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wirsindkrieg · 4 months ago

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My apologies if this comes across as harsh, but given the many similar responses I've seen like this, apparently I need to be far more blunt about this. If I use "you" at any point in this, know that it isn't directly at anyone specifically.

Until the passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868, African-Americans weren't considered to be people under American law. It took until 1971 and the Supreme Court case Reed vs. Reed for there to be a ruling definitively saying that women are full persons under the law, with the full rights and privileges thereof. The legal definition of who qualifies as a person has changed in the past, and there is no reason to think it can't change again.

More importantly than that, though, consider the fact that there are major politicians in multiple countries right now that are campaigning on the idea that their out-group of choice aren't actually people. You see it in the vicious anti-LGBT stances throughout Europe, the hatred against immigrants and migrants being used to stir up fear on the campaign trail, and the literal talking points of open fascists.

Denial of personhood was how slavery was justified; if Africans aren't considered people, it becomes okay to treat them as property. Denial of personhood is how policies are justified that send refugees back to the very places they are fleeing from; if refugees aren't people, it becomes okay to stop caring about their wellbeing. Denial of personhood is how the Holocaust was justified; if Jews aren't people, it becomes okay to exterminate them en masse.

This isn't me saying, "You don't get to choose how you're referred to." This is me saying, "The removal of personhood is often the first step towards fascism and genocide, and you need to be very careful with that."

If a fascist sees an LGBT alterhuman declare that they aren't a person, that fascist isn't going to care if it's just an attempt to distance oneself from being human. All that fascist is going to see is someone in the LGBT community agreeing with them that an LGBT individual isn't actually a person, and therefore exterminating them is justified. And I really hope that we can all agree that giving fascists any amount of help justifying their hate is a bad idea.

If you don't want to be referred to by the word "person", that's fine. But there is a very big distinction between "I don't want to be referred to as 'person', please call me something else," and saying, "I am not a person." And the latter is the one I take issue with, and the one that is frighteningly prevalent in non-human and alterhuman spaces.

So yes, it is correct to say that respecting someone's boundaries around what they want to be called does no harm. But it is equally correct to say that denying one's personhood is a dangerous act that needs to be considered very carefully, especially in a political climate in which we are seeing the visible rise of fascism around the world. A philosophy that, I will remind, is built on the idea that some individuals are lesser, do not deserve the rights and privileges of personhood, and are fit to be eliminated from society.

"Person" is not a personal identity label that one can choose to opt in or out of. It is a status granted by the society around you, and which comes with a guarantee of safety. A guarantee that, again, there are major politicians actively campaigning to remove from groups they hate.

To make my primary point incredibly blunt: There are fascists out there right now that would see many, if not most, of the members of our community killed en masse for reasons entirely unrelated to our non-humanity and alterhumanity. Giving up one's personhood is adding fuel to their fire, and gives them a potential foothold to continue advancing their literal genocidal ideologies.

All I'm asking the community to consider is this: Do we really want to be enabling fascists?

"Person" is not an Identity

The topic of nonhuman personhood came up in a conversation earlier, which led to me scrolling through the notes on the essay/rant I wrote on the topic at the end of last year [link]. While scrolling through, I saw multiple people express the view that if someone doesn't want to be referred to as a "person", that should be respected.

I would like to kindly but firmly disagree with that view.

Personhood is not a personal identity, and it should not be approached the same way that one approaches identity labels like sexuality, gender, or even species identity. Personhood is a social and legal category, which carries with it significant implications about how (and if) one is treated as a member of society.

Whether it is intended or not, a declaration like "I am not a person" is declaring that one does not see themselves as a being deserving of basic rights and safety. It is saying that they do not see themselves as deserving of dignity and basic respect as a thinking being.

The declaration that an individual (or more often, a specific group) does not have personhood has been used as the justification for all manner of atrocities, up to and including genocide. And I want to be very clear that I am not exaggerating that point. The removal of personhood is a key element of fascist ideology, and is not something to be done casually, even to oneself.

If someone tells me that they use a specific identity label, or set of pronouns, or even choose to not identify as human, I can respect that, and I will do my best to embrace their decision. On the other hand, if someone tells me that they are not a person, I consider that cause for alarm.

The important difference is that personhood is not a personal identity. It is the state of being recognized as worthy of basic dignity, rights, and respect. To deny one's personhood is to deny that you deserve basic rights like freedom from harm, the ability to own property, and the ability to make decisions about your own life and body. I would hope that it's abundantly clear why denying oneself those basic rights is a bad thing.

"Person" is not an identity. It is a fundamental trait that cannot and should not be removed from anyone, even voluntarily. The denial of one's personhood is, at best, incredibly misguided, and at worst incredibly dangerous.

So if you're someone who wants to not be called a "person", I implore you to examine why you feel that way in depth, and consider if the problem isn't being called a person, but the societal assumption that person = human. And if the problem is that societal assumption, the solution isn't to deny your personhood; it's to join the large number of people pushing for society to accept that not every person is human.

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apenitentialprayer · 3 years ago

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As U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban retook control of the country, Mayor Quinton Lucas on Monday tweeted that Kansas City was ready to receive refugees.

“Kansas City would proudly accept refugees from Afghanistan who have served bravely by our side over the past generation,” Lucas wrote. “And, we have space for many who have not been able to serve, but who seek freedom to learn, vote, work, and have the equal rights our country offers for women and men.”

By the time Lucas made his invitation, Kansas City had already welcomed several families fleeing Afghanistan and the Taliban, and more are expected to arrive in the coming months. Della Lamb Community Center and Jewish Vocational Services are two agencies in Kansas City who receive refugees through the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement. Della Lamb resettled two families in the past 60 days and Jewish Vocational Services received one family last week. “So we've worked with about, I would say 15 or 20 in the last couple of months,” says Jewish Vocational Services executive director Hilary Singer. “But we are anticipating getting, hopefully, a whole lot more folks who are able to make their way to safety.” JVS and Della Lamb are the primary organizations in Kansas City for resettling people with Special Immigrant Visas — immigrants who worked as translators, interpreters or other professional roles for the U.S. government in Afghanistan or Iraq. “They come here because they've qualified for Special Immigrant Visa status, which means that they have verified that they have provided support to U.S. troops, either as an interpreter or an engineer or security personnel, something like that,” Singer says. “And because of that affiliation, their lives are in danger.” Some of these refugees may eventually show up to Kansas City on their own, while some are placed here by the U.S. State Department, says Paul Costigan, the senior vice president for operations and Missouri refugee coordinator at the International Institute of St. Louis. Costigan says that since 2016, Missouri has received 615 Special Immigrant Visa applicants. Between last October and July 31, 2021, the state welcomed 51 of those applicants and their family members. A long road ahead for refugees For new Afghan refugees, though, it may take more than a year before they reach a new home. Singer says many of the refugees being airlifted out of Kabul are being processed through Fort Lee, Virginia, where they’re provided with temporary shelter, food and health services. From there, approved refugees will be relocated by nongovernmental agencies around the country. For example, Catholic Charities in Kansas City, Kansas, handles refugee resettlement in Wyandotte County. Ryan Hudnall, executive director at Della Lamb, said there’s a lot of uncertainty right now in the vetting process, so agencies like his are preparing however they can, so that they’re ready by the time refugees get to Kansas City. “I think what we can do locally is know that there will be refugees from Afghanistan who are coming, prepare for that, build up our language competencies, our cultural orientation competencies, and certainly we can offer our thoughts and prayers for them,” Hudnall says. Once refugees get settled here, the agencies don’t leave them on their own. Hudnall said they will help people register for Social Security, find housing and create a path forward for self-sufficiency. And other local organizations like Refuge KC help not just Afghans but all refugees acclimate to Kansas City’s neighborhoods and culture. Advocates have also been prepping so they can make all new arrivals feel welcome. “All these people come in with trauma,” says Patty Bergloff, coordinator for programs and volunteers at Refuge KC. “They’re fleeing. They’re fleeing persecution. They’re fleeing violence.”Bergloff said her organization is committed to offering friendship and education to refugees learning to navigate their new surroundings. “We work together as a community,” she said. “We call them our new American neighbors.”

#Afghanistan #United States

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southeastasianists · 4 years ago

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As the battle against COVID-19 rages in Malaysia, a new population has become collateral damage: Rohingya refugees. A terrified public, instigated by political opportunists, has endorsed numerous anti-refugee online petitions that have gained well-distributed support across Malaysia’s ethnic spectrum. Although Malaysia once embraced these survivors of Myanmar’s genocidal regime, Rohingya refugees are now being called ungrateful, uncivilised and backward leeches. This public outcry has led to mass support for Malaysia turning away boats carrying Rohingya asylum seekers. Given that many Malaysians assume that all refugees from Myanmar are Rohingya, the petitions have supported Malaysia’s detention of thousands of undocumented migrants—even those holding UNHCR registration cards—whose fates are unclear.

Perceptions of Rohingya refugees as indolent and, more recently, as virus carriers emerge from simplistic discursive representations that materialise from and circulate far beyond Malaysia. A number of entities unwittingly mutually reinforce reductive depictions of Rohingya. Myanmar nationalists vehemently deny that Rohingya belong to the polity, since the latter are perceived to be different—Rohingya “look South Asian” and are Muslims in a Buddhist country. International media have incentives to tell (and sell) simple stories, while humanitarian agencies achieve efficiencies in aid delivery when they can treat every Rohingya as a replicable token of a common type. Rohingya elites themselves have reason to present a common and distinct Rohingya identity, as this contests the Myanmar state’s assertion that the Rohingya are simply interlopers from Bangladesh (“Bengalis”).

In the academic world, fieldwork with Rohingya documents significant internal differentiation. But this reality has been obscured by the lack of sustained study of the group, particularly because northern Rakhine (Arakan) state, the area to which Rohingya are indigenous, has been largely inaccessible to researchers. Academics have mostly only considered elite debates or recapitulated stories of misery in Burma.

The creation of a homogenous image of Rohingya obscures the ethnic community’s striking diversity: Rohingya do not share an identical dialect, do not all look the same, nor are even all Muslim. Such diversity is unsurprising—homogenous groups tend to be maintained only through coercion and control. Given the Myanmar state’s claims that Rohingya do not exist, counter-narratives claiming a unified identity also make perfect sense. What is noteworthy are the effects of these claims and counterclaims amid mass violence and dispossession. Those who do not conform to the narrow characteristics which allegedly distinguish the Rohingya are not only excluded from making identity claims, but also the protection afforded to recognised asylum seekers and refugees.

This post draws upon fieldwork in Malaysia, Bangladesh, Thailand and Yangon, Myanmar between 2017 and 2020 to describe processes of Rohingya identity (re)formation amid ethnic cleansing and attempted extermination. We focus on Rohingya elite discourses and the criteria used by humanitarian organisations to grant protections to refugees, to show how both co-produce a reified image of the Rohingya that is then represented in media and academic treatments. The disciplining of ethnic diversity in turn becomes internalised by Rohingya refugees, who self-reinforce the homogenisation of Rohingya identity.

In Myanmar, the ratification of an ethnic group as indigenous is the only method for securing recognition of substantive citizenship. The claim to citizenship rests in turn on the claim to an essential identity uniting the Rohingya. Self-appointed Rohingya leaders reject expressions of internal difference that might potentially undercut their identity’s supposed authenticity. Rohingya elites have identified particular religious, linguistic, territorial and cultural indicators to demarcate an ‘authentic’ Rohingya-ness that fits the racial ideology of the Myanmar state: Rohingya are Muslims, speak Rohingya, have their homeland in Rakhine state, and share both agrarian subsistence patterns (fishing and farming) and a village culture defined by segmentary clan-based kinship systems.

There are several problems with this description. The Rohingya have faced a half-century of systematic oppression by the Myanmar state, one that has precipitated waves of violent expulsions complemented by legal and symbolic erasure. It is arguably no longer possible to embody the narrow characteristics listed above. The growing displacement of Rohingya has disrupted clan systems and opportunities to learn language dialects, while severing intimate relationships between subsistence patterns and lands. For instance, the absence of vernacular print or radio hinders the standardisation of a dialect, facilitating evolutions in the Rohingya language (which was already subjected to significant regional variation). Moreover, as the putatively originary elements of Rohingya-ness intermix with host cultures across greater Asia (Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Bangladesh and Pakistan, in particular), new variations of identity are produced. An essentialised “Rohingya-ness” can no longer be adequately performed.

Even if the mass uprooting of Rohingya had not transpired, such essentialism would still exclude some who identify as Rohingya. For instance, while Rohingya historian Ba Tha asserts that, “All Rohingya profess Islam,” Hindu Rohingya and the tiny but vocal Christian Rohingya community put paid to such blanket assertions. While these are arguably miniscule exceptions, they throw into relief a larger schism between a growing conservative strain of Islam and those Rohingya who espouse a syncretic Islam that blends animism and Hinduism. Some accounts attribute this expanding rift to Saudi Arabian influence, while others describe the increase in conservatism as a self-protective response to growing vulnerability.

