I.
“Do you think our asylum policy is broken? Do you really think that? That’s what you wrote,” the red-faced lawyer from Homeland Security shouted at me.
We were in immigration court at Federal Plaza in New York City. He was young and outraged that I had written those words in an op-ed and was now testifying as an expert witness on Afghanistan on behalf of an Afghan asylum-seeker. Clearly I had a conflict of interest.
“Actually I think we have a pretty good asylum policy, but we are not implementing it,” I said.
The judge interrupted.
“With all due respect, what she thinks of our immigration policy is irrelevant to why we are here today which is to determine whether there is a 10 percent chance of persecution if he returns to Afghanistan. That’s it.” I was relieved, but the Homeland Security lawyer kept on — I was a paid immigration advocate, I was biased, I was not really an expert since I had no academic expertise. The judge didn’t seem impressed by any of these arguments to disqualify my testimony, which went on for two hours.
I left the tiny courtroom. In the halls, mothers from Central America waited with young children tugging, leaning, falling, bored mostly. He’s lucky to be in New York, I thought. The judge was considerate and fair. In Texas, the judge denied the asylum-seeker’s claim and sent him to prison in Alabama where he was left to his own devices for nearly two years.
“I thought this was a country that believes in human rights,” Samey, the Afghan interpreter, often said to me from his Alabama prison cell after describing the insulting encounters he had with Immigration and Customs Enforcers.
What to say? Sometimes? Depends?
Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
II.
As counterintuitive as it seems, a Chinese dissident with black-and-white goatee, puffy eyes, and a compulsive selfie habit, has come ashore Jonah-like to wake up Americans to the very question Samey posed, challenging us to see refugees in a different light. This week, Ai Weiwei’s documentary “Human Flow” opens in theaters around the world. The film is extremely personal, a poetic pilgrimage spanning four continents tracing what it means to be uprooted, homeless, waiting, a refugee. At the same time, Ai is in New York City to launch his public art project “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors.” It’s loud, provocative, epic in scale. And it’s everywhere. There are 300 sites in all five boroughs of New York. Fences, gilded cages, cages with secret passages, bars over windows that had none, meshed wire locking up bus stops, all giving the lie to the promise of the Statue of Liberty, “her name Mother of Exiles,” who cries with silent lips, “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp! Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.” Or at least that is what she used to cry.
“I love it here,” Ai tells me about the United States. He lived in New York in the 1980s and studied at Parsons School of Design for a bit, wandered the art scene, gardened, played blackjack, and, after 12 years, returned to China. “Unfortunately, the tolerance to accept refugees has dropped to less than half than [the] previous administration, but it’s not the number. It’s how we look at ourselves. Do we still have the self-confidence to defend human rights to help somebody who is in a desperate situation? Do we think those values are important for society and human dignity?” He shakes his head slowly sideways and back. He speaks quietly. “We have become selfish, short-sighted, and quite timid. It sends a very bad message to the world.”
We? Has he become an American citizen?
“No,” he says. “I’m Chinese. But I don’t feel I belong to any place.”
Both homeless — his friends and his mother tell him not to return to China — and a citizen of the world, Ai has been called the most powerful artist working today. He has an asteroid named after him. He himself says he’s become some sort of myth ever since the Chinese police arrested and disappeared him for 81 days in 2011. “I told the police: ‘Without you, I would never have become so noticeable as an artist,’” he said shortly after the authorities gave him back his passport in 2015. Today, his image is almost as ubiquitous as the Dalai Lama. And he’s helped make it so with his nonstop selfie posting on Instagram, and the monumental scale of his public shows, 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds filling the Tate Modern; 14,000 life jackets, bright orange, wrapped around the columns of Berlin’s 19th century music hall; hundreds of red-painted porcelain crabs spilling out of the fireplace of Blenheim Palace in England.
But it is his persecution at the hands of the Chinese, his stoicism, and his absurdist documenting of that persecution — a selfie of hospital patient Ai holding up a sack filled with the blood draining from his temple after he was punched by Chinese police; statue recreations of Ai seated, handcuffed, interrogated by two guards; Ai naked, showering, monitored by two guards — that has confirmed his iconic stature. Icon for the suffering and the politically engaged advocates and curators around him, icon even for the critics who say he is an attention-seeking and self-promoting icon of the grand con. In a secular world, icons embody the possibility of the impossible, they hold a mystical promise to transform the way people think. Can Ai Weiwei deliver? Or is he just the messenger?
Amazon Studios
III.
I want the right of life, of the leopard at the spring,
of the seed splitting open
I want the right of the first man
— Nâzim Hikmet, Turkish poet
The words appear over the sea at dawn as “Human Flow” begins. A lighthouse comes into view, a boat with mountains silhouetting the horizon, a lone helicopter flies in the distance, the tones are purple, gray, the pace calm. A motorboat resolves, people in life jackets waving, tires thrown into the sea, children lifted ashore. And there’s Ai with his camera. He’s an odd, jarring image at first in this film. Why the Chinese dissident?
Now we’re in the desert. Tents as far as we can see. Dust. Iraq hosts 277,000 refugees fleeing Syria. We read that following the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, 268,000 people have been killed in violent conflicts in Iraq. More than 4 million Iraqis have been forcibly displaced from their homes. A girl appears in the entryway to her tent. We travel with the camera through streets of Dresden-like devastation in Syria. The refugees in the desert camp stand for portraits in a tent. A young woman in a red blouse and plaid long skirt. The camera doesn’t move. And in the long, lingering shots, the close-up faces of refugees or police or rescue and aid workers, the sea, trainers washing their horses in the sea, a boy pushing a cart with jerry cans through a red dust storm, girls pounding dough on rocks in the mud, landscapes of beauty and destruction in Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Turkey, Greece, Germany, France, Palestine, and Kenya, our imagination is left to wander or to relive moments from our own or our family’s history.
