Asylum: A Global Phenomenon

North American Philosophical Publications

Asylum: A Global PhenomenonAuthor(s): Virginia BlackSource: Public Affairs Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Apr., 1996), pp. 85-101Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of North American Philosophical PublicationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40435943 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 03:15

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of Illinois Press and North American Philosophical Publications are collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to Public Affairs Quarterly.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.54 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 03:15:56 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=illinois

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=napp

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40435943?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Public Affairs Quarterly Volume 10, Number 2, April 1996

ASYLUM: A GLOBAL PHENOMENON

Virginia Black

"For you were strangers in the land of Egypt.'* - Leviticus 9:34

I. Introduction and Thesis

plight of the refugee, the plight of the host. Palestinian workers and their families expelled by the thousands and without mercy from

Kuwait during the Gulf War stood homeless and unsheltered in the hot desert sand. When I saw their grief on television, I thought, "This is the refugee problem we shall be facing for the next few decades." The displaced were tired, hot, stressed out. Their throats were parched. The transport buses were overcrowded with those who, by fate of war, were despised. Their hapless children, forelorn and frightened, had only confusion to live through. For how long? No one knew.

The asylum-seekers were not individuals. They were a faceless, ab- stract collective, fully vulnerable to decisions not theirs. Exactly so would these deportees have been treated if various institutional aids, ideas, and personnel had not addressed their plight.

Images. Painful images are with us for a long time. They speak to us. Viet Nam boat people, nauseous and ill, rock in perilous waves to escape a hostile regime. Impoverished Chinese from Hong Kong pour onto the California coastline. Twice they are stricken: first by an inhospitable regime at home, second by pirates whose profiteering ransom is the only escape to freedom for these homeless refugees. Three hundred and fifty thousand refugees have been evacuated from Chechnya; they escaped into neighboring villages, climbed into the hills. Half a million children will die this year in Rwanda. Several hundred thousand Cuban refugees - many of them ragged children - peer out from behind barbed wire in Guantanamo Bay; gradually they are sent back home. The Bosnian displacements are almost too calamitous to describe.

Gypsies encamp in fields behind middle-class apartments in Upper Sax- ony, tidy proprietorships turned into rubbish and offal by the slovenly pres-

85



86 PUBLIC AFFAIRS QUARTERLY

enee of people with an unclean reputation. Arabs who know no better tether their smelly goats in the upstairs rooms of Israeli apartments, driving other apartment dwellers to anger. In sweatshops in New York City women hunch over dirty machines sewing piecemeal seven days a week, 12 hours a day, at 60 cents an hour. Migrant laborers living in dingy shacks harvest grape fields for low wages. Soft charity is unkind under these conditions. Those we allow in but whose circumstances are likely to remain sealed at below-living wages - even if not defined under law, their effective position into the only future we can see for them is that of indentured servitude. Security and protection of their vulnerability, the very rock bottom for survival, are the biggest problem the host nation must face, and the very minimum that moral obligation requires.

Mexicans pour across the southern borders of the United States. This is not entirely voluntary. In 1993 Mexico deported 60,000 "undocumented" workers. Haitian fugitives drown in their watery quest for safety and freedom. Turks flood the streets of German cities fending off the hatred dis- charged against them since the economy no longer bubbles with air balloons. Suddenly they are "dispensable," in the way, a national nuisance. The battle cry is for deportation.

A hundred years ago, two million poverty-stricken and hungry Irish in- vaded America. In response, employers, as they sought workers, formu- lated their ugly classified ads, "No Miks." Irish "Mickys" need not apply for work. After the Civil War, huge black migrations swarmed northward, but they were not much happier in the North. Such severe prejudice greeted them that President Lincoln concluded he had to suppress his deep, anti-slavery preoccupation when he justified the War. "Free the slaves" would have inspired no one to fight. Today, as I write, 40 to 80,000 des- perate Hutus are on the move again. Forced to flee from Rwanda, they sought refuge in Burundi, but the same fears now force them to seek another border to cross. Tanzania blocks its borders and claims it has food for only another month. Zaire is not friendly. Latvia expels Kurds, Pales- tinians and Afganis. "We cannot accommodate you." Three million Afghans flee their country. The Kurds have no territory they can call their own.

