Arthur Helton: Well thank you very much Utrice. And thank you again for the promotion from guest to co-host, at least for this temporary assignment. I think we have traced an interesting path in the last few days. We began with an examination of the impacts and benefits of immigration in New York City and with a deep discussion assisted by Philip Kasinitz, on the faculty the CUNY Graduate center at Hunter College, as well as Hector Cordero-Guzman on the faculty at the New School for Social Research. I think we investigated in a deep fashion the situation of immigration in New York City. Yesterday we had the opportunity to discuss the values of immigration and ultimately citizenship and national identity with Muzaffar Chishti who is the Immigration Director at the Union of Needle Trades Industrial and Textile Employees, as well as Antonio Maciel, who directs the Emma Lazarus Fund at the Open Society Institute. So we’ve moved from where we live, New York City, to the values associated with citizenship and national identity, avery appropriate inquiry in this week leading up to July 4. Today, we’re looking at one of the key humanitarian dimensions in immigration policy, namely refugee policy. Much of refugee policy occurs outside the United States, but certainly the images have flooded in from our television sets and radios and newspapers with people displaced by virtue of aggression in Kosovo, or other human catastrophes around the world. Joining us for this conversation is Beverlee Bruce who is a Program Director at the Social Science Research Council in New York City, and also Chair of the Board of Directors of the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, and also a member of the board of the International Rescue Committee. We will be joined shortly, by a colleague who is making his way here, I’m sure with a sense of desperation at the moment, Felix Cardona, Professor of Public Policy and Legal Studies at the City University of New York. We have a chance to look now at perhaps the element of immigration that most often comes to the attention of those who, as ordinary people, watch and wonder about the state of world affairs. People are driven from their homes, people are in need of protection internationally. Our reception of those in desperate situations, New York’s Statute of Liberty being a symbol of this reception, is something Americans are proud of and, during the 4th of July, celebrate. Tomorrow we will have a general wrap-up session, looking broadly at the impacts of immigration, perhaps the contours of the immigration debate. I hope we have sustained a constructive conversation, as opposed to the sometimes rather mean-spirited discussion, which often times characterizes the immigration debate. But I suppose we will not be the judge of that, only our listeners will be.
Utrice Leid: Well could I ask you to lead us into this discussion by starting off with a kind of definition, as you will, of what a refugee is, who a refugee is?
Arthur Helton: The definitional issue is key to every discussion of refugee affairs, because what we mean by “refugees” differs so much in our own thinking. People are called refugees when they flee natural catastrophes and disasters, earthquakes, et cetera. People are called refugees when they have to move because their land will be flooded because a dam is being built on a river in a country. There is a highly refined international consensus that in a very articulated way identifies refugees for purposes of international law and protection, but doesn’t necessarily deal with all of those who are in need, for reasons that I’ll mention in a moment. Currently, about 50 million persons in the world are considered to be forcibly displaced. About a third of those, a little less, are considered to be conventional refugees. Those who have fled their home countries and who have a well-founded fear of persecution on account of at least one of five reasons: race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion, and who would, if returned, face the prospect of persecution on one of those five grounds. This is the classical refugee character. The consensus was arrived at, between the First and Second World Wars and made universal thereafter. More than 130 countries are now parties to international treaties that define refugees in these terms and the United States is one of those countries. Now most of the fifty million who are forcibly displaced, however, are not conventional refugees, but rather internally displaced persons who have been uprooted, but not crossed any national border. Increasingly, persecution has become more localized, as internal wars now far outnumber international ones. Kosovo may just be the most recent example. There are upwards of two hundred thousand people internally displaced in Kosovo as we speak here today according to the estimates of human rights monitors in Kosovo and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. These vast populations of forcibly displaced, which are quite significant in number, are not considered to fall within this narrow conception of the refugee definition. And even forced displacement itself has to be considered in context. The World Bank estimates that perhaps as many as a hundred million people have been displaced in the decade of the 1990s by virtue of development projects. So we’re only touching the tip of the iceberg with the political persecution definition. The international community considers this group to be most vulnerable and thus most deserving of protection and assistance. Now, in the United States, the number of politically persecuted is much smaller. We’re talking about, probably, about four hundred thousand people who’ve applied for asylum in the United States. And that’s a backlog. Each year we’re talking about perhaps fifty thousand new arrivals who apply for asylum. Roughly a hundred thousand people are admitted as refugees each year, to whom we offer new permanent homes. A quite significant number of those admitted today come from the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina in particular. There’s a proposal to admit as refugees people from Rwanda who have not been able to return, particularly mixed families in Rwanda, that is now being considered. The United States has its own policies and procedures for dealing with this vast population of forcibly displaced persons. Its contribution is small, but in comparison to other countries, it makes perhaps the greatest contribution, but nevertheless in absolute terms a small contribution. Beverlee?
Beverlee Bruce: Yes?
Arthur Helton: One of the issues that is often neglected in these discussions concerns the situation of women or children, who are not just migrants, but truly forced migrants. That might be worth a moment to dwell on, now at the very beginning, so we can pick up this theme as we discuss the matter.
Beverlee Bruce: I think it’s extremely important because we usually think in generic terms, and when we do we marginalize women and children, who turn out to be extremely vulnerable populations in the refugee situation, and they’re vulnerable because in many situations of forced migration, whether it’s as internally displaced or as refugees, or as the very few who are allowed to resettle here in the United States, they have had experiences for which they were not prepared. Husbands, fathers, brothers, have been drafted into the armed militia. Women who are from patriarchal societies where men are responsible for them, now become heads of household and they are responsible for their children in ways that they had not expected previously. Children end up being unaccompanied because they have been separated from parents. And so the tragedy is quite serious for this kind of dislocation. One of the things that the Women’s Commission is very concerned about, and one of the reasons that we came into being is because 80% of the world’s refugees are women and children. And so it’s very important that we pay attention to the very special needs of these population groups. It isn’t that we are unconcerned about men, it’s that their situation seems to be handled in kind of a different way. For example, if a woman is applying for asylum it is expected that she would have the documentation and sometimes it is only the male members of the family that are responsible for that, so there is a problem. And there are different kinds of persecution that women face. It was very interesting for the Women’s Commission because our mandate is to travel to refugee situations around the world and to put a human face on the experiences of the women and children that we speak to. Someone asked us what was happening here in the United States and our almost gut reaction was to say, “Well, we’ve got it covered”, I mean this is the United States, but we stopped for a moment and rather than just respond, we said, “Well let’s look into that.” What we found has been quite startling, that a number of women are kept as asylum-seekers in situations of detention which can only be characterized as prisons. I mean they are put in prisons because the INS has contracts with various prisons. We first came into understanding this with the Golden Venture, I think you remember the Golden Venture, the three hundred Chinese. And people always talk about the Chinese, but they don’t talk about the fact that there were eight Chinese women on that ship. And they were taken to very distant places, Mississippi, Louisiana, places where the sheriff looked like the sheriff that we remember from 1963, that had full sway over the circumstances of those women’s detention. When we talked to them about the whole question of interpreters, of access to lawyers, of fresh air, of language teaching, of skills training, of the ability of these women to get beyond their circumstances, we were told, “we cannot treat certain segments of the population in this center differently. This is a prison and we treat people as prisoners”. So women who were having serious health problems in terms of their menstrual cycles, in terms of pregnancy, were basically ignored. The question of women having difficulty explaining to a male officer at the airport the real reason that she is fleeing is nothing if not problematic. There’s a rather celebrated case of an Albanian woman whose husband refused to participate in the war. When the army came for him, he was gone, and so she was gang-raped. She fled to the United States, had a hearing, did not say until the very end of her hearing what had actually happened to her, was not believed and was deported. Advocates followed her case and she was able to return to the U.S. to appeal the disposition of her case. I don’t know what has happened but we’re just very concerned that the kinds of issues that cause women to flee are not given the same sort of attention as are the issues that cause men to flee. One other case that I want to mention is that of a Ghanaian woman who has been in the INS Wackenhut facility in Queens for a very long time because she was detained during the change in the law. The judge agrees that the woman had a credible fear. The young woman in question is rural and semi-literate, but very articulate in discussing her circumstance. Her mother, a chief, died, and the young woman was to inherit her mother’s title. But because she was not a virgin she was to be subjected to FGM (female genital mutilation), so she fled. The villagers were happy for her to flee, because they felt that she was going to wreak evil spirits on the village because of her contrary behavior. The judge believed her, but did not accept the argument that there was reason for her to be afraid to go home. And there are people here who are willing to take her in. The INS does not have to detain people, but the message we are sending is that you will not find an easy way to find asylum in America. And we do that by taking a hard line, even in those cases where there is an option for the person to be with a family until their case is heard. This possibility is totally being ignored and is of grave concern to us.
