The FBI has revealed one facet of its antiterrorism strategy by its handling of the high school girl deported (‘voluntarily returned’ under duress) to Bangladesh. They’re finding neoreligious Muslim kids, those who turn to religion as a way of rebelling against their more liberal parents. They’re zeroing in on those who listen to radicals like Omar Bakri Mohammed, an infamous North London imam.
Up to this point, I agree with their strategy. Here’s where I think they go wrong: they’re deporting them under any pretext without distinguishing between actual extremists and those who are just rebellious teens.
From childhood, Tashnuba embraced religion with a kind of rebellion. By 10 she was praying five times a day – and reproaching her more secular father, a salesman of cheap watches. At 12, Tashnuba even explored Christianity. But at 14, she adopted a full Islamic veil… Her parents… rejected… an arranged marriage to an American Muslim man… When Latif suggested an elopement to Michigan, Tashnuba impulsively agreed…… she had repeatedly tuned to sermons broadcast daily by Sheik Omar Bakri Muhammed… What mainly drew the agent’s eye, the girl said, were papers from an extra-help class for home-schooled girls that Tashnuba had joined to prepare for exams. On one page was a diagram highlighting the word “suicide” – her notes on a class discussion about why religions oppose it, she said…
Tashnuba said she believed she was singled out precisely because she is a noncitizen – allowing investigators to invoke immigration law, bypassing the familiar limits of criminal and juvenile proceedings. [NYT]
The most interesting part about this story is that the FBI agent who gets credit for the takedown of a confused 16-year-old is herself familiar with the North London fundies. Thirty-seven-year-old Foria Younis was raised a British Muslim:
Armed with her knowledge of three continents, and fluent in Punjabi and Urdu, she flies the globe with FBI teams… Younis won’t go into specific details of her work, which is often undercover, but admits to travelling to “South Asia” on missions, and to co-operating with officers from Scotland Yard. Flanked by an FBI press officer, she is allowed to confirm she has been involved in the arrests of several Islamic extremists…She knows that when she enters a Muslim household, even on a raid, the sight of her has an electrifying effect, especially on the women and girls of the home. In many households, women are “held hostage” by their men’s radicalism, she says… Britain has changed in 20 years, she says, especially the corner of the East End in which she grew up. “I grew up in a very South Asian community, so I didn’t get full exposure to all of what England had to offer…”
Sometimes, she will be sitting in a company waiting room when her interview subject enters. “They look around the room and ask the secretary, `Where’s the FBI agent?’… “I spent some time doing narcotics investigations and I could be sitting in a car right next to a drug deal going down, and people are just not looking for me. I’m a nobody.”She senses – again stressing she is speaking for herself, not the FBI – that Islamic extremism has more of a grip in Britain than in America. “I think the UK has heightened problems, more than what I see in the US. The young there seem to be a little vengeful in their feelings, more anti-Western.” [Telegraph]
After reading the details, I now have far more sympathy for the government’s position in this case — it’s intrinsically difficult to distinguish between talkers, like depressed kids who go through a heavy metal phase in high school, and doers. Bakri is one dangerous man — he reportedly encouraged two British Muslim boys to become suicide bombers in Israel. The government is trying to be proactive about identifying potential extremists. Imagine if they’d been able to do this before the Columbine killers had struck.
But their broad-brush tactics leave much to be desired. They’ve probably drawn up a psychological profile of talkers vs. doers, to sort out the small number of true extremists. Most security officials quoted early in this story said they didn’t consider Hayder dangerous. But they’re willing to overlook their analysis for political reasons, to give the appearance of doing something on terrorism. They’re exporting teens wholesale and ignoring potential blowback, just like the Saudis. To them, the confused high school kid was low-hanging fruit because she was deportable. But there are lots of kids like her out there, many who are American citizens. If Tashnuba Hayder had no gripe with America before, she certainly has one now, Dhaka’s rock scene notwithstanding.
