Category: Migration, Refugees, and Asylum

We accept asylum-seekers because it is our moral duty, or so we are informed. Yet, as a practical matter, most of the people who can request asylum are those who are physically tough enough to travel to our southern border and then live under a bridge for a while. See “Thousands of Migrants Huddle in Squalid Conditions Under Texas Bridge” (NYT, 9/16/2021):

The temporary camp in Del Rio has grown with staggering speed in recent days during a massive surge in migration that has overwhelmed the authorities.

The U.S. Border Patrol said that more than 9,000 migrants, mostly from Haiti, were being held in a temporary staging area under the Del Rio International Bridge as agents worked as quickly as they could to process them.

The temporary camp has grown with staggering speed in recent days, from just a few hundred people earlier in the week. The authorities and city officials said they expected thousands more to cross the ankle-deep river between Mexico and Del Rio in coming days.

The Southwest border has been inundated in recent months with a surge in unauthorized crossings not seen in more than two decades. More than 200,000 people crossed last month, bringing the total this fiscal year to more than 1.5 million.

The vast majority of those who arrived appeared to be fleeing Haiti, the Caribbean country still reeling from a series of natural disasters and the assassination in July of its president, Jovenel Moïse, local officials said.

If people have the right to live in the U.S. because they formerly lived in Haiti (incorrectly characterized as a less than awesome place by Donald Trump), isn’t it our moral duty to send Airbus A380s every hour to Toussaint Louverture International Airport and bring 900 people, potentially elderly and infirm, to IAD, SFO, ORD, LAX, and other airports in the U.S. that are near Americans who express a sincere desire to help migrants (e.g., with lawn signs)?

From Labadee port guide, an image of the hardship that I witnessed first-hand in Haiti. A toothbrush shortage leads to unorthodox methods of dental hygiene:

We were able to flee:

More seriously… why not an airlift of anyone from Haiti who wants to request asylum? If even one Haitian has a moral right to live for the rest of his/her/zir/their life here in the U.S. (in means-tested public housing, let’s hope!), why shouldn’t that right extend to all Haitians equally? We don’t have any reason to believe that the people who walked across the Rio Grande and are now living under the bridge are morally superior to those who stayed behind in Haiti (or Tapachula; see below), do we?

The Los Angeles Times says that we might want to set up a permanent hotel underneath the bridge… “Tens of thousands of Haitian migrants are trapped in southern Mexico”:

TAPACHULA, Mexico — Psyching themselves up for a 1,000-mile journey, hundreds of migrants gathered near the central plaza of this southern Mexican city and broke into a chant: “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”

This sweltering city near the Guatemalan border has become a vast open-air detention camp, a dead end for as many as 50,000 migrants who scramble daily to pay for food and shelter as they mull new strategies to break out and get to the United States.

Their presence here is so ubiquitous that the city can seem like a slice of the Caribbean. Haitians line up at banks, aid agencies and cellphone shops. They hang out in the central plaza. Street markets, cafes and hair salons have sprung up to serve them. Haitian music blares from storefronts.

The Haitians here are not fleeing in the aftermath of last month’s earthquake or the July assassination of the country’s president.

Rather they are among the 250,000 Haitians who left their homeland after the devastating 2010 earthquake there and settled in Chile or Brazil. Both those countries have suffered steep economic declines during the pandemic, sparking the current exodus.

The journey to Mexico is epic, but the goal is to reach the United States — where the Biden administration is already trying to figure out what to do about an encampment of thousands of migrants, mostly Haitians, outside of Del Rio, Texas.

The economics of this aren’t important because we have framed providing asylum as a moral issue. However, the dollar figures can still be interesting… We are assured by our ruling elite that low-skill migrants make everyone in the U.S. richer (disagreeing with a Harvard prof). Will we get rich off the 11,000 Haitians at the bridge and the 50,000 who are right behind them? The CIA says that Haitians are roughly 50 percent more economically successful than Afghans (generating GDP of roughly 1/20th the American per capita average compared to 1/30th for Afghans). So, under our current political logic in which the lower the skill the more economically valuable the person, one million Haitian migrants will not make us quite as rich as one million Afghan migrants.

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Photos below of a church in Bethesda, Maryland, one of the nation’s wealthiest neighborhoods (thank you, Big Government!). We learn the preferred pronouns of the minister. Also that Kara Scroggins prefers not to work in person. Worship is via Zoom and YouTube (but there will be growth in the spring and perhaps then, when all is well in the garden, in-person gatherings can resume after a two-year hiatus?