Utrice Leid: When you talk about women and children and the difficulties in classification, are they refugees or are they just very emotional people wanting to get into the United States, I thought the whole idea of family reunification ...I thought that that was at the center of this whole immigration philosophy, that entire families are affected. But is there a reason why women flee, for example, and not the men they are attached to?
Beverlee Bruce: The men may be dead. The men may not be available. For example in the case of the Albanian woman, her husband had disappeared because he didn’t want to fight, and so she wasn’t looking for him, she just wanted to get out of the situation. People really do feel that the United States is a beacon .. “Give me your tired, your poor, etc...” We have a very good PR and people really feel that as soon as they get to the United States all of their problems are going to be over. With the case of the refugees it’s a question of being resettled, that’s a different story from someone who’s an asylum-seeker and there are people who have a very difficult time adjusting to the United States, and there are population groups that come and they do come as families because the whole question of family reunification is an important aspect of the policy, although there are some differences over time in terms of who is considered family. That can be somewhat of a problem in an African context when we talk about the extended family, and large numbers of people are included. For us, we talk about the nuclear family, a mother, a father, and siblings. Cousins and aunts and others are not included. On the basis of our classification of family, it becomes difficult for certain population groups who categorize family differently.
Arthur Helton: Felix, welcome. We’ve been joined by Felix Cardona, who I mentioned before, Professor of Public Policy and Legal Studies with the City University of New York. Now I wonder if we can take Beverlee’s very persuasive plea on behalf of women and children and generalize it for a moment. We are coming up to that day of celebration, July 4th, respecting those yearning to breathe free, and in some ways that’s the quintessential idea behind asylum. But maybe Felix you could let us know if there are some darker forces that we should be considering in terms of recent asylum reforms and problems that may have gotten some attention lately.
Felix Cardona: I think the issue of asylum is such a quandary for American policy. On the one hand we have had a rather generous history of responding to the needs of refugees and to some extent that history has been somewhat tarnished by the ideological slant that we’ve always seemed to paint on most policies that deal with foreign affairs. However, we do have, and we have had, a fairly generous spirit. I think we can look at the plight.... I always think of the plight of the Central Americans during the eighties, when the government took an extremely conservative, or reactive position, with respect to those seeking protection or safe haven in the United States and pretty much succeeded, for a while, in stalling practically every effort by Central Americans by simply redefining what was meant by the term “refugee” and attempting to paint a very, very narrow definition. That eventually flowed up in two directions. One direction was the courts, and as we persisted in having that reevaluated and challenging the government’s take and definition on the question of refugee status in the United States, eventually they agreed with us. The courts found that American policy, American refugee policy, had been misapplied. In fact, they found the government had essentially violated the law. And something very similar eventually happened, I think, in a different way at the congressional level, where eventually congress determined that we would have sort of a separate category of safe haven in case someone fooled around with refugee policy or if political considerations dominated refugee policy too much, it was possible for the congress to take a position and say, “Well even if they’re not precisely refugees in definition of the law, we may extend protection to them.” I think those developments in the history of refugee policy are very important and I think they’re applicable today, although I don’t think we have the same ideological slant we had then. I think there’s something different happening today. I think today we have people who are fairly well-intended in how they consider, or how they interpret the Refugee Act. I think what’s happened is that immigration as a whole has become a wedge issue and I think refugee policy has fallen victim to the reactive mode the country has been in with respect to immigration policy. And I think that is dangerous, because I think we’ve always had sort of a distinction where refugee policy is concerned. That held sort of a special morally-based position in American policy and I think that has been lost somewhat in this reactive mode that the country has been in since Proposition 187 in California was started. So I think that’s where we’re at, but I think, I’m sort of optimistic. I think we have to remember we had a million immigrants and refugees enter the country last year. We have the most, probably the most generous immigration policy in the world. We probably receive them with more receptivity, and perhaps a greater historical appreciation for them. I think where we fall short, and that’s going to include some of the current politics, but I think where we fall short is in how we go about integrating new immigrants. I think the legal system isn’t always responsive to them, the localities are not responsive, and I think most importantly, the federal government doesn’t have a policy… it has a policy of resettling refugees, which is questionable at times, but it doesn’t have real strong and coherent policy on settling immigrants, on financing their integration into localities, on providing the essential pieces of the local effort, and that includes education, healthcare, law enforcement services. All these things would have to be augmented if you’re going to receive one million people a year. And that’s something that the federal government has essentially dropped on the lap of localities. And the localities, particularly at the very communal level, have reacted, and the reaction has been against immigration, against immigrants.
Utrice Leid: Could I ask you about the view often held that the generous policies that you’re celebrating here, the U.S. generous policies towards immigrants and people seeking asylum and immigrants, being a concession, if you will, to make up for the damage done by instigating the unrest or the civil wars or the other kinds of disasters that befall populations? And for political reasons granting these concessions, but you know, quite selectively opening up the sluices so that some people, let’s say people from Latin America maybe granted asylum but Haitians are not, even though they experience the same objective conditions.