As humanitarian and state apparatuses internalise essentialist definitions of Rohingya-ness, they become sieving machines separating ‘true’ Rohingya from ‘false’. Rejecting deviant Rohingya experiences, cultural practices and identities is problematic because it denies protection to those with legitimate claims to membership. Humanitarian regulatory processes and state discourses pressure Rohingya to perform and take up the traits that signify an “authentic” Rohingya. State elites such as Malaysia’s Najib and Bangladesh’s Sheikh Hasina have emphasised how Muslim countries must help Rohingya as they are fellow “Muslim brothers and sisters”. Rohingya consequently have an incentive to foreground a Muslim identity to qualify for the support of such states.

Meanwhile the UNHCR compels Rohingya to conform to narrow definitions of Rohingya-ness in order to access the identification documents that provide a modicum of protection in Malaysia. In interviews, Rohingya applicants for refugee status, translators and civil society leaders revealed some non-Rohingya applicants (Bangladeshis or Myanmar Muslims) have attained cards by paying bribes to translators or colluding with Rohingya applicants by “learning things about [Rohingya] areas in Rakhine state and paying to ‘join’ their family,” as one translator told us.

More importantly, Rohingya have reportedly been denied cards by not satisfying the agency’s expectations of ‘authentic’ Rohingya-ness. Cards have been allegedly refused to applicants who were deemed too educated, could not adequately relay geographical knowledge of Rakhine state or describe details about political events (pogroms against Rohingya, for example), or could not speak in the same Rohingya dialect as the UNHCR translator. Insistence on these qualities would particularly disadvantage Rohingya who spent most or all of their lives outside of Rakhine state.

Rohingya applicants rehearse the narratives of those who have successfully attained refugee status to prepare for the UNHCR interview. Kamal, a Rohingya who came to Malaysia through Bangladesh and Thailand in 2016, shared that: “My relative told me the questions the UNHCR asked. I practiced how to answer them with my relative, and I learnt some of the answers he gave so that I could be guaranteed success in getting the UN card.” The perceived need to “tell the same story” for fear of being denied refugee status reinforces the homogeneity of Rohingya-ness as an ethnic category, putting in doubt all narratives that stray from the dominant one.

Many who now see themselves as Rohingya only came to do so after the violence of the last decade, or from interacting with humanitarian agencies or host states—some had not even heard the name before. Hasinah, an older woman who fled Rakhine after the 2015 conflict, shared that she had only thought of herself as a Myanmar Muslim back in Sittwe. The discovery of her Rohingya identity took place when the UNHCR officer told her that she was Rohingya: “I only [learned] in Malaysia that because we are Rohingya, that’s why Myanmar wanted to kill us. Before this [back in Myanmar], I only thought it was because we are Muslims, and Buddhists hate Muslims.”

These experiences demonstrate how some Rohingya have begun to understand themselves through the parameters they encounter during state registration processes. They also show how the Rohingya category is enlarged by the incorporation of those who had not seen themselves as Rohingya before. Hasinah’s testimony reflects a shift in her identity, and how she relates to her world. In explaining the violence in Myanmar, her Rohingya identity becomes foregrounded over her general Muslim one. Hasinah’s experiences do not imply that all Rohingya were unaware of their ethnic identity or the basis of their persecution. Instead, narratives such as Hasinah’s reveal the diversity in Rohingya’s perspectives. They also point to the growing solidification of Rohingya-ness—to be Rohingya is also to be Muslim, thereby excluding the marginal voices of non-Muslim Rohingya.

“Those are Myanmar Muslims and Bangladeshis. Not Rohingya,” so declared a Malaysia-based Rohingya refugee in a May 2020 Facebook post, at pains to distinguish the Rohingya community from other refugee groups in Malaysia. If Rohingya were not already compelled to differentiate themselves, the COVID-19 pandemic has both produced and made more pronounced distinctions between Rohingya and other migrant communities. Adding to the pressure from humanitarian and state apparatuses, societal acceptance—and rejection—of Rohingya in Malaysia have led to the growing need among Rohingya refugees to present themselves as a docile subjects deserving of protection.

Allowing for alternative performances of Rohingya-ness not only allows for a broader and more complex understanding of Rohingya to emerge—a good in its own right. It accomplishes two additional goals. First, embracing Rohingya diversity forms a stronger basis for the articulation of collective political aspirations. The tactic of strategic essentialism has not worked due to the Myanmar state’s persistent denial of Rohingya as “inauthentic.” Embracing Rohingya diversity, by contrast, recognises their various complex historical and cultural entanglements with Rakhine state and Myanmar in general.

Second—and arguably more importantly for a stateless group of people who have been denied belonging and a homeland—flattening Rohingya-ness inevitably prevents many “deviant Rohingya” from claiming a name that has been denied by the Myanmar state. For some, the Rohingya identity is the only thing they have left. The Rohingya identity is a crucial aspect of their existence. A more fluid understanding of Rohingya—one that both allows more people to enter and more people to exit, but also permits people to inhabit both positions at once—would better reflect the immense challenges of living as Rohingya today.

#myanmar #rohingya #rakhine state #identity #research

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socialjusticeartshare · 4 years ago

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What We Owe the Families We Separated at the Border

Our government should acknowledge the grievous wrong it has committed through a systematic policy of family separation.

cIn a secret program that started in 2017—and which was later publicly announced as “zero tolerance”—the Trump Administration separated more than 5,500 migrant children from their parents. A stated goal was to deter would-be asylum seekers from crossing the southwest border illegally. Even after a federal district court enjoined this policy, our government continued to separate families, affecting another approximately 1,110 children.

According to the Office of the Inspector General, due to inconsistent and inadequate record-keeping by the administration, the total number of separated children is unknown, and the actual number may never be known. Recent court filings indicate the parents of some 545 of the separated children who remain in the U.S. have not yet been found—and may never be.

Representative Rosa DeLauro described family separation as “state-sanctioned child abuse.” Some parents described hearing their children screaming for them from the next room as children were taken from them. Others were unaware that they might never see their children again, because agents claimed that the youngsters were being moved only temporarily.

Quite apart from the unspeakable trauma that these separations inflicted on the children and their parents, other Trump policies instituted around this time inflicted further damage, in effect slowing the release of these youngsters into long-term child-appropriate placements, and leaving many to languish in warehouse-like facilities for weeks and even months. According to the Associated Press, the children had no books or toys; overhead lighting was kept on around the clock; and the children had only foil sheets to use as blankets. Lawyers serving as compliance monitors in the Flores litigation reported seeing children without any adult supervision, with older children caring for younger ones, and even changing diapers. The Inspector General reported that 300 children were given antidepressants—in some cases, over concerns voiced by facility staff.

For the parents who have been identified—representing about a third of the total 5,550 separated children—the trauma inflicted by our government continues unabated. Our government has now presented these parents with an impossible choice—you will be reunited with your child only if you agree to have the child returned to your country of origin, notwithstanding possible dangers; or you can face permanent separation, if you want your child to remain safe in the U.S. Many parents have “chosen” to give up their children.

According to the ACLU’s Lee Gelernt, the lead attorney in the separation litigation, only about 20 parents have been allowed back into the U.S. Even for these “lucky” few, their legal status here remains uncertain, in large part because asylum cases—even for individuals facing grave physical danger or even death in their countries of origin—are difficult to win. “I think a lot of people don’t realize that the Trump administration is still trying to deport these families, either the child alone or once reunited,” says Gelernt. “So the trauma from the separations exists. But on top of that, there’s the trauma of fighting for your life not to be sent back to danger.”

So, how can we as a country begin to make amends for the outrage of separating families? At a minimum, our government should first acknowledge the grievous wrong it has committed through this systematic policy of family separation, which qualifies as an “atrocity”—both in the colloquial sense, but arguably also under international law. (On the latter point, see Article 7(1) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.) Second, rather than putting up resistance, as it has done so far, our government must embrace efforts to search for the missing parents of the 545 “lost” children and commit its vast resources to doing so.

Third, we must offer a pathway to U.S. citizenship to every separated child, and their immediate family members. Rather than representing a novel or generous solution, such a move would merely borrow frameworks that already exist in humanitarian immigration law, which provides legal status to victims harmed by actors who commit serious crimes or other atrocities. Examples in humanitarian immigration law include: U and T Visas, for victims of certain serious crimes committed in the U.S.; the VAWA (or Violence Against Women Act) Self-Petition, for women and men abused by their U.S. citizen or legal permanent spouses or other close family members; Temporary Protected Status (TPS), for those who cannot return to their countries due to natural or manmade disasters; and, of course, asylum, withholding of removal, and Convention Against Torture (CAT) relief, for those fleeing persecution or torture in other countries.

Many of these remedies provide a pathway to citizenship, both for the victim and immediate family members; some of these remedies also offer eligibility for federal public benefits and other forms of assistance, in recognition of the trauma that victims have suffered and the help they will need to recover. Just as we already do with refugees and asylees, who are victimized by foreign governments, or groups these governments cannot or will not control, why should we not offer similar status and benefits to these victims, who have been harmed by the actions of our own government?

Remarkably, granting legal status to the 5,500 separated children and their families would not have made a dent in reaching our expected refugee and asylee numbers for the year. Cuts by the Trump Administration have decimated the refugee program. For instance, in fiscal year 2020, which ended September 30, only 11,814 refugees were resettled, a number far short of the annual ceiling of 18,000 proposed by the President himself. And this untapped annual ceiling of 18,000 refugees in 2020 itself represents a historic drop, reflecting the lowest levels of refugee resettlement since the program’s inception forty years ago. (For comparison, before the Trump Administration, the lowest ceiling of 67,000 refugees dated back to 1986; in 2016, the U.S. resettled 85,000 refugees. Even during the Trump early years, the refugee resettlement ceilings wildly exceeded this year’s limit—50,000 in 2017; 45,000 in 2018; and 30,000 in 2019.)

With border apprehensions down by half in 2020—initially because of the Administration’s efforts to end long-standing asylum protections at the southern border and, more recently, because of its total shutdown of the border in response to COVID—asylum applications will likely also drop dramatically. (In contrast to refugee resettlement, there are no numerical limits on the number of people who can apply for and receive asylum.) Thus, in comparison to these lowered ceilings for refugee resettlement, combined with the likely diminution in asylum grants, the number of children we have separated from their parents at the border is both small and finite—5,500 children and their immediate families.

These separated families will never fully recover from the trauma our government has inflicted on them, but it is time we as a nation take reasonable measures to atone for and hopefully learn from our inhumanity.

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#families separated #border #owed

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perennialphilosophy · 5 years ago

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Identity Issues and Terrorism

First, I will point out that my PhD circulates around the Arabic language and interpretations of it in different socio-political contexts, hence the topic of this post (as well as others coming in the future).

I don’t know if you’re familiar with a woman called Shamima Begum, but I will give you a quick overview. Shamima Begum is a British citizen, of Bangladeshi heritage, who was born and brought up in Bethnal Green - a part of London that has a large South-Asian Muslim community. In 2015, at the age of 15, Shamima and two of her friends left the UK to join IS and their ‘jihad’ in Syria. Shamima married an IS member out there and had two children, who passed away. Earlier this year, after the capture of her husband and IS having been defeated on the most part, she applied to return to the UK so that she could give birth to her third child here. Britain was unwilling to take her back as citizenship is automatically revoked when you join a terrorist organisation. There was widespread debate about this, as the child would still be the responsibility of the UK, even if Shamima was not as well as discussion around her not ‘understanding’ what she was doing when she left as she was ‘a child’. The long and short of it is that she was not allowed to return, and gave birth in a refugee camp. Unfortunately, given the circumstances of the birth and surroundings, the child also passed away a month later of lung infection.

Shamima is not an isolated instance. Over the years, there have been numerous young men and women leaving the UK to join IS in their fight. I began to wonder why this is. What is it that causes these people to feel something so strong that they abandon their own families, friends, country, to join another? What makes them want to adopt new names and identities? Admittedly, there is no one answer to this, but there may be a few that together make the right combination.

I spent today reading British Muslims and the Call to Global Jihad by Kylie Baxter, which really opened my eyes a little.

One thing that is clear, not just in this book but in the facts also, is that the Muslims that are getting radicalised, and ‘brain washed’ come mostly from a South-Asian background (by which I mean mostly Bangladeshi and Pakistani), which is what I will concern myself with in this post. Looking at these South-Asian Muslims, we can then also narrow the demographic down to second and third generation Muslims. It is never those who immigrated to the UK in the first place who take up these ideologies, but rather their children, or their children’s children.

One theory presented for why the second and third generations seem to be affected so much and why they make journey is an issue regarding a lack of identity. Following World War II, South-Asians (and others from the British Empire) were welcomed into the UK to help rebuild it, and take up working class jobs. As members of the Empire, they held the status of ‘British subject’ and upon entering the UK were offered full citizenship. This role to them, however, was purely economic and political, and viewed as a temporary phase. Those of South-Asian backgrounds, therefore, tended to group together in parts of London. Many did not feel the need to learn to speak the language and held on to their own cultures and traditions tightly as this is what they identified with. Their Asian background was their identity.

Once they had children, however, the religion that the children were asked to practice was one that was splattered with cultural norm and speckled with the opinions and judgment of the first generation. Without a good or proper understanding of their true culture and religion, as well as feeling isolated from the British society (as their practices were different), this leaves them little to put to their name and claim as their identity. Baxter says

It ‘appealed predominantly to young religious-seekers. Generally, the organisation’s recruits had a poor understanding of Islam, a dissatisfaction with the often culturally influenced religious tradition offered by the older generation and a sense of alienation from the British societal system of which they were meant to be a part’.