We also learn that the parishioners want us to welcome Afghan refugees, noting that Jesus him/her/zir/theirself was a child refugee (the gender ID of the historical Jesus is unknown; note that the refugee flight into Egypt is “regarded doubtfully by modern scholars”).

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Most of the migrants from Afghanistan are men (source), presumably reasonably young and fit since they were the ones who made it to the airport (“Inside the Afghan Evacuation: Rogue Flights, Crowded Tents, Hope and Chaos” (NYT)). Unless these guys want to be celibate, they will need to marry:

Pre-marital sex is absolutely forbidden in Islam, no matter whether it is with a girl-friend or a prostitute. Pre-marital sex is fornication (zina).

They can’t marry Afghan migrant women because the migrant population is now overwhelmingly male. They can’t marry each other in a beautiful rainbow ceremony because homosexual acts are forbidden by Islamic law:

One way of fulfilling the sexual urge which is now becoming acceptable in the Western world is sexual relations between members of the same sex: homosexuality (which by definition includes lesbianism). By saying that it is becoming acceptable in liberal societies I do not mean to say that homosexuality is a 20th century phenomenon; no, not at all.

But there is one big difference between the past and the present: in the past, homosexuality was considered a perverted sexual behavior whereas now it is being labeled as ‘natural’ and as a result of ‘inborn tendency’!

So we see that as far as the Qur’an is concerned, homosexuality is an “indecency,” and that Allah had destroyed a whole nation because of this indecent sexual behavior.

In the Islamic legal system, homosexuality is a punishable crime against the laws of God. In the case of homosexuality between two males, the active partner is to be lashed a hundred times if he is unmarried and killed if he is married; whereas the passive partner is to be killed regardless of his marital status.

Under Islamic law, therefore, they will need to find people who identify as “women” to marry. A lack of integration of Afghanistan into the world air travel network might make it tough for single male refugees to exfiltrate women from the old country (as Syed Rizwan Farook did when he brought Tashfeen Malik over). The simplest solution, therefore, would be women who are already present in the U.S.

Afghan immigrants tend to be the lowest-income migrants in the U.S. (“Challenges to the economic integration of Afghan refugees in the U.S.”). American women are already rejecting median-income American men as not having sufficient income to be desirable (see “Are There Not Enough Men Worth Marrying?” Psychology Today, 9/10/2019; note that, in many states, having sex with an already-married high-income man pays better than a long-term marriage to a medium-income man, so marriage is not an economically rational strategy for a typical woman seeking to maximize her spending power). If native-born American men don’t earn enough for women to want to marry them, what hope is there for a low-skill Afghan migrant?

This is where there is opportunity for our new nonprofit organization. There are righteous Americans, e.g., the parishioners of the North Bethesda United Methodist Church, who say that they want to help Afghan migrants. Presumably, therefore, they’d be delighted to see their daughters going out on dates with, and ultimately marrying, the guys for whom they are praying. We can help facilitate. We could help the guys write their Tinder profiles. We could fund a speed dating night at the North Bethesda United Methodist Church for Afghan migrants and daughters of churchgoers. We could pay for first dates. We could offer to fund a trousseau of burqas for any American Christian woman who decides to marry a migrant and chooses to adhere to her husband’s family’s notions of feminine modesty. We could provide a bride price, using funds raised by Uber and other righteous organizations, in which the woman gets paid the difference between what her Afghan migrant husband earns and what she would have obtained in child support if she’d popped a Clomid and had sex with a married dentist.

Readers: What should this bridge between two cultures be called?

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A follow-up to We care more about Afghan migrants than about homegrown indigent? …

To celebrate the company’s plan to provide 86 cents per Afghan refugee (see below), the Uber app now has a “Help Afghan Families” button that is approximately 8X the size of the “Request a ride” button:

From this can we infer that it is approximately 8X more important to help the Afghan refugees (with 86 cents each!) than to get a ride? Why is it only 8X? If Uber is truly passionate about the refugees, shouldn’t the “help” button be at least half of the screen? (Or maybe all of the screen and then users would scroll down to get a ride?)

