As newsreaders know, there are a number of situations arising right now where vast numbers of persons are finding it necessary to move from their usual nation or territory of residence out to another with all possible speed, and no clear intention of returning.
Some are forced by the governmentals of their original place of residence intentionally such as those of African heritage being forced from the Dominican Republic to Haiti, and a serious number of Palestinians we know much too much about and whose issues with Israel are themselves not the principal subject of this diary, only still another variant on an ugly general situation. Rohingya in Burma who Burma wants out of there and Bangladesh right next door won't take either.
A goodly number of Syrians in danger because of not being the majority religious style of Islam in their home area, Sunni in a Shi'a area or vice versa, or members of any of a group of true Islamic minorities loathed by both, or not being in Assad's sect, or not being IsIs caliphate supporters, or being Christians or Jews or other religious groups or religious-ethnic groups once in Syria. People moving for economic reasons or because of unbearable heat and drought in what we call the Middle East and several other places, in the highly desperate situation zone including Iraq and Afghanistan. All sorts of folk in western and northeastern Africa. Folks forced out of border Venezuela into Colombia earlier this year.
Another goodly number forced out of their nations by internal disorder of a life threatening sort covered in Central America by the Cartagena Declaration, and the OAU 1967 declarations, which are not limited to specifically political, religious or ethnic conflicts or flat out civil war, but are in the Western Hemisphere. Many of these are fleeing illegal organizations, what we here call gangs, which do kidnapping, rape and murder on a regular basis or take children to provide services inside the gangs as members, in their territories with no help from anything we would call law enforcement available against them, because the local LEOs are their own gangs.
None of the DKos favorite refugee generating situations are even among the larger of those on the move as this is written.
Some of these groups are generally fleeing, but others are determined to get into a particular country, as if the four or five they went through to get there didn't exist. The folks marching through the Balkans to get to Calais, so they can go to Britain if they can avoid the police for long enough and do not desire to stay in France, North Africans trying for Ceuta, a little but Spanish port on the Moroccan coast, or over the Straits to Gibraltar or Spain, so they can go North from Spain, or from Libya in rubber boats to the rescue forces off Italy.
Nobody has explained yet how it is that Putin let them through Russia so they could get into the EU through the gate from Northern Russia to Finland, but it has been reported as a small use but regular use route.
Canada is also an intermediate stop as well as an acceptor of refugees.
The people from many places headed specifically to Germany or to Denmark, are the most famous of these, and number in the millions, with Rohingya headed for Australia and tryng to avoid Malaysian slavers en route, right behind them.
Some are moving by themselves in family groups and many, many others are in the hands of traffickers who will take all their money and may get them to the needful border or may leave them to die on the ground far from help or sealed in trucks or drowning in sinking boats in the Med or on the way to Florida, or cargo shiploads beached here and there on one way trips.
Part of the problem that those on the move feel entitled to ignore is that those whose countries are being virtually compelled to accept tens or hundreds of thousands of folk moving through in larger and larger waves (one country got more in October 2015 than in all of the prior year) in places where the reputation is good but the land is crowded and paid for by sacrifices made and payments remitted by the current residents based on the current population, and who have long established cultures which they love and want to preserve. And where there is a standard immigration protocol which is deliberately not being followed for 'refugees', and in some cases whole groups of unhappy minorities whose subordinate position is not being fixed while the 'refugees' get a sweeter deal.
Many of those moving are also of religions not common in the destinations they intend, and are oblivious to the religious wars or the Turkish invasions which gave rise to the peculiar religious or nonreligious traditions of those places they want to go to, and expect to establish their old cultures in toto in the new place, regardless of what the old residents of the new place think about it.
On arrival , the migrants will convert these to political rights when the migrants may total ten or fifteen percent or more of the entire population of the destination country when this wave is done, before they learn the local language. Great anxiety is already produced European responses. There has already been published in the light of the current EU wave at least one modern fantasy novel in France in French, reviewed this week in the NYT, in the same articles as Charlie Hebdo revenant, about what happens when France acquires an Islamic majority and suddenly turns into an Islamic state.
The migrants can also be oblivious to various views destination countries have and will implement with force.
In a number of cases, the desired locations, the UK and Denmark being two, there are already great stresses from internal EU migration and complaints that various eastern European workers are coming and taking jobs at cheap rates from locals. Refugees are in addition to that, and the international regime for refugees gives them more help than that available to eastern European EU residents.
Even though the country itself is emptying out as its young move west to where in the EU the money, education and jobs are, a wave Western Euros and Brits objected to before this additional wave, Hungary has built a huge fence to keep them all out, even those in transit to Germany.
Germany encouraged Turkish workers to come after WWII but did not allow them to become citizens and now has a very large non citizen Turkish minority with some very famous members who may be on German athletic teams and in German businesses but who are still not accepted seventy years later as Germans. Germany has now without reconciling that population agreed to accept 800,000 new refugees.
The US likes Hidalgo Cubans but is meh but stuck with Puerto Ricans and some varieties, but not all, of Afro-Caribbean folk , and feels free to loath and build huge walls and send vigilantes out against Mexicans and Central Americans wherever found and no matter how long here, and has been known from time to time to evict American Citizens of Central American heritage who were, because citizens, not carrying papers proving nationality when seized. Forget the International rules about children travelling alone.
In the US, the refugee process is also much speedier than the usual conventional immigration process, as once one is officially accepted as a refugee and given the right to come, one's family may also come, without the twenty year wait list depending on nation of origin. So there is a premium on qualifying for refugee status, but the press reports do not indicate that the Cartagena Declaration is used in the process, as it allows as a ground great internal disorder of various kinds, not just the political. It is not clear that the US has ever acceded to the Cartagena Declaration or the OAU 1967 declaration containing it.
