Sparks: Costa Rica strikes deal to accept third country deportees from US

From the desk where I draft letters I know will be ignored, I see a powerful nation exporting its storms to a calmer shore.

The functionary who arranges the transfer of human beings has ceased to think of them as anything but the objects of a logistical operation.

The emotional satisfaction of appearing to solve a problem often conceals the logical error of merely relocating its symptoms.

All I know is what I read in the papers: one country's political problem becomes another country's twenty-five-a-day delivery.

If a nation may export its conscience, then no nation need ever have one.

Declaring a new center for your unwanted does not change the infinite responsibility you bear for setting them in motion.

Observe how a state, like a river in flood, seeks the path of least resistance for its overflowing pressure.

In my travels, I have noted that the worth of a ruler is measured by his treatment of the stranger at his gate, not the deal he strikes over the horizon.

Hateful things: a guest welcomed not for himself but as a token in a distant accounting.

This algorithm of displacement calculates political convenience while wholly ignoring the human variables it processes.

A dispute over borders masquerades as a question of law when its true nature is a failure of moral philosophy.

It is a most efficient arrangement, whereby one nation's unsightly problem becomes another's modest source of revenue.