Ai’s film crystallizes many encounters I and so many have had in the conflicts of the past two decades. I remember an Iraqi cardiologist in Baghdad who I met shortly after the Americans announced the de-Baathification of Iraqi society. I followed him as he discarded his secular Baathist attitudes and clothes. Off went the suit, on came his dishdasha — the white robe with loose-fitting bottoms, a sign of piety. He attended prayer meetings. And then left for Syria to raise money and plan for insurrection with Baathists and Islamists.
America didn’t foresee the consequences of throwing 250,000 armed young Iraqi men, and 50,000 Iraqi civil servants, to the desert winds and to anyone with a good idea for revenge. We see the consequences here with flashlights on the shores of Lesbos. There’s a fire. We hear clapping, cheering. Children grabbed, wrapped in blankets. Refugees on cellphones. They made it. Another refugee in Turkey, holds 17 ID cards. He’s in a field of mud graves. He shows a photo, “This is my brother. He’s gone completely mad.” His wife, his son, his daughter are all buried. The other son drowned at sea. “They appear in my dreams at night.” He pounds his head with his fingers as the rain falls on his face.
A subtitle appears over the sea: “In 2015 and 2016 more than a million refugees arrived in Greece. Most of them came from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq.”
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IV.
Last year I received files in folders, organized with Excel by a teacher from Denver who was connected to a carpenter from Colorado and lawyers from around the U.S., all of whom were volunteering their time in Greece. By accident, they found Iraqis and Afghans in the camps in Greece who had worked for the U.S. military and had fled from their homes in fear for their lives. Many of the Afghans had a summons to appear in a Taliban court, charged with the crime of aiding the infidel.
There were hundreds. We know the stories. Some are still wandering. Some went back voluntarily or were deported. One I know, a musician with a TV company, who risked the Mediterranean journey with his wife and small children because he couldn’t take the war in Kabul any more, lost his two children in the sea and lost his mind there too. In “Human Flow” we see these men and women with backpacks, anoraks, sneakers, children, boarding the gargantuan ferries that normally transport cars and tourists to Greek islands.
“I am, thank God, strong-willed and determined,” says a young man with his son in his arms on the prow of the boat. “We are out at sea. We will reach a country that will help us, and we will return the favor.”
Maybe. Or maybe he will be one in the tide along a ribbon of road through green rolling hills, cultivated fields and corpses of trees, trekking on aching feet, holding children by the hand, in their arms, on their backs, into the woods, some sitting on the verge, then a rushing river, wading, tripping, losing shoes, only to arrive at a fence of barbed wire. The refugees, the film tells us, traveled on from Lesbos, hoping to find asylum in Germany, Sweden, and other European countries. (Noticeably omitted from the list is the United States.) By 2015, European countries started closing their borders, stranding tens of thousands in Greece.
We are at the Hungarian border. The cinematography is exquisite. Tanks roll over the wide European landscape, so familiar from World War II movies. The fence stretches for miles. Two police mounted on horses trot by. The press pool waits in the middle of the road. There are dozens of cameras.
A military officer asks a policeman: When did you last see your family?
— Last week.
And when will you travel home?
— In five days.
I hope you have an incident-free shift, says the commander in blue, and he salutes.
Amid echoes of the Cold War landscape, we read that when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, 11 countries around the world had border fences and walls. By 2016, 70 countries have built border fences and walls. Every day, 34,000 people around the world flee their homes to escape famine, poverty, and war. Sixty-five million people are displaced, a record.
Amazon Studios
V.
In 2016 the European Union and Turkey struck an agreement to stop the flow. The EU could return refugees to Turkey in exchange for promising 6 billion Euros in aid and visa-free travel to Europe. Afghanistan also struck a deal. Give us money and you can send back the refugees.
We watch police firing tear gas. Children rubbing their eyes, crying. In the dark we hear a man soothing his brother. “I don’t want to see you cry. If you want to go back to Turkey we’ll go back to Turkey tomorrow morning. If you want to go to Germany, we’ll go tomorrow. Are you not my older brother? I’ll follow you wherever you go, even to tell.” His brother can only wail.
We see the back of a woman in jeans and black coat seated at a wooden table inside a tent. She’s been roaming aimlessly for 60 days with her son. “Nobody has shown us the way. If I want to apply for asylum, how exactly? Where am I supposed to start my life? How many more days can I live like this?” She waves her hands away. It’s OK, Ai says, and gives her a bucket. She vomits.
We’re in the eye of a drone spinning over rows of white containers in the dust, descending over children running away from it. Turkey.
While Europe struggles to cope with 1.2 million refugees, the U.S. agrees to accept just 45,000 — the lowest since the Refugee Act was signed in 1980. The majority of the world’s 65 million refugees are in already strained economies; 3 million in Turkey, 2 million in tiny Lebanon, 1.3 million in tiny Jordan, millions in Kenya, Uganda, Bangladesh, Pakistan.
Amazon Studios
VI.
