Category: Migration, Refugees, and Asylum

I’ve recently finished Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America by James and Deborah Fallows. James is a Cirrus pilot and the couple traveled around via light airplane so I thought that there would be some interesting material for pilots (presumably reflecting the general public’s lack of interest in the details of flying, not too much ink is spilled on the subject of flying per se).

The authors describe a country where nearly every corner is packed with immigrants of all types, including asylum-seekers and refugees:

Like Sioux Falls, Burlington[, Vermont] has been a resettlement city for refugees for decades. It, too, has refugees from all over the world, and it, too, has embraced the sense of becoming a richer, better city for having them. During our first days in Burlington, I sat in on a workshop at the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program (VRRP) in Burlington, where nearly twenty very newly arrived Bhutanese were learning the cultural ropes for their new jobs. Get to work on time. Check bus schedules on holidays. Call your boss if you are sick. Be friendly to your colleagues. Smile. Sit with workmates at lunch, even if language is a barrier. Wear deodorant and clean clothes every day.

The authors are enthusiastic about the potential of a planned economy (“public-private partnerhip”), especially when applied to the challenge of bringing in low-skill immigrants:

Miro Weinberger, mayor at the time we visited, is himself an example of Burlington’s draw for its particular kind of human capital. Weinberger’s parents, from Long Island, moved north during the Vietnam War “to opt out and find a different value system,” Weinberger told us. He is one of many forty-something children of that migration who stayed in Vermont. “You’ll hear a lot about public-private partnerships,” he told us on our first visit. “This is a place where it’s really true.” In Vermont, these efforts—to teach nutrition and sustainability courses in the schools, to find work for some of the Burmese and Bhutanese refugees being resettled in the area, to foster tech start-ups—are often called “social responsibility” efforts, a part of the brand we came to think of as being classically Burlington.

What is hard to understand is why people from Bhutan qualify as refugees. (Or at least did in 2013 when the authors visited.)

The U.S. Department of State says that Bhutan is as safe as anywhere on Planet Earth (travel page). Lonely Planet says “Bhutan is a remarkably safe destination, almost completely devoid of the scams, begging and theft that affects its neighbours.”

The described Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program is part of a larger organization that is funded about 90 percent by tax dollars. The public housing, Medicaid, food stamps, and Obamaphones consumed by the Bhutanese in Burlington are funded by tax dollars. Why are taxpayers funding refugees from a country that they would otherwise be dreaming of being wealthy enough to visit (Bhutan charges a minimum of $200-250 per tourist per day, depending on the season, plus airfare from the U.S. isn’t cheap!).

[If the public-private partnership yields the Bhutanese only a low-wage job or if demand for workers who don’t speak English proves weak, the folks described will be lifetime dependents on U.S. taxpayer-funded welfare (means-tested public housing, Medicaid, and food stamps, for example).]

Maybe there is an argument for filling the U.S. with immigrants from Bhutan, but why are they “refugees”?

Readers: Are there other luxury tourist destinations from which a person can come to the U.S. as a “refugee”?

Related:

• “In Bhutan, Happiness Index as Gauge for Social Ills” (nytimes): “In 2015, his staff members released a study that showed 91.2 percent of Bhutanese reporting that they were narrowly, extensively or deeply happy, with a 1.8 percent increase in aggregate happiness between 2010 and 2015.”
• “Vermont job creation lagging nation’s by considerable margin” (Burlington Free Press, October 31, 2018): “Unlike in Vermont, the U.S. economy has been adding jobs at a very respectable rate. To show how far Vermont is lagging the nation, consider that Vermont now has the same number of jobs it had in early 2015.” (not too many employers required fluency in Dzongkha, as it happened?)

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A caravan of 7,000 Hondurans (“The Committee to Re-elect the President”?) are making their way through Guatemala and Mexico to the U.S. The good news is that they are entitled to free housing, free food, free health care, and a free smartphone as soon as they arrive (“The Contracting States shall accord to refugees lawfully staying in their territory the same treatment with respect to public relief and assistance as is accorded to their nationals” — Article 23 of the UN Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees).