What if a person doesn’t need a ride from Uber? How can Uber remind them regarding what it implies is its core mission? My inbox today, under a subject line of “Help Aghan refugees today”:

It looks as though Uber is going to give $2 million in cash to non-profit organizations in the Refugee-Industrial Complex. How much would you give if you wanted to be equally virtuous? Uber has a market cap of $76 billion. So you’d multiply your net worth by 0.00002631578 in order to be just as generous as Uber. For example, a millionaire would donate $26.

What if we were to divide the $2 million in cash by the number of refugees who’ve already left Afghanistan? The BBC story below says that there should be roughly 2.32 million Afghans who either were already refugees or who were newly airlifted out. Uber is thus alerting us to a program in which 86 cents per refugee has been committed.

(Separately, since corporations could distribute profits to shareholders and let the shareholders donate to charity, corporate charitable donations are typically considered a form of management stealing from shareholders. The Uber executives who donate $millions that would have belonged to shareholders, for example, will get the benefits of being charitable donors: invitations to elaborate dinners, connections to other rich people (or other managerial thieves!), etc. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi got paid $42 million in 2019 while his buddies near the top got an additional $82 million. Together they could certainly give 86 cents to each Afghan refugee, but why not keep the money to spend on luxury consumption if instead the shareholders’ money can be donated?)

Related:

• “Afghanistan: How many refugees are there and where will they go?” (BBC): The United Nations has warned that up to half a million Afghans could flee the country by the end of the year and has called on neighbouring countries to keep their borders open. The current crisis comes on top of the 2.2 million Afghan refugees already in neighbouring countries and 3.5 million people forced to flee their homes within Afghanistan’s borders. More than 123,000 civilians were evacuated by US forces and its coalition partners after the Taliban took control of the capital on 14 August …As many as 300,000 Afghans have been affiliated with US operations in the country since 2001, according to the International Rescue Committee …

• Why does Uber charge a commission on rides given by black drivers?
• Uber stands with the Black community
• Pacific Islanders won’t be safe on Uber?
• Uber demonstrates that diversity is irrelevant or harmful to business success?

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Prior to coronapanic, approximately 40 million Americans were suffering in poverty (HHS). To these unfortunates, 8 million were added via shutdowns, mask orders, and economic slowdowns (Bloomberg). Who is first in our thoughts when we’re looking to extend a helping hand? Afghan migrants, says the NYT. “Americans Stretch Across Political Divides to Welcome Afghan Refugees”:

In rural Minnesota, an agricultural specialist has been working on visa applications and providing temporary housing for the newcomers, and she has set up an area for halal meat processing on her farm. In California, a group of veterans has sent a welcoming committee to the Sacramento airport to greet every arriving family. In Arkansas, volunteers are signing up to buy groceries, do airport pickups and host families in their homes.

The moment stands in contrast to the last four years when the country, led by a president who restricted immigration and enacted a ban on travel from several majority-Muslim countries, was split over whether to welcome or shun people seeking safe haven. And with much of the electorate still deeply divided over immigration, the durability of the present welcome mat remains unknown.

(How many Muslims immigrated or traveled to the U.S. during this purported “ban”?)

Uber thoughtfully interrupted my locked iPhone with a notification:

(The canine portion of this image is a friend’s Samoyed puppy.)

Where does the urgent notification lead?

What’s interesting to me about this is that Uber has never notified me regarding the need to help the homeless encamped within a few blocks of their headquarter. From Working in San Francisco today (January 2019):

[the meeting is] inside of WeWork Civic Center on Mission between 7th and 8th wedged between a homeless encampment and emergency heroin detox center. I would recommend picking a hotel in another part of town. … Due to the layout and direction of the one way streets and traffic I’ve found cabs/Uber to work fairly poorly and often take longer than BART. I stopped using cars when junkies started trying to open my door at stop lights.

The described location is literally 2 minutes away from the Uber HQ. As with other rich Californians, it’s not that Uber couldn’t help these people, e.g., by funding construction of an apartment building or the rental of one or more apartments … it is just that Uber doesn’t want to.

Maybe it is because we have more hope for Afghan migrants than we do for people who’ve already failed within U.S. society? (they couldn’t even get organized to collect welfare, which in some states is more lucrative than working at the median wage)

I talked to a Harvard graduate and lifelong Democrat about this. She said “It will probably take three generations before they are fully integrated into American society.” I thought it was interesting that she assumed that adopting our value system was inevitable and desirable. (See also Omar Mateen, the most famous second-generation Afghan-American, reared by “All-American” and “moderate Muslim” immigrant parents.) Is it fair to call the assumption that immigrants would want to assimilate a sign of white supremacy? The U.S. is plainly richer than Afghanistan (Afghans are close to being the world’s least economically successful people), but is the U.S. value and moral system superior to what prevails in Afghanistan? Other than white supremacy, what is our basis for saying that our rainbow flag religion is better than Islam, for example?