Is this all just one very serious identity issue?

I think the identity issue runs deeper than just now knowing if you belong more to the Asian culture or the British one that you are born and brought up with, and stems back to the parents themselves. If the parents make an attempt to ‘assimilate’ (for lack of a better word), it would make the task of combining Western and Asian living more cohesive. However, with parents who often do not speak the language or mix with people that are not Asian themselves, it is hard to draw on the two yourself to create an identity for yourself.

In a study conducted in 2005, it is reported that 3% of the British population is Muslim. But if you look at the dispersion of the 3%, you find that 38% are living in London alone, which is quite a high percentage (though I’m not one to judge, being from London myself) but it makes some sense as this is the capital and most diverse and welcoming of other cultures. Looking at the dispersion within London also, if we look at the boroughs of Tower Hamlets and Newham, their Muslim population is 38% and 36% respectively, perhaps indicating ‘ghettoisation’.

Speaking from personal experience, my grandmother has been in the UK since the late 70s, that makes it forty years, and she is unable to speak or understand any English. Why? Because she lived in Tower Hamlets, where over a third of the population was Muslim and a large majority of Bangladeshi heritage. She did not need to learn because wherever she went, there were people speaking Bengali. Her neighbours were Bangladeshi, the shop assistants were Bangladeshi, as were the doctors and teachers at her children’s schools. There was nothing to compel her to learn and she had no desire.

Not only this, but in 2002, a report found that 48% of Bangladeshi women and 40% of Bangladeshi men were unqualified, as well as 40% of Pakistani women and 27% of Pakistani men. This would make it hard for these members to join society openly and mix with those in qualified jobs (which were mostly held by you typical Anglo-Saxon English man or woman), even if they wanted to. This alienation is passed down to the children who are then faced with the task of overcoming this alienation not just for themselves but for the parents too, and introducing them to British culture and norms.

Just a quick analogy: I have an aunt who has been in this country now for twenty five years. She can just about say common things like ‘how are you’ and ‘shut up’ (the latter I’ve heard her use a lot) but other than this, her knowledge is basically zero. She is a housewife that never leaves the house. She has made no attempt to make friends, not even with other Asians. I recall going to a wedding once and she was there, it was a big fat Asian wedding. The bride invited some of her colleagues and friends, who were you typical Anglo-Saxon white men and women. My aunt commented saying “look at that show off, inviting white people”, because she does not want ‘white people’ there. It is the role of her children now to introduce her to Western society, as this will become a barrier for them, when their mother will not want them inviting ‘white people’ to their weddings.

And I will leave you with that. I feel like I have rambled a lot, but I hope my point comes across somewhat clearly, and if it does not, you will have to excuse me, I have a raging fever at the moment.

N.B. Again, for the keyboard warriors, these are only my opinions. There are also many more reasons that I could list, such as certain ‘cultures’ being more deprived, funding, education etc. There is a lot to be said. Perhaps I will speak about those in separate posts, if anyone is interested.

#terrorism

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litheammunition · 5 years ago

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Brexit: An Unwinnable War

How do you stage a coup? You start a war. You fan its flames, until it grows out of control. You make it so that it’s impossible for the moderates to win, showing them as out of their depth, needing a stronger, unconventional hand to sort the mess out. Then you step in, and find that you can get away with breaking all the rules...

Act 1 - Project Fear

The spark was the slow part. There had always been rumblings of discontent around the UK’s place in Europe, dating right back to our accession to the European Community in 1972, and intensifying since the project formally became a political European Union in 1993.

There had been a referendum in 1975, won by a 67.2% vote to remain, but the question was raised again after the 1993 Maastricht Treaty. No referendum was needed for the government to sign up, but neighbours Ireland and France held one to confirm the decision, and many in the UK thought they deserved the same. That year saw the birth of a number of protest parties, the most successful of which, UKIP, continues to pressure for ‘Brexit’ today.

After years of pressure from UKIP and the sizable Eurosceptic wing of his own Conservative party, Prime Minister David Cameron finally gave into their demands. In 2016, a referendum was held, with one simple question: Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union? No details were provided as to what the latter option would look like. That was down to the campaigns to provide.

It turned out that it was actually many options hidden within one. Every leaver had their own idea of what shape Brexit would come in. Many talked about the Norway model, a country with full access to single market, but which is obliged to make a financial contribution, accept most EU laws, and which has free movement with the rest of the EU. Others suggested a Swiss model, part of the EFTA but not the EEA, making a smaller financial contribution to access specific areas of trade, and again with free movement.

Still others spoke about Turkey, with no membership of the EEA/EFTA but its own customs union with the EU, to avoid the need to impose tariffs on exports. They were a dozen combinations available. What was certain was that there would be some sort of deal, and it would be quick and painless to negotiate. What was clear was that “absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market” as Daniel Hannan, known as the Godfather of Brexit and a major push behind it, had said the year before. I have saved a full raft of quotes from other Leave leaders for Act 2, below.

On 26 June, senior Leave campaigner and PM hopeful Boris Johnson wrote an article confirming that the UK would remain part of the single market. In government and parliament, discussing how to implement Brexit, the main debate was between full access to the single market or only a customs union. There was no mention of crashing out with no deal. There was certaintly no mention that, in August 2019, over three years after the debate, we would be no closer to a resolution.

The Leave campaign seemed happier telling voters what the former option on the ballot would look like. The electorate might have thought they already knew what staying in the EU would look like, seeing as it was just the continuation of a fairly agreeable status quo, but they were corrected with a spate of glossy leaflets from the multiple Leave campaigns, and the same talking points brought up in every interview.

One colourful infographic, common across the material, tried to spread fear that the entirety of Turkey’s 76 million population was about to move in next door. The truth is that Turkey is nowhere near joining the EU, and that the UK has a veto (i.e. even if they tried to join, we alone could stop them). Turkey cannot join the EU unless the UK wants it to. But if you say “Turkey is joining the EU”, or treat it as a done deal, and slap FACT on it, people will get shocked. If you highlight it in orange and red with a big red arrow of Turkish people swarming into the UK, people will be worried. That’s what you want. It doesn’t matter if it’s true.

I use the term ‘swarming’ advisably, because although it’s a despicable way to describe to human beings, dehumanising them to insects, vermin, it’s the term that David Cameron used in July 2015, shortly after plans for the referendum were confirmed. As shown in other Leave material, such as the UKIP poster above that has been frequently compared to the Nazi propaganda below it, this debate was consistently coded with xenophobia and racism, an attempt to win by appealing to voter’s fears of mass immigration, the need to secure our borders, even though this was a picture of refugees moving approximately one thousand miles away and several countries away from the UK.

If there was any doubt over the racial intention, the original photograph for this poster is below. It has a prominent white face at the front. Now note the way the original has been cropped and where the single opaque box of text has been placed, with everything else transparent. Note which one individual has been covered up, with all of the others put on show.

Even if they weren’t abhorrent, the claims around immigration are also not true. The UK already has control of its own borders. Whilst some other EU countries like France and Germany have chosen (of their own will), to have open borders with each other, in a region called the Schengen Area, the UK had the free choice not to be a part of this. This means that the UK has full border checks on every individual entering the country. The UK’s agreement with the other EU countries is that nationals of those countries (not refugees from the Middle East passing through) can stay here on a three month visa, but after that it’s our choice.

In addition, that agreement has always been subject to ‘grounds of public policy, public security or public health’, which effectively means that the UK can choose not to let in any individual they don’t want to. The UK has specific power to expel any EU citizen who they believe poses ‘a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat affecting one of the fundamental interests of society’, and the country they came from has to accept them back.

In short, the UK only needs to accept productive members of society. Indeed, all research (including by the government’s own Office of Budget Responsibility) has shown that immigrants make a net contribution to the country’s economy, and many industries are dependent on migrant workers. The campaign to ‘end uncontrolled immigration from the EU’ or ‘protect our security - open borders gives criminals and terrorists an easy route into the UK’ is therefore another straight-up lie designed to leverage people’s base xenophobic fears.

The frequently repeated idea that the NHS and UK benefits system are being exploited by migrants is also fake. Not only do migrants pay £78,000 more into the UK government over their lifetime than they take out over their lifetimes, but the NHS specifically depends on immigration: 37% of doctors qualified overseas. The problem with long NHS waiting times is not because the system is overcrowded, but because it is understaffed, and immigrants are the solution rather than the problem. But this is a government policy problem, and for too long they have found it easier to blame the people coming here to help.

Before the referendum, David Cameron had also secured the UK further powers in restricting benefits paid to migrants, a massive compromise from EU principles of fairness which would have given the UK privileged status amongst member states. There would be a 4 year break before benefits had to be paid to EU citizens working in the UK, with tax credits phased in over the same period. EU migrants without a job would be restricted to claiming jobseeker’s allowance for 3 months, and then deported after 6 in they were still unemployed. Benefit payments would be fixed to the amounts available in their home countries, removing any incentive to come to the UK to claim them.

This is all without even considering a fourth angle, that the freedom works both ways. Hundreds of thousands of British citizens exercise their right to visit and live in and work in the EU, just as happens the other way around. Finally, it’s worth noting that immigration from the EU makes up a minority of total migration to the UK, even with these supposed ‘open borders’, and specifically when net migration is considered. Most of the people coming for the long term do so from elsewhere in the world, where we have never had ‘open borders’ but still freely choose to let them in, suggesting that immigration numbers have always been up to the UK government and migration from EU countries will similarly continue at a similar rate no matter what the border situation is.

There were many other obvious lies at the time, such as the suggestion that the EU were in the process of building an army, a completely transparent attempt to spark fear, but they were told so often that they started to be believed. On the other side, all concerns about the risks of leaving were dismissed as Project Fear, a classic example of projecting: as the Leave campaign were in the business of fearmongering, it helped distract from that by accusing their opponents of the same at every opportunity.

Project Fear became a term used to silence all dissent as part of some elitist conspiracy. Some experts said that Brexit will cost the economy? Project Fear. Since the referendum the value of the pound has dropped off the charts, the UK has experienced negative growth at a time of economic success for its neighbours, and Sony, Dyson, Flybmi, Nissan, Honda, Ford, Moneygram, Philips, P&O, Airbus, Barclays, Hitachi, JPMorgan, Citibank and other firms have announced they are closing their UK operations and moving to Ireland or the Netherlands or other countries who still have trade links with the EU. Brexit hasn’t even hit its hardest yet, and it had already cost the economy £66 billion by April this year, about £1,000 per person. It turns out that the experts were exactly right.

Project Fear said that leaving threatened a break up of the UK. “If we vote to leave then I think the union will be stronger”, Michael Gove countered in May 2016, but the referendum vote has predictably intensified movements for Scottish (and Northern Irish) independence, as well as creating an endless dispute over the Irish-UK border, reopening scars that were just started to heal. Again, it seems that the people who knew what they were talking about... actually knew what they were talking about. The Leave campaign told people to ignore these false warnings as part of elite conspiracy, writing off the expertise of academics and industry leaders as ‘this country has had enough of experts’, an unexcusable anti-intellectualism that excused all lies and criticised anyone who dared to point out the truth.

They still put their fingers in their ears now, when reminded that those warnings have virtually all come true. This weak, the government’s reports on Operation Yellowhammer were leaked, their own forecasts suggesting a massive negative hit from leaving without a deal. When Kwasi Kwarteng, Minister of State for Business and Energy, was asked about them on TV, he described his government’s own projections as scaremongering and Project Fear, confused as to which lie he was supposed to be telling. Lead Brexiteer Michael Gove came out to dismiss them as the ‘worst case scenario’, even as a Whitehall source clarified ‘this is the most realistic assessment of what the public face with no deal. These are likely, basic, reasonable scenarios – not the worst case’.

It isn’t the first time. Theresa May withheld projections and legal advice from voters and MPs, and her government was the first ever to be held in contempt of parliament for deliberately hiding the facts to push through her votes: in contempt of democracy, in contempt of the truth, adding constitutional offences to the free-flowing lies that have been a feature throughout. Amongst all of them, perhaps the biggest lie was that Brexit was about the sovereignty of the UK parliament, taking back control from the undemocratic elites: from Theresa May and Boris Johnson we have seen two unelected Prime Ministers who have tried everything they can to circumvent British democracy, as detailed below.

#Brexit #UK #politics #Boris Johnson #EU

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rasoir-national · 5 years ago

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Welcome to Immigration law, where words have no meaning : a case study

While working on cases, I stumbled across yet another fun example of the way political pressure has rendered legal principles meaningless in Immigration law, to the point that judges have to go against the very words of the law they’re supposed to be applying.

If you need a refresher of what’s broadly wrong with immigration law in France, presumably because you hate yourself, you can hop over here.

Anyway, let’s talk about Refugee family reunification.

