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Tag: International

When Immigration Goes Hard-Line

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.

Why a “Contraceptive Mentality” Can Save Lives

Seems the Converts’ Zeal thread has attracted one of the “contraceptive mentality” types who can’t seem to see any value whatsoever in the Vatican’s recent tentative moves to recognize that maybe their absolutely-no-condom policy is harmful to people in countries ravaged by AIDS. Seems Tony can’t quite believe that there could be any value whatsoever to relaxing the Church’s position on condoms where one spouse has AIDS or HIV; he feels that the spouses should just suck it up and never have sex again.

But, via Qusan at State of the Qusan, here’s an example of why that might not work out so well in practice:

Kenyan women’s rights activists have condemned an MP who told parliament that women usually say “No” to sex, even if they mean “Yes”.
During a debate on a new sex crimes law, Paddy Ahenda said Kenya women were too shy to openly say “Yes” and warned the law could prevent marriage.

Twelve of Kenya’s 18 female MPs walked out in protest, saying Mr Ahenda and other MPs were “trivialising” rape.

Many Kenyans are alarmed by a huge rise in the incidence of sexual abuse.

“This is a nation that should be in shame because its leaders are laughing at offences committed against women and children,” said Kenya National Commission on Human Rights official Catherine Mumma.

‘Impediment to marriage’

Several male MPs feared that the bill went too far and could lead to a spate of false accusations by women. *

“If the bill is adopted the way it is, it will prevent men from courting women and this will be a serious impediment to the young who would want to marry,” said Mr Ahenda.

“In our culture, when women say ‘No’, they mean ‘Yes’ unless it’s a prostitute.”

The AFP news agency reports that many of his male colleagues laughed and applauded his comments.

So here we have an example of a culture in which women aren’t really going to have the option of nobly foregoing sex with their husbands lest they fall prey to a “contraceptive mentality.” Oh, no — this is a culture where forced sex is considered “courting,” because “no” really means “yes,” so even if she refuses, there’s no such thing as rape, because of course, of course she really meant yes!

Erm, unless she’s a prostitute. Which means, apparently, that she can mean no when she says it. I’m still trying to figure that one out.

But back to this condom thing. The Catholic Church is an enormously powerful institution and has its hands in all kinds of relief organizations serving the countries and continents most affected by AIDS. Yet until recently, they wouldn’t even entertain the thought that condoms could have any value in prevention, so they stood in the way of AIDS education that promoted condom use. As a result, you have a lot of women in countries with fucked-up attitudes like those on display in the Kenyan Parliament at the mercy of men who view them as property. Women are expected to be pure, but men can fuck whomever they please — which means that even good girls who remained pure until their wedding nights and faithful to their husbands are contracting AIDS from those very husbands — who visit prostitutes with impunity. And without any contraception, these women are also getting pregnant and passing HIV to their children.

Outside of abstinence, condoms are the single most effective form of AIDS prevention available. Comprehensive AIDS education that takes into account cultural taboos and the disparity of power between men and women can be effective in controlling the spread of the disease (Thailand, for instance, home to a large sex-tourism industry, has had success in doing so). It is enormously damaging to the very populations the Church is trying to assist with poverty relief, vaccinations and sanitation programs to discourage the use of the one truly effective weapon against uncontrolled HIV infection.

_________
* This doesn’t really have anything to do directly with the subject of the post; I just wanted to highlight this as a perfect example of the whole “those lying sluts” phenomenon. If we acknowledge that women have autonomy and can say no, if we then make it a crime to violate that autonomy by forcing a woman to have sex against her will, men will be the real victims because women will falsely accuse them of rape. So, better not make rape a crime, then.

Global Sex Survey

The Good News: Sexual satisfaction correlates with gender equality. Take that, anti-feminists.

The Bad News*: Men are generally more sexually satisfied than women. This is not surprising.

“Pleasure is not part of the story” in sexually conservative cultures in the Far East — China, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand, Laumann said. “Procreation is the rationale for sex. Many women … characterize sex as dirty, as a duty, something they endure” — and often stop having it after age 50.

And therein lies the problem with making sex all about the babies, and describing marital sex as a “duty.” I’ll take hedonism over that any day.

*I should be clear here: I don’t think it’s bad that men are sexually satisfied. I’m quite happy for them. I just wish we were all more sexually satisfied, and that sexual satisfaction was equal across the sexes.

