Javert, who admits no exceptions and has “nothing but disdain, aversion, and disgust for all who had once overstepped the bounds of the law.” How many times have we heard similar antagonism directed toward immigrants and refugees?

Aversion toward anyone from a different country certainly underlies some arguments that “criminal immigrants” should be deported. But another belief, too, keeps Lundy Khoy and others in her situation from fulfilling their potential with a tranquil mind. Some people fail to appreciate our human capacity for change, our ability to progress in morally positive ways. When Javert in the Les Misérables musical says of Valjean “Once a thief, forever a thief,” his phrase is entirely too familiar. Javert—who in his narrowmindedness could not see reality—is a powerful cautionary example for us today.

Read on The Huffington Post site.