The juxtapositions in “Human Flow” signify with no need for interpretation. Particularly as Ai cuts from the humans to their animals. The most arresting is in Gaza, a spit of land where 1.8 million Palestinians live like prisoners. We see Ai Weiwei and his crew interview 10 young women who’ve come from school to the beach, just for a tiny escape. They are still in Gaza. They dream of a cruise ship, traveling the world. They know it’s impossible. And then we cut to a tiger circling in a mud enclosure below. He was smuggled or escaped through the tunnels from Egypt, says a man’s voice. “Animals feel like humans. They can feel disasters. Tigers hear much better than us, the bombs around them. To keep an animal where it is not able to touch the grass, I don’t believe this is correct.”
The Palestinian man is from Four Paws. We see a montage of him and co-workers hauling a massive green container into a steel cage on the back of a truck at night. “We have to work with Jordan, with the South African authorities, with Israel and the Palestinian authorities,” he says. “It needs import export permit, a veterinary certificate, custom advisory, military approval. No one said no to help this animal have a better life.”
The next day, Laziz the tiger would be transported to an airport in Israel, flown to Johannesburg, and released.
“I call it his trip for freedom.”
Amazon Studios
VII.
Ai appears throughout his odyssey, often looking out of place, like he doesn’t know what to do with himself. “There’s nothing to do in the camps. I have nothing to do,” he says. Except break up the tedium. Getting his hair cut, buying fruit off a truck, filming with his iPhone. Or just performing the role he has cast himself in — the witness wandering across four continents, waiting, like the refugees, for he knows not what. For divine intervention. For Godot. For something to happen. For nothing to happen. For darkness.
“Witnessing,” he says when I ask him why he says his favorite word is “act.” He goes on. “To pay attention, to gaze your vision to something probably is one of the most important acts humans can have. In the modern media we don’t give time. We can change channels or move the images with our finger. Or talk about one subject and jump. Not pay attention. Our attention span is so short. It’s the same as our emotional capacity. We cannot stay in anything for too long. We are like animals. We react to the reality and maybe we have become a new human being incapable of caring anymore.”
Do you really think so? I ask.
“I think so,” he says.
“When the refugees come to Europe there’s so little hope being offered by the society. I just couldn’t believe it. Not to help and find the excuse not to help is beyond belief.”
We know we’re in dark times, but here I have to part ways with Ai. Away from the very loud, xenophobic backlash against refugees has been an extraordinary hospitality from ordinary citizens, mayors, families in Greece, Germany, England, and elsewhere. Small towns like Altena took in refugees, citizens volunteered to have them in their homes and teach English. Mayor George Ferguson in Bristol, England, called on his citizens to take refugees into their homes. The mayor of Athens has started to work with Airbnb on a project called Open Homes, where people sign up to offer temporary housing for asylum-seekers.
There is a crisis and moral failure, as journalist Patrick Kingsley so eloquently argues in his book “The New Odyssey.” “But it’s one caused largely by our response to the refugees, rather than by the refugees themselves,” he writes. And by our response, he means the policymakers. They attacked Libyan smugglers hoping to stave off the flow, they ended rescue operations in the Mediterranean to stave the flow. In 2016, more than 5,000 refugees drowned trying to cross the sea. They reinstated the rescue operations. Kingsley again: “With each desperate scheme, politicians repeatedly ignored the reality of the situation.” No matter what the refugees will keep coming. “Had they created an organized system of mass resettlement from the Middle East in 2014 and 2015, and had this kind of scheme got going fast enough, and on a large enough scale, Europe might have been able to curb the most chaotic aspects of the crisis.”
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VIII.
So where does Ai Weiwei’s act of witnessing leave us, the audience, particularly here in the United States? Are we witnesses, or are we incapable of caring anymore? Are we spectators to refugee porn or a call to arms? And if it’s a call to arms, what can we do in the face of an administration that has dropped the number of refugees we will welcome to just 45,000. We took 800,000 refugees after the Vietnam War. Even under Barack Obama, we promised to take just 10,000 Syrians. And though they will be the most vetted foreigners entering this country under any circumstances, 31 governors said they’d veto attempts to house Syrians in their states.
U.S. policies toward refugees have fluctuated wildly since the 1924 Immigration Act that set limits by national origin. The numbers have reflected the politics of the day. Today we are governed by fear. So while Germany accepts 1 million refugees, the United States, arguably responsible for wars that have led to these mass exoduses, is ducking for cover. It doesn’t have to be that way. We have the capacity and the willingness on local levels to process and take in hundreds of thousands of people.
Ai has delivered his message. It’s all he can do. On a national scale, nothing will change for now. But across the country in Georgia, Connecticut, Nebraska, New York, California, friends of refugees, lonely communities, mayors are taking cues from our northern neighbor and trying to follow the refugee sponsorship program of Canada. Churches from Brooklyn to Charlotte post signs in their windows and on their announcement boards saying “Refugees Welcome Here.” Gone is the fear-mongering rhetoric of identity and national security. “If you’re a mayor, 3,000 refugees in a town of 3 million doesn’t threaten your identity or your security because they are far better screened than tens of millions of other visitors,” says Gregory Maniatis, director of Open Society Foundations’ International Migration Initiative. At the U.S. Conference of Mayors, he says, “They speak of practical day-to-day challenges” — schooling, jobs, transportation, housing, doctors — “as opposed to the abstractions: Are they going to blow us up or change who we are?”
