Hey, hey, hey! Who writes the longest posts around? Me! I already know that it goes on for pages and pages, so, if you want to comment, please remark upon the substance, not the length. Oh, and despite the encyclopedic proportions of this OP, I am not trying to write the definitive history of immigration. So, I apologize in advance if I left out your favorite exile atrocity. Thank you.
Intro. Nope, I am not going to write about terrorism. Terrorism is the tool governments use to persuade their citizens to give up their freedom. I would like to talk about something even scarier, the way that folks are forced to give up their homes.
Twenty or thirty thousand years ago, no one had homeland security. We were all hunter gatherers. We followed the herds, making camp in whatever cave was convenient. But, about ten thousand years ago, we learned that we could improve on foraging by planting. Agriculture sprang up in several different parts of the world, more or less simultaneously. People started building storehouses for their extra food. They began to trade for items that were not close at hand. They built permanent dwellings. And they constructed city walls to defend their property---because the very second you decide you own something, you start worrying about losing it.
Jericho was the result, the city whose walls came tumbling down. Due to its position on the Jordan River, it is the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city, with an archeological record that spans 11,000 years. People have been living in Jericho since the dawn of agriculture----but they have not always been the same people. Waves of invaders---including the Biblical Joshua---have appropriated the site for their own uses. Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, Great Britain---all of them snatched up this valuable piece of real estate, without much regard for the current inhabitants. Basically, it was like a game of Risk. The one with the most power (game pieces) was the one who controlled it.
Might may not make right, but it can get you a deed of ownership.
I. Diaspora Usually, invaders appropriate both the land and the people who live upon it. However, some populations are easier to enslave than others. When the native people refuse to go along with the new rules, the bosses have two choices. Kill the inhabitants or relocate them.
The most infamous mass relocation took place in Palestine during the Roman occupation. The Jewish people of the area were enslaved and carted off the Europe. There, they spent the next two thousand years essentially homeless, since many countries restricted the rights of nonChristians and many governments used them as scapegoats for various social and economic ills. The Nazis deprived German Jewish people of their citizenship, and--- when they could not find anyplace to relocate them---attempted to get rid of them once and for all.
While Diaspora most often refers to the exile from Palestine, there have been several major “scatterings” in the last two thousand years. North America has had a nasty history of forced relocations. One of the most infamous is the Trail of Tears, in which Christian, land owning, literate “westernized” Native Americans were forced to leave their ancestral homes in Georgia, ostensibly because Natives and European immigrants just could not get along. In fact, the United States coveted Cherokee lands, where gold had been discovered. An “Indian Territory” was created west of the Mississippi in what is now Oklahoma. Try to imagine what it must have been like to be moved from lush, green farmlands in the east to a patch of near desert half a continent away.
Africans had a slightly different kind of forced relocation. Over the course of centuries, tens of millions of Africans were sold as slaves to various parts of the world. Some were condemned criminals, some were war captives. In later years, as the slave trade became a lucrative business, wars were fought for the express purpose of capturing slaves. Many of the forcibly relocated Africans went to parts of the world where they were assimilated into the population. However, business interests in the United States prevented the assimilation of the (involuntary) African immigrants, because they made a cheap, easily exploitable work force that could be used for onerous work such as cotton farming. Also, the presence of an unpaid workforce in the country drove down the wages of all laborers. A century after their ancestors’ arrival on the American continent, many African descendents were still treated as outsiders, people without a country.
The Irish suffered an economic diaspora during the 19th century. The potato blight, which struck Europe in the 1840s, cut down on available food supplies for Irish tenant farmers, many of whom were little more than serfs of absentee landlords in England. In a policy that has been called genocidal, Great Britain decided that it would not reduce Ireland’s exports of food even though the people of that country were starving. After all, Ireland existed so that Englishmen could get their beef. The needs of the Irish (whom many British considered subhuman) were not important. The man supposedly in charge of helping Ireland through the crisis Sir Charles Trevelyan, said "the judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson". Faced with the choice of starvation or emigration, hundreds of thousands of Irish each year left their homeland for the Americas. The lingering bitterness over this economically forced removal probably contributed to the fact that many Irish-Americans supported the Irish Republican Army generations after their arrival in the United States.
A similar economic scattering occurred within the United States during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, when many people lost their farms and had to move to cities to look for jobs.
More recently, hundreds of thousands of Tibetans have been forced to flee their country in the wake of China’s invasion. The Dalai Lama is probably the world’s most famous man without a country. Other modern mass exoduses include a million Cubans after Castro took power in that country. Almost every major modern war has lead to the massive efflux of refugees, as in Afghanistan, Rwanda, Iraq and other countries. And, of course, Muslim Palestinians experienced their own forced exile when restitutions were made to the Jewish people of Europe through the creation of Israel.
II. Tell Old Pharaoh, Let My People Go Can you go home again after a forced exile lasting centuries or longer? Two attempts at creating a “homeland” have had different results.