Brings to mind a tv-movie I saw recently called “Dirty War”
As bad as it sounds, the United States is better off with a substantial muslim population. Hopefully muslims will perceive America as unfriendly and stop coming here. I would hate to see America have the problems that Europe (or for that matter India) has. Muslims bring too much cultural baggage and are unwilling to appreciate the greatness of the western world and end up being a major nuisance to their host countries. I say, speed up the deportations of these muslims even if the law needs to be bent a little.
Going after kids for what they’re saying on internet chat room is a huge waste of government resources. Either they don’t have enough real terrorists to go after, or they don’t know what the hell they’re doing.
The actualities of the case don’t leave us much room to criticize. They are always within their rights to deport people with visa problems, and there’s no point in complaining about that.
Still, I liked the part about how in her high school ethics class she was encouraged to voice her own opinion: “[I]n my high-school ethics class we had Communists, Democrats, Republicans, Gothics — all types. In all our classes, we were told, ‘You speak up, you give your opinion, and you defend it.'”
Wrong. If you’re a Muslim teenager with visa problems, you don’t have freedom of speech. You don’t get to have an opinion, and if you do, you don’t get to defend it.
Take America to task for the crudity of its judicial system and the prejudice of individual cases but dont start copying the rhetoric of Islamic extremists who try to make out that America is a charnel house of opression. Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed is in the news today for making a speech saying that it is the duty of all Muslims to kill infidels.
This is just the latest in a long line of provocative and extremist hate filled rhetoric that this man has come out with.
But killing all the infidels is a very bad idea for Sheikh Omar because he lives on welfare benefits. The British tax payer pays for his wife and six children to live in comfort in a nice house in West London and provide him plenty of money because he is a ‘political refugee’ from Syria. So if Muslims kill all the infidels who is going to pay for him to sit on his fat arse all day long spitting piss and vinegar about the Zionists and Nazi State of America and Great Britain? Where
Comparing being a hypnotised disciple of this asshole to being just a regular kind of girl, like a Goth or a Democrat is an insult to the intelligence. Its more like being a follower of the Ku Klux Klan.
The fact is that America has got the jitters because there really are people out there who want to kill as many people as they can, and this is an unfortunate result of that nervousness. That is all. Get it into perspective. Dont diss the whole of America. Its more complex than that. Slogans about how Muslim teenagers with a fixation on the Jihad are opressed in America shows a misunderstanding of the dynamics of what is going on.
This is an unfortunate case. It should be noted to make sure it doesnt happen again. But everything has another point of view, and whilst I am sympathetic to her plight, I dont believe that equating Bin Ladenist thought with being a goth is anything but the most myopic relativism.
Just my point of view as an Englishman.
” the Zionists and Nazi State of America and Great Britain”
is that intended irony ? cause thats hilarious.
Dude, she’s sixteen years old. She is someone who tuned into a web broadcast; she is not herself Sheikh Omar. She was targetted for expulsion because of her beliefs, not her actions.
Nowhere have I defended the content of her beliefs. The reason I quoted that sentence about her ethics class is that it points to a deep irony in the situation, which apparently you have missed. Let me spell it out for you:
In school, she was taught that respecting the diversity of opinion is part of the American way. What happened to her shows that that is not the case.
What I’m saying is the opposite of relativism: I believe in freedom of speech as a universal principle. That includes tolerating what people say when you don’t like it — whether it’s racist radio DJs, Jo Bole So Nihaal, or Muslim-American teenagers who throw around the word ‘jihad’ on chat rooms.
And finally, I’m not dissing the entirety of America. I’m dissing a government agency that has lost its compass, and is now wasting everyone’s time and money while inflicting a fair bit of human damage along the way.
Andrew Jackson
Did you actually read my post? If you did, you wouldnt have to ask that question.
Because of the jitters caused by the reality of Omar Bakri Mohammads in the world and the reality of people who act on that rhetoric.
A very unfortunate and regrettable side effect of this situation and the ideology out there. But a blanket statement implying America is at heart denying free speech to all Muslim teenagers is an over reaction and an echoing of the rhetoric of those hateful ideologues. It is self flagellation.
Punjabi Boy A very unfortunate and regrettable side effect of this situation and the ideology
You can fight terrorism without side-effects. Deporting this 16 year old girl is not a side-effect, it is a tragedy, and a preventable one.