What is Refugee law ? Well, in the 19th Century... just kidding, we’re not doing that here. I mean, we’re absolutely doing that here someday, but not right now. If you’re unclear on what a refugee is, here’s the broad idea : if a person from a certain country finds themself in a situation where their life is in danger in that country, either because the authorities can’t/won’t protect them or because those authorities are the ones threatening them, then they can enter another country and ask for that country’s protection. If they can jump through all the hoops and get their request approved - and all I have to say about this at the moment is that it’s a goddamn miracle every time it happens- then they are recognized as refugees : they will be allowed to stay in that country for a consequential period of time, have civil rights almost similar to a citizen, and generally be taken care of.

Now as I said, when you get recognized as a refugee, it means you’re set to stay in the country that took you in for about 10 years, that can be renewed if the situation didn’t get better in your country of origin. Something would have to go massively wrong for you to lose that status before then. That’s time during which you are legally forbidden to go back to your country of origin, since the very point of getting the status is that it was critically unsafe for you to stay there. 10 years, that’s a good chunk of life. So it stands to reason that you should be able to have your family with you during that time. See, asylum seekers sometimes come as a family, but more often than not, only one person makes the trip and tries to get the status, then puts in a request for the rest of their family : the trip is extremely expensive and dangerous. Still, not only is it coherent to allow the refugee’s family to come as well - if they were in danger, their family most likely was too - it’s a human right : you have the right to have a private life, and therefore to be with your family wherever you are. So there’s a special procedure for refugees to get their family to rejoin them without having to go through a painful and most likely illegal trip : if the request is approved, they will get a visa, and then they can come to France simply by making the trip on commercial lines without being detained at the airport/train station and forbidden to enter the country.

But, of course, it’s not that simple.

One of the main principles of immigration law is, if there’s a risk, any risk at all, that an element of the system might be exploited by a few individuals to cheat its principles, then the entire system must be warped to avoid any possible fraud.

Let’s apply that principle to family reunification. See, one big fear of lawmakers is that people will use that system to create the dreaded “chain migration”, i.e get more people in the country that the system means for them to. What does that mean in practice ? Well, the people allowed to join a refugee are meant to be only the close family : the spouse, the minor children, maybe the parents in some cases. So the fear is that some refugees will present some people as being related to them, or more closely related to them than they are, in order to get them admitted. So we must make sure that the people presented as their spouse, their child, is indeed who they pretend to be.

Now let’s break this down to its core : because some people may undeservedly profit from a legal system - and some people always will, let’s not be afraid to admit that - then every single individual who wishes to benefit from that system must pay the price of that risk. Principles will be inverted. Assumptions will be flipped on their head. And make no mistake : that’s not the fault of the fraudsters. Yes, it’s “wrong” to exploit a system in a way it wasn’t meant to be exploited - that being said, i struggle to see how immigrants trying to get more people they know to safety despite them not being family is a bad thing - but there is NO REASON, NONE AT ALL, that the price for that state of affairs should end up on the asylum seekers and not on the government. If they government is that afraid of the “wrong” people coming in, then it should be on them to prove that there’s fraud in a particular case. It’s just logical.

But of course, that’s not how it works.

How do you prove someone is related to you ? If you live in a “developed” country, it must seem quite easy : you’ve got your marriage certificate, your birth certificate, your official papers... And even if you don’t have them, all you have to do is go to city hall and get new ones.

Now imagine you have all that, but you’re in a country that’s not your own. All those documents are legally worthless : the State has no reason to recognize documents from another country. But of course, it would leave you with literally nothing to prove your identity. So the way it works is while those documents don’t officially have the same value as they do in the country that delivered them, it should still be taken for granted that they are genuine, until there is proof to the contrary.

In France, that notion is enshrined in the civil code in its article 47 :

“ Tout acte de l'état civil des Français et des étrangers fait en pays étranger et rédigé dans les formes usitées dans ce pays fait foi, sauf si d'autres actes ou pièces détenus, des données extérieures ou des éléments tirés de l'acte lui-même établissent, le cas échéant après toutes vérifications utiles, que cet acte est irrégulier, falsifié ou que les faits qui y sont déclarés ne correspondent pas à la réalité.”

What this means in english is that if the document respects the formal presentation of the country that is supposed to have delivered it, and there’s nothing in the other documents or in the document itself that could hint at a forgery, then the document is regarded as authentic.

This principle is logical and straightforward : the civil statute from another country is assumed to be genuine, until there is proof of the contrary. That’s the legal concept of presumption in action right here : let the party whose claim would be the easiest to prove to have to bring that proof rather than the contrary : it’s much easier to prove a document is a fake than to prove it is authentic. An absence of fraud cannot be proven.

But that’s not the kind of eternal logical rule that can stop lawmakers. So let’s talk about the Central African Republic.

A beautiful country - I assume - the Central African Republic has had the misfortune of being in an off-and-on state of civil war since the beginning of the 2000s, with two powerful militias, the Séléka and the anti-Balaka, fighting for power on a background of religious conflict. I am not at all qualified to say more on the subject, but if it interests you - and it should - don’t hesitate to check primary sources. But here’s the part that’s relevant to my point : one of the consequences of this prolonged conflict is the utter disorganization of the administrative system, and particularly the impossibility to access civil registry services. Central African law requires you to register a birth right away in the circonscription in which the child was born - that is of course a problem if you’ve had to move because of the conflict, and that particular zone is inaccessible due to combats. On top of that, the vast majority of civil services are not equipped with computers, meaning many documents have been lost/inaccessible for the last 20 years. The result is that there are many, many children in the Central African Republic who have not been properly registered and therefore have no legal existence and no proof of their lineage.

The CAR government is currently trying to remediate this situation with the help of NGOs. See, if you weren’t registered as a newborn, then there’s need of a judicial decision for you to be registered as a child or a teen. One of the most notable solutions has been to create mobile courts who go from village to village and hold public sessions to get as many people as possible the right decision so they can ask to be registered, but there’s still a long way to go, and the system is far from back to normal functioning.

Now because french is spoken by most of the population of the CAR, and France has historical *coughs*colonial*coughs* ties to the country, many people who have fled the country have seeked asylum in France. And for those who got it, they asked, as was their right, for their family to be able to join them.

Do you see the problem looming on the horizon ? Oh yes, you do.

The children of refugees who remained in CAR were born in the last twenty years, and therefore many of them were not properly registered and have no direct way of proving their relation to the refugee.

But here comes the really perverted part : in order to get the request accepted, the families of refugees in CAR have rushed to register the children so they would have proof to present to the french authorities (in CAR’s case, the French Consulate in Bangui). They travel to their village of birth, they try to get to a mobile court, they put in the legwork.

And what does the consul say when they get those preciously obtained documents ? Well, they say that since it’s so rare for children born in that period to have the proper documents... Then those must be fake. Yeah. Let me remind you, by law, those documents should be presumed to be authentic. But because the context dictates that central african children are more likely not to have documents, those who do become suspect. The administration will cling to the tiniest mistake to claim “evidence of forgery” : technically, if you get the judicial decision allowing the registration, then you have to wait six months for your identity to be added to the family registry. But of course, because of the massive under-registration and the mobile courts system, the administration rather ignores that mandatory delay in order to get people a legal identity as soon as possible. But that’s apparently too outlandish an idea for the french administration to understand. No, everything in CAR must work exactly how the law dictates, except of course for the fact that the country is apparently so fucked up that the simple fact of having the proper papers indicates you’ve broken the law. I know a lot of paradoxes, but this is by far the most vicious I’ve ever met. This is no-win situation. How on earth can you prove documents are genuine when you having those documents is seen as evidence that they are fake ?

And that’s exactly the kind of shit I’ve been talking about. : in immigration law, there’s no reason words shouldn’t mean their opposite if it fits the political agenda. Immigration authorities are only pragmatic when it suits them. As a result, the day-to-day practice of immigration law is getting increasingly disconnected from what that law is supposed to be, until principles don’t exist anymore, and basic legal ideas are completely ignored. There’s always going to be a gap between a law and its application ; but this isn’t about being down to earth, this is ignoring the very principles you should be enforcing.

#law stuff #immigration law #tonight on raz rants : refugee family reunification

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phroyd · 5 years ago

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From Esquire

Surely, the United States of America could not operate concentration camps. In the American consciousness, the term is synonymous with the Nazi death machines across the European continent that the Allies began the process of dismantling 75 years ago this month. But while the world-historical horrors of the Holocaust are unmatched, they are only the most extreme and inhuman manifestation of a concentration-camp system-which, according to Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, has a more global definition. There have been concentration camps in France, South Africa, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and-with Japanese internment-the United States. In fact, she contends we are operating such a system right now in response to a very real spike in arrivals at our southern border.

“We have what I would call a concentration camp system,” Pitzer says, “and the definition of that in my book is, mass detention of civilians without trial.”

Historians use a broader definition of concentration camps, as well.

"What's required is a little bit of demystification of it," says Waitman Wade Beorn, a Holocaust and genocide studies historian and a lecturer at the University of Virginia. "Things can be concentration camps without being Dachau or Auschwitz. Concentration camps in general have always been designed-at the most basic level-to separate one group of people from another group. Usually, because the majority group, or the creators of the camp, deem the people they're putting in it to be dangerous or undesirable in some way."

Not every concentration camp is a death camp-in fact, their primary purpose is rarely extermination, and never in the beginning. Often, much of the death and suffering is a result of insufficient resources, overcrowding, and deteriorating conditions. So far, 24 people have died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the Trump administration, while six children have died in the care of other agencies since September. Systems like these have emerged across the world for well over 100 years, and they've been established by putative liberal democracies-as with Britain's camps in South Africa during the Boer War-as well as authoritarian states like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Camps set up with one aim can be repurposed by new regimes, often with devastating consequences.

History is banging down the door this week with the news the Trump administration will use Fort Sill, an Oklahoma military base that was used to detain Japanese-Americans during World War II, to house 1,400 unaccompanied migrant children captured at the border. Japanese internment certainly constituted a concentration-camp system, and the echoes of the past are growing louder. Of course, the Obama administration temporarily housed migrants at military bases, including Fort Sill, for four months in 2014, built many of the newer facilities to house migrants, and pioneered some of the tactics the Trump administration is now using to try to manage the situation at the border.

The government of the United States would never call the sprawling network of facilities now in use across many states "concentration camps," of course. They’re referred to as "federal migrant shelters" or "temporary shelters for unaccompanied minors" or "detainment facilities" or the like. (The initial processing facilities are run by Border Patrol, and the system is primarily administered to by the Department of Homeland Security. Many adults are transferred to ICE, which now detains more than 52,000 people across 200 facilities on any given day-a record high. Unaccompanied minors are transferred to Department of Health and Human Services custody.) But by Pitzer's measure, the system at the southern border first set up by the Bill Clinton administration, built on by Barack Obama's government, and brought into extreme and perilous new territory by Donald Trump and his allies does qualify. Two historians who specialize in the area largely agree.

Many of the people housed in these facilities are not "illegal" immigrants. If you present yourself at the border seeking asylum, you have a legal right to a hearing under domestic and international law. They are, in another formulation, refugees-civilian non-combatants who have not committed a crime, and who say they are fleeing violence and persecution. Yet these human beings, who mostly hail from Central America's Northern Triangle of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador-a region ravaged by gang violence and poverty and corruption and what increasingly appears to be some of the first forced migrations due to climate change-are being detained on what increasingly seems to be an indefinite basis.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration continually seeks new ways to stop people from applying for asylum, and to discourage others from attempting to. The current regime has sought to restrict the asylum criteria to exclude the exact issues, like gang or domestic violence, that these desperate people often cite for why they fled their homes. The administration has sought to introduce application fees and work-permit restraints. They have tried to prohibit migrants from seeking asylum "if they have resided in a country other than their own before coming to the U.S.," which would essentially eliminate anyone who traveled to the border through Mexico. Much of this has been struck down in federal court.

But most prominently, Trump's Department of Homeland Security has used "metering" at the border, where migrants are forced to wait for days or weeks on the Mexican side-often sleeping in makeshift shelters or fully exposed to the elements-until they are allowed across border checkpoints to make their asylum claims and be processed. That processing system is overwhelmed, and the Obama administration also used metering at various points, but it remains unclear whether the wait times need to be as long as they are. (DHS did not respond to a request for comment.) There are no guarantees on how long migrants will have to wait, and so they've increasingly turned to crossing illegally between checkpoints-which constitutes "illegal entry," a misdemeanor-in order to present themselves for asylum. This criminalizes them, and the Trump administration tried to make illegal entry a disqualifier for asylum claims. The overall effort appears to be to make it as difficult as possible to get a hearing to adjudicate those claims, raising the specter that people can be detained longer or indefinitely.

All this has been achieved through two mechanisms: militarization and dehumanization. In her book, Pitzer describes camps as “a deliberate choice to inject the framework of war into society itself." These kinds of detention camps are a military endeavor: they are defensible in wartime, when enemy combatants must be detained, often for long periods without trial. They were a hallmark of World War I Europe. But inserting them into civil society, and using them to house civilians, is a materially different proposition. You are revoking the human and civil rights of non-combatants without legal justification.

"In the origins of the camps, it's tied to the idea of martial law," says Jonathan Hyslop, author of "The Invention of the Concentration Camp: Cuba, Southern Africa and the Philippines, 1896–1907," and a professor of sociology and anthropology at Colgate University. "I mean, all four of the early instances-Americans in the Philippines, Spanish in Cuba, and British in South Africa, and Germans in Southwest Africa-they're all essentially overriding any sense of rights of the civilian population. And the idea is that you're able to suspend normal law because it's a war situation."