Related:

• Islam is more powerful than Rainbow Flagism?

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We started the war in Afghanistan in 2001. The country’s total population then was 21.6 million (Google). The estimated 2021 population is 40 million (source). If roughly half of Afghans don’t like the current government, i.e., a similar level of political division to what we have here in the U.S., that means the potential number of refugees seeking to leave could be more than than the total number of people in Afghanistan when we invaded.

If only 20 million want to leave for political reasons, how can the refugee pool expand to 21.6 million? Let’s assume at least a small percentage of people will seek to leave for economic reasons, on top of those who don’t support the Taliban; among nations, Afghanistan is ranked #213 out of 228 in income per person (CIA). Afghans are only 1/4 as successful economically as Guatemalans, for example, whom we are told are “fleeing” poverty when they show up at our open-to-anyone-claiming-abuse southern border. (Once in the U.S., Afghans are the least likely to work of any immigrant group. See “Challenges to the economic integration of Afghan refugees in the U.S.”:

Among adults ages 18–64, Afghans have the lowest rate of employment (59%) among the comparison groups. This is due primarily to the very low rate of employment of Afghan women (46%). The latter is low regardless of how long they have been in the U.S., but it is particularly low among recent arrivals (23% among those in the U.S. for 0–5 years) and those with the lowest and highest levels of education. Further, when controlling for education, Afghan men with a college degree or higher have the lowest levels of employment.

The righteous academics who wrote the above explain why Afghan-Americans don’t work: “we hypothesise that anti-Muslim discrimination is an important unmeasured explanatory factor” (citing white Americans’ support for Donald Trump). Maybe if an Afghan wore a rainbow flag burqa, he/she/ze/they could get a job in San Francisco, despite the postulated anti-Muslim discrimination?)

Is it fair to say that the U.S. will have created a second Afghanistan by invading the first? The second Afghanistan will have the same population as 2001 Afghanistan, but it will be a virtual and distributed country of Afghans in the U.S., Europe, etc.

Here’s the beginning of a design for the rainbow flag burqa, mentioned above:

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“As Greece installs ‘sound cannons’ on border, Denmark passes law allowing asylum seekers to be sent overseas” (Washington Post):

A law passed by Denmark’s Parliament on Thursday allows asylum seekers to be sent outside Europe to await the review of their applications.

In Greece, high-tech “sound cannons” are being used to deter migrants from crossing into the European Union from Turkey.

The sound cannons are part of a larger strategy to create a high-tech barrier that will prevent migrants from entering Greece in hopes of seeking asylum. Artificial intelligence will be used to analyze potentially suspicious movement captured by long-range cameras, and the country is also experimenting with using the technology to conduct lie detector tests during interviews with asylum seekers, according to the AP.

In Denmark, attempts to discourage migration have taken on a different form: A law that passed Thursday means asylum seekers can be sent to another country outside Europe while they wait for their cases to be reviewed.

“If you apply for asylum in Denmark, you know that you will be sent back to a country outside Europe, and therefore we hope that people will stop seeking asylum in Denmark,” Rasmus Stoklund, a spokesman for the Danish government, told broadcaster DR, according to Reuters.

Although it’s not yet clear what countries will take in refugees under such an arrangement, Denmark and Rwanda recently signed a memorandum of understanding that has led to speculation that migrants will probably be relocated to Africa.

Denmark, one of the wealthiest countries in Europe, has increasingly taken a hard-line stance on migration in recent years. The Danish Refugee Council said in a statement that sending refugees to a third country was analogous to Australia’s much-criticized policy of housing asylum seekers in offshore camps, and warned that the model has meant that migrants face “physical assault, slow asylum proceedings, lack of access to health care and lack of access to legal assistance.”

From joebiden.com:

Immigration is essential to who we are as a nation, our core values, and our aspirations for our future. … Trump’s policies are also bad for our economy. For generations, immigrants have fortified our most valuable competitive advantage–our spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship. Research suggests that “the total annual contribution of foreign-born workers is roughly $2 trillion.” Key sectors of the U.S. economy, from agriculture to technology, rely on immigration. Working-age immigrants keep our economy growing, our communities thriving, and country moving forward.