And if you are callous enough to not care about ordinary lives, think of the practical effect of deporting screwed up, overly dramatic girls on the war on terror.
Rahut Gill wrote:
Hopefully muslims will perceive America as unfriendly and stop coming here. . I say, speed up the deportations of these muslims even if the law needs to be bent a little.
This makes me sad.
I can’t believe you’re accusing me of “echoing the rhetoric” of radical Islamists because I’m angry about the way the government treated this girl…
Like I said before, citizenship – it has its privileges. The “familiar limits” are all about how to prosecute citizens – it shouldn’t be some sort of dark / conspiratorial surprise that they don’t apply here.
Actually, the real precedent isn’t Columbine so much as … 9/11. The 9/11 Commission Report specifically noted that the only laws the hijackers broke in a somewhat consistent manner prior to their atrocity were immigration violations – overstaying student visa’s, enrolling in schools outside of their visa’s, etc. For ex. –
In particular, in hindsight, one of the few pre 9/11 successes that materially impacted the terror act came from this. A couple of the potential “20th” and “21st” men weren’t ejected from the country as a result of a terrorism investigation per se but rather as a result of enforcement of existing laws – what the commission refers to as “routine consequences for violations.” It’s sort of like a beat cop who, by happenstance, breaks up a drug gang by arresting a thug for vandalism.
As you may know, Vinod, the 14th amendment applies equaly to citizens and non-citizens. Equal protection under the law, due process, and other procedural safeguards are available too everyone subject to US law enforcement. Citizenship confers to priveliges in this regard.
I do think enforcing immigration laws is a good idea, but I’d be careful about giving credence to every gvt claim about immigration violation. If you’ve dealt with the INS/BCIS, you know that the laws are arcance and easily violated. It’s also not too hard for the US to manufacture immigration violations — by cancelling a person visa and then detaining them for not having a valid vis (to take a real life example).
I think the concern that people ought to pay attention to is whether the gvt is using immigration laws the way state gvts used to use vagrancy laws.
If you were to lock up everyone who supported bin Laden due to the juvenile desire to bloody America’s nose, you’d have to lock up Mexico (who chanted ‘Bin Laden! Bin Laden!’ during a soccer match) and much of Europe.
If you deported everyone who’s ever had a passing fascination with extremist thought, you’d have deported a hell of a lot of Sikh kids who were Khalistanis at age 16 and are now dyed-in-the-wool capitalists: VCs, bankers and lawyers. I know a few of them personally, they’re good people. And you’d have deported a lot of college kids who flirted with Greenpeace, some of whom are now federal judges and prosecutors.
You need to sort out the 0.5% of committed extremists from the 99.5% who passively cheer. The way you do that is by infiltrating and monitoring over time, and moving in once you’ve identified accurately and built a case, or if there’s impending danger. This kid? From the looks of it, not even in the ballpark.
Puh-leeze. They profiled and then investigated her and found nothing of substance. If you tell me they found her with a terrorism plot in motion, I’d be the first in line to jail her.
To prevent progression from bystander to extremist, it’s far more useful to take down the leaders than the followers.
If you’re a Muslim teenager with visa problems, you don’t have freedom of speech. You don’t get to have an opinion, and if you do, you don’t get to defend it.
Amardeep, I like and respect you and, though I would not go as far as Punjabi Boy, I think the key phrase here is “visa problems,” not “freedom of speech”.
Put another way, the US government deports scores of illegal Mexican immigrants who have never been anywhere near an Internet chat room. It sounds like you’re saying that this girl deserves to be exempted from US immigration law because of her beliefs.
Jeet,
I’m glad you like and respect me, but that’s exactly the opposite of what I said. I said, these girls deserve the first amendment same protections as everyone else. Somehow you’ve contorted it into “these girls deserve special protection.”
From the beginning, my complaint was not with the fact that she ended up deported, but what this tells us about the methods and priorities of the FBI and DHS.
Ok, whatever, I’m so bored of debating this. Let me introduce a new topic, and that is someone who got himself in (smaller) trouble for exercising his rights, and that is Rakesh Sharma, an Indian filmmaker who was recently detained and questioned for Filming-While-Brown in New York. Sharma is Hindu, so hopefully no one will accuse me of “echoing” the Islamic extremists when I mention his name.