This pairs well with the rhetoric that Trump deploys to justify the system and his unconstitutional power grabs, like the phony "national emergency": he describes the influx of asylum-seekers and other migrants as an "invasion," language his allies are mirroring with increasing extremism. If you're defending yourself from an invasion, anything is defensible.

That goes hand-in-hand with the strategy of dehumanization. For decades, the right has referred to undocumented immigrants as "illegals," stripping them of any identity beyond an immigration status. Trump kicked off his formal political career by characterizing Hispanic immigrants as "rapists" and "drug-dealers" and "criminals," never once sharing, say, the story of a woman who came here with her son fleeing a gang's threats. It is always MS-13 and strong, scary young men. There's talk of "animals" and monsters, and suddenly anything is justifiable. In fact, it must be done. Trump's supporters have noticed. At a recent rally, someone in the crowd screamed out that people arriving at the border should be shot. In response, the president cracked a "joke."

"It's important here to look at the language that people are using," Hyslop says. "As soon as you get people comparing other groups to animals or insects, or using language about advancing hordes, and we're being overrun and flooded and this sort of thing, it's creating the sense of this enormous threat. And that makes it much easier to sell to people on the idea we've got to do something drastic to control this population which going to destroy us."

In a grotesque formulation of the chicken-and-the-egg conundrum, housing people in these camps furthers their dehumanization.

"There's this crystallization that happens," Pitzer says. "The longer they're there, the worse conditions get. That's just a universal of camps. They're overcrowded. We already know from reports that they don't have enough beds for the numbers that they have. As you see mental health crises and contagious diseases begin to set in, they'll work to manage the worst of it. [But] then there will be the ability to tag these people as diseased, even if we created [those conditions]. Then we, by creating the camps, try to turn that population into the false image that we [used] to put them in the camps to start with. Over time, the camps will turn those people into what Trump was already saying they are."

Make no mistake: the conditions are in decline. When I went down to see the detention facility in McAllen, Texas, last summer at the height of the "zero-tolerance" policy that led inevitably to family separation, Border Patrol agents were by all appearances doing the very best they could with limited resources. That includes the facilities themselves, which at that point were mostly built-by the Clinton administration in the '90s-to house single adult males who were crossing the border illegally to find work. By that point, Border Patrol was already forced to use them to hold families and other asylum-seekers, and agents told me the situation was untenable. They lacked requisite staff with the training to care for young children, and overcrowding was already an issue.

But according to a report from Trump's own government-specifically, the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security-the situation has deteriorated significantly even since then. The facilities are overcrowded, underfunded, and perhaps at a perilous inflection point. It found adult detainees are "being held in 'standing-room-only conditions' for days or weeks at a border patrol facility in Texas," Reuters reports. But it gets worse.

Single adults were held in cells designed for one-fifth as many detainees as were housed there and were wearing soiled clothing for days or weeks with limited access to showers, the report said. Pictures published with the report show women packed tightly together in a holding cell.

“We also observed detainees standing on toilets in the cells to make room and gain breathing space, thus limiting access to toilets,” the watchdog wrote.

This was at Paso del Norte, a facility near El Paso, which has a stated capacity of 125 detainees. But when DHS inspectors visited, it was holding 900. For a period, Border Patrol tried housing migrants in cage under a nearby bridge. It was ultimately scrapped amid public outcry. When migrants and asylum-seekers are transferred to ICE, things can get worse. Queer and trans migrants face exceptionally harsh treatment, with reports of high levels of physical and sexual abuse, and the use of solitary confinement-considered torture by many psychologists-is widespread. As a reminder, by DHS's own assertion, these detainments are civil, not criminal, and are not meant to be punitive in the way of a prison. Many of these people have not even been accused of a crime.

Again: these are inhuman conditions, and crystalize the dehumanization. So, too, does the Trump administration's decision, reported by The Washington Post, to cancel classes, recreational programs, and even legal aid for the children held at facilities for unaccompanied minors. Why should these kids get to play soccer or learn English? Why should they get legal assistance? They're detainees.

The administration is citing "budget pressures" related to what is undoubtedly a dramatic spike in arrivals at the border last month: 144,000 people were detained in May. It remains unclear how much of this is tied to the Trump administration's border policies, like metering, which have severely slowed the process of declaring oneself for asylum and left people camped on the Mexican border for days or weeks after a thousand-mile trek through Mexico. Or Trump's recent all-out push to seize money for a border wall and declare "we're closed," which some speculate led to a surge of people trying to get over the line before that happened.

It's also in dispute how many of these people actually need to be detained. Vox's Dara Lind suggests releasing migrants from Guatemala or Honduras isn't straightforward as "many newly arrived asylum seekers aren’t familiar with the US, often speak neither English nor Spanish, and may not have appropriate clothing or funds for bus fare." But release with ankle bracelets has proven very effective as an alternative to detention: 99 percent of immigrants enrolled in one such program showed up for their court dates, though ICE claims it's less effective when someone is set to be deported. Those subjected to the bracelets say they are uncomfortable and demeaning, but it's better than stuffing a detention cell to five-times capacity. Unless, of course, that's exactly what you want to happen.

"At one point, [the administration] said that they were intentionally trying to split up families and make conditions unpleasant, so the people wouldn't come to the U.S.," Beorn, from UVA, says. "If you're doing that, then that's not a prison. That's not a holding area or a waiting area. That's a policy. I would argue, at least in the way that [the camps are] being used now, a significant portion of the mentality is [tied to] who the [detainees] are rather than what they did.

"If these were Canadians flooding across the border, would they be treated in the same manner as the people from Mexico and from Central and South America? If the answer is yes, theoretically, then I would consider these places to be perhaps better described as transit camps or prison camps. But I suspect that's not how they'd be treated, which then makes it much more about who the people are that you're detaining, rather than what they did. The Canadian would have crossed the border just as illegally as the Mexican, but my suspicion is, would be treated in a different way."

It was the revelation about school and soccer cuts that led Pitzer to fire off a tweet threadthis week outlining the similarities between the U.S. camp system and those of other countries. The first examples of a concentration camp, in the modern sense, come from Cuba in the 1890s and South Africa during the Second Boer War.

"What those camps had in common with what's going on today is they involved the wholesale detention of families, separate or together," Pitzer says. "There was very little in the way of targeted violence. Instead, people died from poor planning, overloaded facilities and unwillingness to reverse policy, even when it became apparent the policy wasn't working, inability to get medical care to detainees, poor food quality, contagious diseases, showing up in an environment where it became almost impossible to get control of them.

"The point is that you don't have to intend to kill everybody. When people hear the phrase 'Oh, there's concentration camps on the southern border,' they think, 'Oh, it's not Auschwitz.' Of course, it's not those things, each camp system is different. But you don't have to intend to kill everyone to have really bad outcomes. In Cuba, well over 100,000 civilians died in these camps in just a period of a couple years. In Southern Africa during the Boer War, fatalities went into the tens of thousands. And the overwhelming majority of them were children. Fatalities in the camps ended up being more than twice the combat fatalities from the war itself."

In-custody deaths have not reached their peak of a reported 32 people in 2004, but the current situation seems to be deteriorating. In just the last two weeks, three adults have died. And the Trump administration has not readily reported fatalities to the public. There could be more.

"There's usually this crisis period that a camp system either survives or doesn't survive in the first three or four years. If it goes past that length of time, they tend to continue for a really long time. And I think we have entered that crisis period. I don't yet know if we're out of it."

Camps often begin in wartime or a crisis point, and on a relatively small scale. There are then some in positions of power who want to escalate the program for political purposes, but who receive pushback from others in the regime. There's then a power struggle, and if the escalationists prevail over the other bureaucrats-as they appear to have here, with the supremacy of Stephen Miller over (the reliably pliant but less extreme) Kirstjen Nielsen-the camps will continue and grow. Almost by definition, the conditions will deteriorate, even despite the best intentions of those on the ground.

"It's a negative trajectory in at least two ways," Beorn says. "One, I feel like these policies can snowball. We've already seen unintended consequences. If we follow the thread of the children, for example, the government wanted to make things more annoying, more painful. So they decided, We're going to separate the children from the families. But there was no infrastructure in place for that. You already have a scenario where even if you have the best intentions, the infrastructure doesn't exist to support it. That's a consequence of policy that hasn't been thought through. As you see the population begin to massively increase over time, you do start to see conditions diminishing.

"The second piece is that the longer you establish this sort of extralegal, extrajudicial, somewhat-invisible no-man's land, the more you allow potentially a culture of abuse to develop within that place. Because the people who tend to become more violent, more prejudiced, whatever, have more and more free rein for that to become sort of the accepted behavior. Then, that also becomes a new norm that can spread throughout the system. There is sort of an escalation of individual initiative in violence. As it becomes clear that that is acceptable, then you have a self-fulfilling prophecy or a positive feedback loop that just keeps radicalizing the treatment as the policy itself becomes radicalizing."

And for a variety of reasons, these facilities are incredibly hard to close. "Unless there's some really decisive turn away, we're going to be looking at having these camps for a long time," Pitzer says. It's particularly hard to engineer a decisive turn because these facilities are often remote, and hard to protest. They are not top-of-mind for most citizens, with plenty of other issues on the table. When Trump first instituted the Muslim Ban-now considered, in its third iteration, to be Definitely Not a Muslim Ban by the Supreme Court-there were mass demonstrations at U.S. airports because they were readily accessible by concerned citizens. These camps are not so easily reached, and that's a problem.

"The more authoritarian the regime is, and the more people allow governments to get away with doing this sort of thing politically, the worse the conditions are likely to get," Hyslop says. "So, a lot of it depends on how much pushback there is. But when you get a totally authoritarian regime like Stalin's regime in the Soviet Union, there's no control, or no countervailing force, the state can do what it likes, and certainly things will then tend to break down.

"It's more of a political question, really. Are people prepared to tolerate the deteriorating conditions? And if public opinion isn't effective in a liberal democratic situation, things can still get pretty bad."

Almost regardless, the camps will be difficult to dismantle by their very nature-that extrajudicial "no-man's land" Beorn mentioned. The prison at Guantanamo Bay is a perfect example. It began in the early 1990s as a refugee camp for people fleeing Haiti and Cuba. The conditions were bad and legally questionable, Pitzer found, and eventually the courts stepped in to grant detainees some rights. In the process, however, they granted the camps tacit legitimacy-they were allowed to continue with the approval of the judiciary.

Suddenly, they were enshrined in the law as a kind of gray area where detainees did not enjoy full human rights. That is actually why it was chosen by the Bush administration to house terror suspects: it was already rubber-stamped as a site for indefinite detention. By the time President Obama came into office with promises to close it, he found the task incredibly difficult, because it had been ingrained in the various institutions and branches of American constitutional government. He could not get rid of it. As courts continue to rule on the border camp system, the same issues are likely to take hold.

Another issue is that these camp systems, no matter where they are in the world, tend to fall victim to expanding criteria. The longer they stay open, the more reasons a government finds to put people in them. That's particularly true if a new regime takes control of an existing system, as the Trump administration did with ours. The mass detention of asylum-seekers-who, again, have legal rights-on this scale is an expansion of the criteria from "illegal" immigrants, who were the main class of detainee in the '90s and early 2000s. Asylum seekers, particularly unaccompanied minors, began arriving in huge numbers and were detained under the Obama administration. But there has been an escalation, both because of a deteriorating situation in the Northern Triangle and the Trump administration's attempts to deter any and all migration. There is reason to believe the criteria will continue to expand.

"We have border patrol agents that are sometimes arresting U.S. citizens," Pitzer says. "That's still very much a fringe activity. That doesn't seem to be a dedicated priority right now, but it's happening often enough. And they're held, sometimes, for three or four days. Even when there are clear reasons that people should be let go, that they have proof of their identity, you're seeing these detentions. You do start to worry about people who have legally immigrated and have finished paperwork, and maybe are naturalized. You worry about green-card holders."

In most cases, these camps are not closed by the executive or the judiciary or even the legislature. It usually requires external intervention. (See: D-Day) That obviously will not be an option when it comes to the most powerful country in the history of the world, a country which, while it would never call them that, and would be loathe to admit it, is now running a system at the southern border that is rapidly coming to resemble the concentration camps that have sprung up all over the world in the last century. Every system is different. They don't always end in death machines. But they never end well.

"Let's say there's 20 hurdles that we have to get over before we get to someplace really, really, really bad," Pitzer says. "I think we've knocked 10 of them down."

Phroyd

#immigration #concentration camps

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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https://www.propublica.org/article/emails-show-the-va-took-no-action-to-spare-veterans-from-a-harsh-trump-immigration-policy/amp?__twitter_impression=true

Interesting how Trumpian nationalism doesn’t apply to immigrants who served the US in uniform. I wonder why that could be.

