Foreign Policy
Immigrants Serve Abroad While Fighting Deportation At Home
Published November 11, 2009 @ 11:27AM PT
Pfc. Kham Xiong, was one of 11 children of Hmong refugees. He followed in the footsteps of a younger brother and his father, who fought Communists in Laos during the Vietnam War and fled with his family to Thailand, where Kham Xiong was born
Xiong was only 23 when he died in the gunfire at Fort Hood last week.
One bad apple does not represent all apples but it might be hard to gain that wisdom from mainstream media coverage around the Fort Hood tragedy, which gets no awards for racial or religious sensitivity. Today, as we honor our veterans and fallen soldiers, Muslims in the military fear a backlash in return of their service. It is crucial to lay rest to a cloud of xenophobia that threatens the safe existence of immigrants in the military, where they have served proudly since the Revolutionary War.
A newly released timely report from the Immigration Policy Center, Essential to the Fight: Immigrants in the Military, Eight Years After 9/11, highlights the critical role immigrants are playing in today's military. Non-citizens make up 5% of all troops in the U.S. military and since 9-11, over 150 immigrants have been killed while serving. The report notes that "without the contributions of immigrants, the military could not meet its recruiting goals and could not fill its need for foreign-language translators, interpreters and cultural experts."
Some notable statistics from the report:
- As of June 30, 2009, there were 114,601 foreign-born individuals serving in the armed forces, representing 7.91 percent of the 1.4 million military personnel on active duty.
- In Fiscal Year (FY) 2009 alone, 10,505 members of the military were naturalized. Naturalizations of immigrants in the military are at their highest during times of war."
Post Fort Hood: Please Resist Muslim-Bashing
Published November 05, 2009 @ 03:59PM PT
Speculation, anger and hatred is ripe on social networks such as Twitter after the massacre at Fort Hood, Texas that killed at least 12 and injured dozens more.
Tweeples are asserting a 'jihad attack' on one end and incompetent Obama policies on war on the other end.
When I first heard about the attack, my first thought was "let the perpetrator not be a Muslim or person of color." I remember the anti-immigrant, Muslim-bashing that this nation engaged in post-9-11 and how many lives were ruined in the aftermath. Eight years later, a recent Pew research found that 58% of Americans admit Muslims face discrimination in the United States but 38% also see Islam as a violent religion when compared to other religions.
Hope slowly died when Major Malik Nadal Hasan was named as the lone shooter allegedly responsible for the unfortunate incident. If he was White with a name like 'Major Tom Thomson,' his religion or color won't draw any attention. After all, the media did not declare Timothy McVeigh to be a "White Christian Terrorist" but Major Hassan has already been stripped by many of his soldier status and labeled a jihadi. It's sad that in a country where Barack 'Hussein' Obama is President, racism and religious persecution continues to run rampant.
I strongly oppose the many wars that this nation-state has engaged in over the course of our history. At the same time, I also know that in such situations people of color have to be more silent because anything we say can be labeled as 'Anti-American' and used against us. I do ask that we not be silent to any persecution of innocents. I ask everyone to pray (in their own way) for the families of the victims. But also keep in mind and pray for the victims of the unwarranted backlash that may just intensify against Muslims and people of color in this country.
Violence begets violence. Haardik Shubhkaamnaon Sahit.
(Photo Credit: Broken Thoughts)
Institutional Support for Torture Undermines Government's Legitimacy
Published August 25, 2009 @ 08:05PM PT
In case my last post was a little too patriotic for some jaded, worldwise visitors to the blog, I received something upsetting in my inbox today. It was a description from Amnesty International of the ways the U.S. government tortured many innocent men over the past several years, and sometimes children.
I studied human rights in law school. I felt upset and outraged reading Andrew Sullivan's consistent writing on torture back in 2004-05 (I'm sure he wasn't the first). I have represented asylum-seekers, some of whom had experienced unimaginable misery, in the U.S. asylum system for the past three or four years.
But after all this, I only recently came to understand in a deep, personal way the true destructive, dehumanizing impact of torture. Torture takes a person and erases that person. I don't know that I believe in good and evil, but seeing the effects of torture up close is the closest glimpse of evil that I have ever had. I did not until recently understand what torture "meant" in a moral or practical sense.
Reaching that realization and then remembering that the government to which I send part of my income every year to spend on "national defense" has used some of that money to torture human beings is a disturbing place for anyone to arrive. I had thought before that I was distrustful of my government, I had even felt betrayed as I watched events unfold over the last several years. Now thinking about that government and the national community which gives it its raison d'etre, I feel only deadness. I don't know how to reconcile that with the inspiration I have felt watching the nascent Dream movement coalesce.
