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When Immigration Goes Hard-Line

Jill

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a well-known member of Parliament in Holland, has recently stepped down from her political post after her immigration background was investigated. She repeatedly admitted to lying about her name and circumstances when applying for refugee status, and a member of her own party finally launched an investigation, concluding that Hirsi Ali had no right to be in the country. Some have suggested that the investigation was politically motivated, as Hirsi Ali has become something of a spokesperson against fundamentalist Islam and questions the success of multiculturalism. And while I agree with the Times that I’d be happy to welcome her to the United States — even if I don’t agree with many of her views — I do think that it’s important to point out that this is what happens when you take a hard line against immigration, amnesty and refugee policies. Hirsi Ali’s case is notable, but it’s certainly not the most tragic. Holland regularly turns away asylum-seekers, and the woman who was behind the Hirsi Ali investigation is known for her “straight back” when it comes to immigration issues:

Rita Verdonk was only a particularly extreme and unimaginative exponent of this new mood. One of her wildly impractical suggestions, mostly shot down in Parliament, was that only Dutch should be spoken in the streets. It was she who sent back vulnerable refugees to places like Syria and Congo. It was under her watch that asylum seekers were put in prison cells after a fire had consumed their temporary shelter and killed 11 at the Amsterdam airport. She was the one who decided to send a family back to Iraq because they had finessed their stories, even though human rights experts had warned that they would be in great danger. This was part of her vaunted “straight back.”

We see these attitudes here in the U.S., too. A month or so ago I went to watch oral arguments in the Second Circuit, and there was one which involved a Chinese woman seeking asylumn in the U.S. because she claimed to have had a forced abortion in China. Her story of the abortion was chilling, and doctors backed up her claims that an abortion did occur (even if they couldn’t tell whether or not it was forced). The pro-life U.S. government, naturally, was petitioning for her to be removed and sent back to China. Now, I’m not arguing that we have to let in anyone and everyone, but our amnesty and refugee policies are far too strict, and we’ve repeatedly sent people back into harm’s way (see Haiti in the early 1990s). What’s happening to Hirsi Ali is entirely logical if one operates with an anti-immigratn mentality — the same mentality that, here, applauds the Minute Men, wants to build a wall between the United States and Mexico, and spews xenophobia (and tries to ship survivors of forced abortion and other gender-based violence back to where they came from).

The usual suspects, of course, inexplicably blame liberals and pro-“Islamists.” They conveniently ignore the truth about who pushed Hirsi Ali out of her position — the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim “friends” who first showed her support.

And don’t worry, the author of the National Review piece wouldn’t let an opportunity go by to blame feminism for something.

As the author of the second Times op/ed piece writes,

By all means let us support Ayaan Hirsi Ali now, but spare a thought also for the nameless people sent back to terrible places in the name of a hard line to which she herself has contributed.

10 thoughts on When Immigration Goes Hard-Line

  1. The expression “hoist on one’s own petard” comes to mind.

    Hirsi Ali has been a favorite of the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant right. She had to have known she was cozying up to forces that would screw her in the end.

  2. “Now, I’m not arguing that we have to let in anyone and everyone…”

    Well, why not?

    It is criminal that there’s a single refugee in this world who cannot immediately find asylum and a new life for herself in another country. It is inexcusable that this system of international apartheid is maintaining the S.S. St. Louis immigration policy to this day. There’s no room for compromise or moderation when real people’s lives are hanging in the balance, as they are all over the world.

    “So, after all, maybe the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists…” – Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

  3. “Now, I’m not arguing that we have to let in anyone and everyone…”

    Well, why not?

    Well, because I do think that it’s reasonable to draw lines. This will surely be an unpopular argument with some people here, but completely open borders would wreak havoc on both our economy and our national security, and would be virtually impossible to manage unless most other countries signed on, and we created a nation-less world. That would bring about its own problems — like how do we provide social aid to everyone? Who gets taxed, and for what? How do we manage a criminal justice system? How do we manage much of anything?

    That said, I do agree with this:

    It is criminal that there’s a single refugee in this world who cannot immediately find asylum and a new life for herself in another country.

    And like I said in the post, we really need to loosen up our asylum policies. When I said “anyone and everyone,” I was referring to immigrants in general, not just asylum-seekers.

  4. I don’t understand why you cite Haiti as an example of denying refugee status gone wrong. Though it was quite silly for the administration to suggest that those arriving on American shores from Haiti were actually “economic” and not “political” refugees (philosophically and politically, the two are inseparable in the context of an authoritarian state–if Haiti could even be called that at the time), doing so would have forced a reliving of the Mariel Boatlift of 1980.

    The differences between the two, of course, are that 1) Haiti didn’t occupy the same political signficance as Cuba during the Cold War, 2) Haiti is much further away than Cuba from U.S. shores and thus a similar boatlift would have resulted in significantly larger fatalities, and 3) refugee crises gobble up government resources like anything–relocation, logistical support, screening, etc.

