Wednesday, November 8, 2023

what do the experts say about immigration ?

 As a country, we have been involved in discussions about immigration for close to 200 years, and we still do not have full agreement today.

Although I have written several articles about this topic over the years, there are two quick points that I would like to make:
1) The Biden administration is doing a better job than it is given credit for. 
Heather Cox Richardson provided details in her letter of November 6:

"On Friday, President Biden hosted the first leaders’ summit for the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity (APEP). Biden announced the creation of APEP in June 2022 to establish a forum positioned to improve the economies of countries in the western hemisphere, with the idea that stronger economies will be able to address economic inequality, bolster supply chains, and “restore faith in democracy by delivering for working people across the region.” 

APEP is also designed to strengthen the Los Angeles Declaration for Migration and Protection that established a responsibility-sharing approach to addressing this era’s historic migration flows. Rather than working solely on getting Congress to pass legislation to fix the border—as Biden has urged since the beginning of his term—the administration has focused on the prosperity and security of the countries from which migrants come, so that they feel less pressure to leave. 

The administration has worked hard to develop that strategy. Vice President Kamala Harris took the lead in “diplomatic efforts to address root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras,” and in July 2021 she released a report on strategies to slow migration from the region. In June 2022, at the 9th Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, the administration helped to bring to reality a long-standing realization among many countries that migration must be addressed on a regional level rather than with patchwork attempts by individual nations. That’s when the U.S. got 21 governments to sign on to “a comprehensive response to irregular migration and forced displacement in the Western Hemisphere,” known as the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection. 

The Biden administration has emphasized that it wants to work with the region, not dictate to it, and the leaders of APEP are working with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to fund improvements to infrastructure and train skilled workers and entrepreneurs. The IDB is an international financial institution, owned by 48 member states and headquartered in Washington, D.C., that provides development financing for Latin American and Caribbean countries. " 

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-6-2023

El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are some of the most dangerous countries in the world.
Honduras has the 4th highest murder rate in the world
Guatemala is 13th highest, and El Salvador is 15th highest.
Due to the prevalence of drug cartels, Mexico is 11th highest.
The reason that we have experienced a surge in immigration recently is that people crossing our border are literally fleeing for their lives.
2) The best source about immigration comes from a person who is a refugee herself. Her name is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and she has written 4 books about immigration. I read "Infidel" a few years ago, and I finished reading "Prey" this week.


Here's her bio:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-born Dutch-American activist and former politician. She is a critic of Islam and advocate for the rights and self-determination of Muslim women, opposing forced marriage, honour killing, child marriage, and female genital mutilation. Hirsi Ali has founded an organisation for the defense of women's rights, the AHA Foundation. She works for the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the American Enterprise Institute, and was a senior fellow at the Future of Democracy Project at Harvard Kennedy School.[She currently hosts The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Broadcast and is a columnist for UnHerd, a British online magazine.

In 2003, Hirsi Ali was elected a member of the House of Representatives, the lower house of the States General of the Netherlands, representing the centre-right People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). A political crisis related to the validity of her Dutch citizenship, namely the accusation that she had lied on her application for political asylum, led to her resignation from parliament, and indirectly to the fall of the second Balkenende cabinet in 2006.

Hirsi Ali is a former Muslim who became an atheist. In 2004, she collaborated on a short film with Theo van Gogh, titled Submission, which depicted the oppression of women under fundamentalist Islamic law, and was critical of the Muslim canon itself. The film led to death threats, and Van Gogh was murdered several days after the film's release by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Moroccan-Dutch Islamic terrorist. Hirsi Ali maintains that "Islam is part religion, and part a political-military doctrine, the part that is a political doctrine contains a world view, a system of laws and a moral code that is totally incompatible with our constitution, our laws, and our way of life." In her 2015 book Heretic, Hirsi Ali called for a reformation of Islam by countering Islamism and supporting reformist Muslims

Here is an excerpt from the film

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZMcyBruobU

In 2005, Hirsi Ali was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. She has also received several awards, including a free speech award from the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, the Swedish Liberal Party's Democracy Prize, and the Moral Courage Award for commitment to conflict resolution, ethics, and world citizenship. Christopher Hitchens regarded her as "the most important public tellectual probably ever to come out of Africa."Critics accuse Ali of being Islamophobic and question her scholarly credentials "to speak authoritatively about Islam and the Arab world". Her works have been accused of using neo-orientalist portrayals and of perpetuating a "civilizing mission" discourse. Hirsi Ali married Scottish-American historian Niall Ferguson in 2011, migrated to the United States and became a U.S. citizen in 2013.

"Peril" is a deeply disturbing book, since much of it is devoted to the discussion of sexual violence in Europe caused by young men from Muslim-majority counties, which generally treat women as second class citizens. 
Hirsi Ali emigrated twice in her lifetime, first from Somalia, and next from the Netherlands.
She is not opposed to immigrants or refugees, since she has been both, but she feels that destination countries can do a better job of dealing with people crossing their borders. The last 17 pages of the book contain measures that European countries can do to reduce the problems caused by immigrants, but her lessons can also be applied to what we can do in America.
You may or not agree with her views, but they seem reasonable:

1. Repeal the existing  asylum framework. "Rather than focusing on where people come from and their motivations for leaving, I believe the main criteria for granting  residence should be how far they are likely to abide by the laws and adopt the values of the host society

2. Address the push factors. ":Western societies will have to invest resources to address the security and economic issues in the countries from their migrants are coming from.. 
(this is exactly what the Biden administration is doing)

3. ".. as well as the pull factors. There there must be meaningful limits on what outsiders can claim based on the feat of having crossed a nation's border".
4. Reinstate the rule of law. " Technology has a role to play, but ther is not substitute for humans with expertise.

5. Listen to the successful immigrants. 

6. Provide sex education to all children


There are politicians in our country who feel we are being invaded by hordes from the south of our border, but the truth is that Europe has problems far worse than ours, so listening to Ayaan Hirsi Ali would make sense for us as well. 
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