We are all familiar with Israel, so I am going to write about the lesser known homeland, that which was created as part of the “Back to Africa” movement. In the 19th century, some folks thought that African immigrants would never be assimilated into the U.S. So, they conceived the idea of sending them home---to a continent which most of them had never seen, a place where people spoke a foreign language and had very different customs.
With the help of the U.S. government, colonies were founded in western Africa. Eventually, these became the country of Liberia, which was ruled for over a century by Americo-Liberians----descendents of African immigrants to America who came back to their ancient homeland a changed people. The new rulers of the country spoke English, were Protestants and had adopted many European customs and values. They accepted investments from Americans and Europeans, which they used to make themselves rich. At the same time, they suppressed the non Europeanized Liberians, limiting their access to jobs and restricting their ability to take part in the democratic process. We all know the result. In 1980, there was a (bloody) revolution, followed by two civil wars. Three decades later, the country has finally achieved something close to peace.
I mention Liberia, because it should serve as a warning for those who believe that you can “go home” simply by moving your family and your stuff to a different piece of real estate. Forced exile can have profound effects on a group of people, since the local environment plays a large part in shaping culture. For instance, those who live in the world’s mountainous lands tend to be individualistic, a quality that is beneficial when you have to survive on your own in a challenging environment. Folks from large cities tend to adapt a herd instinct---they learn that the best way to get along is to go with the flow. Farmers have one set of values. Bankers have another. Ideally, people who “go home” should attempt to adopt local ideals and customs. However, if your main motivation is the desire to escape persecution, you may find that you have very little in common with your new neighbors.
Too often, western countries adopt the attitude “If we just cut out this cancer, our lives will be perfect.” When the “cancer” is other human beings, we commit the worst possibly crimes against humanity. We use racial profiling to lock up certain demographic groups so that there will be less crime. We forcibly sterilize some people, so that there will be fewer of those people in the future. And we resort to segregation---which is generally separate and
unequal----because we do not want to be bothered to sit down and actually do something that might make this a better world for everyone. Sending people "home" can be a blessing, but it can also be a particularly nasty form of segregation. Which brings me to:
III. Refoulement Not everyone wants to “go home” again. In some cases, “home” is the last place they want to be.
Many Americans probably do not know that it is against the law to send immigrants who are at risk of death or suffering back to a country against their will. That is because the U.S. commonly sends people where it wants to send them. We are the United States, after all. If we want to bomb your country, who is going to tell us “no”?
However,
Non-refoulement is pretty much the law of the civilized world. Non-refoulement means you can not send people back to places where their lives or freedom could be jeopardized. It does not stop at political asylum. If your country is in the middle of a war, if the local volcano just exploded, destroying all the farms, if you can prove that going back is likely to kill you and your family (even if it is a death by starvation), then your host country is supposed to let you stay.
Don’t believe me? Ask Amnesty International:
International law absolutely prohibits states from returning persons to a country where they face a real risk of torture, or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. The prohibition is now recognized to be a part of the general and absolute prohibition of torture and as part of this general prohibition it is binding on all states at all times regardless of whether the state in question has or has not ratified a treaty which specifically prohibits it.
http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/feature-stories/amnesty-internationalreprieve-conference-non-refoulement-and-outThe article addresses the issue of illegal renditions of people to other countries so that they can be tortured without getting the CIA’s hands dirty. However, certain types of economic refugees fall under this category, too.
Forced exile is not new. In Europe, nonChristians were often the target. Edward I of England expelled all Jewish people in 1290. They were not allowed back until the 17th century. In 1492, Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain exiled Jewish people from their country. That ban was not officially lifted until the 20th century. We have already discussed the Nazis.
And, of course, many Native Americans, Australian Aborigines and other indigenous people have been kicked off their homelands and forced onto reservations in order to free up their land for European settlers (some of whom were involuntarily exiled from their own countries and transported to the colonies to work). This practice continued well into the 20th century. During WWII, Japanese-Americans were “relocated” to camps. Since German-Americans and Italian-Americans did not receive similar treatment, race must have been a major factor. In South Africa, the Black Homeland Decitizenship Act of 1970 stripped Black South Africans of their rights and made them citizens of a new “countries” or Bantustans in order to create an artificial white majority in South Africa.
However, a modern, more brutal twist to forced exile is sending people back to their country of origin, even though they had a very good reason to leave. Even though they are returning to starvation, persecution and almost certain death. Even though they are no longer citizens of that country.
During the Great Depression, the federal government rounded up close to a million Mexican-Americans and forced them to go “back home”. Many of those sent “back home” were actually U.S. citizens, who knew nothing about Mexico. However, it was easier to blame an ethnic group for the economic woes of the United States than it was to go after the businesses which really contributed to the disaster. (Sound familiar?)
Here are some shocking examples of refoulement. We all know that during WWII, Switzerland sent Jewish Germans back to face almost certain death. Less well known, after WWII, a number of Russian immigrants in Europe were turned over to Stalin, in hopes that he would release the Europeans and Americans that he was holding. Some of these “Russians” were actually citizens of other countries. Many were part of groups which were considered enemies of the Soviet state. Some were shot the moment they arrived in the USSR. Others were forced into camps.