Posted in Sex

Wombs for Rent, Cheap

Women in India are being paid to serve as surrogate birth mothers for Western couples. This is one of those stories that makes my feminist-meter go all wonky: It’s a reproductive freedom issue, but it’s paying a less-privileged woman to use her body in the service of another; I’m not sure that paying for personal services is in and of itself wrong, but what about when you’re doing so in a highly unequal situation; it sounds like all the people involved are benefiting, but I’m still concerned about the lack of legal protections for the surrogate mothers; $5,000 is a lot of money by Indian standards and I’m happy to see women able to support their families, but does that coerce impoverished women into putting themselves at a substantial physical risk?

This, I think, is one of those things like pornography and prostitution: There isn’t an “easy” feminist answer when we’re talking about exchanging reproductive/sexual services for money.

And the article itself is a little shallow, at least at first. For example, the lead:

As temp jobs go, Saroj Mehli has landed what she feels is a pretty sweet deal. It’s a nine-month gig, no special skills needed, and the only real labor comes at the end — when she gives birth.

I’ve never been pregnant, but I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that it’s not exactly a walk in the park until birthing day. And I have a feeling that if I told my mom that “the only real labor” came at the end of her pregnancies, she’d be a little peeved.

(After writing this, I scrolled back up in the article to see the author’s name — Henry Chu. Gonna guess he hasn’t ever given birth either.)

Some see the practice as a logical outgrowth of India’s fast-paced economic growth and liberalization of the last 15 years, a perfect meeting of supply and demand in a globalized marketplace.

“It’s win-win,” said S.K. Nanda, a former health secretary here in Gujarat state. “It’s a completely capitalistic enterprise. There is nothing unethical about it. If you launched it somewhere like West Bengal or Assam” — both poverty-stricken states — “you’d have a lot of takers.”

Others aren’t so sure about the moral implications, and are worried about the exploitation of poor women and the risks in a land where 100,000 women die every year as a result of pregnancy and childbirth. Rich couples from the West paying Indian women for the use of their bodies, they say, is distasteful at best, unconscionable at worst.

“You’re subjecting the life of that woman who will be a surrogate to some amount of risk,” said C.P. Puri, director of the National Institute for Research in Reproductive Health in Mumbai (formerly Bombay). “That is where I personally feel it should not become a trade.”

The reason that families are outsourcing surrogate motherhood to India is because it’s a whole lot cheaper than in the United States. Which doesn’t make it necessarily bad, but it does mean that Indian women generally lack access to the kind of medical care and legal resources that U.S. women have. And that, I think we can say, is definitely bad.

If all other things were created equal — if there weren’t all these issues of race, economics and gender — I’m not sure that “renting out” one’s uterus would be all that much more questionable than contracting for other personal services. But then, we don’t allow people to sell organs. And a baby isn’t an organ, but lots of the same ethical issues overlap.

Bottom line: I’m uncomfortable with this situation. Paying poor brown women to carry pregnancies for wealthier Western women strikes me as, at the very least, problematic, especially considering the physical risks and the high potential for coercion. At the same time, my most basic inclination is to argue that women should have every right to do with their bodies what they please. Lucky for me, those two ideas aren’t irreconcilable. Women should certainly have the legal right to do this. That does not mean, though, that we can’t question it and parse through all these issues.

Thoughts?

Paging Ms. Van Susterns

I’m just gonna quote directly from Gawker:

Last week, a group of six New Yorkers were on a Caribbean vacation in St. Maarten. Two of them were brutally beaten — one, Dick Jefferson, a 51-year-old top producer at the CBS Evening News, is out of the hospital but now has a titanium plate in his head; the other, a 25-year-old researcher there, remains in intensive care with brain injuries. Why were they beaten? Because they’re gay, and the attackers had earlier that night been thrown out of a bar for heckling Smith and his boyfriend, Justin Swenson. ABCNews.com did a thorough story earlier this week, which made an interesting point:

The part of the island of St. Maarten where the assault took place is Dutch territory in the Caribbean, just like the island of Aruba. It was almost a year ago that Natalee Holloway disappeared in Aruba. Since then, her parents have had an exasperating odyssey through the island’s Dutch legal system. Smith’s family and friends are bracing for a similar journey.