Felix Cardona: We can go even a step further in that example, we can see if we look at the height of the Cold War. We used to have something called the ‘ballerina syndrome’. Any individual from the Soviet Union, whether they be an athlete, dancer, singer who left the Soviet Union and suddenly said, “I’m suffering political persecution”, by virtue of having said that and by virtue of having made a statement against the Soviet regime was immediately granted refugee status in the United States, or at least offered, at times aggressively offered, because it was embarrassing to the Soviet regime. The same would not be said, in fact if you look at the initial stages of instability in many of the Latin American countries, to a large extent brought about by American foreign policy, we wanted to have it both ways. We wanted to create instability and arm those who were violating the main protagonists, violating human rights policies in those countries, and death squads and ...we can go through that whole history, and particularly in Central America, but in other parts as well... we were at the same time saying, when they were leaving and fleeing, that they were not refugees. They were not refugees because they were leaving for economic reasons. Of course, you’d have to then draw a rather fictitious distinction between refugee policy or refugee status and that of the status of an economic migrant, which is not possible given the confluence of events in those countries. So I think you’re right and I think if you look at some of the major feeders of refugees to the United States, to a large extent they have been countries that we have had some, either relationship of intervention or they were proxies in the Cold War. Think of the large number of Southeast Asians in the United States, think of the large number of Cuban Americans, largely a product...it’s highly unlikely that had Cuba not been a pawn in the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union that we would have received as many Cuban refugees as we did. And certainly Haiti, not being in that category, accounts for why it was treated so distinctly. And of course there are also other issues with respect to the Haitians, the racial overtones...and particularly in the eighties I think we saw that, it was so obvious given the distinction in treatment between two, essentially coordinate groups. But I think you’re right if you look at Central America we have a large number of El Salvadorans and Guatemalans who came in during the late mid-eighties and late eighties during the height of instability there created by a war largely financed by the American government and they are here largely as a result of that policy. Half a million of them came precisely during that period, when the war ended the flow, to a large extent, subsided. And that was driven all by American policy. Clearly there were issues of instability within the country, but the rampage of the war and the complete instability in the population and the decimation of rural areas, which forced population movements of enormous scale, was a direct result of American policy.
Arthur Helton: You know, I wonder if in the course of our conversation over the last few days, if we haven’t almost irrefutably established that whatever impulses there are to generosity in American immigration and refugee policy, there also exist less-benign motives than the ones we proclaim on July 4. (laughter)
Utrice Leid: You could take a vote right here, Arthur, we’d all raise our hands and say “I”.
Arthur Helton: I suppose if you had to look at one defining event for this century, in terms of refugee policy, it would be the demise, if not the final end of the Cold War. Refugee policy used to be a political game. Refugees were the enemies of our enemies. We helped them and they, by publicly rejecting their governments and embracing ours, helped us. Today, the ideas are smaller, the circumstances are more situational, alliances switch back and forth a little more easily, and so we have a refugee policy that has wandered astray from the foreign policy imperative that it once enjoyed, and which was once probably its inspiration to generosity. So the question is how to be generous in a post-Cold War setting when the incentive to generosity may no longer be there. Is the Cold War completely over? I’m reminded, of Cuban baseball players still apparently come out in groups of nine, as far as I can tell, so there still is an element of the Cold War left. I thought Felix you might want to touch upon the new measures of un-generosity, these expedited removal procedures, people who come into airports, Beverly, you mentioned this procedure, brief interviews and people are removed swiftly to places of origin. As Felix mentioned, this was part of a set of tools that Congress gave the executive branch to deal with unauthorized immigration. It was an attempt by immigrant restrictionists in Congress, who saw asylum as being used or abused as a back-door to immigration, to control immigration. These new expedited removal procedures, expanded detention capacities, a cottage industry of privatized detention facilities for non-citizens, have sprung up in the United States. Upstate New York, in Batavia, has a new detention center that just opened. New York City has its well known Walcenhut facility, a contract detention facility. I suppose these points should be born in mind to some extent, tempering your optimism, Felix, about the current situation. It’s a story that is still tinged with clearly some restrictive elements, I would submit.
Felix Cardona: Yeah, I think you’re right, in fact they recently had investigated one of the private detention facilities that was being used for a good period of time in the New Jersey district, the New Jersey detention facility, and they found it was absolutely abhorrent conditions that existed there. So I think we are seeing that and I think that what we’re seeing...and again, I think it started with the failed campaign of Governor Wilson, Governor Pete Wilson or California, who I think brought the whole restrictionist mode back to center-stage in American political debate, and one of the major...I remember hearing him say this once when I was out in California...one of the major images that he would paint in people’s minds was “We’ve got this frontier, and it’s being over-run, and because it’s being over-run that’s why we’ve got crime, that’s why we’ve got excessive this, we’ve got problems with the highways,” he would attribute every possible problem that his government and the state of California couldn’t solve was somehow attributable to immigrants entering the state of California. And of course he never raised the fact that prior to that he had supported rather expedited procedure for the entry of migrants who would work in the large agricultural businesses that his supporters were running, that is many of his campaign contributors that run these huge farm conglomerates in California import cheap labor across the border for temporary purposes, pay them terrible wages, have them in terrible conditions, and make huge profits off of this. There is a certain level of political hypocrisy in the American debate as well, but I think what has happened is these images that have been painted...and of course that in California that culminated in Proposition 187 and there were even proposals of eliminating the essential, the accepted standard that citizens exist by virtue of their birth in the United States or by naturalization, and then there was talk of “Well, maybe if the parents are undocumented we should say that the child who is born in the United States should no longer have citizenship status.” So even that was tossed around at one point. And I think that was a low point of the debate. And I don’t think it’s quite that low at this stage. But I think what happened was, as Arthur was referring to before, I think that sort of moved the legislative apparatus so that we created a series of administrative and legal structures that operate with an efficiency, or on paper appear to operate with a wrath that we would not have imagined in the worst days of the Cold War when they were out to get Central Americans out of this country. I mean at least then we didn’t have expedited removal proceedings. We had many instances where we could....where there was unfairness in the process, we could re-open and make motions and force the judges to reconsider what they had done or appeal and have that judge removed. I mean there were all kinds of maneuvers that were available to us to ensure the due process and what they’ve done...they’ve toned down the debate so the debate has subsided in terms of the use of rhetoric, anti-immigrant rhetoric. That has been reduced. But in that quiet, one might say, they’ve slipped through these very restrictive immigration procedures and legal systems that we would have absolutely been appalled at ten years ago. And even members of congress, I think, would have been appalled at those structures ten years ago. And what was incredible was that these reforms, so-called reforms, these restrictive reforms, passed with relative ease, were supported by many of those that we consider to be stalwart liberals and pro-civil rights and was signed by a Democratic President in a grand compromise that apparently, he was told, would ensure his re-election. So there’s some, one might say, some expediency to some of this as well, rather than principle. But I think it is quite true, that I think we’re dealing with a rather....sort of a paradoxical kind of environment right now. I think we have, we do have, a system in place that permits large numbers to enter and I think, depending on the region of the country you’re in, those numbers are received with, more or less, greater or lesser generosity. I think New York may be a special case. I don’t think most of the country is reflective of New York. I think we’re sort of, not to be, not to pat ourselves on the back, but I think we do have sort of a different approach to immigration than the rest of the country, perhaps L.A. being the exception.
Arthur Helton: We established that in our first program as a matter of fact. Before moving on, I have a question for you, Beverlee. I can’t resist, since he’s running for Senate now. Chuck Schumer was actually quite engaged with this immigration issue. He’s one of these strange bed-fellow figures that Felix was referring to, a liberal, staunchly embracing liberal values, who, however, was one of the key actors in terms of imposing these restrictions on asylum in Congress. An interesting combination. Now Beverlee, you have something to say, but I wanted to first pose a question. Felix touched on this, you touched on this. There is an element of this “New Frontier”, where we have refugees who are accepted into the country, but not offered sufficient material assistance. Integration programs and torture rehabilitation programs have been cut. We have a relatively generous refugee policy. In order to maintain it, money has been cut in other areas – one of these areas is assistance programs. What can you tell us about this new trend, what I would call a sort of social darwinism that’s being applied to these arriving refugees. Are we, in effect, saying to refugees, “Make it here if you can.”?