Read about Mohammed Jawad, a teenager we locked up at Guantánamo and beat, tortured, and denied access to the legal system. We told him his family would be killed if he did not confess. After his case went up to the Supreme Court, he was finally released and went home.
It looks like the system worked after all!
Ask President Obama and members of Congress to take action to ensure this doesn't happen again and that those responsible for torturing in the name of the greater good are held accountable.
</call to righteous action>
<meditative diversion>
I've had a song stuck in my head lately: Bad Religion's "Sorrow." Here's a low-key acoustic version with some horrific imagery that you should not show your children and maybe not yourself.
This is how systems work. These are the results of a well-functioning system:
Below the fold, do you take Bad Religion's song "Sorrow" at face value or not?
Modern Population Control Movement Motivated By Nativism
Published August 17, 2009 @ 11:00AM PT
Andrea Nill of ThinkProgress yesterday criticized recent pieces by David Friedlander and Joseph Chamie arguing that the U.S. should "rethink its 'pro-growth immigration policies' and consider the 'demographic realities, future population projections and likely environmental costs' of immigration."
Andrea nicely takes apart the argument on its merits and highlights the rather odd statement from Chamie:
As a result [of increased non-European immigration], America will increasingly look, sound and act differently over the coming decades – which is neither good nor bad but different.
Well, I'm glad he cleared that up. I wonder if that sentiment drove the choice of the photo he used to accompany his article, which shows a group of Latin@ migrants of indeterminate nationality (read: "Mexicans") which could have been used for any still shot or photo reel on every single Bill O'Reilly and Lou Dobbs story about immigration for the past four years.
[Image: Workers who to Chamie are "neither good nor bad but different"]
Looking at the votes for immigration restrictionist group NumbersUSA's favored nativist politicians, it's clear that the population control movement which puts these ideas out there for "respectable" figures like Chamie and Friedlander to parrot has absolutely no commitment to environmental policy, only to the messaging benefits of environmental bandwagoning.
The politicians in the House who NumbersUSA rates most highly voted against the recent climate change bill 5 to 1. (And I am fairly certain that those who voted against didn't do so out of disappointment over an insufficiently pro-environment bill). Based on this analysis, politicians are in favor of protecting the environment or in favor of deporting immigrants en masse, but rarely both.
I asked restrictionist leaders John Tanton, Mark Krikorian, Roy Beck, and Dan Stein to respond to this information 40 days ago, and none of them bothered to answer. Maybe this is an issue they'd rather not get into, because if you look very closely, the shallowness of the population control movement's commitment to the environment becomes quickly apparent. I hope someone will notify Joseph Chamie and David Friedlander.
Immigration Raids Increase Pressure to Migrate
Published August 02, 2009 @ 08:40AM PT
Your weekend links:
- In the context of the Gates arrest in Massachusetts, Maria-Theresa Hernandez writes about her experience with a border patrol officer (ICE wasn't formed until 2003) a decade ago.
About 10 years ago, I was crossing the international border to the United States from Mexico with my cousin, who is a Mexican citizen. She was going to visit me for a few days.
The ICE officer she was speaking to about a tourists visa was outrageously rude. She is a retired school teacher, which is stated on her I.D. Instead of using the word "retirada" (retired), he said she was "retardada" (retarded). She and I were shocked at his audacity. Yet, neither one of us said anything. You cannot say anything to an ICE officer, or he'll find a way to make your life miserable. In that particular situation, she would not have been able to cross over with me.
Unfortunately, while not true of all ICE and CBP officers, disrespect and abuse of power are still prevalent among many. I see this as an attorney with my clients--far worse goes on when no attorney is present.
- Representatives of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights visited U.S. immigration detention centers recently and found that "many men, women and children detained in those facilities are held in unacceptable conditions, and the right of those persons to due process remains, in many cases, compromised." The ACLU has more.
- Aspiring immigration lawyer Cynthia Mazariegos guest-blogs at Latina Lista about her trip to Guatemala to visit Postville deportees.
- And Frontline journalists Greg Brosnan and Jennifer Szymaszek went to Guatemala and Postville to interview people in the aftermath of the federal raid. Watch the video here.
- Glenn Greenwald explores how both Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann have been censored by their corporate masters at GE and News Corp. But this is emblematic of how U.S. journalism too often bends to the will of corporate conglomerates.
- Dee brings word that Minuteman and former Aryan Nations soldier Gunny Bush is now a suspect in a fourth murder, this one in 1997 in Washington state. Bush is separately charged with the murders of nine-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father Raul.
- Writing in the Washington Blade, Julie Kruse from Immigration Equality encourages LGBT voters to support a comprehensive immigration reform package that includes an option for Americans to sponsor their same-sex partners for legal residency. Bringing the broader LGBT community into the debate adds momentum for both positive immigration reform and LGBT equality, she argues.