    Accepting refugees is fine and dandy when it is of a much smaller scale–obviously the individual examples that you present–but even slightly larger, such as during Kosovo.

  5. I don’t understand why you cite Haiti as an example of denying refugee status gone wrong.

    I was referring to the policy that said you weren’t officially a “refugee” until you made it onto land — so even if you were in the water, three feet from the beach, you could be snatched up and deported. More specifically heinous was the Haitian refugee policy that had Coast Guard employees plucking Haitians out of the water and onto a Coast Guard ship, asking them a few short questions while they were freezing, terrified, fleeing a nation in crisis and quite afraid of authority (especially big men with guns), and using only that to establish whether or not they qualified for refugee status.

    Oh, and then there was our choice to hold a whole ton of Haitian detainees at Guantanamo because we didn’t know what else to do with them and didn’t want to award them refugee status. They were only slowly released when nearly all of the women became pregnant, HIV spread through the population, and the medics at Guantanamo were simply unequipped to deal with the situation.

    Those are the kinds of refugee policies gone wrong that I’m talking about.

  6. Hirsi Ali has been offered a job by the American Enterprise Institute, in D.C. What does that tell you about her?

  7. I read Buruma’s piece and I thought it was pretty weak. “Though neither a populist nor a xenophobic opponent of immigrants (how could she be?), [Hirsi Ali] warned the Dutch about the Muslim menace,” he writes, admitting that she wasn’t anti-immigration, but using loaded language (“Muslim menace”) to paint her as some kind of crypto-racist. He seems to be arguing since Hirsi Ali criticized the treatment of women in Muslim communities, and some anti-immigration hardliners agreed with her, it’s poetic justice that her citizenship is being questioned. There’s a big difference between arguing that immigrants should not be allowed to abuse “their own” women, as Hirsi Ali did, and arguing that immigrants should be barred from the country altogether.

    And someone on these boards was recently harshly criticized for suggesting that some elements of the left turn a blind eye to non-Western abuses of women’s rights.

  8. Jill: This will surely be an unpopular argument with some people here, but completely open borders would wreak havoc on both our economy and our national security, …

    Why?

    Jill: And like I said in the post, we really need to loosen up our asylum policies. When I said “anyone and everyone,” I was referring to immigrants in general, not just asylum-seekers.

    Part of the problem with this is that not everyone agrees on legitimate reasons for granting asylum, and if you allow the politicians to pick and choose who to let in, then the kinds of people they recognize as “real” refugees are going to be limited by the political blinders that mainstream politicians or immigration bureaucrats happen to have on when they approach the issue. To take a real world example, it’s been like pulling teeth getting the immigration bureaucracy to recognize the threat of almost certain death as cause for granting asylum, if the threat comes from your abusive ex-husband — because wife beating is not considered a “political” issue by the immigration inquisitors or their political bosses, and so doesn’t really come into their worldview when they ask themselves who counts as a political refugee. People written off as “economic” refugees are routinely turned away, as if starvation were somehow less of a crisis for the refugee than near-certain murder. Generally speaking, political agencies respond to political incentives, and frankly I don’t trust politicians to pick and choose who counts as a “real” refugee, especially not when most of the candidates already come from marginalized groups that are routinely misunderstood and ill-served by politicians here as well as abroad.

  9. Hirsi Ali has been offered a job by the American Enterprise Institute, in D.C. What does that tell you about her?

    It tells that she has been offered job by the said institution. Duh. Now, it is actually a endorsement for the AEI, as I’m under the impression that it is very conservative/libertarian, fan of Supply-Side Economics etc.

    That’s how it goes for a Classical Liberal who loves J.S Mill (Hirsi Ali). You have to find allies whereever you can find them, ’cause Modern Liberals sure as hell would just as well throw you to Somalia.

    The usual suspects, of course, inexplicably blame liberals and pro-”Islamists.” They conveniently ignore the truth about who pushed Hirsi Ali out of her position — the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim “friends” who first showed her support.

    Fair enough, you ae quite correct there. What you and others miss is that the strong anti-immigration laws and anti-immigrant backlash has been caused by the failure of the Socialist, immigration policies in assimilating the immigrants. The strongly anti-immigrant (perhaps too strongly, IMO) parties get the majority of their votes from native Europeans who actually have to live in the MultiCultural ghettoes.

    For once, the blame is not with the immigrants alone, but instead with the “tolerant” paradigm that refuses to address the problems caused by immigration, and problems within the immigrant communities, and dismisses dissenters as “racists”.

  10. ‘cause Modern Liberals sure as hell would just as well throw you to Somalia.

    … Or maybe not, but rather think that yout community (collective) should have a right to suppress your views (invidual).

    This is why she prudently rejects collectivist Modern Liberalism.

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