Beverlee Bruce: Well, first of all I’d like to say, as I look at it there’s always been selective generosity, and we haven’t been as generous to all categories of individuals as we have to others. And I also think the whole question of detention as a deterrent is a very singular concern, that those of us who are advocates voice. And I do think that this whole question of assuming... I have to say, I’m an anthropologist, and so I find it very difficult for us to assume that we have all of the answers to other people’s problems. For example, the whole question of victims of torture, that is a very serious issue, but in a way it’s becoming, as Arthur has pointed out, a cottage industry, almost anybody can sign up to treat victims of torture. Frequently re-settled refugees are in communities of color where the resources are very limited to begin with. There’s absolutely no discussion among and between population groups and so relationships are exacerbated and tensions are created, which I find unconscionable. There is enough social science research for us to know how to integrate newcomers into our society. There is a meanness of spirit, if you will, that is operating around the country, which I find very upsetting when you see that the Dow is doing so well, we keep talking about how the economy is booming, and yet there are certain people who are just outside the sphere of prosperity. And it concerns me in terms of the whole question of education, the question of national identity and participation. I think about the infamous McVeigh, who is representative of the alienated population we tend to ignore. We are so busy looking at other countries and other issues, and other problems, we do not look at the tinderboxes that we are creating for ourselves. And while we are a moral leader I think the fact that when we ignore our moral obligations it means that we are less prepared to deal with eventual possibilities in our own society and that’s one of the things that I am so concerned about. If anything happens anywhere - it can happen everywhere - and I think we forget the World Trade Center, I think we forget Oklahoma, I think we forget what happens when we don’t integrate populations into the ideal of America that we celebrate on the 4th of July. I don’t think that what we see happening needs to happen but we have to be very clear about these issues and talk about why it is we allow our politicians in our name - I’m a Californian, who is not pleased by what’s going on there - to take away the legacy of a very dynamic country. I mean as we travel around the world and for all the complaints we have about what’s going on, America still offers the most opportunity. I had a very interesting conversation with two immigrants in California, two men from Central America who have been in the country twenty years, who talked about the discrimination they face as dark Americans. But by the time we ended the conversation, their commitment was to America and to a better life for their children. So whatever the complaints are it’s because we know that it can be better and that it should be better. We should not allow a president who is concerned about reelection to waffle on something as important as people being able to come here and have a better life.
Utrice Leid: Well, let’s take a break right here and we’ll come back shortly and continue this conversation on refugee issues with Beverlee Bruce and Felix Cardona and, of course, co-host Arthur Helton right after this.
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Utrice Leid: You’re listening to WBAI 99.5 FM in New York. I’m Utrice Leid and Arthur Helton and we are co-hosting a series on immigration. Our guests in the studio are Beverlee Bruce who is a Program Director at the Social Science Research Council and chairs the Board of Directors of the Women’s Committee for Refugee Women, and Children, and Felix Cardona, professor of public policy and legal studies at the City University of New York.
Arthur Helton: Utrice, I wanted to pick up for a moment on a question you posed before our break on the ways in which our refugee policy more generally can be used as a substitute for a higher, a more justice oriented policy or even a more direct political policy. Historically, you could point to the Hungarian refugees in the 1950s. There was no interest at that point on the part of the West in intervening in Hungary despite the calls of those who were in Hungary and the response then was to receive people as they fled. Indochina in the 1970s, after a withdrawal of US forces. The refugees were considered US allies, and the US was expected to honor this fact by offering asylum. In the Soviet Union - when there was a Soviet Union - it was even a more careful minuet in the sense that it was a human rights debate about the right to leave and freedom of movement of people. And the unwritten agreement was we will accept as refugees needy individuals if you let them leave. That worked for a while until too many people actually were able to leave and then we backed off a bit on that offer. But I think you should see refugee policy almost always as a substitute for something more fundamental and direct. It’s highly remedial and highly instrumental in that sense. This is in some ways the modern refugee approach; rather than to take a strong political or even military position in a place like Bosnia and Herzegovina, what you do is deploy humanitarian workers. You try to feed people and you try to assist them in the midst of conflict. This poses great dilemmas because, of course, it can never be completely successful. Perhaps two hundred thousand people died in that circumstance, in Bosnia mainly innocent civilians. And it also puts at risk aid workers who find themselves in the literal midst of violent, deadly conflicts – conflicts they had absolutely no role in creating. You see this when aid agencies try to work in places like Somalia before the military deployment there or in other situations of great danger. Humanitarian aid is used to compensate for a lack of political will in international community. We are now at the point where many voluntary agencies like the International Rescue Committee on whose board Beverlee sits often feel themselves misused as a substitute for broader military or political responses from the international community. Today it’s Kosovo and what will happen there. There are a handful of voluntary agencies on the ground including the International Rescue Committee, and what will the international community do there? I don’t think you should be surprised, and you probably weren’t, that refugee policy or asylum policy is used as a substitute for more fundamental and structural changes.
Beverlee Bruce: I’m always amazed by Arthur’s analysis because he is quite right. One of the terrible dilemmas faced in the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda was the whole question of aid agencies having to deal with the Interhamwe who had infiltrated the refugee population and the IRC, I am very pleased to say, left one of the refugee areas because of the moral dilemma of really dealing with the perpetrators of the genocide who were holding two million people hostage. But then the question really is addressed to the international community and its lack of political will because UNHCR says well, how do you think...
Utrice Leid: You know you’re flinging around...
Beverlee Bruce: Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, yes it’s one of the things I said...
Utrice Leid: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Beverlee Bruce: Yes, please forgive me. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees did comment that her staff is not trained to take on military conflict and so the question becomes who is responsible for making the distinction between those who were the military and who were the refugees requiring assistance. Until people really assume responsibility for those kinds of issues in a very fundamental way aid workers will be increasingly at risk and one of the things people have to think about is security. And when I talk to students at historically black colleges and universities about the possibility of their working in refugee related fields because we’re not represented there, one of the things they ask me is about the danger associated with such an occupation. But people who want to do good should be in a position to be able to do that without having to watch their back as we would say.
Utrice Leid: I’m glad you raised the question of the international community as well because supposedly there are in place such things as international conventions on human rights, one which would compel, say, the United States and other signatories to recognize genocide which the president himself admitted the United States was slow to call what was going on in Rwanda and other parts of the world, but specifically there a genocidal situation. The recognition of genocide compels the signatories to these conventions to move very differently from these concessions that we were talking about earlier and respond instead in the ways that you were talking about Arthur.
