Listening to the New Yorker's podcast February 5, "Trump Closed the U.S. to Asylum Seekers. Will Biden Reopen it?" I was struck by how the law functions in individual cases.
Medical journals typically only publish papers which give you the big picture, studies which are "sufficiently powered" to draw general conclusions: This vaccine works to protect from disease or it does not. Double blind, prospective, controlled studies.
But sometimes they publish a case report of a single well studied case, and the axiom has been, "A single, well studied case sometimes tells you more than a big study."
So it was with this podcast. Looking at how general rules set down by Trump play out for a single case, you see the larger picture more clearly.
Once we look at what happened to one woman from Honduras, we can back away from the close up to see the larger picture.
In this case a woman appears, without a lawyer but with a translator before a newly Trump appointed immigration judge who clearly is faced with a body of law she is not comfortable with and the federal prosecutor, who is seeking to deny this woman entry on the basis of arguments with which she clearly is accomplished in using.
https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-new-yorker-radio-hour/how-trump-closed-the-us-to-asylum-seekers
The woman has walked from Honduras, through the jungles of Guatemala and Mexico to reach the southern border of the US, where she asked for asylum. She testifies she was a political party functionary in Honduras and her husband was a store owner and between the two of them they apparently offended both drug traffickers and government officials friendly to the drug lords. Her husband stepped out his door one morning and was shot to death. One of her three daughters was kidnapped, raped in the presence of a police officer, who stood in a corner of the room while she was raped on the bed, and later the daughter was shown a picture of the whole family and told, "We are coming to get your m other and sisters."
The mother thought it prudent to flee her home town, and when it became evident she was safe nowhere in Honduras, she headed north to the USA.
She now appears before the judge and her testimony is her only evidence. There is no document from her hometown chief of police. There is no witness to deny what she says and none to confirm it.
The judge asks her if she herself was tortured, or was it only her daughter?
The law requires the person seeking asylum has been directly personally threatened, not by rumor or not by association.
The judge asks the prosecutor about the presence of the police officer. If the policeman was carrying out an official policy of the Honduran government then the woman may have a case under an exception called the CAT rule, having to do with protecting asylum seekers if they have credible evidence they will be tortured because of their race, religion or political beliefs.
Since the policeman was of her race and presumably also Catholic, then those cannot be used, but maybe political belief. The prosecutor points out it's not known if the man dressed as a policeman was actually a real policeman or at what level, local, state, federal or whether he was just a rogue cop or acting out a Honduran policy. In fact, the prosecutor points out the entire case is based on what this asylum seeker says: there are no supporting documents, no proof her daughter was raped or even that she has a daughter.
The judge asks the woman if she has the badge number or name of the policeman who stood in a corner while her daughter was raped. Oddly enough, the woman cannot provide these.
In the end the judge says her heart goes out to the woman but the law requires she send the woman back to Honduras because she does not meet criteria for admission. And, the judge notes, this woman was naughty: she crossed over two other countries on her way to America and did not seek asylum in those countries.
It's fascinating to hear the judge try to get herself off the hook of her own conscience, how emphatically the judge wants to say what a nice person she is but she is helpless before the requirements of the law to help this naughty, law breaking mother who walked through two countries to reach the American border.
MS St Louis
Of course, this is not a new story: When Cordell Hull, Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of State, refused to allow the M.S. St. Louis entry to any American port in 1939 because its load of Jews fleeing Hitler did not qualify for asylum, because they did not have a letter attesting to their good character from their local police, who were the Gestapo, he literally wrapped himself in the American Flag by his desk saying he would be betraying his duty to American law by admitting these people, and the ship returned its people to die in the concentration camps. Hitler later laughed about the American posture of being the savior of the downtrodden Jews, pointing to America's rejection of the St. Louis and sending them back to France and Germany where they were exterminated by men who at least had the spine to own what they were doing.
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| Rejected and sent home to die |
Of course, as Daniel Okrent details in his amazing book, "The Guarded Gate," American immigration policy has always instilled barriers based on race and class disparagement. First it was the Chinese. Later the dark races from Southern Europe (Italy, the Balkans) then the Jews, and along the way even the Irish, who while still white, were often Catholic and always poor.
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| Immigrant from Slovenia, a "shit hole: country |
Why, asked Donald Trump in amazement, were immigrants always trying to get into America from "shithole countries?" Why weren't more Norwegians applying for membership in the American Dream Machine?
Of course, in some ways the barriers to immigration find support from people who do not mind the idea of seeing communities spring up which are dark skinned. There are other objections:
1. What if new immigrants take away jobs from those already here?
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| Immigrants |
2. What if new immigrants who cannot find jobs turn to crime?
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| What Trump sees when he sees immigrants |
3. What do we do with new immigrants who reject the basic idea of tolerance? The UK is beset by problems of Imans in London who preach that the UK is an infidel nation and the immigrants arriving there should not tolerate the British women who walk around half naked, enticing good Muslim boys to impure thoughts, Imans who activity reject the nation and its values into which they have moved. A graft vs host reaction.
4. And what about numbers and rates: Suppose tomorrow America threw open its borders and 10% of Indians and 10% of Chinese moved here in 2022? That would be 150 million Indians and 150 million Chinese and in that case English would not be the language of the majority of people living here.
But for now, we are dealing with immigrants from Central America mainly, people who can walk here. The same forces of instability driving immigration into Europe from the Middle East and Africa: poverty, political instability, crime and violence drive people to vote with their feet and flee.
International law says, Mad Dog is told, that no nation can reject a boatload of Jews or any other similar group who would be returned to a country with laws which would send them to extermination camps, and having passed that law, the nations of the world sat back feeling very virtuous.
But what about that lady whose daughter was raped, or so she says, and what about all those folks, the wretched refuge of the teaming shore?
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