Emanuel Ransom was the first African-American mayor in Clarkston, Georgia, a town of 15,000 that has welcomed more than 1,000 refugees a year for the past two decades. Ransom used to see the Ku Klux Klan marching past his house in the 60s. Yet he first got involved in city politics because he was worried about the refugees, he didn’t think they had a place in Clarkston. Then he became mayor. He got to know the Burmese and Bhutanese and Syrians and Afghans and Tibetans, 80 percent of whom were employed and paying taxes. Asked in a documentary a few years ago how he felt about his past view of the refugees, he said, “Like an ass actually. Because I knew better.”
Top photo: Chinese activist and artist Ai Weiwei stands in one of his new art installations in Central Park, part of a series of works titled “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,” on Oct. 10, 2017 in New York City.
The United States ruling classes decided some fifty years ago that they would flood America with cheaply got foreigners as a means to their ends.
Refugee
How to love this broken world,
holding the dreams of Spring close.
Remember the brave infant taking new steps on old carpets.
Recall the goat and olive tree the
taste of sun on ripened fig,
Pause to swallow the bird’s song.
Embrace the immigrant and refugee,
who wave goodbye to rich men’s wars and prisons.
How to repair the ravaged soul,
releasing the string that ties the heart to home.
Make a promise to avoid the fearsome thought.
Remind yourself the earth still moves from day to night-catching stars and moon in liquid light.
Love for all and for all that means.
Pray the tide will bring the salt of new dreams.
What about the non-human ‘flow’? Do migrating animals get to ‘flow’? What about the caribou? The Monarch butterflies? The elephants? Oh, yes–what about their habitats and their needs?? Why the exclusive concern for the masses of humans, overbreeding and destroying the planet??
“…“I love it here,” Ai tells me about the United States.”
And why wouldn’t you? It’s a fantastic place if you’re a fat sanctimonious phoney artist millionaire being lionised by a bunch of stupid pseudo-progressives. Not so much if you’re a desperate refugee struggling to stay alive somewhere in the Middle East or North Africa, after seeing your country bombed into the stone age by the USA or its allies, and half of the people in your village killed.
Still, never mind. Here’s a fat sanctimonious phoney artist millionaire come from the USA to make a film about your terrible plight, which somehow he manages to do without ever bothering to explore the root causes of why you became a refugee, and who was ultimately responsible.
“He lived in New York in the 1980s and studied at Parsons School of Design for a bit, wandered the art scene, gardened, played blackjack, and, after 12 years, returned to China.”
You know something? There’s always been a bit of a gap in Ai Weiwei’s biography – that bit between making bricks out of mud in a cave in rural China, and then somehow magically swanning around America for 12 years like some playboy, without apparently needing a job, a green card, or any money. I don’t know any Chinese people who could have done that.
Maybe one day Ai will plug that gap.
Who started and continues to finance most of these conflicts? The U.S.A. of course but Americans won’t pick up the tab for the consequences of all these wars. Why should some small European nations with no involvement in these wars have to take on the burden of the resulting refugees? The author seems to be clueless as to the cost of housing, healthcare, food, clothing and education for these people. Americans LOVE war and Americans can PAY for the consequences of their wars. Oh and what of Israel and its policies that result in such despair for the Palestinians that they are looking for a home outside of their own sovereign state.
This article is STUPID! It shows that you are intent on continuing the unrest and ill conceived ideas of the left! So far you have NOT posted a single 1 of mine!
Wawa…if they would assimilate into the country’s customs and laws maybe, but instead they demand free housing, free medical and food! We need to take care of our own! Veterans, homeless people, hungry children, before immigrants and illegals!
There are far too many people on the planet than the planet can rightfully hold. Waste, chemicalled food supply, weather catasrophe, etc. AMERICA HAS NOT “LOST” IT’S CONSCIENCE, AMERICA WAS ROBBED OF IT’S GOOD WILL by wallstreet thieves and their elected whores who place other countries above the comfort and power of any and all individual US citizens.
The criminal enterprise that runs the economy has no conscience – just hands to steal, a mouth to lie, eyes and ears to close.
“There are far too many people on the planet than the planet can rightfully hold.”
Total bullshit.
Anthropology/geography 101: you can fit the ENTIRE world population into Texas, and haave land to spare. The problem, though, is that Texans are there.
The problem is not over-population; the problem is the race/class/ethnic conflicts that are manipulated by banksters who seek control of resources.
If I were Ai Weiwei I could take a dump on a tarp and charge people $100 to tell me how good it smelled. If white Ai Weiwei from Appalachia made the same exhibits he would be ignored.
He’s a tool for the liberal art scene, the US-to-Asia pivot, and now for economic migrants who undermine things like the minimum wage and trade unions.
I admire an artist who involves himself so much in such a worthy cause. Bless him for showing the world the humanity of the refugees. Thank you for writing this story .
I’m with Elizabeth. If only the world was filled with more celebrities like Ai Weiwei and fewer grubby people the world would be a much nicer place. Thank you Elizabeth and thanks Ai Weiwei. We are all better off with both of you.
At one time, immigrants as a cheap source of labor were welcome in America. But the United States no longer has any use for refugees, or any legal immigrants. Illegal immigrants will work a lot cheaper and don’t complain, providing a few are deported every now and then to keep the others in line. Capitalism is all about developing better business models, and it is no use being nostalgic for the primitive business models of the past. Refugees aren’t officially welcome, but those with enough talent and ingenuity will find a way to enter the United States illegally and then Americans will be happy to exploit them. America hasn’t ‘lost its conscience’ – it has simply evolved.