ALSO FOR U.S. VETERANS: The White House established a phone line for veterans for issues,complaints, immediate assistance needs, including suicidal thoughts; it does work, do take action, have veterans who understand what only veterans can for claims.1-855-948-2311

“No Comment”: Emails Show the VA Took No Action to Spare Veterans From a Harsh Trump Immigration Policy

The VA’s approach differs sharply from the Pentagon’s, which won an exemption for active-duty members of the military.

by Yeganeh Torbati, Isaac Arnsdorf andDara Lind | Published Aug. 19, 1:29 p.m. EDT | ProPublica | Posted August 20, 2019 9:38 AM ET|

Top officials of the Department of Veterans Affairs declined to step in to try to exempt veterans and their families from a new immigration rule that would make it far easier to deny green cards to low-income immigrants, according to documents obtained by ProPublica under a Freedom of Information Act request.

The Department of Defense, on the other hand, worked throughout 2018 to minimize the new policy’s impact on military families.

As a result, the regulation, which goes into effect in October, applies just as strictly to veterans and their families as it does to the broader public, while active-duty members of the military and reserve forces face a relaxed version of the rule.

Under the so-called public charge regulation, which became final last week, immigrants seeking permanent legal status in the U.S. will be subject to a complex new test to determine if they will rely on public benefits. Among the factors that immigration officers will consider are whether the applicant has frequently used public benefits in the past, their household income, education level and credit scores.

Active-duty military members can accept public benefits without jeopardizing their future immigration status; veterans and their families, however, cannot.

The rule, which could reshape the face of legal immigration to the U.S., is one of the highest-profile changes to the immigration system undertaken by the administration of President Donald Trump. An initial proposed version of the rule received over 266,000 public comments, the vast majority in opposition. Three lawsuits challenging the policy were quickly filed: one by a coalition of 13 states and filed in Washington state, one by San Francisco and Santa Clara County in California, and one by a coalition of nonprofit groups in California.

Because the new rule creates a complex and subjective test, it’s impossible to predict precisely how many veterans and their families who otherwise qualify for green cards will now be rejected. (The Department of Homeland Security told reporters last Monday that it hasn’t analyzed how many people would most likely be denied green cards under the new rule.)

However, documents tracking the regulation’s development show that the DOD was concerned enough that the rule would harm military families that it worked with DHS to limit the regulation, ultimately securing the benefits exemption for active-duty military members.

The reasons for the VA’s inaction are unclear. The agency referred all questions to the White House, which did not respond to a request for comment. During the six months officials had to weigh in on the new regulation, the VA lacked permanent leaders in several top positions while juggling several major initiatives, which fell behind scheduleor failed.

“They should be the foremost government agency that’s fighting for protections for veterans,” said Jeremy Butler, chief executive officer of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “If they have a ‘No Comment,’ that says to me that it wasn’t given the time and attention and research necessary to understand how it would affect the veteran community.”

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who sits on the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, said in a statement to ProPublica, “It’s despicable that the Trump Administration is punishing veterans who sacrificed for our country simply for using the support services they’ve earned.”

He added, “Instead of tearing down military families, the President should be working to support those who’ve done so much for our country.”

In practice, the exemption the DOD won for active-duty military members is a narrow one. While the frequent use of public benefits is a “heavily weighted negative factor” in determining whether to block an immigrant under the new rule, members of the military and their families are still subject to the other factors weighed by immigration officers when applying for green cards.

But narrow as it is, no such exemption exists for veterans and their families, so using public benefits — as well as other factors like having meager savings — will count against them if they or their families apply for green cards.

“If they care about the active-duty people, I don’t know why they don’t care about military veterans who aren’t doing very well,” said Margaret Stock, an immigration attorney with many military clients. Stock helped create a special program called Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest, or MAVNI, which created a pathway for military enlistment for refugees, undocumented young people, foreign students and others who lack green cards.

A spokeswoman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the DHS agency that is implementing the rule, declined to comment, citing pending litigation.

The new policy is a signature effort of the Trump administration and builds on a long-standing law that bars immigration by people deemed to be “public charges.” But the law does not define the term. In 1999, the Clinton administration narrowly defined it to mean someone who “primarily” depends on the government for subsistence, either through cash welfare or long-term care funded by the government.

The new regulation lowers the bar to be considered a “public charge” by redefining it as an immigrant who receives certain types of public benefits for more than 12 months in a three-year period. If an immigrant receives two benefits in a single month, that would count as two months.

The public charge test applies to people entering the country or those trying to become lawful permanent residents, commonly known as green card holders. It does not apply to those who already have green cards and are seeking citizenship.

Noncitizens have long served in the U.S. military, often contributing specific needed skills such as sought-after foreign language fluency. Census data shows that about 100,000 noncitizen veterans live in the U.S., according to a ProPublica analysis of data provided by the University of Minnesota’s IPUMS, which collects and distributes census data. Most of them already have permanent status, Stock said.

It’s not clear exactly how many veterans do not have green cards or have spouses who don’t. Since 2008, about 10,000 people have joined the military through the MAVNI program, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan immigration research group. But the program is currently not accepting applications.

In practice, the public charge rule is more likely to affect veterans’ families — such as spouses who are undocumented or on temporary visas — rather than veterans themselves. Under federal law, undocumented immigrants and temporary visa holders are generally not eligible for public benefits.

“A lot of veterans end up marrying women or men that don’t have green cards; that happens very often,” said Hector Barajas, who leads an advocacy group called Deported Veterans Support House. “There is a population of people that will be affected.”

The White House began seeking agency comments on March 29, 2018. An official at the Office of Management and Budget emailed officials from 19 agencies, including the VA, attaching a draft of the regulation and asking for comments. The email was sent one day after the VA secretary at the time, David Shulkin, was fired by Trump in a tweet. One week after the White House’s email, a VA official in the secretary’s office responded: “VA submits a ‘No Comment’ response.”

The White House again asked for agencies’ comment in July and September 2018, and each time, a VA official sent the same response.

The White House’s Sept. 4, 2018, email stated that the newest draft included “exemptions for service-members.” In an initial proposed version of the regulation released to the public later that month, DHS made clear that it decided on the exemption “following consultation with DOD.”

The emails obtained by ProPublica do not include military officials’ communications with the White House or DHS. A Pentagon spokeswoman, Jessica Maxwell, said, “DOD was consulted in these conversations,” but she declined to provide further details.

But because the VA declined to provide such “consultation,” an exception for veterans wasn’t considered in the initial proposed regulation in 2018.

Only after members of the public raised the issue during the regulation’s comment period did DHS consider, and ultimately refuse, a veterans’ exemption in the final regulation, which was released last week.

In its justification for the new policy, DHS said veterans aren’t afforded the same exemption as active-duty service members because they have access to special VA benefits, which the new policy doesn’t count against them. Furthermore, the department said, while active-duty service members often need to use benefits to supplement low military salaries, veterans are free to take higher-paying jobs.

But not every veteran receives veterans’ benefits, and the benefits — which include health care for conditions related to military service, education stipends and home-buying assistance — are not a substitute for benefits that make up the broader social safety net like food stamps, Medicaid and housing vouchers. Critics of DHS’ decision say many veteran families occasionally need to use public benefits or fall into poverty.

A VA spokesman declined to say if the agency has any concerns about the new policy’s impact on veterans.

The emails obtained by ProPublica also show that as the White House scrambled to finish the regulation and release it to the public last year, it discouraged federal agencies from arguing against the major thrust of the policy.

“Please do not worry about non-substantive line edits,” a White House official, whose name is redacted, wrote in bolded type. “Please recognize, also, that the decision of whether to propose expanding the definition of public charge, broadly, has been made at a very high level and will not be changing.”

Hannah Fresques contributed to this report.

#impeach trump #trumpsucks #trump administration #donald trump #president donald trump #trumpism #trump scandals #u.s. immigration and customs enforcement #immigrants #immigration #u.s. military #military #veterans #politics and government #us politics #politics #latest news #u.s. news #u.s. politics

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berniesrevolution · 6 years ago

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I have previously pointed out that Tucker Carlson, one of the most prominent public defenders of Donald Trump’s immigration policies, has egregiously distorted evidence in order to make people irrationally afraid of unauthorized immigrants. I have also responded to his criticisms of multiculturalism. But in a recent debate with Cenk Uygur at Politicon, Carlson took a position that he thought so self-evident as to almost be beyond discussion. Asked for his basic thoughts on immigration and the caravan of migrants, he said the following:

This caravan, and the ones that came before, and the 22 million living here illegally, it’s all sort of a species of the same question. I mean, there are many questions and one of them is “How do you help other people?” And a lot of smart people who run NGOs are thinking about that in Washington. And some are doing a good job, others are not. But the main question the U.S. government has to answer is “How do we enforce our laws, voted on democratically by our Congress, and how do we protect our people?”—the people to whom we have, really the only duty that we have. Right? I mean the purpose of the government is to protect you, to help you. And again, I’m a Christian, and I think I’m a person of… decent faith. So I’m always for helping people, but the government’s job is to represent the voters and enforce the laws that they sent their representatives to Washington to pass. And that’s kind of all their job is, actually. So our law says that you need permission to come into this country, and that is the law of every country that is a country. And without that, you’re sort of not a country. You can ask the obvious question, which is “There are an awful lot of poor people around the world. Does everyone have a right to come here and go on Medicaid?” I don’t know. If you think so… let’s talk it through. And tell me why. Where does that obligation come from exactly? Is it written in the Constitution? Is it in the Bible? What exactly are you saying? [… These debates often begin with the other side saying] “If you were a better person you would agree with me.” And that’s a theological debate. But that’s not a policy debate. There isn’t much of a policy debate here. Our laws are as they are and if you want to change them, send representatives to Washington to do it. And maybe we’re about to see that happen. But there’s a massive cost to any government saying “Because of temporary political pressure we’re going to ignore our own laws.” Then why can’t I ignore the law? … I’m not really sure what the debate is here, other than the virtue debate, which is not interesting.

In response, Uygur made a very important point, which is that while FOX and Donald Trump have made it “sound like the caravan is going to come and bust through a gate of some sort,” they’re actually seeking to migrate legally under the protections of asylum law. As Uygur says, “If they wanted to sneak into the country they wouldn’t do it in a giant caravan,” and they’re actually on their way to the U.S. border precisely so they can request legal permission to enter the country. Trump’s position on the caravan is actually the opposite of “following the law,” because Trump believes the caravan should just be turned back and categorically barred. But the U.S. has asylum laws that allow victims of persecution to enter the country lawfully. We have these in part because the nations of the world looked back on the turning away of Jews before and during the Holocaust and realized it was necessary to allow people admission to your country if they might be killed in their own! So in terms of where that obligation “comes from,” it comes from an international treaty called the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which the United States agreed to, and in domestic law, it’s codified in the Immigration and Nationality Act. If people are being politically persecuted in their home countries, and they show up here, we have to take them, because when you force people to return to countries where their lives are in danger, they are often murdered. Murder is commonly understood to be a bad thing.

Now, you may object that many of the migrants in the caravan are clearly coming for economic reasons. But first, as Uygur told Carlson, the whole point of doing an interview with the asylum-seekers and not just turning them away is to figure out who has a claim that merits asylum protection under the law. There is an incredibly complicated process for doing this. But granting asylum to people who fear for their lives is a pretty clear legal and moral obligation.

What about people who are just poor and want to come here because they want to give their children good lives? They don’t qualify for asylum protection, and so here we face Carlson’s central point: A government serves its people, not other people, we have laws, those laws must be enforced, there is no obligation for the U.S. government to help people who do not live in the U.S.

The “well, we just have to enforce the law” point is very common. First, I want to note the way an important distinction gets blurred in these discussions: what the law is versus what the law ought to be. Many of the people who say “Well we just want the law enforced, don’t you agree that laws must be enforced?” yet also believe that the law is good and should remain as is. Carlson is of this type: He says that there’s no real debate because the law is the law, but later in the discussion he begins talking about the reason immigration restrictions are good, because you need cultural cohesion and you can’t let in people who don’t fit in or understand your country’s norms. (These arguments are usually very poor, because immigrants to the United States almost always “assimilate” within a generation and the migrants’ children will grow up completely “Americanized.” [I realize there are problematic assumptions in these terms.] The migrants in the caravan probably love the United States more than the vast majority of existing citizens. When the newspapers have talked to them, one said “I miss Buffalo Wild Wings” and another started saying the Pledge of Allegiance. I don’t go to Buffalo Wild Wings and I think the Pledge is stupid. I am certain that nearly every member of that caravan will adopt more of American culture than I and many of my friends have, and we do just fine here.)

So the debate can slide back and forth between a discussion about the “rule of law” and a discussion about what immigration policies we should have. “Should the law be enforced?” “Yes.” “Ok, so you believe in mass deportation.” No, because if that is the law, then I would think the law is abominable!

The rule of law question actually isn’t easy, even though it seems like the simplest one to answer. What should the “enforcement of the law” look like? If we adopt the position that no unauthorized immigrants belong in this country, that would mean deportation by the millions. It would mean a police state. It would mean countless families destroyed, countless people sent to countries they have no connection to. This is why the overwhelming majority of Americans believe that unauthorized immigrants should be able to stay if they meet some qualifications. “Enforce the law” really isn’t simple, actually, because when the absolute enforcement of law to the letter would create a vast human tragedy, you have to think carefully about how to balance your desire to see rules followed with your pragmatic understanding of the world as it actually is.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #current affairs #rule of law #immigration #immigration reform #immigrant rights #mass deportation

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tremendouspeachduck · 6 years ago

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Attn: All Invaders (Asylum Seekers possibly)

NOTE: There are two ways to obtain asylum, affirmatively or defensively. Migrants who apply for asylum affirmatively submit a form to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services within one year of arriving in the U.S., either at the U.S. border or from within the country. Those who apply defensively do so after they’ve been arrested and placed in expedited removal proceedings.