His complaint against the NYPD is here.
And you can sign the petition in support of the complaint here if you so choose.
We all know the solution to radical Islam lies in fostering democracy in the Middle East. Unfortunately our myopic foreign policy has never addressed this problem; instead we choose to support dictators time and time again across the globe for short term solutions. Pakistan and Uzbekistan being the current poster boys.
Moderate Moslems abroad also need to be more vocal in fighting for equal rights for women. Until they do so they will continue to be marginalized as “religious extremists and fundamentalists”.
If you’re a Muslim teenager with visa problems, you don’t have freedom of speech. You don’t get to have an opinion, and if you do, you don’t get to defend it.
well, but the problem is that this isn’t really true in the generality, this specific case got out of hand, but it’s not a general problem from what i can see. the key is to move beyond individuals (at least for a moment)-travesties of justice happen all the time. people who are assumed to be guilty of X are often jailed for marijuana violations…are they actually guilty of X?
moving beyond specific cases of injustice, there is a problem out there, and the US gov. is not addressing it. after 9/11 (spring 2002) 60 minutes interviewed a bunch of kids who attended a muslim school in the shadow of the twin towers (or where they were). when asked about suicide bombers in israel the kids expressed admiration for the “martyrs.” morlie safer was shocked. cut scene, and the kids recanted, they had mentioned to their parents what they had said, the parents freaked and the school freaked, and hte kids explained that they didn’t know that civilians had been injured. the word around the school had distorted what was really going on in israel. let’s ignore whether the palestinians are even justified in targeting the IDF (which the kids would not back off as legit)-the bigger issue is that these kids expressed some freaky opinions (in the context of 9/11 and all) on national television! are they locked up? no. so this incident to me is sad as far as the personal tragedy, but more disturbing because it seems a pro forma band-aid on the resentment in parts of the muslim american community.
my own family are identified brown muslims in the seattle area, and when people in bangladesh asked if they were harrassed or bothered after the twin towers fell they simply said they had heard from sikhs that they were having issues but they never experienced any problems of their own. i have talked ot other muslims who have been “profiled” and what not, but ultimately though amardeep’s assertion might hold for that particular girl, as a general situation i think muslims in america have a shit load of freedom and can be profiled in Time without being terrified that they will have the FBI break down their doors.
people talk about america being a place of diversity of opinion, where all kids can express their opinions. that’s good, but i also think that instead of oro forma deportations (the real terrorists are going to be too smart to do shit like this) i think our nation, our gov., has to focus on emphasizing the values that unite us. some of these values are pretty weird in the context of almost all “traditional” cultures. muslims have a pretty robust “meme-complex” that they bring, attractive to many amerians of long term native stock (mostly black), and we need make sure that an appropriate remapping of values occurs, just as roman catholicism became more american, or judaism became more american, in the 20th century.
regardless of the shibboleths that separated that girl from america, or the racial differences plain to see, now in bangladesh she understands that substantively she was american, that her core values were american. yes, in some ways her defiance of government authority was in many ways very american, going back to the backcountry whisky rebellions right after independence from britain. but so was the hot rhetoric of early 20th century anarchists. there are realistic constraints, and a total diversity of opinion in sharp contradiction beings self-refuting to some extent. a liberal order does not exist in a vacuum of common feeling and sentiment, and i think the american polity has to “slant” the playing field for a particular set of values. there are many individuals in this nation, whether communists or reconstructionist christians who support values and views at odds with the liberal order. they are marginal, and sometimes explicitly marginalized (there were questions about my possible association with communism when i was naturalized, and the left and libertarians regularly denounce conservative christian overreach, which probably dampens of the influence of the small “dominionist” faction on the far right of christianity which resembles islam in its attitude toward the intersection between religion and the public sphere).
i guess what i’m trying to say is
1) tragedy 2) but this is a sideshow from the real deep rooted instabilities inherent in a liberal order on the social scale 3) islam is, at least in its majority form, somewhat at tension with the liberal order (to use my atheist phraseology, unlike christianity and american judaism [not israeli judaism obviously, as it is is basically the state religion there] islam has not been gelded, beaten into the private realm, rendered supine at the feet of liberal values [though declaring outwardly that it has “won,” because the “true islam” is just a subset of liberal values]) 4) and we can never take these incidents out of the context of the genuine conflict, both high and low, that a certain faction of muslims seems intent on pursuing with the west or all they deem “unislamic.”