“Tear Down That Wall”, Mr. Trump! (h/t the ghost of Reagan’s past.)
*mi casa es su casa, is the only legitimate immigration policy, benitoe . .. swimming pools, movie stars welcome.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/16/end-immigration-controls-money-people-barriers
Until so-called journalists begin to do Real, Empirical Reporting or Journalism, as opposed to zero-content, or no-content, phony reportage, we will continue to have well-parsed endless articles of this ilk.
Who creates those refugee flows? How do they profit from doing so? On how many variegated levels do they profit by it? Why has the patterns of such processes become so obvious to everyone by so-called “journalists”?
Forever doing everything to inflate their financial assets, while concurrently doing everything to lower the costs of labor, be it those endless refugee flows, whether from endless wars, or endless so-called “free trade agreements” (reporters, research into how many subsistence farmers in Mexico were thrown off their farmlands after the passage of NAFTA, which legalized the foreign purchase of Mexican banks, which then pressured for the privatization of those farmlands, leading to former Mexican farmers flowing north to be cheap labor for the USA, etc.) would be far more worthy of close and detailed examination.
Otherwise, you are just confusing the issue!
Some of the comments below are mindboggling, but all too expected from elitist pseudo-empathisers.
I’m English and not remotely keen on my country’s vile history and the history it’s continuing to make.
For people to flee from their own country, they must be pretty desperate. Something most Americans cannot possibly understand. Why would they? They’ve been indoctrinated with right wing extremist views for ages. This is something that Ai Weiwei is trying to show them, but the USA just doesn’t get it. It’s truly scary what is happening in the world, especially now as the Austrians (yes, the birthplace of Hitler) are joining the merry throng of right wing extremists. We’re marching towards a 2033 and that should make people concerned. At least if the “Leader of the free world” presses the button, in one of his megalomaniacal hissy fits, then there won’t be any more refugees…..
Please show some empathy and some admiration for an extremely brave artist.
Conscience? WHAT conscience?
Only complete and utter devastation, or a preternatural penchant for insatiable greed, can make a real human being *want* to live here today.
Of course I would open the door to more immigration, much more, by those who have been subjected to the former. It could only serve to improve matters, though keeping them safe once they get here could prove to be a challenge in most parts of the US.
The US has helped create a problem for which there is no solution. It has done so throughout the Middle East. Others bear the brunt, of course; “externalized costs” is always the American capitalist ideal.
No surprise. It’s what people in the current White House call “winning.” They’re serious, too.
Great article
Thanks
Elizabeth Rubin describes Ai Weiwei’s new project as “loud, provocative, epic in scale.” As opposed to the public artists, whose works are not? His exhibition features gilded cages, fences, and mesh wire, replete with a self-aggrandized public relations release that would make Goldman Sachs blush. To act as if Ai Weiwei’s art provides sublime insight into asylum policy smacks of charlatanism. Ai says we have become “selfish, short-sighted and quite timid,” reducing immigration, an utterly complex phenomenon, to artistic opportunism.
On its face, asylum’s required elements provide a nebulous rubric. The court has added numbers to make the process appear more scientific and objective. The person’s “reasonable fear of future prosecution” must be between 10 and 15 percent. How a court evaluates this fear is plagued by information barriers. After all, the very nature of threats requires subterfuge. How courts parse through the noise of an asylum-seekers’ subjective fears, not to mention any ulterior motivations, is a guessing game. Persecution is not defined under US Asylum law. However, it was defined by a 2009 6th Circuit Appeals Court decision as “the infliction of harm or suffering by the government to overcome a characteristic of the victim.
“Harm” and “suffering” are amorphous and could both be nonlinear events. Both could mean death. As such, it’s odd to use a 10-15 percent rubric to evaluate the future event of death. Most individuals would take a 99% of getting beat up, ostracized, and losing their jobs –over a 15 percent chance of death.
Assigning a probability to future persecution is plagued with complexity. It must be extrapolated from past events. The 6th Circuit decision, mentioned above, requires the asylum-seeker to provide evidence of the motive for persecution. Not only will this typically secretive evidence be hard to find, it will be difficult to extrapolate events based thereon. The asylum seeker must show a 10-15 percent this motive still exists. This may be difficult to accomplish if the country has made superficial changes in leadership or provided safer areas of the country for persecuted individuals to live safely. Countries would proudly broadcast this information to the world, which may merely be more noise –hiding their underlying motivations. Even well-meaning countries could fail to appreciate how complex their socio-economic climate is. Without a global controller, ideas emerge and take hold, groups organize and act.
Uncertainty is also an area of knowledge to be considered. There may not be enough information to make a prediction with any degree of scientific validity and, as such, the court would have to accept uncertainty. In such a case, the court should default to granting asylum.
In sum, the asylum approval process plagued by complexity, nonlinearity, and information asymmetries. It needs better judges, lawyers, and legislatures, who understand these disciplines as well as their interplay with law and politics. It does not need artists being promoted as prophets.
Why do so many people want to come here? USA is okay but it’s hardly Shangri-La….
You have to admire the Left’s shrewd manipulation of the Christian instinct for Charity and Compassion… and the masochistic tendency to “turn the other cheek” — how dare you defend yourself? Paradoxically it’s strongest in places more thoroughly de-Christianized like UK or Sweden, it becomes sublimated and serves as the basis of a new kind of sick religion. You almost have to conclude that people can’t live without religion, it just gets reupholstered, new apostles are deployed, new witch hunts launched. Boring really. It must give our Corporate Overlords a real headache.
