And again the insanity of the American media, culture and polity:
Gee, females are mistreated in much of the world. And the solution is to give every female on the planet a right to flee here. And give every female rejected here another bogus claim to make at her deportation hearing.
What is the purpose of US immigration law? If we are planning on letting in everyone who has a hard time anywhere in the world, what we are de facto calling for is fully open borders. That is a morally defensible position. It would destroy our unique historical polity, society and culture. It would bankrupt as long as we link rights to residence [and would require verifiable National ID cards if we cease to]. It would run our wage scales internally down to world levels. However egalitarians would rejoice. We would cease being ‘better’ than anyone else.
Folks we can only digest so many newbies at once and we are approaching limits. Now part of those limits are self-inflicted. We could go back to 1950’s type schooling where we used the schools and other elements of social control to forcibly Americanize. Gee that wouldn’t be hip, multicultural and ‘nice’. Gee, it would upset a lot of Democrats. Gee, I care? LOL. We could also dump economic globalization to make internal jobs for all these new people. That would make a lot of rich people mad. They couldn’t afford servants anymore. The stock market would go down. The balance of income between capital and labor would switch more in labor’s favor [look at the stats for 1953 and 2003, its all there]. The flood of immigrants mean cheap deferential servants [the domestic servant class was gone by the 60’s]. The globalizers broke the unions and made those with capital richer at the expense of the bottom half of the pyramid. Virtually all the income growth since 1974 has been concentrated in the top 10% and most of that in the top 1% [and yes I know the stats lie – because they track yearly numbers, windfalls exaggerate the differences but the stats for asset holdings are less well developed – they show the same results in less exaggerated form – the top third gets the goodies with the top 10% getting a disproportionate share].
With immigrants we grow population at a fraction less than 1% / year. We would probably be better off at 2% - 2.5% [the social security problems mostly goes away by raising the ‘normal’ rate of economic growth to 5%]. However to afford to get to 2% we would need some form of the changes above AND we would still need to choose who can come. Are oppressed women the most useful people we could take? Female oppression inversely correlates with poverty in society and with Muslim / traditional African cultures. So do we need a flood of Muslim and African women? If so why? If so are we going to then let them use family reunification as a means for chain migration [which is what we have done since 1965]. Choices folks. What do we need:
1. IT professionals
2. People with technical degrees – our increasingly dogshit HS and lower schools do not produce good candidates for science PhD’s
3. Health care professionals – especially RN’s and LPN’s
4. Certain blue collar skill packages – especially skilled machinists and building trades
5. Entrepreneurs with capital and prior experience
6. A certain number of young men willing to be combat soldiers – even 911 hasn’t ended our domestic recruiting difficulties – specific language skills a must within this subset – Arabic, Dari, Chinese…
Mexico and the Carib will give us all the cab drivers and restaurant help we need and our ability to avoid full labor mobility over time with these nations is quite limited. Proximity plus past US decisions plus domestic politics means that this train is a commin’ with the old question being whether we find a method of legal regulation before the real world overwhelms any stop short of open borders.
Now given this how many Somali Bantus, African women fleeing clitoretcomies, oppressed Muslim girls do YOU feel we have room for? Not as a matter of feel good liberal conscience but in terms of the taxes you are willing to pay, drop in personal economic prospects, increased social turmoil, decreased social cohesion…actions have consequences.
Scott
A stain on our asylum law?
By Jennifer Watson / Bruce Fein
Women fleeing bondage to fathers, husbands, or male relatives are denied eligibility for asylum in the United States despite the moral abomination that their plights present. This stain on the nation's escutcheon should be removed. Holding females in servitude is every bit as morally repugnant as are the outrages that qualify for asylum: Persecutions based on race, religion, nationality, membership in a social group or political opinion.
The existing asylum categories were enacted in 1952. At that time, women were the stepchildren of constitutional and statutory law. Stereotypes of female meekness and fragility and the patronizing belief that women were unfit for any but domestic tasks were cultural commonplaces. But time, experience, and protest have taught the moral and constitutional injustice of denying women the same dignity and opportunity as men to chart their destinies.