Although the International treaties to which the US is a party have definitions of what a serious crime, commission of which by a refugee applicant can result in denial of status, the statute of limitations provision on the international papers for which looks only about three years back, but not the US one which peers at parents, and the international notion of a serious crime is one for which the death penalty (treaty written in 1951) or a very long prison sentence would be the minimum, not a DUI or driving while suspended or without a license or user drug misdemeanors, as it is here.
And for refugees, there is a strong international bias against sending those not acceptable as refugees back to where they started from, something the US loves to do to Mexico specifically and near exclusively, and violating international law every time it does.
Ahem. This is the horrible mess that Paul Ryan has agreed with the Freedom Caucus not to address while BHO is President because he dared to move on even a bit of it, other than building fence,s by executive order.
This diary is about this mess, or the parts of it you would like to address, because a lot of these separate issues, the Dominican expulsion or the Venezuelan one, or the Rohingya and Australia and such have flown below the US radar when there are not writers with families involved on DKos, and others because . . . . because.
So far, BHO has indicated in light of the movement West of half of all Syria (only half snark, unfortunately), to admit fifteen thousand or so additional refugees who get through the huge paperwork pile, even though his ICE troops cannot get through the paperwork to move those who worked with the US in Iraq and are being hunted to the death as they wait for interviewers to appear, after the first year of waiting, and their own families long after that.
The only thing that may be said for the legal regimes applicable to refugees and migrants and such is that in the destination locations, the laws are not ready for prime time in the worst possible way.
The international treaty world has several sets of rules for adults and families and a separate set of rules for Children, for example, and one set of rules for regular immigration and another set entirely for refugees which has more rights attached to it such as the ability once determined to be a refugee to bring the entire family (definitions of family vary, and some allow same sex couples and some do not, for example) and not have to wait on the regular immigration waiting line to get to them. Various definitions appear for who is a refugee entitled to apply for asylum, and most require formal applications which must be processed usually at the first place outside the territory being fled, which does not always or usually happen, and which produces in people walking away from that office going north not less than the usual amount of arguments about bureaucrats who are not doing anything right and are stalling, when they are acting at all.
It also produces people first encountered by legal systems in the destination location who apparently arose from the mind of God with no prior location whatever which can be proven, but who have nevertheless the right to stay until someone figures out something, assuming they really trashed or successfully hid literally all of their legal papers before the gummint found them.
Most of the international treaties and agreements have date and other coverage limitations, and apply to persons who became refugees out of certain circumstances or before or after certain dates so that, for one example only, refugees from Vietnam and Palestine don't qualify under the 1951 treaty which only applies to persons who become refugees after that date, leaving the Refugee Works Authority to care for Palestinians while later refugees get the UN High Commissioner for Refugees regime and a treaty to help him rather than a jury rigged refugee camp system surrounding camps full of people with countries who will not accept them as permanent residents. This is material as, as time goes on, there are more and more occasions for the mass creation of refugees which are not included in the coverage limits of any treaty, especially as not all of the countries which agreed to the 1951 treaty, including the US, have agreed to any of the subsequent emendations.
The international system also provides that as to 'immigration', the rules of the destination state apply as long as they do not allow forced repatriation to the place being fled from. The US system may take a year to work through an application while asylum applicants wait somewhere outside the US if possible.
Of course, the international rules provide that asylum may be applied for if one is in the destination country, as long as it was the first place where the migrant stopped and resided outside the country being left behind, whether or not the presence in the destination country was achieved legally or not, and that the applicant's application must be processed in accordance with both international and domestic destination law, reviewed and appealed if necessary before a final decision is reached. on asylum and refugee status. You cannot in the US export a person with an asylum application pending until the processing is done and the appeals as well, rather than having the ICE guy or the local cops simply stuff the victim into a car and dump him or her at the border without paperwork even being done.
This slow motion process is not helpful when ten thousand a day are moving through a small town or two in Greece, thirty or forty packed boats a day from Libya to Italy, The bureaurcratic details which determine when one is or is not legally a refugee make counting angels on the head of a pin easy by comparison. Ten thousand a day of those.
Except for Mexicans and the USA, most of this has been snoozing along under the DKos radar.
This diary is intended to form a location for the beginning of a DKos discussion about the issues of refugees and immigrants not limited to IP or H1-b for job relocators and college kids. .
Why, for example,-
- the Europeans are willing in crowded and not very big lands in many cases to take literally millions of refugees and their major fight is how to allocate them among the EU states and get the costs paid for,
-and the US is desperate to throw out people who have been here for several generations and to built huge walls and use vigilantes to chase those of certain ethnicities only, and to have huge areas a hundred miles from the border where anyone thought to be possibly foreign can be stopped, and suspending all federal funds for Sanctuary Cities at the same time it is hopelessly dependent on below minimum wage jobs filled by said persons which US citizens will not take and which underpin our agricultural industries, including whole communities of persons known to be paperless and present for decades in agricultural areas to serve the ag interests.
Or what you think about the proper adjustment to make in communities which have an existing culture into which several thousand persons of a very different culture suddenly appear, to stay.
Or what to do about the border traffickers.
Or the unaccompanied children, which were more common even on transatlantic boats a century ago than they are now.
Have at it. Usual Christy rules. If you are citing documents as evidence, use a link. No personal attacks. No violations of Godwin. This is NOT and IP diary. But give the topic some serious thought and tell us all what you think. This IS coming to a neighborhood near you, and in some places, such as New York City, has come like that every fifteen or twenty years since that neighborhood was built.