The World WE have built, ALL not just America, a World of over population, pollution, resource depletion and competition thus devaluation of human life. America and Americans have contributed greatly to this. However, America is not the totality of history. Our’s and World’s stewardship has been poor, we did not invent empire or inequity, indeed we were established as a Republic with some frail hope of avoiding E&I. Sadly, E&I are two of the cornerstones of civilization. America has killed millions some deserving some not but it could of been and if we all do not change our path to over population and conflict for resources, billions can die , PDQ.
America should do its part to set right what it was PART of setting wrong but no Nation can absorb continuously what is becoming a Worldwide scramble for a lifeboat for humanity. WE ALL must fix it, set it right at the source, not try to absorb more than We can sustain as a species. Through out history, competition for limited or even coveted resources are the roots of empire, injustice and warfare. More people more conflict, we all must choose.
Why do this in NY? Try Dallas, or Baton Rouge for an actual effect. This guy likes Fame and Attention
America ever had a conscience? No, she didn’t. Not ever.
Founded by elitists for an elite (like all ‘societies’), practicality and not morality is the determinant in the USA.
The masses are pawns in every ‘society,’ and until people realize that rulers and elites operate to maintain power regardless of (what they regard as superstitious, abstract concepts like) “virtue,” it will be ever thus.
Don’t forget how the USA was built after they killed off the native Americans and put the rest in reservations: black slave labor.
The culture of many Nations has violent roots. America’s native America culture runs deep in our society character and law. First off I am part Cherokee. Better take a hard look at history and human nature. We had wars, slavery, tribal imperialism before a “white” foot touched the shore. Best we ALL deal with our angels and devils, nationalism tribal or supper power is just a symptom and evil or good is not racial color-coded. Just an abbreviated history of long “Indian” wars for one Nation, for land, money, power, empire, red on red, white on red, red on white, white & red on red and so on. This is the same Native American Nation that inspired our Constitution. http://tolatsga.org/iro.html
Other tribal histories peripherally available on this site.
America and many other Nations are rooted in conflict. Perhaps we should have taken the Native American name of one of our State for the Nation, Kentucky, one many possible translations “dark and bloody ground” more to our roots and much of the rest of humanities’.
Man if I had a dollar for every white dude that that said they were part native American before going on a native American genocide apologetic rant….even had a coworker do this to ne…lol
Yes, I am part Cherokee only one sixteenth but it was not uncommon for Native Americans and Europeans to marry on the frontier. I am a man of many “Nations.”The love of Nature abides in me. As to Your “genocide apologetic rant,” cheap shot,” I extol neither but understand both and acknowledge they have been practiced by all races and most Nations to include Europeans and Native Americans, all my peoples have done evil and good. Yes the conquest of the “new world,” old to those that lived there, was the greatest genocide in history largely due to not just to conquest and war but one of the other horsemen pestilence. See the site provided above. Also do not assume a person is a racist, genocidal and untruthful. It kills your credibility when wrong on all accounts.
Fred,
I’m glad you responded to hm; I don’t get what he was on about; likely just venting in his rage at whatever.
We are witnessing the world, especially America, changing in real time, becoming selfish, arrogant, and bereft of empathy.
Yes, there is lots of rage in humanity and history. America is ruled by greed and rage. Time to try something different?
1/16th? And you’re on here acting as if you are a ‘Cherokee’? I knew you were full of B.S. So here’s what you really are: you’re a white guy who hates Indians, so your clever idea is to post comments being critical of Indians while posing as one. LOL! I know another schmuck in Michigan who does the same thing :-D
Although I am like many/most of mixed race I do not represent any tribe or ancestry. I have read and lived some history. I simple find blaming any particular race for the ills of the world when every race at one time or another has “joined in” nonproductive to building a future that confronts our human flaws and seeks our better angels to steward a better future. The site I lists seems to be a good history of conflicts that were the foundations of the Nation. http://tolatsga.org/iro.html
I did not write the history.
So true. You nailed him! :-D
Sorry Fred, but I think you’re completely incorrect in comparing the violence done by indigenous peoples to other tribes to what the European settlers did to Natives. In short, your arguments are laughably bad and ignorant, as any informed historian of N. America would agree. Also, you’re putting your foot in your mouth which is rather embarrassing. Next…
The only possibly unique ingredient of the USA is that it at least gives voice (not reality, perhaps) to the concept of self-governance, i.e., democracy, but the fact that you assume it is unique in its bloody origin simply indicates your abysmal ignorance of the history of other countries.
Ignorance can be cured, stupidity cannot.
I’m glad my prescient and most accurate post in this thread, i.e. that the American colonialists committed a holocaust against the millions of indigenous tribes–then used black slave labor to build this country got you so pissed off. The truth hurts sgt dum. Deal with it.
deschutes & stg doom Your both right no one is stupid. Violence and atrocity, warfare, slaver, genocide, have been the hallmark of civilization for all races. “Deal will it” God I am trying to, more important changing this.
Cheers Fred. You make many excellent points. Kudos!
REALLY? Seriously? ALL the USA? All the infrastructure, the factories, the buildings? Everywhere??? Black slaves built the railroads? In the industrial NE? Illinois? (Where a young Lincoln helped pass laws to keep free blacks OUT). Save the hand-wringing histrionics. Pick up a history book sometime.