St. Maarten police, Jefferson said, initially did not want to investigate the incident.

So. A promising 25-year-old American was beaten nearly to death while on vacation, and an impassive Dutch-colonial government is unwilling or uninterested to adequately investigate or prosecute the crime. We’re sure the cable networks will be as excited as when Natalee Holloway, a promising 19-year-old American, disappeared while on vacation and an impassive Dutch-colonial government is unwilling or uninterested to adequately investigate or prosecute the crime.

After all, it’s not like they would care more about a Southern blonde girl than a New York gay of indeterminate hair color? Of course not.

Alleged Hate Crime in Paradise [ABCNews.com]

Viva Prodi

Romano Prodi’s coalition narrowly beats Silvio Berlusconi’s in the Italian general elections. Woohoo! I do love to see Forza Italia go down.

When I studied in Italy, Berlusconi made waves by comparing a German MEP to a Nazi — not an OK thing to say in Germany. Recently, he raised ire again by comparing himself to Jesus — for the second time. And he didn’t stop his crazy-man antics during the election:

During the election campaign, he managed to upset China by claiming its communist regime once boiled babies to make fertiliser, a dig at Prodi’s allies.

I can see how that accusation would be slightly upsetting. Berlusconi is a loud-mouth, a liability, and a corrupt politician. He’s a major media mogul and the richest man in the country; Prodi is a seasoned politician whose work with the EU has been laudable and who saw Italy through some turbulent political times (of course, when have Italian politics not been turbulent?). I’m glad to see him in power. Brava, Italia.

“When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.”

-George W. Bush

Except, you know, when we won’t.

In Colombia, for example, the leftist guerrilla group FARC often kidnaps civilians and demands ransom from their relatives. FARC also requires the payment of a “war tax” from Colombians in the regions it controls, upon threat of serious harm. Nearly 2,000 Colombians who faced such circumstances as paying a ransom or “tax” — and who later fled the country and were determined by the United Nations to be refugees — have been denied U.S. resettlement on the basis of the “material support” provision.

In Liberia, a female head of a household was referred to the U.S. resettlement program by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees as a person particularly vulnerable to attack. Rebels had come to her home, killed her father and beat and gang-raped her. The rebels held her hostage in her own home and forced her to wash their clothes. The woman escaped after several weeks and made her way to a refugee camp. The Department of Homeland Security has decided that because the rebels lived in her house and she washed their clothes, she had provided “material support” to the rebels; the case has been placed on hold.

A Sierra Leonean woman’s house was attacked by rebels in 1992. A young family member was killed with machetes, another minor was subjected to burns and the woman and her daughter were raped. The rebels kept the family captive for days in their own home. Homeland Security has placed the case on hold for “material support” concerns because the family is deemed to have provided housing to the rebels. Under this interpretation, it does not matter whether the support provided was given willingly or under duress.

I’ll also point out that many minority groups in Iraq — Palestinians, for example, who were protected under Saddam Hussein’s regime — are now being systematically slaughtered. American forces are unable to offer protection, and the administration refuses to offer these people refugee status in the United States, because that would be bad for the PR effort in presenting the war as a success.

The “committment” to liberty is disengenuous. We’re perfectly willing to sell liberty-seeking people down the river if they don’t narrowly fit in with our interests — even if it was our policies that directly put them in harm’s way.

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

A really interesting policy paper (pdf) evaluating the power of the pro-Israel lobby in influencing U.S. foreign policy. It’s been making some waves, and is definitely worth a read.

My thoughts: I can see why this paper is upsetting a lot of people. The authors’ choice of language unfortunately smacks a little too much of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, like the Elders of Zion or ideas that Jews control the media/banks/government/whatever else they supposedly control. However, that doesn’t make the facts that they present untrue, and they’re fairly clear in explaining that they aren’t suggesting that this is a big conspiracy — just that the pro-Israel lobby works like any other lobbying group, except it’s far more well-funded and well-organized, and not challenged in any real way.

That, though, leaves me to question exactly what the problem with the lobby itself is. Lobbying groups exist for just about everything. Some happen to function more effectively than others. Is the pro-Israel lobby “bad” simply because it happens to be better organized and better funded than just about any other lobby? Isn’t the onus on politicians and policy-makers, not lobbying groups, to resist pressures that are damaging to U.S. interests?