As the United States Supreme Court sermonized in United States vs. Virginia in 1996, "Neither federal nor state government acts compatibly with the equal protection principle when a law or official policy denies to women, simply because they are women, full citizenship stature — equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities."
Telling a woman she is neither the moral nor legal equal of a man is reminiscent of Jim Crow law and culture. It stings as sharply. It anguishes as deeply. It demeans as greatly. The omission of gender persecution as a justification for asylum in the United States is thus morally anachronistic. And it is twice-cursed: males evade stigmatization for demanding female servitude; and, females seeking emancipation from male domination are denied sanctuary in a country whose creed inscribed in the Statue of Liberty is open arms to all yearning to breathe free.
A lively sense of these moral truths is more effectually impressed on the mind by the tragedy of Dalia as chronicled by Norma Khouri in "Honor Lost" than by all the dry volumes of philosophy ever written.
Dalia was a Jordanian woman in her mid-20s, filled with arrested hopes. She lived in de facto bondage to the males of her family. They issued orders that governed her wakening hours. She obeyed in resentful acquiescence. Male relatives monitored her movements and glances. Either conspiracy or duplicity was required to sneak a cigarette, peruse uncensored magazines,or otherwise thrill in rebellion against a humiliating vegetative existence. Other assertions of independent life or individuality were denied her).
Romantic infatuation occasioned secret but chaste trysts between Dalia and a Christian Arab. The innocent relationship was discovered. In Arab culture, the slightest female boldness is a capital crime. Dalia's last grim chapter was thus unsuspenseful. She was slain without remorse by her father. Her tearless brother summoned an ambulance only after her corpse was cold. She was thrown in an unmarked grave. Her budding life was sacrificed to propitiate male fixations with hierarchy and dominance.
As elaborated by Ms. Khouri and corroborated by a wealth of companion literature, Dalia's fate is re-enacted daily in Jordan, in neighboring Arab states, and elsewhere in the non-Western world. And for every persecution of a woman that finds expression in an honor killing, millions find expression in a lifetime of indoctrinated submissiveness and subjugation to male lusts for power and control. Few are sufficiently brave to risk anonymous martyrdom to protest their debasements. And even fewer ever contemplate cultural rebellion either because of the futility of the enterprise or because they are stripped of the self-will indispensable to confronting their persecutors.
Arab female counterparts of Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, or W.E.B. DuBois are thus unimaginable.
Gender persecution claimants would not overwhelm the United States. Scholars, books, human-rights reports, and self-evident earmarks of exclusion, such as a minuscule representation of women in public life or occupations, would establish a persuasive probability that any woman fleeing designated countries would encounter oppression if she returned.
However, most of the eligible women would lack the courage or means to escape their persecutors. They characteristically are without the money or travel documents essential to leave their home countries. In any event, the Refugee Act of 1980 empowers the attorney general to establish rules of evidence to deter and to detect asylum fraud; and, to deny asylum to an eligible claimant to avoid a flood of immigrants.
Imprecision in defining gender persecution for purposes of asylum would be untroublesome. The amended law should expressly classify as persecution de facto or de jure enslavement of a woman to her father, husband, or male relatives; female genital mutilation; or rape.
Immigration law judges would decide case-by-case whether other claims of female subjugation constituted persecution, just as persecutions based on race, religion, nationality, membership in a social group or political opinion are decided case-by-case under existing law.
Some foreign nations might complain of the addition of gender persecution as a foundation for asylum in the United States because their laws and cultures have celebrated that pronounced obliquity for centuries. The addition thus might estrange our relations with nations whose oil or cooperation in fighting global terrorism we covet, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Jordan.
But isn't our national honor too sacred and the urgency of a sanctuary for women fleeing persecution too compelling to surrender to a mess of foreign policy pottage?
Jennifer Watson is a paralegal and Bruce Fein is a founding partner of Fein & Fein.
posted by scott 1:07 PM