These scenes have fed all of history with diasporas and displacements. The ancient empires attest to masses of dislocated peoples who lost forever the stabilities of living where they chose, and, safely, with their own. Frantic migration flights are not new, and they are not always border-cross- ings. Internal migrations are equally problematic and present the same dilemmas. Natural droughts do not cause the Ethiopian starvation tragedies that happen over and over again. The Ethiopian people have always anticipated droughts and know how to prepare for them. But to assure their control of power, political factions in Ethiopia redistrict the land, coercing crowds into territories with unsustainable and irreparable weather



ASYLUM: A GLOBAL PHENOMENON 87

and soil conditions that predictably necessitate crop failure. On the move, restless, unstable, conflict-ridden, the people cannot plant or prepare for drought.

Today these dilemmas are global - momentous in size, costly, terrible, inhumane, and endlessly unfinished. Not a day passes without some exo- dus capturing the headlines. Increasingly, the United Nations Human Rights Monitor extends its pages devoted to "Refugees and Migrants." These dismal dramas totally perturb our expectations. Since we know about them and have come to believe in the bureaucratic handle for picking up what hatreds, wars, and political aggression have spawned, we think there ought to be a resolution. Often there is not. There is only a continued puzzlement. By comparison, the "Ellis Island syndrome" seems like the rebirth of a dream.

What shall we do? What is our attitude? We feel sorry. We give money. We set up organizations. We put the Red Cross, International Amnesty, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to work. We sermonize in churches and synagogues. We write letters to

congressmen and editors. Sometimes we volunteer and trek out into de- serts, fields and forests to help. We provide on-site shelter, water, medi- cines. We know that these short supplies will never resolve the lastingness of tragic and hopeless deportation. They will only buy a little time to

prolong millions of miserable deaths. We are not only perturbed by displacement dilemmas of global magni-

tude. We are also angry and mean-spirited. "The nation," said one activist official, "is in a nasty mood. Nothing makes people angrier than welfare

recipients and foreigners. So preserving benefits even for legal immi-

grants is going to be a very tough sell." Refugees have become the contemporary symbol for the scapegoat. We

want to scream out - "No entrance here!" At the massive, uninvited influxes crossing the globe, dangerous tensions flare up between our compassion and morals on the one hand, our anger and fear on the other. I think we do not know which emotion - hostility or hospitality - to weigh most heavily. We feel sorry, upset, helpless, and confused. Behind all this, we believe we have a right to preserve the culture of our national sovereignty and our heritage communities. Too many foreign people admitted too soon will change in disvalued ways what we like and are familiar with and believe in. Crime is

up. Culture wars prevail. The quality of life erodes. Each year for wrong- doing, the United States jails 2800 immigrants. Employment for the native born, for the citizen who got there first, seems under siege by too many incoming, low-skilled laborers - indentured servants - seeking too few

jobs. For the most part, some figures show, these newcomers pay only half their way in taxes. (In 1993, for example, American immigrants used services costing 44.18 billion in excess of taxes they paid.) We wonder, too, why




many immigrants do not work at all. Radical fundamentalism, religious zealotry, and ethnic riots frighten us, and for good cause.

Political extremists demand rejection of illegals and aliens, and moder- ates call for better border controls and temporary moratoria on legal immigration. The perception is that so many fugitives are crowding into lands that are not theirs or for which natives have no room, that environments and resources even minimally optimal for people and animals seem fast disappearing. Wildlife extinction is rampant. Infectious diseases and viral plagues have returned. Immigrants have introduced illicit drugs. We crave to repatriate the outsiders, send them back, fix them up at home so as not to trouble our preferred ways of life and our consciences.

England is reluctant to join the European Union because the EU's immigration policy is too broad. In France, many persons reject the federal idea proposed by the EU; under a federal arrangement they lose sovereignty over who can cross their borders and stay there. Quebec secessionists believe the same; under the dominion of Ottawa, they lose control of a culture they perceive as already under attack. For these reasons, national- ism is on the rise, and right-wing hate groups are increasing in the Ameri- cas, and in Western and Eastern Europe. California's Proposition 187 endorsed by two-thirds of the people, if it passes the state appeals court, will deny social services and education entitlements to illegal aliens. It is said that every year 300,000 immigrants illegally arrive and stay in the United States. Worldwide, I have read, from 30 to 100 million persons of refugee status currently wander the globe.