- To give credit where due after I wondered whether Senator Schumer was getting his immigration talking points from restrictionist websites, he has now written in the Buffalo News that "Daniel Stein, head of an extremist group called FAIR [the Federation for American Immigration Reform], distort[ed] my position on immigration in order to scare the American people using false and distorting arguments."
- Underground Undergrads tells us that Education Secretary Arne Duncan now supports the DREAM Act.
Yet, the bigger question is: Did the raid deter future migration to the United States? No.
The reality of the severe poverty found in Guatemala is still enough reason for fathers, mothers, and children to leave their families behind and make the life-threatening migration north. What the massive raid in Postville did was to create more financial difficulties for a population that is already in poverty.
She also reminded me that family separation is a problem for families in sending countries as well as those that travel to the U.S. or form here. Children in entire communities grow up without one or both parents, who have traveled abroad for work to support the families they've left behind.
[Image: Guatemalan Human Rights Commission meeting with Postville deportees. (Michelle Cassel, via Latina Lista)]
Our Sabra and Shatila?
Published July 12, 2009 @ 09:19PM PT
What did the U.S. government know about the massacre of Taliban POWs at Dasht-i-Leili by U.S. allies in Afghanistan in 2001 and when did they know it?
New reporting from the Times describes the Pentagon’s noncompliance, if not interference, with efforts to investigate the killings. If war crimes had been committed, why would the U.S. not want those crimes to be investigated and prosecuted? What obligation does the U.S. now have to get to the bottom of what happened?
After a mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Bush administration officials repeatedly discouraged efforts to investigate the episode, according to government officials and human rights organizations.
. . .
Survivors and witnesses told The New York Times and Newsweek in 2002 that over a three-day period, Taliban prisoners were stuffed into closed metal shipping containers and given no food or water; many suffocated while being trucked to the prison. Other prisoners were killed when guards shot into the containers. The bodies were said to have been buried in a mass grave in Dasht-i-Leili, a stretch of desert just outside Shibarghan.
A recently declassified 2002 State Department intelligence report states that one source, whose identity is redacted, concluded that about 1,500 Taliban prisoners died. Estimates from other witnesses or human rights groups range from several hundred to several thousand. The report also says that several Afghan witnesses were later tortured or killed.
. . .
Separately, 10 or so prisoners brought from Afghanistan reported that they had been “stacked like cordwood” in shipping containers and had to lick the perspiration off one another to survive, Mr. Spry[, former senior F.B.I. representative at Guantanamo,] recalled. They told similar accounts of suffocations and shootings, he said. A declassified F.B.I. report, dated January 2003, confirms that the detainees provided such accounts.
Mr. Spry, who is now an F.B.I. consultant, said he did not believe the stories because he knew that Al Qaeda trained members to fabricate tales about mistreatment. Still, the veteran agent said he thought the agency should investigate the reports “so they could be debunked.”
But a senior official at F.B.I. headquarters, whom Mr. Spry declined to identify, told him to drop the matter, saying it was not part of his mission and it would be up to the American military to investigate.
“I was disappointed because I believed that, true or untrue, we had to be in front of this story, because someday it may turn out to be a problem,” Mr. Spry said.
The Pentagon, however, showed little interest in the matter. In 2002, Physicians for Human Rights asked Defense Department officials to open an investigation and provide security for its forensics team to conduct a more thorough examination of the gravesite. “We met with blanket denials from the Pentagon,” recalls Jennifer Leaning, a board member with the group. “They said nothing happened.”
Pentagon spokesmen have said that the United States Central Command conducted an “informal inquiry,” asking Special Forces personnel members who worked with General Dostum if they knew of a mass killing by his forces. When they said they did not, the inquiry went no further.
“I did get the sense that there was little appetite for this matter within parts of D.O.D.,” said Marshall Billingslea, former acting assistant defense secretary for special operations, referring to the Department of Defense.
Is this our Sabra and Shatila?
How many Americans even knew this massacre in Afghanistan took place? I’m ashamed to say I had never heard of it until the recent Times story, and I try to stay informed about international news and U.S. foreign policy.
After the story first broke on Friday, President Obama ordered his national security team to investigate the issue. That is a good start.
[Image: Physicians for Human Rights]
QOTD: Yglesias on Climate Change and Global Redistribution
Published June 29, 2009 @ 08:59PM PT
It’s very difficult to imagine Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) wading through the jungles of Vietnam slaughtering villagers and redistributing their possessions to the people of Missouri. It’s easy, by contrast, to imagine her tweeting complaints about Waxman-Markey being unfair to coal-dependent states like Missouri.