Arthur Helton: Very much so. The terrible dilemma is presented because you have a document that you have agreed to that defines out of the terrible experience of the Second World War something like genocide, and then you have Cambodia, and later Bosnia and then Rwanda as leading candidates for characterization as meeting that legal standard. And as you rightly say, governments recoil because they’re concerned that by simply calling these events genocide, they will be seen as having a responsibility to do something about it. Indeed this is the way the genocide convention is drafted to impose a duty to prevent, to ameliorate genocide. It’s the characteristic human rights dilemma - you have majestic principles reflected in documentation and very difficult enforcement problems, to the point where political considerations often become paramount. And you see this all throughout the efforts in the international human rights movement to implement these lofty objectives and aspirations, some of which are binding obligations but nevertheless mediated through political filters. This is exactly the debate that’s going on today in Rome about the International Criminal Court and what role it should play, for example, in addressing those who abuse or kill aid workers for example. But it is among the policy disconnections that I think characterize this field and it is a central one. Also, it is not hard to identify large numbers of needy, abused people who are in danger around the world. Certainly in the former Soviet Union, former Yugoslavia, and many parts of Africa today. There are literally millions of persons who are at imminent risk and in very marginal circumstances, yet they are not part of our refugee admissions program which is driven by other considerations. And I don’t know, Felix, if this is what was contained in that teasing word you used “questionable”? But maybe you could expound on that a little.
Felix Cardona: Yeah, I think that’s right, I think you hit the nail right on the head. I think American refugee policy has two sides to it, two elements. One is the numbers that are assigned to refugees by Congress and sent to the president and then the others are the asylum process by which individuals who are fleeing persecution into the United States in an attempt to gain protection. I think if you look at the numbers historically, most of the overwhelming majority of refugees admitted to the United States even entering post Cold War period have been from the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe or now the various pieces of what was then the Soviet Union. The smallest numbers have invariably come from Africa or from Latin America. The only exception in Latin America would have been Cuba which is a special case in and of itself. But for the most part American policy is largely driven by two things and I think it will continue to be driven by two things. one will be the vestiges of what certain members of Congress consider to be worthy members of our society. I think it was a comment made by Pat Buchanan...
Arthur Helton: I think he said Zulu, as a matter of fact.
Felix Cardona: May have been Zulu, yeah, he may have used that term. But I think that gives you an idea and I think that drives... I think when they sit and they do the numbers part of that is driving the debate. I don’t think they see it quite in the stark contrast that Pat Buchanan paints it but I think there is sort of a preconceived notion of who are the deserving few because after all the numbers for initial refugee entries aren’t that many. May get a hundred thousand, a hundred and twenty thousand. in terms of what - I just want to pick up on something Arthur mentioned before - I think the problem that’s operating in terms of the lack of enforcement with international conventions is that we have very lofty international conventions. We don’t have the mechanisms to carry them out and even when we have the systems in place to do something about it, I think absent the very strongly defined interest, ideological interest that existed during the cold war, each piece of the puzzle, the various factions of the alliances do what they think is in their interest. And I think what you saw in Bosnia was each piece of NATO deciding well maybe not. Initially the Europeans said we can handle this and of course their response was we don’t want to do anything because it’s too expensive, it’s too bloody and after all they’re southern Europeans, they’re not like us northerners. So there’s a certain prejudicial element playing within Europe itself and then of course at the end they finally accepted American intervention. But it required intervention of massive bombing campaigns, it required an influx of American forces there. Similar thing happened in Somalia - everyone wanted to do something but nobody wanted to do it, everyone knew something had to be done but nobody wanted to do it. We don’t have the international structures in place that can effectuate this and so it depends on what the political winds are in the United States and what the political winds are in Europe. And if they’re operating against intervention, nothing is going to be done or something as Arthur referred to it’s going to be somewhat like pablum(?). It’s going to be something stop gap measures. And I think part of the reason you see these efforts at investments in humanitarian efforts right at the source is because I think for the Europeans anyway, that was an important way of controlling the outflow of refugees. If you feed them and you clothe them and you put up tents for them right there where they are, right outside the bombing, the areas where they’re bombing or the cities that are being strafed with bombs, you can make sure that they won’t move into France, they won’t move into Germany, they won’t move into Spain. The Europeans saw that as a very useful stop gap measure. I think we saw it in the same way at the end of the Gulf War when we experienced the huge outflow of Kurdish refugees. I think if we had set up tents and we threw food over through airborne supplies, we at least knew that they won’t be going any further, they’d stay somewhere, they wouldn’t be moving too much. The other piece of this is with respect to Africa. I think Africa is very much more intractable than the Bosnia situation because if you look at the Rwanda genocide you saw the government that was perpetrating, initially supporting the genocide having several months earlier received large shipments of armaments from the French. And what you see there are the vestiges of colonial dependency and the vestiges of military apparatuses and bureaucracies that have been responsive to outside influences and, of course, the sale of arms is one way that major western countries keep part of their economy moving. and the French are no different from the Americans or the British and they were selling arms to the Hutu regime several months before the outbreak of the genocide. And I think that’s an important consideration; if we’re going to have these kinds of conflicts I think some responsibility rests with those who are providing the vehicles for the exercise of these tragedies.
Arthur Helton: There’s no doubt that there is a framework problem as you rightly pointed out Felix. But I think we should keep in mind that there are still certain circumstances where state interests will prevail and frameworks depending on the circumstances. I’m thinking particularly where you have a migration or refugee emergency and you have a highly capable state like the United States for example who could deploy its military assets and project forces to do things like intercept Haitian boat people, and ultimately to even deploy military forces in Haiti as a response to the prospect of a migration or refugee emergency. Now, this exercise was not lost on the Italians when they did the same thing in respect to Albanian boat people a few years ago.
Utrice Leid: I should mention that our mayor was the architect of the Haitian anti-refugee policy.
Beverlee Bruce: But not only that setting up a base on Guantanamo so that they could have a safe haven.
Felix Cardona: But they were narrowly based. I think those instances are instances when governments saw themselves between a rock and a hard place. Either they received your warning numbers and take care of them or they invent a stop gap measure. But in terms of a comprehensive kind of policy which the Europeans are certainly in a position to invent you seem to have, we seem to have a policy backed in...
Arthur Helton: I think that’s absolutely right. Now we must turn to what people call the CNN effect all the time. The framework is the media and so you have pictures in Somalia and then you have a lot of pressure put on the US for some kind of intervention. You have pictures in Bosnia. I suppose people should be grateful that there aren’t very good pictures yet in Kosovo. I think President Milosevic has learned that CNN is not an ally in this circumstance so there is no access by the media to Kosovo. So all you have are print stories and you don’t get much of a reaction at this point, despite the Serbian crackdown and displacement in Kosovo,. I wanted for a moment to turn to a point that Felix made and maybe ask you, Beverlee, to comment on this. We’re talking to some extent about the limited circumstances in which refugees - some of that 50 million forcibly displaced around the world - can be selected and invited into the United States, no more than say a hundred thousand per year out of that total. And if I heard you correctly Felix, you were arguing that there is a whole array of considerations some of which are not very benign, this was the Pat Buchanan assimilation quotation. And I just wanted to ask Beverlee if there is another side to this issue that is worth discussion. People have pointed to the difficulties faced by the hill people from Laos, the Hmong, or there is now consideration being given to resettling mixed marriage Hutus and Tutsis from the Great Lakes region of Africa. I don’t know where they would go at this point and I don’t know what the plans are. But particularly in this period of ungenerosity, if you will, in terms of social support, is there another side to this issue or is this simply a bogus question.