Razib,
Thanks for a thoughtful response. I’m thinking this one over…
Ironically, I am (or was) at a conference for low income immigrants yesterday, and read the article before I came down here. I have to say a few things that are getting lost.
1) Although I don’t agree with Vinod that it is good, the reality is that citizenship has particular privileges. The deportation system was used in this case (and many, many others) to circumvent the safeguards normally applied in criminal investigations. So, interrogation wtihout attorney, jailing without being presented with evidence, the right to habeas corpus in certain instances was recently stripped by the REAl ID act. In other words, there is an entire separate stream of “justice” for undocumented people, and that’s a real problem. Not only is it inherently unfair, it’s also problematic–one of the reasons that the criminal justice system exists with safeguards is to proect the interests of hte state as well as the interests of the people being prosecuted. As you can see, law enforcement dollars are being wasted deporting people that could otherwise be used to, say, find people interested in destroying things or committing other crimes, investigating them, etc. Not that I’m a big fan of the criminal justice system, btu I just want to point out for all you national security and “the law is good” buffs, that this creation of an alternate system doesn’t serve your interests.
2) Deporting people does nothign to address criminal behavior. If you have a problem with child molestation, do you think it would be better to send the person to another country with lax rules and/or ways to get around it so that they can molest even more people? If you have a problem with domestic violence, do you think it’s better to send a person to a coutnry where domestic violence is the socially accepted norm? Deportaiton of “criminal elements” is a way for the United States to dump social problems onto other countries while continuing to cherrypick the immigrants it wants. IF you don’t buy the moral argument, consider the effects of deporting, say, 100 suspected terrorists to Egypt. Exactly what do you think those people are going to do in Egypt? Communicate the nuances of Ameircan culture?
We’re living in a time when undocumented immigrants don’t call emergency services and end up dying (this happened about two weeks ago in New york to a Chinese man). That’s the context in which this is happening, and it didn’t start with 9/11—that just shifted it. I say again, about 1.5 million people have been deported since 1996, there are about 11 million undcoumented people in the country who are picking our strawberries, mowing our lawns, and serving us our food (and paying taxes that they’ll never see benefits from).
There are ways to protect labor rights, protect national security, etc., if you’re interested in those things–scapegoating immigrants on a massive scale is not one of them–it’s part of a different project that some friends of mine like to call the creation, maintenance, and control of an underclass in the United States. Those of you who love economics should appreciate what a “marginal labor pool” means.
More later…
Vinod, You stated Like I said before, citizenship – it has its privileges
Heard of Jose Pedilla.
Vinod, I get a little disturbed when you keep alluding to the non citizen status of resident aliens who are poorly treated in the US. I know you are not justifying the actions of the government, but when you say that citizenship has privileges there is an implicit message here that non citizens should just deal with their lack of privileges. We are not talking about a Hamza Yusuf being stopped for a few hours at the Canadian border. We are talking here about a girl who has lived almost all her adult life in the US and is now being unceremoniously deported. There was a very interesting article in Washington Post a few days back which detailed the use of arcane immigations violations to deport people. I am not sure how much you know about Immigration Law, but over 95% of non citizens can be deported for violating some provisions of the Immigration Law during their stay in the US. If the INS gets down to it, almost all immigrants have violated some little provision of the INS Code. Also we need to be aware of the fact, that a lot of immigrants in the US are here to stay and are not just visitors. If you look at the number of immigrants in the US, they by themselves are probably the biggest minority in the US. Also a vast majority of these people are not on temporary visas but are either in the process of becoming citizens or working towards it. I think its a litte reckless to dismiss the aspirations of probably the biggest minority in the US as an unfortunate by product of their non citizen status.