However, there seems to be a dispute about whether these 7,000 folks are restricted in terms of where they can apply for asylum. From “President Trump Threatened to Turn Back Caravan Migrants If They Don’t Claim Asylum in Mexico. That’s Not Legal” (TIME):

President Donald Trump has said the Central American migrants traveling via caravan should seek asylum in Mexico – and threatened that they will be turned away if they reach the U.S. border.

“People have to apply for asylum in Mexico first, and if they fail to do that, the U.S. will turn them away. The courts are asking the U.S. to do things that are not doable!” he tweeted Sunday.

But following through on that threat could violate international law, experts say.

As a signatory of the 1951 Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, Mexico is obligated to protect people who are outside of their country and afraid to return due to a well-founded fear of persecution based on religion, race, nationality or membership to a particular social or political group.

The United States is also a signatory. And while Mexico is required to offer protection for refugees under international law, migrants have no obligation to request it there.

Under U.S. immigration law, the the United States can deny asylum if a person can be returned to a country where their life or freedom is not in danger, but only if the U.S. has entered into a bilateral or multilateral agreement that codifies the arrangement.

The U.S. and Canada have such an agreement. It says that people must seek refugee status in the first country they arrive in—either the U.S. or Canada—but there are some exceptions for cases of family reunification.

No such agreement exists with Mexico.

Additionally, some argue that Mexico would not meet the standards for such a designation. For one, given high rates of crime, there are credible safety concerns.

(In other words, the country in which Americans are willing to pay $1,000 per day to vacation is intolerably dangerous for a Honduran native speaker of Spanish.)

In Europe, it seems that “the country where an asylum seeker first enters the union is responsible for registering the asylum application and taking fingerprints.” (see “Explaining the Rules for Migrants: Borders and Asylum,” nytimes, 9/16/2015) But the U.S. is not part of this “Dublin Regulation,” so perhaps the last paragraph of the TIME article is definitive:

“If people who are fleeing persecution and violence enter Mexico they need to be provided access to the Mexican asylum system, and those entering the United States need to be provided access to the American asylum system,” says Chris McGrath, a UNHCR spokesperson.

Suppose that the TIME article and the UN bureaucrats are right and a caravan of 7,000 Hondurans can transition through Mexcio to California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, wouldn’t it work equally well for all of the migrants currently in the EU? There are millions of refugees in Germany. They are the majority of the welfare recipients in Germany (Wikipedia: “In April 2018 more than half, at 55%, of the recipients had a migration background. According to the Federal Employment Agency this was due to the migrants lacking either employable skills or knowledge of the language”). Instead of paying out Hartz IV benefits every month to a refugee, why not offer him or her a one-way plane ticket to a Mexico border town? Maybe the U.S. will deny the refugee’s application for asylum after 2 or 3 years, but during all of that time, the German taxpayer is relieved of the responsibility for paying Hartz IV. The refugee will be way better off as well because (a) no need to learn German, and (b) the American welfare system provides for a much higher standard of living than the German Hartz IV welfare system.

We’re told that the Europeans don’t love us anymore because Trump. What is stopping them from wishing bon voyage to Airbus A380s full of welfare-collecting refugees enthusiastic about living the American Dream in California or Texas via Mexico?

Alternatively, is it possible that Trump is right? Is there a rule that prevents a refugee from traveling to a lot of intermediate countries before settling down in the place that offers the most generous “public relief and assistance as is accorded to their nationals”?

Related:

• “Can the refugee caravan at the U.S. border simply fly up to Canada?“

 

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“Strummers in the city: Ukulele program gives Portland immigrant students head start” (The Forecaster):

PORTLAND [Maine] — Two dozen students filed into a classroom at Portland High School Monday for a ukulele lesson, strumming with determined fingers as part of a program to help them acclimate to the coming school year after emigrating to the city.

The students are housed at the city’s shelter for homeless families and are participating in a five-week-long Portland Public Schools’ summer program designed to give them a head start on school success and connect their families to school and city resources.

The theme this year, its second, is “Summer in the City.”

Most students are from Angola and the Republic of Congo, and communicate through interpreters during their time in the program.

Customers at Tony’s Donuts thought that ukulele skills would be useful: “They’re probably going to be on welfare for their entire lives so they need something to keep busy.”

 

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