Beverlee Bruce: I don’t think it’s bogus, I don’t think it’s biased, I think it’s real. The figures for Africans is 7,000 per year; we never meet that. The Congressional Black Caucus and other groups have addressed this issue. I’m always ambivalent and I’m ambivalent simply because of the Buchanan factor and that is the whole question of how do you bring people in and integrate them in an environment that is supportive but I think that also begs the question. And so my take is that it’s both/and, not either/or. It isn’t just the numbers and meeting those numbers but that you provide supportive environments for individuals to thrive in. And not being a lawyer, I would say...
Arthur Helton: That’s good...
(Laughter)
Beverlee Bruce: What I am saying is that lawyers tend to think in terms of legal remedies and I think there is more to the equation. As a social scientist and a humanitarian aid worker, I think about things that people can do on the ground, I think of social institutions such as churches and of civil society and of ways in which we can make a difference at the level of the grassroots in terms of welcoming the stranger. This kind of focus requires a great deal of work because the CNN effect does not look at the communities to which these resettled refugees are being sent. It just looks at the horror of conflict and does not follow what happens in the post-conflict situation, and it’s really the aftermath that is so important. But it would seem to me that we need to organize support for increased numbers and to see to it that our country lives up to what we thought it was when we learned the pledge of allegiance.
Arthur Helton: I have detected among the voluntary agencies a kind of bashfulness on this issue because of the costs and refugees are cited as the one category in the immigration debate that is not very profitable. Refugees drain funds through their heavy reliance on social assistance programs. Why the reticence, why not the assertion of values? What are the voluntary agencies concerned about?
Beverlee Bruce: Many organizations are into the bottom line and that concern impacts on the moral questions that motivated us initially. There is competition among and between voluntary agencies though some commit themselves to their mission statement more than others. However, the Conrad Hilton humanitarian prize is a breakthrough. The prize is awarded annually and the selected organization receives a check for 1 million dollars. The award is a good thing because there needs to be that acknowledgement of people who maintain the commitment with which they began.
Utrice Leid: In terms of strategy, what are some of the pragmatic approaches that could be taken on the matter of refugee issues that are reasonably doable and reasonably achievable and reasonably successful?
Arthur Helton: Well you could start out with the question of coverage. We should actually recognize that refugees are a larger population than is now defined internationally as simply those who left their home countries and have a well founded fear of persecution upon return. There should be a more calibrated response to other persons in need and in fact even the United States has invented something called Temporary Protected Status which it uses to deal with people who cannot return; it was recently granted for people from Kosovo, for example. We should look carefully to see whether procedures are fair. We should have realistic minimum standard procedures that countries should be required to meet. Some countries have virtually no procedures in terms of determining who merits refugee protection and assistance; others have inadequate procedures and the recent developments in the United States risk falling below minimum international standards. I’m talking about brief encounters at airports and detentions. And I think we should pay more attention to how these questions are determined. In this area too much discretion has been left to governments and the safeguards for individual asylum seekers are not always present. That’s an important area to work on and a priority recognized in the legal cultures of many governments in question.
Utrice Leid: Felix what do you think?
Felix Cardona: I think Arthur raises a very important point. I think even if we had ideal standards or we tried to create better procedural measures, I think one of the things we have is a culture, a bureaucratic culture within the current government agency that does not operate in a manner that’s consistent with the protective measures that refugee policy was designed to promote. So there is that cultural factor. I think the other problem is that if we look at the integration of refugees or immigrants generally, I think there is a disconnect between the federal government’s position, the refugee policy as it is implemented by the government or as it should be implemented we might say, and the localities who have to deal with the numbers that come in. Federal government basically, once they come in, there are dollars for refugee resettlement but for the most part if you talk to any state or local official they think it’s inadequate. And so that breeds a certain amount of dissension within the policy and I think that you saw that happen most recently in Florida where the governor successfully convinced even the mainstream Cuban community to oppose further entries by Cubans because it would destabilize the economy or we wouldn’t have the money to resettle them or they’d impose excessive cost on the educational apparatus. So I think there is a real disconnect between federal policy and local policy and I think with respect to the voluntary agencies which Beverly referred to before, I think what has happened unfortunately with some of these voluntary agencies is that they have become I guess voluntary bureaucracies, for lack of a term. I think they’ve lost a sense of mission and I think they are locked into an organizational mindset that is not too distinct from a government agency. And I think when you have that when an agency exists foremost for its own existence, perpetuating its existence I think it may compromise its mission and I think that’s happened to some of them and I think that may be why they’ve had a rather tepid response in some instances. But in terms of integrating refugees and immigrants and in terms of creating a refugee policy or resettlement policy that’s more in the spirit of what the international conventions want, I think we’ve got to look at what’s happening structurally in terms of the budgets. The educational system is the most important instrument for integrating new arrivals and it is being decimated; it is in terrible shape in New York. We abandoned it for about thirty years; it’s not only a question of not having enough teachers, of having class sizes that are too large, and inadequate outcomes but you’ve got the very structures, the building themselves need to be repaired, they’re falling apart. That’s the same case in California, in Florida. We’re having 20,000 students a year into the school system in New York City. A large percentage of them are children or either immigrants or children of immigrants or refugees. We simply do not have the capacity, we don’t have the budgets to do what we need to do to effectively integrate all of them. And I think that largely falls or should fall on federal policy and federal policy is operating in a reverse mode, it is delegating more responsibility to the states and localities. You saw that in welfare reform and part of welfare reform was to precisely take the responsibility away from the federal government. The difference here is that this is a clearly defined federal responsibility and yet it is not being sufficiently supported by federal government.
Utrice Leid: Beverlee?
Beverlee Bruce: I think the churches are an important resource. Many of them are involved in refugee resettlement and immigration work and in terms of the black churches refugees have become of interest to them. I’ve spoken to a number of groups who want to make a difference in the communities where African refugees are resettled. And I think while we work on the federal government and our legal community to set the structures in place, there are things that people at the grassroots can do, should do, will do, and must do.
Utrice Leid: Well, let’s get an overview of where we are so far. Arthur how far have we come with regard to the topics we have discussed and are still discussing. And what do you think so far of the opinions offered today, what do you make of them?
Arthur Helton: Well, I think we have done a good job in looking at the humanitarian foundations of the refugee regime and the system of asylum. We have identified refugees as having special needs and requiring special attention in terms of the full flay of immigration policy. The point has been made and we’ve underscored the humanitarian foundation of the refugee character. Now, I think we’ve also noted that that foundation principle has been distorted from time to time in the eyes of policy makers through the optic of foreign policy and even domestic immigration policy. Oftentimes refugees, because they are a relatively needy group, in terms of integrative assistance, are seen by members of Congress or the executive branch as more of a burden, than of a problem which needs a solution. Refugees are thus vulnerable not only objectively but in the eyes of our policy makers as well. We have explored the tension that exists between the human rights imperative that underlies the refugee character and refugee law. These are individuals who are at risk of serious harm perpetrated by states against their own citizenry or forces within states that either cannot or will not be controlled by the powers that be. And it’s oftentimes in this context that issues of gender related persecution, particularly in the traditionally private spheres in which people lead their lives, is more and more often being recognized as a basis for granting refugee protection. This includes female genital mutilation and sexual orientation. These are doctrinal developments that reflect developments in the application of international human rights principles and imperatives. On the other hand, we’ve also identified the sovereign prerogatives, the government’s interests in terms of foreign policy and domestic immigration control issues, and ways in which these human rights imperatives are mediated and sometimes overwhelmed by the interests and actions of states. No area in immigration policy seems to be as vulnerable to this outcome as refugee policy.