I am not sure how much you know about Immigration Law, but over 95% of non citizens can be deported for violating some provisions of the Immigration Law during their stay in the US.
many cambodian gang members have been sent back to cambodia for a decade now because of these provisions. so people should note that the main use of these laws isn’t to go after political/ideological malcontents as it is to get rid of likely future criminal offenders.
so people should note that the main use of these laws isn’t to go after political/ideological malcontents as it is to get rid of likely future criminal offenders
But since 9-11, these immigration provisions have found draconian usage in detaining and deporting Muslim immigrants or immigrants who look like ‘Muslims’. Case in point : After 9-11, over 3,000 Muslim immigrants were detained (some of them were Hindu and Sikhs as well). After a year or so the day before the Senate Judiciary Committee was to hold a hearing on these ‘detainess’, 500 of them were all of a sudden released. ( Shock!) Some of these people are still in prison. Out of the 3,000 only one was charged with terrorism and two others are being held as material witnesses. The rest were detained for months and years and were never charged. A lot of them were deported (for arcane immigrations violations only) and some were just released when they found nothing on them. These people were not future criminals. All these people were detained within one month of 9-11. Almost none of these people were members of gangs or had ever engaged in criminal activities. Most of them were just plain unlucky like the Sikh dude who was detained because his ex girl friend called the FBI on him. These people were not allowed to meet their families. They had no access to lawyers. Yes some of them were abused and even tortured. Several civil cases have been filed against the Justice Department. The Inspector General came out with a scathing in house report on the abuse of these detainees. Lets not shut our eyes and pretend this shit isnt happening. Lets not ignore the plight of these non citizens.
Punjabi Boy, As you are an Englishman, let me educate you a little on this pesky little concept called free speech in America. You stated This is an unfortunate case. It should be noted to make sure it doesnt happen again. But everything has another point of view, and whilst I am sympathetic to her plight, I dont believe that equating Bin Ladenist thought with being a goth is anything but the most myopic relativism. Hate Speech in America is free speech as well. In fact unpopular speech deserves more protection than popular speech because no one objects to popular speech anyway. So cheering Bin Laden deserves as much if not more protection as cheering for a Goth lifestyle because cheering for Bin Laden is unpopular. If Nazis want to march and advocate for world wide destruction of the Jews, then a Jew civil libertarian will go to the Supreme Court and argue for their right to march in Skokie. Thats what free speech is all about. There is no relativism in free speech. All speech is free as long as its only speech.
The vast majority of the people deported are Mexican citizens, not Cambodian gang members or Bangladeshi visa overstays. The “main use” of these laws varies by the person proposing or implementing them, but it’s primarily economic in nature.
For some it’s a pr mechanism to look tough on crime or storng on national security. For others, it’s a means of controlling a highly disempowered class of workers and ensuring that they can’t advocate for their rights. For others, it’s a means of making legible a population that the business community wants kept underground or otherwise controlled. For others, it’s precisely to suppress political dissent or ideological extremism. For others, it’s a means of removing people to other places (none of these laws “get rid” of future criminal offenders…they only outsource them). For others, it’s a tool in the war on drugs. For others, it’s a means around criminal justice protections.
Regardless, there’s very little good coming out of this. I don’t see how we should be happy that a desi man who’s violent towards his children and partner is deported to India or Pakistan, where he can engage in gender violence with far less consequence. Or that it’s okay that there’s an alternate criminal justice system that’s developed to appliy to a punish a certain class of people twice for the same alleged crimes (sometimes even when they’re not convicted in the first place).
Gee thanks Al Mujahid! I really needed a recant of Voltaire’s dictum from you! Coming from England, we dont know what freedom of speech is, seeing as how we just broke free from the Soviet Republics and all that, but now that you have educated me, I know and prostrate myself before your American wisdom.
This is a very emotive issue. Several people have talked bollocks in response to my postings, some people have made sense, lots of wilful misinterpretation and sulking have taken place, but I stick by what I say, because I chose my words carefully and what I said was right.