Affirmative Asylum Process

Step One

To apply for asylum in the U.S., you must be physically present in the U.S. or seeking entry into the U.S. at a port of entry.

Step Two - Apply - New Policy

To apply for asylum, you should file Form I-589, Application for Asylum and for Withholding of Removal, with USCIS within one year of your last arrival in the United States (unless you qualify for an exception to the one-year filing deadline).

Do not submit a completed fingerprint card (FD-258) or fingerprint fee with your application. Your application will be accepted without the fingerprint card attached.

More information about how to file your application can be found in the instructions for Form I-589 (PDF, 295 KB).

For information on asylum eligibility, see the Asylum Eligibility and Applications page on USCIS.gov.

Bars to Applying for Asylum

You may not be eligible to apply for asylum if you:

Did not follow the one-year filing deadline for Form I-589, Application for Asylum and for Withholding of Removal. The one-year deadline is calculated from the date of your last arrival in the U.S. or April 1, 1997, whichever is later;

Had a previous asylum application denied by an immigration judge or the Board of Immigration Appeals; or

Can be removed to a safe third country under a two-party or multi-party agreement between the United States and other countries.

There are exceptions to these bars for “changed circumstances” or “extraordinary circumstances.”

Both are defined in 8 CFR 208.4. For more information on the bars and the exceptions, see our Asylum Bars Web page.

above pic is new construction of wall - The USA loves asylum seekers, migrants, immigrants and refugees, if process is done legally. Illegal attempts have dire results.

Once USCIS has received the completed application, you will receive two notices:

1. Acknowledgment of receipt of your application, and

2. Notice to visit your nearest application support center (ASC) for fingerprinting.

For more information on locating an ASC, see our USCIS Service and Office LocatorWeb page.

Step Three - Fingerprinting + Background Check

After maybe 2 mos. - You should read the ASC Appointment Notice and take it with you to your fingerprinting appointment at the ASC. You do not need to pay a fingerprinting fee as an asylum applicant.

If you are also requesting asylum status for your spouse and children and they are with you in the U.S., they will need to go with you to your ASC appointment.

More information is available on our Preparing for Your Biometric Services Appointment page.

Step Four - Receive Interview Notice

Depending on where you live, we will schedule you for an interview with an asylum officer either at one of the eight asylum offices, the two asylum sub-offices, or at a USCIS field office (“circuit ride location”). For more information about USCIS field and asylum offices, visit our Find A USCIS Office page. Your interview notice will tell you the date, location, and time of your asylum interview.

As of January 29, 2018, the USCIS Asylum Division is scheduling asylum interviews in the following order of priority:*

First priority: Applications that were scheduled for an interview, but the interview had to be rescheduled at the applicant’s request or the needs of USCIS;

Second priority: Applications that have been pending 21 days or less since filing;

Third priority: All other pending affirmative asylum applications will be scheduled for interviews starting with newer filings and working back towards older filings.

Step Five - Interview

You may bring an attorney or accredited representative to the interview. You must also bring your spouse and any children seeking derivative asylum benefits to the interview.

If you cannot proceed with the interview in English you must bring an interpreter.

The interview will generally last about an hour, although the time may vary depending on the case. You may also bring witnesses to testify on your behalf.

For more information about your asylum interview, see our Web page on Preparing for Your Asylum Interview.

Step Six - Officer makes Decision

You must meet the definition of a refugee in order to be eligible for asylum.

The asylum officer will determine whether you:

Are eligible to apply for asylum,

Meet the definition of a refugee in section 101(a)(42)(A) of the INA, and

Are barred from being granted asylum under section 208(b)(2) of the INA.

A supervisory asylum officer reviews the asylum officer’s decision to ensure it is consistent with the law. Depending on the case, the supervisory asylum officer may refer the decision to asylum division staff at USCIS headquarters for additional review.

Step Seven - Get Decision within approx. 4 mos.

In most cases, you will return to the asylum office to pick up the decision two weeks after the asylum officer interviewed you.

Longer processing times may be required if you:

Are currently in valid immigration status,

Were interviewed at a USCIS field office,

Have pending security checks, or

Have a case that is being reviewed by asylum division staff at USCIS headquarters.

We will normally mail your decision to you in these situations.

For more information on the types of asylum decisions issued by USCIS, see our Web page on Types of Asylum Decisions.

Additional information on the affirmative asylum process is available on our Resources for Asylum Applicants page.

You can check your case status online. All you need is the receipt number that we mailed you after you filed your application. Start here: uscis.gov/casestatus.

already know that after just 180 days you can apply for a work permit

While waiting, where in the USA will you reside? You already know that it doesn’t really matter as we in the USA lose track of you anyway, right?

Few, but some actually have a case for asylum. Remember, asylum is not wanting a job or a better way of life; it must be life threatening.

Who is eventually granted asylum?

Comparing to Europe

Invaders coming in mass and could ruin a country. This is why Merkel will end in 2021 at end of term. This is why Brexit is so important to the UK.

Below is letter from Nurse in Germany telling it like it is . . .

A NURSE IN GERMANY SENDS A MESSAGE TO THE WORLD

Just in case you don't think President Trump is doing the right thing! Read this!

*\"Yesterday, at the hospital, we had a meeting about how the situation here and at the other Munich hospitals are unsustainable.

*Clinics cannot handle the number of migrant medical emergencies, so they are starting to send everything to the main hospitals.

*Many Muslims are refusing treatment by female staff, and we women are now refusing to go among those migrants!

*Relations between the staff and migrants are going from bad to worse. Since last weekend, migrants going to the hospitals must be accompanied by police with K-9 units.

*Many migrants have AIDS, syphilis, open TB and many exotic diseases that we in Europe do not know how to treat. If they receive a prescription to the pharmacy, they suddenly learn they have to pay cash. This leads to unbelievable outbursts, especially when it is about drugs for the children. They abandon the children with pharmacy staff with the words: So, cure them yourselves! So the police are not just guarding the clinics and hospitals, but also the large pharmacies.

* We ask openly where are all those who welcomed the migrants in front of TV cameras with signs at train stations? Yes, for now, the border has been closed, but a million of them are already here and we will definitely not be able to get rid of them.

*Until now, the number of unemployed in Germany was 2.2 million. Now it will be at least 3.5 million. Most of these people are completely unemployable. Only a small minimum of them have any education. What is more, their women usually do not work at all. I estimate that one in ten is pregnant. Hundreds of thousands of them have brought along infants and little kids under six, many emaciated and very needy.

See Video - a doozy

If this continues and Germany re-opens its borders, I am going home to the Czech Republic. Nobody can keep me here in this situation, not even for double the salary back home. I came to Germany to work, not to Africa or the Middle East!

Even the professor who heads our department told us how sad it makes him to see the cleaning woman, who has cleaned every day for years for 800 euros and then meets crowds of young men in the hallways who just wait with their hands outstretched, waiting for free, and when they don't get it they throw a fit.

I really don't need this! But I am afraid that if I return home, at some point it will be the same in the Czech Republic. If the Germans, with their systems, cannot handle this, then, guaranteed, back home will be total chaos....

*You - who have not come in contact with these people have absolutely no idea what kind of badly behaved desperados these people are, and how Muslims act superior to our staff, regarding their religious accommodation.

*For now, the local hospital staff have not come down with the diseases these people brought here, but with so many hundreds of patients every day of this is just a question of time.

*In a hospital near the Rhine, migrants attacked the staff with knives after they had handed over an 8-month-old on the brink of death, who they'd dragged across half of Europe for three months. The child died two days later, despite having received top care at one of the best pediatric clinics in Germany. The pediatric physician had to undergo surgery and the two nurses are recovering in the ICU.

Nobody has been punished. The local press is forbidden to write about it, so we can only inform you through email.What would have happened to a German if he had stabbed the doctor and nurses with a knife? Or if he had flung his own syphilis-infected urine into a nurse's face and so threatened her with infection? At a minimum he would have gone straight to jail and later to court. With these people so far, nothing has happened.

And so I ask: Where are all those greeters and receivers from the train stations? Sitting pretty at home, enjoying their uncomplicated, safe lives. If it were up to me, I would round up all those greeters and bring them here first to our hospitals emergency ward as attendants! Then in to one of the buildings housing the migrants, so they can really look after them there themselves, without armed police and police dogs, who, sadly today, are in every hospital here in Bavaria.\"

*Is this \"situation\" coming to our country?

Serious video to watch

USA Problems - Making the Soros Connection

Not only do I worry about the spreading of disease, but I worry about the terrorist causing a pandemic.

Soros Manufactured Crisis Obama/Soros connection back when

What we do know is this thing [the caravan] cost millions and millions of dollars. . . . One of the lies the [mainstream] media is trying to propagate is the fact that all this weird organic thing and all the water and the food and medicine, all dropped [like]. . . manna from heaven. It’s bologna. It’s all highly organized. It’s paid for by a number of organizations/ “We do know that Pueblo Sin Fronteras, which is the main group which has organized this caravan, has a couple of front organizations in the United States and the money is flowing from them to Pueblo Sin Fronteras [in Mexico].”

According to Mexico News Daily and Milenio, around 350 migrants chose to leave the caravan once it reached Tijuana, Mexico in order to return to their Central American countries, claiming they were “misled about their chances of gaining entry to the U.S.

“Pueblos Sin Fronteras [sic] told us not to worry, that there was going to be transportation, that Mexico was going to open the gates so that we didn’t have to enter [the U.S.] illegally, via the river . . .” Honduran migrant Ulises López said, referring to the attempted border breach Sunday.

“What was offered to the caravan of Honduran migrants was a trap . . . The people that brought us to this place, supposedly [caravan] leaders, took advantage of us, they used us in a horrific way, what they did to us has no name,” he added.

Proof of Soros involvement

Please comment - join to chat - -HERE

#asylum #refugees #immigration #welfare #food stamps #caravan #youth #politics

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newformsnewworlds · 4 years ago

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Concepts and Themes >>

Africans as nomadic peoples (with an emphasis on the Bantu people):

In one of her most renowned songs, Marian Anderson sings, “sometimes I feel like a motherless child/a long ways from home/a long ways from home.”

Saidiya Hartman writes in Lose Your Mother: “I realized too late that the breach of the Atlantic and the routes traveled by strangers was as close to a mother country as I would come.”

In an interview on the book, she also writes: “LOSE YOUR MOTHER is about disenchanting a certain myth of belonging, of roots, to actually try to find another language of connection. I think there are people who never get to the last chapter, ‘Fugitive Dreams’, so they never understand that.”

When I bought the book, I did not reach the last chapter because I was trapped in my own grief about the first part. Feeling motherless with no way back to anywhere. But the book and my work with my ancestors eventually carried me to this circle. I could feel in my work that my mother was not lost, but that she wanders. And that is what I’m confirming, here. With you all.

When re-membering Africans as nomadic peoples, feeling wayward becomes a source of power, not a problem to be solved or a perpetual wound. It is reconfigured, for me, as a source of strength.

I have known the routes all the way home were not lost. I have known that home is many and all and nothing and this circle has helped me connect to that knowing in a deeper way coming home to the nomads across the ocean. The Bantu. Their footsteps traced around my edges.

To embrace the wander as a wonder of who we are as African peoples. Who we have always been is to know our power, our connection to each other and to the ancients.

It can never be removed.

I now see in my mind a picture of Africa before and all of the various peoples criss-crossing her Earth: to make kin, make kingdom, make ways, make kind, make peace, make glory, make space.

Nomadicism is a survival skill embedded in my dna and the dna of all African peoples

Nomadic peoples, people who can make home anywhere, who can thrive and build community in many kinds of spaces, places, who can grieve, who can say goodbye, who can say hello, who can learn new plants, rivers, seeds, who can carry their songs along with their children on their backs; are ahead of the game for the new world that is inevitably on the way.. We are prepared for the rapidly changing landscapes that climate change is creating right now. Climate change of the Earth will make it necessary to be ready to move at higher intervals, we will need to be ready to pick up and go. It has been happening around the world for decades, in India, Africa, the Middle East. Climate refugee status is now coming after its main culprit, the US and over the next 20 years, the topography of the United States will change at a scale few will be prepared to embrace.

Our indigenous will keep us as they always have as long as we continue re-membering. The so-called contemporary world will need to continue to catch up to us in order to survive.

INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE IN NEW CLOTHES

Co-working + Co-living are additions to the list we started last week of concepts the contemporary world is catching onto that actually stem from indigenious ways of being. Indigenious ways are all about living and working together. Now, we are seeing many people return to this through “the sharing economy” including through co-working spaces and co-living spaces which are becoming more popular in major cities across the world. It is a return to the village and to the ways of the village.