Coming the above two… Greeks and Danes don’t want to be rich. From Denmark, 2019 (“send them back”):

Americans, it seems, also are averse to becoming rich, even those who have faith in wealth-via-low-skill-migration. “U.S. Aid to Central America Hasn’t Slowed Migration. Can Kamala Harris?” (New York Times, June 6):

As vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr. led an enormous push to deter people from crossing into the United States by devoting hundreds of millions of dollars to Central America, hoping to make the region more tolerable for the poor — so that fewer would abandon it. Now, as President Biden, he is doubling down on that strategy once again and assigning his own vice president, Kamala Harris, the prickly challenge of carrying out his plan to commit $4 billion in a remarkably similar approach as she travels to the region Sunday. “When I was vice president, I focused on providing the help needed to address these root causes of migration,” Mr. Biden said in a recent speech to Congress. “It helped keep people in their own countries instead of being forced to leave. Our plan worked.” But the numbers tell a different story. After years of the United States flooding Central America with aid, migration from the region soared in 2019 and is on the upswing once more.

Here in Guatemala, which has received more than $1.6 billion in American aid over the last decade, poverty rates have risen, malnutrition has become a national crisis, corruption is unbridled and the country is sending more unaccompanied children to the United States than anywhere else in the world.

One, called the Rural Value Chains Project, spent part of its $20 million in American aid building outhouses for potato farmers — many of which were quickly abandoned or torn apart for scrap metal.

Uncle Joe wouldn’t lie to us (unlike you know who!). Thus, since every person from Guatemala who arrives in the U.S. makes us richer, happier (“our core values”), and more hopeful (“our aspirations for the future”), it is odd that we would want to spend $1.6 billion of our hard-earned wages to discourage Guatemalans from coming here.

Related:

• Low skill migrants make the U.S. richer, but will impoverish Spain
• from Harvard: “Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers”

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Lately there has been a rash of American victimhood groups demanding that others stop hating them. I wondered how a strategy that would never be tried within a family (“if your brother hates you for breaking his LEGO, just tell him to stop hating you”) could work on a national scale. See “OC Jewish Leaders Speak Out Against Antisemitism After Rise in Hate Crimes”, for example:

Jewish community leaders across the U.S. are speaking out against what they say has been a recent surge in antisemitic attacks. … A Thursday virtual rally saw a host of national Jewish advocacy groups, like the Anti-Defamation League talking about the issue and demanding Congress curb the threat of antisemitism through meaningful policy.

Now it seems that our next president is working this strategy on a global scale… “Harris tells migrants: ‘Do not come, do not come'” (The Hill):

Vice President Harris on Monday pleaded with migrants from Central American countries to stay home in a speech in Guatemala during her first foreign trip.

The vice president was blunt in her message to Central Americans, repeating the line, “Do not come.”

“I want to emphasize that the goal of our work is to help Guatemalans find hope at home. At the same time I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States Mexico border: Do not come, do not come,” Harris said.

She said that the U.S. would invest in agricultural businesses and affordable housing and help support entrepreneurs in Guatemala. The White House said that it plans to invest $48 million over four years to boost economic opportunity in Guatemala, according to a fact sheet.

(the country that has an affordable housing shortage of 7 million units will teach the Guatemalans how it is done!)

Given that a migrant is entitled to free housing (“means-tested” public housing), free health care for life (Medicaid), free food (SNAP/EBT), and a free smartphone (Obamaphone), President Harris’s statement could be compared to a party disinvitation of the following form:

Don’t come to our party

Sting is performing by the pool

We ordered a mountain of “essential” marijuana from the finest dispensary in Massachusetts

We also ordered a briefcase full of cocaine, which we expect to similarly transition from “illegal” to “essential” soon.

There will be Château Margaux to drink, mostly 1995 and 2003 vintages

Robert Downey, Jr. and Will Smith should be here by 9:30

We’re not checking for invitations at the door, which will be wide open

But definitely don’t come

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Proud 5-year-old: “I was chasing Canada geese on my bike.”

Me: “Why?”

5-year-old: “I want them to go back to Canada.”

Related: Government experts in Everglades National Park remind us that immigrants from Africa, Central America, and South America are “unwelcome” and “crowd out their native neighbors”…

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