The Case For A New Underground Railroad
Wed May 21, 2008 at 03:20:08 PM PDT
The current process of allowing people to seek asylum in the U.S. works poorly. Superhuman efforts to reach the promised land in the U.S. end with no more than a crapshoot that does not distinguish between worthy claims and frivilous ones (and often can't). This is no way to run a railroad.
A better system would work more like the pre-Civil War underground railroad. The judgment about whether someone was eligible for help would be made by a trusted person on the ground where the oppression was occurring, and would be trusted by everyone else on up the line. The scouts at the beginning would pro-actively look for opportunities to spirit oppressed individuals who want to get out, which could be evaluated on the ground, rather than passively waiting to see what turned up on our shores like the flotsam and jetsom of the world. Those in need of help would be actively sheparded to their destination in the U.S. A helping hand and certainty, rather than prolonged preventantive detention and doubt, would great those helped when they arrived.
Some people can't get a fair shake. Kenya still has places where women are burned as witches. It is official policy in The Gambia to behead all gays. A Nigerian state put a woman on death row for being raped. Iraq is full of women targeted for honor killings. China executes thousands of people a year on dubious grounds that are ill proven and would constitute middling felonies in any other country. Often these people are not political dissidents but simply ordinary people who want nothing but to live an honest life. Political dissidents often don't want to leave. But many other oppressed people do.
Victimized people across the world must trek, usually illegally, to the U.S., then prove their cases in the face of absurd expectations of documentary proof, crabbed definitions of persecution, and almost whimisically different standards from judge to judge. Judicial temperment matters so much, because the truth is usually half a world away in a place embroiled in chaos.
The agency I propose would be an independent government agency, not a private conspiracy. But it would serve a similar need. We need as a nation to restore our credibility as positive agents of change and moral leaders. We need to illustrate that we have not subordinated the needs to the individual to geopolitics. The drama involved in rescuing people from private or governmental peril in their home countries would help us make progress towards this end.
We can't save everybody, without fundamentally reshaping the world, and even as the world's leading power, this is impossible. But it is well within our means to rescue tens of thousands of people a year who face challenges above and beyond the norm from horrible local situations, and to offer them better lives.
These individuals might also form a repository of information about their native lands unmatched by our current collection of CIA analysts.
Such an organization might need a few thousand employees, some as agents abroad, some to handle transporation, some to resettle people who arrive here, some to handle the inevitable business of running a government agency. It might need a few small planes, some boats or ships, and rights to cooperation from other government officials, such as the U.S. Navy, U.S. embassy staff, and the U.S. Air Force. But, it wouldn't be very expensive -- probably less than a tenth of the budget of the U.S. Coast Guard, for example (i.e. about $875 million a year).
It could start as a trial program, a tenth that size, with a few hundred employees, $88 million a year in operating expenses, and a goal of rescuing thousands instead of tens of thousands of people a year.
For that matter, the private sector could, like the real underground railroad, probably run the entire program with contributions from non-profits, if it could have scouts deputized to grant asylum on an informal basis without the usual paperwork review, the right to cooperation from U.S. authorities and immunity from U.S. prosecution for their acts in furtherance of the program but in violation of foreign laws.
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