Utrice Leid: Well, we’ll take another break and come back to your questions and comments at 212-209-2900, that’s 212-209-2900. We’ll come back and continue this conversation with Beverlee Bruce and Felix Cardona and Arthur Helton and myself right after this.
(Music)
Utrice Leid: You’re listening to WBAI 99.5 FM in New York. I’m Utrice Leid, the program is Talk Back and today, the third in a series on immigration, today concentrating on refugee issues. Our guests in the studio are Beverlee Bruce and Felix Cardona; my co-host is Arthur Helton and you are on the air. The number to call is 212-209-2900. Hello...hello?
Caller: Hello?
Utrice Leid: Yes, you’re on the air.
Caller: Oh, I have a question.
Utrice Leid: Who’s calling?
Caller: My name is Tracy.
Utrice Leid: Thank you Tracy.
Caller: This is in regard to the welfare system. There seems to be a bias of a particular group when you have the European refugees coming in as compared to other minority refugees coming. Can somebody explain that to me?
Arthur Helton: Well, the bias is not purely against minority refugees and in favor of European refugees. All refugees are entitled to increasingly limited but set forms of integrative assistance. So all refugees who are admitted to the U.S. are eligible for certain forms of public assistance. Now, that’s different from the situation of legal immigrants who are now prohibited from receiving certain forms of public assistance, social security, SSI, food stamps until they become citizens. So, the distinction then, is between categories, not nationalities. It just turns out that most of the refugees who apply for asylum are from Eastern Europe and not from, for example, Africa.
Utrice Leid: Also I think what Tracy was hinting at is that it’s a local fight really in which some communities and she was being I think just oblique about it but there have been great tensions in particular communities especially where we have Hasidic Jews who are said to have gotten preferential treatment with regard to public assistance made available to them and their families. In some cases intic(?) centers were closed completely in order to process this community and it has become a source of tension. But I see it separate and apart from the major issue we’re talking about. We’re talking here in terms of her question on a local matter that fits into the whole racial dislocation going on in the city where people because of the politics of race are pitted against each other to scramble over ever dwindling resources. And this is what keeps the tensions going and the news media very happy. Hello, you’re on the air, this is WBAI... Hello? Okay, we’re not being heard there. Hello, you’re on the air.
Caller: Hello, good afternoon Utrice.
Utrice Leid: Hi, who’s calling?
Caller: My name is Bob calling from New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Utrice Leid: Thank you Bob.
Caller: I’ve been listening these past few days about the immigration stuff, it’s very interesting. But I have a question about something one of the people there spoke about. He mentioned that people are coming over and, how would I put it, this issue of genital mutilation of females you know and that it should be looked at as people looking to escape from oppression. And I was wondering, you know, little boys are genitally mutilated here every day and I’m wondering why that isn’t as much of an issue. I felt that when Congress passed that legislation against female genital mutilation here it’s really more of a slap at Muslims and Africans than it was a real concern with the genitals of any human being. I was just wondering if anyone agrees with that.
Beverlee Bruce: That has been one interpretation but those of us who are anthropologists think in terms of peoples’ cultures. However, we are talking about women who do not want to participate in the circumcision process and they have a credible fear that they will be persecuted if they don’t. That is what we’re talking about. If there are individuals who don’t want their little boys mutilated, as you call it, they have a choice.
Utrice Leid: Thank you Bob. Hello, you’re on the air, this is WBAI.
Caller: Hi, it’s Sandra.
Utrice Leid: Hi Sandra.
Caller: I have been listening all week. It’s wonderful, it’s better than all the graduate classes I had at NYU on American civilization. A two part question. This country doesn’t have such a hot record on letting refugees in. I remember Jews from World War 2. I went to SUNY Oswego when it was a teachers’ college from 1956 to 1960 which is on Lake Ontario and nobody mentioned that boatloads of Jews were interned there for well over a year and I was there not that many years later and I didn’t know that until just a couple of years ago. And the second part is I have to ask - I’m now disabled - I have to ask all of my sisters and brothers of all ages around the world, given the amount of discrimination we disabled face in this country and also around the world what are the odds of a disabled refugee or immigrant in recent years getting into this country. I am thinking specifically also of disabled people, disabled as a result of land mines, other wars. So I’d like a response about that. We’re not popular any place but...so I’ll just listen. Thanks.
Utrice Leid: Thank you.
Arthur Helton: It’s an interesting and an excellent point. In terms of people who are disabled, for the most part they would really not have access to the US admissions program. There are some international resettlement programs that are targeted specifically to especially vulnerable groups, which include disabled people.The Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees administers those resettlement programs. Oftentimes people are received in the Nordic countries or other countries that have made commitments to resettle selected numbers of people who are disabled or have problems along those lines. Now, US policy recently confronted this question in the admission of a number of HIV positive Haitians from Guantanamo. They were admitted finally as refugees but very quietly and without a great deal of fanfare. It was a real dilemma for the administration who did not want to raise the profile of this group in terms of admissions in order to prompt opposition by immigration restrictionists, particularly in south Florida. Refugees are all the things that everybody in the world are in the sense that they are combatants, they are innocent, they are benevolent, they are criminals, they are disabled, etcetera. And to some extent refugee arrangements have to account for all of the things that the world’s population has to deal with. But you are quite right, countries are a little choosy and the US admissions program is selective in that sense, perhaps undeservedly so, and perhaps there should be more efforts to be inclusive as well. And that would not be a big reform. The US was a leader in ungenerosity in terms of refugee arrangements in the inter war period and at the time of the Second World War, witness the images of the Saint Louis and the voyage of the damned, which came to policy makers after the Second World War that led to the establishment of an international refugee regime and ultimately to the US becoming a party to that regime. The images now, of course, are different, with the notion of being overwhelmed by first asylum emergencies, and that’s why you see policy makers becoming more resistant to refugee rescue.
Utrice Leid: Thank you Sandra for your question. Hello, you’re on the air, this is WBAI.
Caller: Thank you.
Utrice Leid: Thank you.
Caller: I’m sorry. My name is Abdi, I’m from south Jersey.
Utrice Leid: Thank you Abdi.
Caller: It’s a very interesting discussion. US refugee policy - by the way I am a refugee too, I had the experience - US policy towards refugees was really selective. Even though I really appreciate the opportunity given to me by the US government and the United States people, but still when I see the overall crisis situation all over the world it [unclear] on the world foreign policy which is Cold War. And based on the crisis situation, when we have a crisis situation, let’s say prior to the crisis there were genuine refugee who had been, who had legitimate causes, who has been languishing in a lot of refugee camps but they never did give him a chance to put forward their cases to have a way to resettle. I’ll give you three scenarios. Number 1, crisis in Somalia, number 2, in 1980s, 1977 to 1980s, crisis in Ethiopia, and also crisis in Gulf War. In the first scenario where the state was in a certain way of collapse, when the Somali state was collapsing, then we had a humongous pour of refugee coming across the borders of countries bordering Somalia which is Kenya and Ethiopia where US and other countries, other European countries or other countries at all decided to resettle people to metropolis [unclear] to western countries. That scenario shows you in a situation with very public huge crisis you have huge number of people who are learned, intellectual [unclear] people who had certain input to the circumstance of the settling countries. So that situation is what you call an opportunity to grab a huge amount of people who are beneficial to the western countries. So that situation is an example where it is really guided in terms of the foreign policy objective. My question is to the panel do you see any other scenario - people are saying humanitarian reasons to help refugees - but do you see any other reasons why a lot of countries are really willing(?) to resettle refugee population all over the world.