Regardless, there’s very little good coming out of this. I don’t see how we should be happy that a desi man who’s violent towards his children and partner is deported to India or Pakistan, where he can engage in gender violence with far less consequence. Or that it’s okay that there’s an alternate criminal justice system that’s developed to appliy to a punish a certain class of people twice for the same alleged crimes (sometimes even when they’re not convicted in the first place).
i stand corrected on my assertion above, but this is probably simply a normative difference between you and i, but i would much rather have molesters, murderers and abusers in other countries molesting, murdering and abusing people who aren’t americans than those who are.
there is a lot of injustice going on in the world today, millions of people have died in the congo because of a civil war, many due to starvation, many in a more direct fashion, some of it even cannibalism because of the starvation. but the fact is that this gets a lot less press attention that the israeli-arab conflict, or the human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay. most people make priorities on what values and who are important to us, plain and simple, perhaps some people do practice universal love in the moist fashion, but very few.
in other words, if pure utilitarian calculations were at work we would talk about a lot of different stuff than what’s talked about on this blog. i sit here drinking a coffee and surfin’ the web and reading a paper on epistasis while people starve.
most people make priorities on what values and who are important to us, plain and simple, perhaps some people do practice universal love in the moist fashion, but very few.
So true 🙁
Saurav, Correct me if I am wrong, but as I understand the law passed by Clinton in 96′ made ‘an aggravated felony’ (imprisonment for more than year) a deportable offense. Sadly, most Americans would agree with this law. I personally think this law is too harsh, especially for resident aliens. One bar fight is usually enough to get you an aggravated felony in most states.
minor note: i didn’t mean “moist” as it kind of wet, i mean Moist as in the chinese philosopher-sage Mo Tzu, who in contrast to the Confucians, proposed that Universal Love should be the basis of society. Confucians asserted that common sense tells us that people favor those near and dear over those distant and unknown, and so society should be based on such relations, ie; the importance of filial piety and the conception of the chinese state with the emperor as the son of heaven who was also the father of his people….
Great points AM. It is amazing how little people know or care about the mass detentions that went on, and continue. How sad that people would think what happened to these girls was an isolated or unusual case.
Well maybe not so surprising considering the liberal media did not report on it or discuss it very much.
AM, I don’t remember the specifics, but, yes, the two immigration laws in 1996 vastly expanded the grounds for deportation, including for green card holders and others, by using “aggravated felonies” and “crimes of moral turpitude” and the definitions continue to be expanded. So, most recently, a case went all the way to the supreme court on whether someone could be deported for having a DUI (the case revolved around whether this constituted a “crime of violence.”). I agree with vurdlife that most people don’t realize how far this has gone. There are also all kinds of other laws on the books that law enforcement can whip out when they see fit (e.g. noncitizens (i think all of them, including green card holders, although I’m not sure) are technically required to report changes of address within 10 days of moving to the Department of Homeland Security)).
Razib, I appreciate that you stated your view on deportation of criminalized immigrants in such a straightforward way, because because so many people who share your beliefs mask them. It’s valid for us to have different views, but I don’t understand how you could make a distinction between people in India, Brazil, the UK, etc. getting molested, murdered, etc. and Americans having the same thing happen to them on the basis of any viable ethical system. It doesn’t seem to be based on normative ethics as much as nationalism (to the point of chauvinism)–and to me, this examples illustrates why nationalism as a grounds for judging people ties into the interests of state power, xenophobia, and other things more than always being a harmless process of rallying around an identity. It’s important to understand if and when it’s a legitimate ethical basis of dealing with the real world.
As for the amount of injustice in the world–I agree that people need to make priorities in what they do with their time and energy and there’s a human reality to what you care about and what you don’t (as well as things like reconciling yourself with the existing society and its values so you don’t turn into the Unabomber, dealing with your own survival so you have the capacity to think about these things, understanding your flaws and limitations, etc.). I think very few people are able to reach a legitimate form of universal love (certainly not me), but loving the people closest to you and receving love from the people closest to you ideally creates within you the capacity to be empathetic towards larger and larger circles, to the point that (if you live long and well enough), you care about other, random people. It’s a hard, long process that i have no illusions about being able to master; but i think others who have the capacity to do so ought to pursue it. And you sound like that kind of person.