AFRICAN CREATION STORIES

// song as direct connection to ancestors >>

I talk about music or a song, rather, as something that arises or rises above the surface. The music is always present and sometimes it enters the realm of the heard, but it is not that when there is silence there is “no music”, or, when there are words that are not readily identified and qualified as “music” in the dying over-culture, that means that there is no song. There is always song. Song is entered and re-entered like river water.

Like identity in many ways (the where are you from?, question), Genres have done me great damage artistically, but more importantly, spiritually. Genres have stifled and confused me. Genres have contorted and broken me into pieces because I believed the lie of their primacy.

Like the Berlin “conference,” genres used to confuse me out of understanding my connection to South Africa, the fact that the Bantu people are all over Africa, not just in one part, as Gogo has shared. Not just the western part or the southern part. All African people are nomadic. Nomadicism, the fluidity of the movement of my people, leaves me free—restoring my ability and my right (right as in the correctness and as in justice) to do that in my own life: to enter and re-enter a never-ending current of song. And to answer to call to sing.

I am called to Sangoma and Sangoma to me.

Pan-Africanism is a fact because Ubuntu is a fact.

This is the embedded, embodied knowledge beyond national and international borders. Beyond the borders of the body. Songs live on sound and water waves and carry through Time. Songs carry us back, through, up, and onto our knees for prayer.

Songs have saved my life.

Hoodoo is defined as embodied historical memory linking us back through time to previous generations and ultimately to our African past, which I would now add is our African present as the future I speak is now. What I know is activated

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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Pregnant teens especially vulnerable in border centers

https://apnews.com/3defe7a843a14d12845227b5e6f930d0

As Trump speaks in front the Lincoln Memorial remember he has children and pregnant teens in cages getting no medical care at the Southern Border. 🤬🎇🇺🇲

Pregnant teens especially vulnerable in border centers

By ASTRID GALVAN | Published July 4, 2019 | AP | Posted July 4, 2019 |

PHOENIX (AP) — As tales of wretchedness and overcrowding in government border detention facilities abound, one group of migrants is particularly vulnerable: teen moms and pregnant girls without parents of their own.

Immigrant advocates and lawyers say the young mothers don't get special medical consideration while they're being crammed into U.S. facilities so packed that migrants are forced to sleep on floors or stand for days on end. As a result, the girls say they're underfed, have poor hygiene and their babies get sick.

Their hardships aren't over once they're released, which can't happen until a vetted sponsor — usually a relative — takes them in as their immigration cases wind their way through the courts. Their lack of legal status and inability to afford child care makes it nearly impossible for them to find a job, and staying in the U.S. legally is an uphill battle even if their children are American citizens.

"The average unaccompanied minor who's coming is facing so many challenges because of lack of access to legal representation, issues in education, lack of support, lack of mental health treatment," said Priya Konings, the deputy director of legal services for Kids in Need of Defense, which helps unaccompanied minors.

"When you compound that with anything else such as being a young parent or being pregnant, everything becomes twice as hard."

An attorney's shocking discovery last month of an ailing 17-year-old girl from Guatemala cradling a clearly premature infant inside a U.S. detention center prompted a national outcry and highlighted the challenges facing the teens. The mother had had an emergency cesarean section in Mexico in early May and crossed the border with the baby on June 4. She was in a wheelchair in extreme pain when legal advocates found her.

The girl and her baby are now doing well after leaving the processing facility in McAllen, Texas, where they were held, said her attorney, Hope Frye.

"The place where they are, it's safe and the baby is the belle of the ball," Frye said.

The accounts from lawyers and advocates come as U.S. immigration agencies have been struggling to handle a growing influx of migrants who cross illegally from Mexico and end up in the facilities of the ill-prepared and increasingly overwhelmed Customs and Border Protection, the first agency in charge of their detention. CBP is supposed to release the unaccompanied children to Health and Human Services — which contracts with shelter providers — within 72 hours, but the overcrowding has created a backlog that has resulted in children sometimes spending weeks in the custody of the CBP.

Customs and Border Protection has said repeatedly that it is not equipped to handle the large number of families and unaccompanied children coming to the border, and says its agents aren't trained to be caregivers. When asked to comment on the treatment of pregnant teens and teens with babies, a spokesman pointed to the agency's guidebook on treatment of detainees, which says underage migrants and those who are pregnant or nursing must have regular access to snacks, milk and juice.

The conditions have prompted protests such as one Thursday in Philadelphia in which about 300 people demonstrated outside the building housing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office. Police say some members briefly interrupted the Salute to America parade and 33 were detained and cited. Organizer Sarah Giskin said earlier that protesters were demanding closure of border detention centers and abolition of the ICE agency.

The number of unaccompanied minors who travel to the U.S. has grown over the last year. Customs and Border Protection apprehended over 56,200 unaccompanied youths in the Southwest border from October to the end of May, compared to 50,000 in the last fiscal year. It's not known how many were pregnant or had babies. But the HHS's Office of Refugee Resettlement says the agency has had about 500 teens with babies in its custody since October.

The trip to the U.S. can be particularly dangerous for pregnant teens, said Nicole Ramos, refugee program director for Al Otro Lado, an organization that helps asylum seekers.

"I feel young pregnant girls are vulnerable to human trafficking. They don't have resources. They're kids, so they're not savvy in all the ways of the world," Ramos said.

A series of reports and federal court documents have shown that their tribulations don't end once they are in U.S. custody. Two reports by U.S. government inspectors found severe and dangerous overcrowding at Border Patrol holding facilities in El Paso and McAllen, Texas.

In interviews with attorneys last month, young mothers who were being held in several Texas border facilities as unaccompanied minors described feeling hungry, cold and terrified because their babies were sick.

A 17-year-old Honduran girl with a 1-year-old daughter said she was detained for weeks at the processing center in McAllen after crossing the border on May 29. The girl told a lawyer she was separated from her husband and put in an area so crowded that some people had to sleep sitting up. The girl said she was allowed to shower once when they were detained but had not been able to again in the 12 days since, and her baby's clothing was dirty with vomit.

"We are given sandwiches that are cold and raw, and so we don't eat them," the girl said.

In a separate interview, a 16-year-old Guatemalan girl with a 1-year-old son who spent at least two weeks in CBP custody told an attorney she and her child were not eating properly.

"Before we came here my baby was eating solid food three times a day but now he is only getting breast milk and sometimes a cookie. I'm only making a little breast milk because I am not eating or drinking enough," the girl said.

Once they're released, the young mothers face a whole new set of challenges, said Konings, of Kids in Need of Defense. Minors don't automatically get legal representation in immigration court because it's considered civil, not criminal. They often have no access to mental health treatment. And though U.S.-born children qualify for welfare services, their mothers are usually afraid to ask for it for fear it might negatively affect their immigration case. Young mothers also have a hard time finding work while also caring for a child, and can't make ends meet, Konings said.

Having an American-born child also does not guarantee the parent can stay in the country legally, Konings said. A U.S. citizen has to be 21 years old before he or she can sponsor a parent. And even then, parents found living in the U.S. illegally are banned from returning to America for 10 years.

"The whole concept of, 'Oh I'll just have a baby in the U.S.' I mean that's not a thing," Konings said. "You're talking about 31 years. That's just not reality."

___

Associated Press writer Amy Taxin in Santa Ana, California, contributed to this report.

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loudlytransparenttrash · 7 years ago

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The Truth About DACA

The decision to end DACA is a deserved end to a magnet for illegal immigration based on an unconstitutional executive order by Obama desperate for the minority vote. The Dreamer Act was completely rejected by Congress, it was never passable to begin with, it’s illegal as those who it claims to protect, though Obama took it upon himself to pass it by executive order soon after he said that he had no authority. Where were the calls for Obama’s impeachment?

So firstly, President Trump is simply undoing an illegal action and reestablishing the rule of law. We are a nation of immigrants yes, but not illegal immigrants, and we are also a nation of upholding common and ordinary law which is found in every other nation on earth. People were brought to this country illegally because we failed to enforce these basic immigration laws, these people aren’t refugees, they aren’t asylum seekers and they aren’t children, all we are doing is trying to enforce our immigration laws which have always been there.

As a sovereign nation, just as every other, we have the right to decide who comes to the U.S and we are already the most generous and welcoming. Even if we tripled our current legal immigration quotas, there would still be people who would enter or remain in the U.S illegally. Enforcing our immigration laws encourages people to come here legally, something we all support, and discourages illegal immigration, something we shouldn’t support.

To hear the media tell it, all 800,000 illegals being kept here by DACA are fantastic role models, they are the next Albert Einstein or someone on the verge of curing cancer and we Americans should be throwing ourselves at their knees in gratitude for them coming to stay with us. If your only understanding of this issue comes from the MSM, of course you are outraged over the fact that Trump is about to order an army to kick in daycare center doors, snatch up all the brown kids and hurl toddlers back over the southern border.

In reality, DACA is a shabby little temporary amnesty program created illegally for illegals. Let’s set the record straight to begin with. We aren’t talking about children here, the average age of Dreamers is 25 and many are as old as 35. They aren’t highly educated either. In August 2013, only 7.5 percent of the DACA illegals who were 18 or older had four-year college degrees. In August 2017, it dropped to only 5 percent. A significant share never event went beyond high school. The idea spread by the pro-illegal alien groups and the news media is that the DACA recipients are mostly inspiring, bright college kids, is a lie.

There’s also a little myth going around that 100 percent of DACA illegals have never broken the law. The truth is, over two thousand of them have lost their amnesty benefits due to crime and gang violence, and just as they have become less educated year by year, rates of DACA participant crime and violence have rapidly accelerated every year since 2012. Bear in mind that the bar is very low for acceptance into the DACA program, explicitly allowing people with multiple offenses and certain felony convictions to be approved. Only a handful of the applicants were ever interviewed, and rarely was their information on application ever verified.

Dreamers have long-since terminated their studies and most have committed multiple felonies in order to get jobs - Social Security fraud, forgery, perjury on I-9 forms, falsification of green cards and drivers’ licenses, identity theft, etc. DACA guidelines give illegals committing multiple felonies and significant misdemeanors a total pass as long as they have not been convicted of their criminal activity. This means that Dreamer gang-bangers, Dreamer identity thieves, Dreamer sexual predators, Dreamers who haven’t paid income taxes, and Dreamers committing a wide range of other crimes all qualify for DACA status as long as they haven’t been convicted of their crimes.

Sure, convicted murderers aren’t allowed entry into DACA, though if you have gun violations, you’ve beat your wife and skinned a cat a couple of times, you’re in, as long as it’s only two cats as successful entrants can have up to three misdemeanors regardless of severity, which is why virtually all applicants are accepted. So let’s do the math on how easy it is for anyone, no matter how little merit, to get into the DACA program that’s now being lauded by the media as “the best illegal immigration has to offer.”

According to official data from the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services, DACA has a rejection rate of just six percent, which means 94 percent of all applicants, no matter how gamy their paperwork, no matter what their misdemeanors or other “acceptable” criminal activity is, and no matter how low-achieving or uneducated, all while being illegally here in the first place, have been gifted residency ahead of all legitimate immigrants who have waited in line, proven themselves to be highly qualified and educated, have proven their identity and have followed the law. One set of laws for them, one set for everyone else. This is the warped sense of equality which fails the left.

If your parents break into a stranger’s house and they tell you that this is your home now, it’s your right to live there and the police eventually come to kick you out, is it the homeowner’s fault when you are told to leave, or is it the fault of your parents for illegally entering the house in the first place and convincing you that it’s yours to stay in? The simple fact is, these adults are here illegally, and we can downplay it, lie about it and sugarcoat it all we want, the fact remains that they are here illegally, they are actively cheating the system and cheating both Americans and legal immigrants.

As I’ve said before, illegal immigrants don’t do the work Americans don’t want to do, they do the work Americans won’t do for that price. When you flood the country with illegal workers by design and suppress wages to a point where only those willing to be exploited are willing to work for peanuts, unemployment becomes a big issue. The moment businesses are forced to raise wages without illegal workers, people will flock to these jobs and employment rates soar. This does not necessarily apply to all DACA illegals, though the principle remains, illegal workers are cheating Americans and legal immigrants job opportunities, especially with hiring quotas skewing the selection process.

It’s important to remember this decision on DACA does not mean these illegals now face the risk of deportation. Trump has no plans to throw anyone out tomorrow, this is about legalizing the illegal and he has given Congress six months to fix Obama’s unconstitutional mistake. If we’re going to keep illegals here, at least the policy keeping them here should be legal. DACA is an illegally created work permit program that offers those who came here illegally to take jobs that would otherwise go to Americans citizens. Trump’s “Buy American, Hire American” policies are extremely popular and with good reason, American views on putting its citizens first are no different to anyone else, though we along with other Western countries are the only ones told to be ashamed of it. Simply wanting to put fellow citizens first and follow standard immigration law is today considered Nazism.

The outrage over DACA has only started, and in the coming days we are guaranteed to be inundated with claims Trump is going to tear eight year olds from their mothers’ arm and the economy is about to collapse. My advice in the upcoming cacophony of cries and shrieks: don’t lose sight of the truth.

#daca #defend daca #dreamer #dreamers #trump #donald trump #mexico #politics #black lives matter #blm #feminism #social justice #antifa #anti sjw #sjw

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