Utrice Leid: Thank you very much for your question. Well, Felix all eyes are looking at you.
Felix Cardona: I think he raised a number of interesting comments. I think if I understood the thrust of one of his remarks which was that perhaps there should be other considerations including the level of preparation, whether or not the individual is professionally trained, etc. that is beyond the humanitarian concern of admitting a refugee. I think one has to be very careful with that because we don’t want to strip countries who’re already in an extremely problematic situation of their best and brightest and then allow that country to flounder further. I think we have to be very careful about that and I think it’s very clear that part of American policy outside of refugee policy tends to attract those who are capable, those who can make use of their skills in the United States, in the American economy. and an ongoing concern in both the countries where these individuals are trained and to some extent for policy makers in the United States is that you may in fact diminish the skills and the professional elite that you need to get these countries operating and functional. So I think one has to be very careful with that.
Arthur Helton: Another point the caller made that resonated with me was the problem with refugee camps per se. People who are languishing for many years without a solution to their plight and in need of a home. If you look at refugee camps as a highly abnormal situation, oftentimes rife with violence, including sexual violence, these are societies that have been torn asunder and put together artificially in very stressful and difficult circumstances. You really have to wonder whether or not refugee camps in and of themselves are an insult to human rights.
Beverlee Bruce: I would like to comment on that. I agree with Arthur, but there are possibilities. The Women’s Commission has called for greater attention to the problems in refugee camps. I think that they can be minimized if not eliminated. And it is an opportunity to provide skills training. In other words, a refugee camp doesn’t have to be a situation of languishing. I do think it is a good idea to dismantle them but while they’re there positive activities can take place.
Utrice Leid: Thank you Abdi for your question and your comment. Hello, you’re on the air, this is WBAI.
Caller: Yes, Utrice thank you for taking my call.
Utrice Leid: Thanks. Who’s calling?
Caller: This is Maria from Brooklyn.
Utrice Leid: Thank you Maria.
Caller: My question for the panel is when a legal citizen gets the citizenship, there are a number of things that are being done in the immigration that are really almost illegal and there is no way to call and appeal this problem. It’s like a group of, it’s a mafia, there is no way... To make it short, when I went to get my citizenship I read the whole book first of all, the whole American history only to go there and to be asked how many stars are there on the flag. I mean this is an insult for one’s... Anyway the other one is they ask you if you are a member of a communist party, if you are this and that. What does my past have to do with my present citizenship. And the third is they’re asking if I’m going to be a citizen I should be willing to kill and die for the United States and I told the lady who was asking me these questions well, if it is necessary I could die or I can share my kidneys or something but I would definitely not kill anybody no matter whether I am a citizen or not. Then she closed my document, they sent me away. One whole year I have to run up and down, appeal and reappeal and reappeal to get back to the same question and to say yes yes yes I’m willing to kill. Does one have to be a murderer to be an American citizen. Why are they asking this kind of question. I mean are American born citizens required to kill also? Isn’t that a very psychotic question?
Felix Cardona: I think Maria, the part that they are referring to is the part where you have to swear allegiance to the US constitution and if she characterized it in such a manner i.e. that you would have to kill for the American government that was probably an exaggeration. First of all you would be ineligible for the draft under current law so that would be an instance where someone who answers that in the negative may have a problem but for the most part it is an oath and yes, it’s essentially a commitment to stand by the American constitution and that really refers to the draft which would be that you could be inducted in the military service. With respect to the comment about communist party membership, that is a throwback to the Karen(?) Walter act back in the ’50s and several red scares when we had an extremely volatile Cold War and the concern about communists being everywhere including under the president’s bed was a major major issue and took up a great deal of the policy debate in the United States. That is still there and for the most part the question is antiquated, it’s out of place but for some reason the Congress has determined to keep it there and the immigration service has not challenged it.
Utrice Leid: But she’s also pointed out something that we raised in discussion and that is the arbitrary nature of how people interpret your fitness for citizenship. You are there with some jerk in a booth and you get asked these insane questions and told these insane things and your life is literally hanging on this thread of somebody who is not well adjusted asking you questions like this.
Felix Cardona: You’re quite right. And that goes toward the culture of bureaucracy, dealing with a bureaucracy that for the most part has two heads. On the one hand, in a position to restrictively apply American immigration policy and to exclude and deport. And on the other hand it is supposed to serve individuals who want to become citizens like clients and welcome them and assist them in the process. What you have I think is a confusion of mission in that situation. And you also have many individuals there and this is something that she will have to, many individuals there who are not familiar sufficiently, they don’t have sometimes examiners who are sufficiently trained to understand whether an individual is eligible or to ask questions that are perhaps irrelevant to the application. One of the things that she mentioned with respect to the...when she was asked about the exam, there are a series of questions and one of the things that the examiner is supposed to ask, can ask, several questions. Obviously the examiner’s duty is to ask the most obscure question and then say, oh you don’t know that. That’s too bad. But she should know that she can have a rehearing, if the examiner told her she did not pass or if she for whatever reason was denied she can ask for one additional hearing and it may or may not be with the same examiner. So she may find that she has an examiner who’s a saint. The other thing is that one of the reasons why you have so many examiners who may not know precisely what they are doing is that there is a large influx of individuals coming out of both amnesty and because of the several provisions which give you a better reason, for example the recent reform in welfare law make it more attractive to apply for citizenship. And therefore, we have an influx of applications and an insufficient number of trained examiners to process people so you’re going to get these kinds of bizarre instances.
Utrice Leid: Well, we’ve reached the end of our program and I would love to throw it back over to you, Arthur Helton, to basically give us the old benediction so we can come back tomorrow.
Arthur Helton: Well, I think we’ve now provided a real bridge between our earlier discussions this week and for tomorrow. I’m intrigued by the notion of the Immigration and Naturalization Service as a kind of mafia.
(Laughter)
Arthur Helton: I hope we’ll have a chance tomorrow to examine that idea in detail. Now, to help us on that thankless task...
Utrice Leid: We’ll blame Maria.
Arthur Helton: ...we have Peter Kwong who is a Professor of Urban Affairs and Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center in Hunter College and Annie Wilson who is a Program Director at the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. I think tomorrow we will try to bring together some of these threads and images that we’ve been discussing all week long.
Utrice Leid: That’s great. Well, I want to
thank you Beverlee Bruce of the Social Science Research Council and the
Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children. I want to thank you
Felix Cardona of the Public Policy and Legal Studies Department at City
University of New York. Thank you so much for really sharing all this expertise
with us and bringing us along on this discussion, this little journey we
started on Monday. Tune in again tomorrow from 3 to 5 for our closing edition
on immigration and stay tuned for Behind the News with Samori Marksman.
Thanks again. See you manana.
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