Shame on Europe. And shame on the United States. We sent Haitii refugees back to their country, where they faced death at the hands of a brutal regime. Our excuse? As long as the Coast Guard intercepted them before they could step foot on American soil, they were not refugees, just trespassers in U.S. waters. Be sure to read Justice Blackmun’s dissenting opinion to Sales vs. Haitians which begins
When, in 1968, the United States acceded to the United Nations Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, Jan. 31, 1967, 1968. 19 U.S.T. 6223, T.I.A.S. 6577, it pledged not to "return (`refouler') a refugee in any manner whatsoever" to a place where he would face political persecution. In 1980, Congress amended our immigration law to reflect the Protocol's directives. Refugee Act of 1980, 94 Stat. 102. See INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca, 480 U.S. 421, 429 , 436-437, 440 (1987); INS v. Stevic, 467 U.S. 407, 418 , 421 (1984). Today's majority nevertheless decides that the forced repatriation of <509 U.S. 155, 189> the Haitian refugees is perfectly legal, because the word "return" does not mean return, ante, at 174, 180-182, because the opposite of "within the United States" is not outside the United States, ante, at 175, and because the official charged with controlling immigration has no role in enforcing an order to control immigration, ante, at 171-173.
Snip
Article 33.1 of the Convention states categorically and without geographical limitation:
"No Contracting State shall expel or return ("refouler") a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion."
The terms are unambiguous. Vulnerable refugees shall not be returned. The language is clear, and the command is straightforward; that should be the end of the inquiry.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=case&court=us&vol=509+&page=155Unambiguous or not, a whole bunch of countries want to send people back to other countries, often because they find those people’s religion or customs (or, in the case of Haitians, race) objectionable. Sometimes (as with illegal rendition for torture) threats of forced repatriation are used to make immigrants give up their rights. If you are told you have a choice between 1) confessing and 2) being sent back to Country X where you will be tortured into confessing, you are likely to opt for number 1.
Here are some modern examples or refoulement:
A number of European countries are trying to expel the Roma (aka Gypsies). If you consider Europe’s previous ugly history towards it Jewish citizens and the fact that Nazis rounded up Roma for elimination, too, you have to wonder “What the hell are they thinking?” Apparently, they do not believe that anyone gives a damn what happens to the Roma. Sweden is sending them “back’ (to Kosovo, scary thought):
http://lolodiklo.blogspot.com/2010/03/swedens-forced-repatriation-of-roma-to.htmlGermany is sending back 14,000 refugees to Kosovo, most of them Roma, even though
On April 14, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière (Christian Democratic Union) and his counterpart in Kosovo, Bajram Rexhepi, signed an agreement that obligates Kosovo to repatriate 14,000 refugees currently living in Germany. In addition to 10,000 Roma, those deported include Ashkali, Kosovo Egyptians and members of the Serbian minority in Kosovo.
With its decision, the German government is ignoring reports by the United Nations Refugee Commission (UNHCR), which has been warning against deportation to Kosovo since 2006. The organisation has warned of dangers to life and limb, in particular for those belonging to minorities. In addition, the desolate economic situation in Kosovo means that repatriated refugees have virtually no chance of a job, health care provision or a proper schooling for their children who are forced to live in miserable slums.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/apr2010/koso-a26.shtmlGermany’s excuse? They promise not to send them back (to their deaths) all at once. Ireland and Italy have also been the sites of ugly anti-Roma protests.
Other people around the world who face the prospect of forced repatriation include Rwandan refugees in Uganda, Burmese refuges in Thailand, Chinese Uighurs (Muslims) in Cambodia and a whole bunch of folks in America, where your fate depends upon which immigration judge is selected to hear your case (refugee roulette).
If you consider the ever-changing borders of the world and the mobility of populations, it can be next to impossible to decide which country is a person’s “home” country---i.e. the place where that person will be safe and prosper. That is why international law requires that deportations be handled on a case by case basis. However, all too often, people are treated as a commodity to be traded for money, for political gain, for matters of foreign policy, without respect for their rights as individuals.
So, please, no more talk about sending “Mexicans” home, when what you really mean is you do not like seeing white Americans become a minority race in this country. The right wing whack jobs who want to strip born in the U.S.A Latinos of their citizenship are no better than England under Edward I---and do we really want to live in a world that has seen no progress since the Middle Ages? Hispanic immigrants own homes, hold down jobs, send their kids to school. The pay sales taxes, property taxes and (yes) income taxes (bet you did not know that the IRS will accept your tax dollars even if you do not have a Social Security Number). They attend PTA meetings. They scrape and save to send their kids to college to become our next generation of nurses, doctors, teachers, engineers. For many of them,
this is home. And if you think that they need to be sent “back” because of the language their parents speak or the color of their skin, then think about all of us whose parents spoke Italian or German or Chinese.
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