from MSNBC<\/a>, described boys aged 10 \u2013 14 in care centers that are probably not massively different than what a group home for American boys would be like, if they needed to scale up the system rapidly and had to deal with the other particular circumstances\u00a0 \u2014 at least I assume that in such cases children are also not allowed to leave the property without supervision.\u00a0 (Of course, for American children, only the very hardest to place are without foster parents, which affects their circumstances greatly as well.)\u00a0 70% are unaccompanied minors, 30% originally arrived with their parents.<\/p>\nAre younger children similarly placed?\u00a0 What about girls?\u00a0 Are they easier to move into foster homes?\u00a0 Was there no pre-existing network of sites because there were significantly fewer teen and pre-teen girls arriving unaccompanied in the first place?<\/p>\n
Is this a new, Trumpian policy?\u00a0 Yes and no.\u00a0 The law is not new \u2014 individuals who cross the border illegally have committed a crime.\u00a0 To the best of my understanding, what is new is that the Trump administration has decided to enforce a law that had previously gone unenforced.<\/p>\n
What happens in ordinary circumstances when Americans who are primary caregivers to children commit crimes?\u00a0 Does a judge make decisions on bail or sentencing that give parents an advantage over nonparents, in terms of their ability to stay out of jail?<\/p>\n
Is this a sign that we\u2019re on a path towards Naziism?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 Look, this is what really irritates me.\u00a0 It\u2019s a trivialization of the Holocaust to suggest that the detention or deportation of illegal immigrants is in any way analogous to the mass murder of the Jews and other undesirables.\u00a0 Even if Trump systematically deported every illegal immigrant, it would not be a \u201cnew Holocaust.\u201d\u00a0 It would not be mass murder.\u00a0 For crying out loud, how can you even claim this is \u201cethnic cleansing\u201d if these people have no legal authorization to live in this country?<\/p>\n
Oh, and incidentally, asylum law as written is about granting refuge for individuals persecuted for specific reasons.\u00a0 Domestic abuse, or high crime rates in the home country, is not a specified reason.<\/p>\n
And this is what really irritates me.<\/p>\n
The progressive Left says they\u2019re all about compromise and being \u201creasonable people\u201d and they say that they indeed want reasonable immigration laws.\u00a0 But they reject every proposal to actually enforce those laws.\u00a0 Deportation brings out a massive hue and cry \u2014 and even with respect to criminals, there are increasing claims that it\u2019s unfair to deport them back to their home countries because that\u2019s unfairly burdening those countries with additional criminals.\u00a0 Enforcement of work authorization requirements or under-the-table employment brings out the objection that it prevents innocent people from earning a living and harms companies who can\u2019t find American workers at the wages they\u2019re willing to pay.\u00a0 (Yes, I am also not a fan of the fact that the same folks who complain that Walmart\u2019s wages are so low that their employees disproportionately use food stamps, are perfectly OK with disproportionately-immigrant-worker employers paying similarly low wages.)\u00a0 Border enforcement or wall-building is unfair because it just causes them to cross in more dangerous ways.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re being essentially told that the only people who ever come to the United States had good reason to, because they were unable to feed their families otherwise (never mind the reports of tremendous cash outlays they make to their smugglers).\u00a0 Hence we have to simply have faith that no one will ever come to this country if it wasn\u2019t truly necessary.\u00a0 We\u2019re being told to trust that abandoning enforcement could not possibly have any ill effects.\u00a0 It\u2019s preposterous.<\/p>\n
Which means we\u2019re in a position similar to that of Germany in dealing with its asylum-claimants, most of whom are ineligible, though the courts are backlogged in assessing individual cases.\u00a0 Unlike here, they don\u2019t have the difficulty that the prior administration widened the grounds for asylum beyond the scope of the law itself.\u00a0 But instead they have the challenge that the flood of migrants destroyed their identity papers and all claimed to be from war-torn Syria, so that the country now needs to employ, among others, experts in dialects to determine whether claimants are actually from the region they claim to be from.\u00a0 But like the U.S., they are also having difficulty taking that last step of actually deporting people.<\/p>\n
Here are a couple differences, though (and apologies for writing from memory):<\/p>\n
in Germany, families are not generally separated; however, they are also not given their permissos<\/em> and sent on their way to await\u00a0a hearing which they may or may not attend depending on whether they themselves believe they have a valid claim as in the U.S.\u00a0 Instead, they live in refugee centers where they are given room and board and a small allowance for personal needs, and from which they complain about the poor conditions.\u00a0 They are not locked in, and there are frequent complaints from townspeople that groups of young asylum-seeking men cause trouble.\u00a0 But they don\u2019t leave and seek to blend into the population, living and working illegally with false papers or under the table, both because, speaking Arabic or Farsi or some other language that\u2019s not as common as Spanish is in the U.S., they can\u2019t easily find a community to disappear into, and because the German system makes it much harder to \u201cdisappear\u201d \u2014 there isn\u2019t the same prevalence of using false ID or working under the table (I assume simply because of much greater enforcement) and even renting an apartment requires registering with the locality.<\/p>\nNow, having said that, it\u2019s not universally true that Germany has \u201csolved\u201d the problem of illegal immigrants, because, after all, the perpetrators of the Koln New Year\u2019s Eve sexual assaults were exactly this sort of young man, denied legal residency but never actually deported, who up to then were known as pickpockets and petty thieves.<\/p>\n
But my bottom line is this:\u00a0 I will be an awful lot more receptive to complaints about \u201ctearing apart families\u201d if those people start offering constructive alternatives.\u00a0 And no, \u201clet\u2019s just open the borders\u201d is not a constructive alternative, and neither is \u201clet\u2019s create a set of laws which we never enforce.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Image:\u00a0\u00a0https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File%3A100203houston_lg.jpg; By U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), www.ice.gov. Please credit by saying \u201cPhoto Courtesy of ICE\u201d. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Here are a smattering of thoughts which I had had good intentions of blogging about in a coherent, sourced manner, but, well, Time is Not My Friend. No, kids are not in cages.\u00a0 The report floating around the internet yesterday, from MSNBC, described boys aged 10 \u2013 14 in care centers that are probably not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":6036,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[463,995],"class_list":["post-9848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-illegal-immigration","tag-immigration-enforcement"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/p>\n