There are a great many lobbying groups whose goals I don’t like: the NRA, the “moral majority,” the anti-choice lobby, or big oil. But I can’t fault their existence any more than I can fault the existence of the AARP, or the AFL-CIO, or the pro-choice lobby. I can, however, fault politicians and policy-makers for folding to demands from special-interest groups. That’s how the modern American political system works. We can certainly criticize the existence of lobbying groups in general, but it seems a little ridiculous to criticize one particular lobbying group because (a) we don’t agree with everything it advocates, and (b) it’s really, really good at what it does.

I may not always love what the pro-Israel lobby pushes for, and I do think it’s problematic that there is no other group pushing back the other way or even balancing out the conversation. The authors of this paper posit that the pro-Israel lobby is simply too intimidating and too powerful for any other group to take a stand against them, lest they be labelled anti-Semitic. And I think they have a point there — questioning Israel’s policies as a nation is too often conflated with arguing that Israel’s very existance is unjustified (something that almost no one is saying), or with anti-Semitism in general. That’s problematic; it’s further troubling that we can’t even have a public conversation about it.

Israel should be treated like any other country: If they’re our ally (and they certainly are), then we should work together for our mutual interests. I don’t have a problem with sending aid to Israel, as we send aid to many other countries. But that aid should be accounted for, like it is in every other nation. And we should use our financial influence to push Israel — and all the other countries we’re invested in — to uphold human rights norms and democratic values. We should not be compromising our own interests and values for another nation.

Anyway, check out the article. It’s long, but worth a thorough reading. I’d love to hear more thoughts about it.

Thanks to Kyle for the link.

Global Gendercide

One United Nations’ estimate says that between 113 million and 200 million women around the world are “missing.” Every year, between 1.5 million and 3 million women and girls lose their lives as a result of gender-based violence or neglect. As the Economist, which reported on the policy paper, put it last November, “Every two to four years the world looks away from a victim count on the scale of Hitler’s Holocaust.”

Zuzu reminds us: “Just to put it in a little perspective, that’s about the number of women and girls in the US.”

Go read this article. Now.

• In countries where the birth of a boy is considered a gift and the birth of a girl a curse from the gods, selective abortion and infanticide eliminate female babies.

• Young girls die disproportionately from neglect because food and medical attention is given first to brothers, fathers, husbands and sons.

• In countries where women are considered the property of men, their fathers and brothers can murder them for choosing their own sexual partners. These are called “honor” killings, though honor has nothing to do with it. Young brides are killed if their fathers do not pay sufficient money to the men who have married them. These are called “dowry deaths,” although they are not just deaths, they are murders.

• The brutal international sex trade in young girls kills uncounted numbers of them.

• Domestic violence is a major reason for the deaths of women in every country.

• So little value is placed on women’s health that every year roughly 600,000 women die giving birth. As the Economist pointed out, this is equivalent to the genocide in Rwanda happening every 12 months.

• Six thousand girls undergo genital mutilation every day, according to the World Health Organization. Many die, and others live the rest of their lives in crippling pain.

• According to the WHO, one woman out of every five worldwide is likely to be a victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime.

All these figures are estimates; registering precise numbers for violence against women is not a priority in most countries.

I don’t love some of the language she uses (like “Third World”). But at its heart, I think her op/ed is correct. We need to be raising our voices and screaming about these abuses.

Three initial steps could be taken by world leaders to begin eradicating the mass murder of women. A tribunal like the International Court of Justice in The Hague should look for the 113 million to 200 million women and girls who are missing. A serious international effort must urgently be made to precisely register violence against girls and women, country by country. And we need a worldwide campaign to reform cultures that permit this kind of crime. Let’s start to name them and shame them.

Yes, yes, and yes. The one thing that I think she misses the mark on is assuming that some cultures permit these kinds of crimes, and some don’t. That’s simply not true. All cultures in existence today permit violence against women to some degree. Some permit it to a much greater extent than others — some outwardly encourage it, some do so more tacitly — but it’s present everywhere. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t come down harder on the places where it’s worse, but it’s irresponsible and innaccurate to assume that it’s a problem with “those people” and that it isn’t on your doorstep, too.

Who says feminism isn’t necessary?