Asylees are refugees

What you will notice when we talk about asylum in the US is that we make asylum seekers jump through some hurdles that are really artificial, that have nothing to do with ferreting out fraud or any other legitimate purpose. I mean we seem to take every opportunity to throw in new make-or-break procedural requirements and drop deadlines and nobody balks. We say it’s about fraud. But I think most Americans feel that our government is equipped to ferret our fraud. It’s something else.

We as a people, we Americans, we want to help refugees. We know what refugees are. Refugees are our Old World forebears on ships. Refugees are people boiling water over driftwood in camps. Today’s asylum seekers often don’t fit our idea of refugees.

We have a system for taking "our share" of the world's refugees. It's called resettlement. That's where we and the other developed countries put all of the (recognized) refugees in a pot and vet them and assign priority based on this or that criterion and divvy them up. If we can serve some geo-political smack on a rival nation, then even better (Remember “Soviet Jewry”?).

It's an awful system. It takes too long and too many people fall through the cracks and, oh, we can talk all day about the flaws in that program. But whatever its flaws, there is at least some satisfaction in knowing that it at least tries to be systematic; that we've at least tried to "save" the people who were most in need of saving (or, failing that, most capable of being saved.)

And that is precisely the opposite of asylum, which “rewards” people who manage to break through our nation’s defenses and land on our shores; which is to say, who didn’t wait their turn, didn’t play by the rules, didn’t stay put. It’s that there is an implicit comparison with the “deserving” refugee. If they came on a visa; at least they were prosperous enough to warrant a visa. Even if they jumped the fence; well, at least they were able-bodied enough to jump the fence.

But contemporary global reality does not really support this black-and-white dichotomy. It is ironic to attack asylum as a haven of the privileged NOW. We only have that impression because we have more asylum seekers, and they are different from the asylum seekers of old. We only have more and different asylum seekers because information and travel technology have opened up international migration to the humble.

Our class of asylum seekers is increasingly representative of the world’s refugee population. I think we as a people could really embrace and celebrate that uniquely American fact, and insist on a rigorous but compassionate and forgiving asylum program.

Satyagraha

One who breaks an unjust law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

My thanks to Mariposa for putting me in mind of this quote today.

It reminds me of a tale. I am from Columbia (the city in Maryland, not COLOMBIA). One day I was out with my two young kids, my Eritrean paralegal, and his friend, who later became an asylum client, in Columbia and we were talking about the city's history of integration. See Padraic Kennedy's excellent essay

I mentioned that my interracial parents moved to Columbia when their marriage was still against state law in Virginia. My daughter piped in. How come they got married if it was against the law? I thoughtlessly responded well, if a law is unjust, you have a duty to break it. No big thing, right? It's just what you say.

In high school and college, the US civil rights struggle was presented to us like ancient history, even though we weren't but one generation removed. We grew up imagining that we would have joined the freedom rides, IF WE HAD BEEN THERE. But, these words, these concepts -- civil disobedience, creative nonviolence -- they were taught to us as finished business, something that was necessary in the bad old days. When we were wrong. Before we got right.

And, partially because I was raised in this relative utopia, my relationship to these principles is reverential, not practical. I'm a wonk; not a freedom fighter.

My clients; they are the real deal. I've had clients who were jailed, tortured, and threatened with death for such crimes as owning a Bible small enough to be hidden in an army boot, growing a beard, owning a radio, making mimeograph copies of e-mails... Who have stood before the torturer, the State, and said, if you kill me now I will still look you in the eye... Who have said, My God is a righteous God and if it His will that you kill me then I die.

The man who was with us when I said that thing to my daughter, he later became an asylum client. He told me later what an impression that comment, said thoughtlessly to a child in a public place, had on him. How privileged, how blessed, he felt to be in this country and to be among people who embraced its principles. Principles the truth of which he has felt but not had words for.

But of course, the privilege, the blessing, is on me. Because, I can quote the principles; but they live them.