Yes, America has a complicated history were many black, red and some white have got a real raw deal. I might make a discovery of a new caner therapy but have no idea how to build a time machine to go back and right past evil and injustice. WE can dwell on and cultivate the bitterness of past injustice to divide and destroy US, or use our knowledge of human history and frailty to deal with the foundations and today’s continuation of evil and injustice and plan a better future, choose wisely.
This looks like an interesting film, and yes, all refugees torn up from their homelands share similar problems – but the specific case of the European refugee crisis and what drove it, doesn’t seem to be explicitly addressed. In terms of geopolitics, the blame for that lies squarely with the U.S., Britain, NATO and EU member states:
http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/09/europe-invaded-mostly-by-regime-change-refugees/
While China’s human rights abuses are legion, and their paranoid repression of free speech and democratic rights within Chinese borders are reprehensible, I’d expect a more explicit condemnation of the British, US, French and other European actors who supported the destabilization of the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa in what is pretty obviously yet another neocolonial adventure.
Of course, the U.S. let many refugees in from Vietnam, but not any from Syria or Libya – what does that mean, we’ve gotten more savage over the years, not less?
“Of course, the U.S. let many refugees in from Vietnam, but not any from Syria or Libya – what does that mean, we’ve gotten more savage over the years, not less?”
From 2011 to 2016, 18007 Syrian refugees were settled in the United States according to the US Department of State Refugee Processing Center Report dated January 4, 2017.
Now tell us:
1) the difference between “not any” and 18,007
2) How many refugees the Libyan crisis created and what did most of those refugees did according to the United Nations?
3) Are you sincerely incapable of understanding what you read or you just don’t read anything and just write whatever makes you feel better regardless it is truth or not?
Want a laugh? ?????
Google “Ai Wei Wei net worth.”
It is INSULTING to call him homeless. Some people seem to use that word carelessly-I wonder if they have ever met actual “homeless people.”
But it is HILARIOUS to see what pops up in Google:
“Frederik Meijer”
No Chinese in America are really talking about Ai-he’s s/th some Americans and worship as a buddha, but secretly covet his greenbacks, and his local connections.
Most American Chinese are looking hard at Guo WenGui tho….and the general opinion is that “he isn’t saying anything that we don’t all know already.”
Not that he isn’t trying….maybe Ai could peek in there, and then, who knows? A new Cultural Revolution! Wei Ren Min Fu Wu! (or ride out of town on an ox backwards)
https://wordpress.com/post/researchorganizedgangstalking.wordpress.com/10268
I’m new here and I’m confused, is Weiwei the Chinese Lena Dunham or the Chinese Bono? Not really sure, but I’m glad to see The Intercept bringing us the news of the world packaged as a celebrity puff piece.
Thank you, great article. Needs to stay front and center.
The world is a mess and alot of it is backed by US policies.Think people didnt notice?You want open borders?You want to flood the US with refugees the US created when we cant even find work for our own people?
Having concern for displaced people and destructive US policies doesnt have to result in a suicide pact does it?
Your comment perfectly exemplifies the baseless fearmongering at the core of the refugee crisis.
Not only are refugees coming into the US go through the most extensive background history check in our history, these people do not risk their lives crossing a dozen different countries to come wage violence in our country.
Your inability to see this issue as more than a black and white problem of “us vs. them” fits into the political narrative that has been created over the last few years.
You’re not wise or educated about this issue, you are part of the problem.
Refugee flows amounting to a fraction of a percentage point of the overall U.S. population is a “flood”? Rigorous legal and security clearance amounts to “open borders”? All of this is to be understood as a “suicide pact”?
The politics of hysteria and psychosis are not new, but…
“U.S. policies towards refugees has fluctuated wildly since the 1924 Immigration Act that set limits by national origin. The numbers have reflected the politics of the day. Today we are governed by fear. So while Germany accepts 1 million refugees, the United States, arguably responsible for wars that have led to these mass exoduses, is ducking for cover. It doesn’t have to be that way. We have the capacity and the willingness on local levels to process and take in hundreds of thousands of people.”
The solution to CIA’s Kryptos “riddle in a riddle” is PEOPLE TO CREATE A SAFER FREER WORLD AND SURELY THERE IS NO BETTER PLACE THAN BERLIN THE MEETING PLACE OF EAST AND WEST”.
Kryptos K4 “BERLINCLOCK” equals Kryptos K5 “BERLINTHEME”.
Looking forward to see Ai Wei Wei’s work.
Reagan arguing for bringing down the wall, Trump wanting to create one.
I named two 1985 Air Force programs Have Trump (tactical) and Bernie (strategic). Or how from its ashes will raise the Phoenix.
We will find out if I was right, hopefully sooner than later.
Same regarding Honduras. Just last week the name Lanny Davis poped up as possible Weinstein crisis manager.
The same Lanny Davis that managed the Lewinsky scandal, was Clinton fundraiser, turned cheif US lobbyist for Honduras sweat shop owning oligarchs and their coup. The coup that led to chaos, to mass violence, to parentless children risking life and abuse to come to the US. When are we going to see a film explaining this poetic flow?
It may be a good film, but no mention in the article of the little inconvenient truth kept quiet by same sort of people that covered up Weinstein et al but are now so concerned about refugee gender “rights”:
Total UNHCR registered displaced persons from Syria in 2016
Saudi: 29
Qatar: 35
Poland: 501
USA: 9808
Germany: 475649
Saudi and Qatar are countries that armed and funded regime change is next door Syria that caused millions fellow Sunnis to flee and many to drown in the Mediterranean.