However, on an intellectual ethical level (as opposed to biological, emotional, or social, or economic), to not care about everything is indefensible even while recognizing it’s near impossible (although Chomsky makes his best effort, in his weird way), and so we strive to figure out what the most pertinent causes of the tragedies you’re pointing to are (along the lines of Amartya Sen’s and subsequent treatments of the relationship between famines and political systems). This part of it is not about being sappy or whatever, but about being clear-eyed (or as close to it as you can) about the modern history of the world, human relationships, etc. To understand has got nothing to do with love–the best day-to-day analysis of contemporary facts tends to come from business journals like the WSJ (News Section! Not Editorial!), the Economist, etc. as opposed to slightly more mushy papers like The NY Times or Washington Post.
As for what you do with your anaylsis, well that depends on at what point you are in your personal growth and in how you relate to people. Kissinger was no intellectual slouch (as opposed to neocons), while good organizers at labor unions and community organizations are no fools either (i’m not including myself here, but people like Aarti Shahani at Families For Freedom, who’s a friend of mine)–they just have less individual power and prestige than a Kissinger because they’ve actually chosen to address these problems to the extent they can in view of trying to achieve some kind of long-term progress. So what you do with your analysis is where the ethical/moral/social choices–and the extent of your love of strangers–comes in. But neither analysis nor love is very much good without the other.
Any lessons to be learned from Tashnuba’s tale of woe?
If you are ONLY a permanent resident in the US, wait til you get your citizenship until you avail yourself of freedom of expression … And, if you have been had a green card for years thinking you are American and there really are no real benefits to going through the INS bullshit (oops I mean Homeland Security red tape), now is the time to “adjust your status” or whatever they call it these days…it’s only gonna get worse.
The man has 3 more years…and then comes Jeb!
PS Let’s start a fund for the poor girl to become an ACLU type, but from Bangladesh lawyer…anyone in? I know a lawyer there who’d help…
Was the girl on a green card ?
She was probably undocumented (you have to concede all the government’s immigration chages to get voluntary departure, which is what she left on). The most recent NY Times article that Manish linked to might have more details.
Saurav, The article does not mention her immigration status. If she had a green card and she lied on the green card (permanent residency application) the INS can take away the green card and make her take a Voluntary Departure. If she had a green card, it makes the situation even more outrageous. I just cant get over the fact that they deported her (ok forced ger to take a VD) considering the fact that all she did nothing illegal. I read the NYIMES article and it seems to me that the only thing she did crazy was listening to the tapes of the radical dude from London.
AM, given that I e-mailed this article to my friends with a note that said that it might make you cry or nauseous, I understand where you’re coming from. That said, what part, of “These people are fu@#ing insane!” do you not understand? 🙂
btw, i would be careful about “illegal” and “legal” given that there’s a trend to find more and more ways to criminalize immigrants–I think it’s counterproductive to distinguish the “deserving” immigrants from the “undeserving” ones–not because they’re all wonderful, decent people, but because they’re all being subjected to extra unfair treatment (like being controlled with the threat of deportation) regardless of whether they are good people or not.
It is possible that Tashnuba did not have a valid immigration status. In that case, the US goverment has the right to deport her without justification. . .
However, if this is the case, I would bet that she/her family probably had an immigration application collecting dust somewhere. The existing immigration system in the US has led to the creation of an underclass of illegal immigrants, who have lived in the US for years but have very limited rights. There are two reasons for this: 1) The backlog in the immigrant application processing. It can take anywhere from 5 — 15 years to process immigrant applications. In the meantime, many of these people are living in the US illegally. 2) There are a lot of inconsistencies in policy between immigrant services in the US (previously handled by the INS) and the state department which staffs the US embassies (for visa applications). The US embassies abroad can deny visas to people for no apparent reasons. This leads to more people favouring to continue as illegals in the US rather than returning to their home country and returning legally.
I can understand that there is a need for rules and regulations controlling immigration and the US government must look out for the best interest of it’s citizens. However, the existing laws and it’s enforcement have been erratic and not necessarily serving their intended purpose.