Saudi is less then 200 miles away from Syria but they closed shut their borders to fellow Sunnis. Same with Qatar. Not much about this in Al Jazeera, Intercept, NBC et al..
Would be surprised if this was mentioned in this Ebay alumn/Amazon produced film, but let’s see..
Ssshhhh. No room for facts here at The Intercept.
How come when you mention Libya in the article there is no mention of the fact that the United Nations said that 96% of the people coming to Europe are refugees at all but economic migrants?
Yes many of those coming from Africa are economic migrants, usually the result of corruption, dictators refusing to give up power so economic development never occurs.
Deirdre: if you simply have no knowledge of what is happening in Africa, i.e. the West’s continued plundering of the continent’s resources, done through arming and supporting violent military and non-military factions that in turn facilitate access to said resources, then perhaps you shouldn’t comment on the situation. The West has been plundering Africa for over 500 years now. The U.S. military’s Africom command secretively acknowledges 46 military bases of various size in Africa. If you have any knowledge of the history of Africa or Latin America under Western influence you know that the whole point of Western policy is “so economic development never occurs.” How else to steal resources from the many poor in those nations for the benefit of the few in the West?
The majority of Syrian Refugees in temporary camps in neighboring countries
June 2017
Turkey – 3 million Syrian refugees are currently in Turkey.
Lebanon – 1 million Syrian refugees are currently in Lebanon.
Jordan – 660,000 Syrian refugees are currently in Jordan.
Iraq – 242,000 Syrian refugees are currently in Iraq.
Egypt – 122,000 Syrian refugees are currently in Egypt.
http://www.unhcr.org/
Don’t negate this. My point is that GCC countries are richest neighborhoods, yet they closed their doors to fellow Sunni Syrian, even though these countries were/are prime instigators of the Syrian civil war. The US helped with smuggled arms (DNC and GOP operatives). Outsider youth were brainwashed and recruited to serve as fanatical human ordinance by US social media giants (Google, Twitter, FB). The US media, including this article is silent about this. That is my point.
“My point is that GCC countries are richest neighborhoods, yet they closed their doors to fellow Sunni Syrian”
This is false statement. GCC countries are not part of the UN Convention of Refugees. Therefore, they do not consider Syrians coming to their territory as “refugees” in the legal term. Saudi Arabia has allowed millions of Syrians into its territory as “workers”. They receive free healthcare, and many of them free education. Moreover, many Syrians get special treatment in terms of bringing their families into Saudi Arabia.
Thanks for these statistics on which countries are accommodating Syrian refugees. What I find interesting is that Israel, which shares its northern border with Syria, is not accepting any Syrian refugees. Also not accommodating any Syrian refugees is Saudi Arabia, the main supporter of ISIS. Why is that?
Why aren’t Israel and Saudi Arabia, both hugely wealthy countries, doing more to offer aid and accommodation to Syrian refugees?
“Why aren’t Israel and Saudi Arabia, both hugely wealthy countries, doing more to offer aid and accommodation to Syrian refugees?”
I am not talking for Israel or Saudi Arabia, but common sense dictates that Israel will not accept a group of people hostile to its government. You cannot possibly believe that even Syrians refugees would feel safer under the Israeli government, which occupies Arab territory illegally. Nevertheless, Israel has treated Syrian civilians in Israeli hospitals and has accepted Syrian refugees who are minors.
According to Saudi officials they have provided approximately $700 mln to the Syrian refugee crisis. The UN has officially thanked Saudi Arabia for its support. Morever, it is distorted to say Saudi Arabia does not accept Syrian refugees. Syrians who were supposed to leave SA had their residency extended under a special program and were allowed to bring some family members to SA where they received free healthcare and free education.
Ridiculous and disingenuous comment about Israel. The Syrian refugees would gladly go to Israel, but Israel being an apartheid regime would never allow them in, just as Israel now bans blacks from Africa from coming into Israel as they don’t want blacks to pollute the Zionist homeland. That said, Israel has been giving free medical aid to ISIS fighters during the entire Syrian Arab war, as has been thoroughly documented. Next…
1) How many Syrian refugees told you, the media or anybody they wanted to go to Israel?
2) You obviously have your own issue with Israel, so you will never accept factual or common sense analysis. Basically a rational discussion with you is a waste of time.
Did we have you fooled!
With the Trump Administration the Republicans are making the next step to a dystopian state.
The positive thing is that these kind of states in time are overthrown by the people.
Everybody in the Village hates this “art”. If this “artist’ was committed to equality, if that’s actually a good goal in art, he would have shared his millions with 299 local artists who could use some exposure instead of using 300 public spaces for his own device. What hypocrisy.
“I want the right of the first man”…Turkish poet.
This is the heart of the problem – expanding populations on a finite planet.
I would argue that zero population growth is insufficient at this point to arrest the burgeoning disaster of refugees. Yet nobody wants to talk about it.
That’s because it’s hardwired deep n the lizard brain – biological success is the survivability of offspring. For a thousand generations, virility and fecundity have been rewarded. The farmer needs lots of help on the farm. The king needs his heirs. The bigger tribe vanquishes the smaller.
We can’t seem to get away from it.
Rather roughly put but it cuts to the quick of the human nature we must learn to control or get more of the same on a ever increasing scale.
Gimme a break about whose opinion judges our conscience as a country. This is trolling journalism to be honest… time for journalism to get off the soapbox
As an American let me apologize for our country;s government not doing just as much as the Chinese, Russian, and Saudi governments in helping with the refugee effort.