An ameliorating condition causes tension and uncertainty - but where does wisdom lie? Immigrants currently coming into the country comprise more than a third of America's engineers and science professionals. That is good for America but self-defeating for the countries they have left. Policy wisdom would keep the skilled professional at home to shore up the flagging culture that disposed him to leave in the first place.

On the other hand, I have read that nearly two-thirds of the legal immigrants entering the United States every year are low-skilled, "...half of them... compete mostly with poor minority workers." That is bad for Amer- ica, but relieving for the countries they have left. Faith lies in an unknown future: what will be their progress in the States, for themselves, for the common good?

Twenty percent of America's Asian immigrants educate themselves in elite university schools, and they are doing brilliantly. Those from Hong Kong who have money invest it or start businesses. Quickly they become "citizens", through practice and operative actions: they build homes, take pride in their communities, school themselves, rapidly learn English. They have no alien-adaptation problems if they are allowed by the natives not to have them.




Environmentalists hold that countries that do not limit their populations to "sustainable growth" will shortly be victims of extinction. Land ero- sion, the decimation of trees, drinking water poisoning - all result from overpopulation. However, this past March, I heard that Northwest America is as "environmentally green" as it was just before the American Revolu- tion. What are we to believe?

Family Planning, Population/Environment Balance, Negative Population Growth, Proposition 187, World Wildlife Federation, Carrying Capacity Network, Border Control, Rainforest Action Network - these national and international organizations have gained many adherents in the past few years. Their central goal is to put limitations on the movements and increase of peoples. Their aim is to control where incoming peoples shall be permitted to go, how many of them, when, and under what conditions. Relatedly, they hope to stabilize births and to shepherd and caretake the world's ecology that reflects the conditions of peoples' habitation.

Thesis. The above observations lean in directions that both confirm and disconfirm the wisdom of fashioning policies that limit, postpone, or pre- vent immigration. The mixed facts and emotions participating in the debate indicate, in my judgment, that sovereign nations must urgently create firm and humane policies to address border incursions by non-citizens before ugly backlash takes place. The principle here is that when we are in doubt, or when, as we already know, long-range political policies never yield what is anticipated, the best recourse is usually to slow down and to exercise a conservative line of thought, one that moves forward in desired directions but is open to reconstruction of its blueprint.

When a critical mass of resentment develops, it is almost too late. The reason for setting secure guidelines to direct immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers (I used these words interchangeably since for my purpose, the distinctions are not important) is to try to satisfy reasonable expectations on both sides - expectations of the citizenry within and of refugees without - with minimum disappointment, confusion, retaliation, and tragedies.

Loving firmness is a formula we understand for effective parenting, where firmness refers to basic standards children should not be allowed to transgress. Regretful firmness is a formula I suggest for effective global interactions among diverse peoples. Firmness refers to the imposition of reasonable prima facie standards whose costs of indifference or violation are distress and anger among closed-out peoples, and vengeful, dangerous reactions among nationals. We are not generous and kind when we agree to do what we cannot. We are kinder when others know where we stand, why we stand there, and what we can or cannot change. While immediate remedies have to be applied to suffering peoples, we have to criticize re- flex sympathy. We have to substitute reflective foresight for impulsive empathy, revising our judgments when relevant facts newly arise. If we do




not move with intelligent caution, I believe that destabilizing catastrophes worse than those already imminent will befall natives and aliens alike, a war of each against all.

As I write, a prominent candidate for the next U.S. presidential election places first on his national agenda strict curbs on illegal immigration. He thinks he is reading the minds of the American public. The American Census Bureau on the foreign-born population in 1994 depicts "an almost unprecedented wave of new arrivals in the past five years; nearly a fifth of the nation's 22.6 million foreign-born residents came here since 1990." He may be right. Our native populace are becoming testy and panicky about immigrants swarming over our shores while we believe they are consuming faster than they are replacing our employment capacities and resources. A turning point arrived when we substituted "family reunification" for national origin as our criterion for entry. The ethnic balance shifted as whole family complexes were mechanically imported from big population communities: Asian, Latin American, Caribbean.

I am sceptical, though, that on balance centralized governmental policies can eliminate social problems by trying to foresee and manipulate the variables - or even if they do so, that they can exercise the necessary cor- rectives or install the desirable social consequences. (We see that socialist economies and distributionist statist policies fail to conquer poverty or bring people's economic condition up to par. Five trillion dollars were spent in the United States in an effort to eliminate poverty. Of this, 30 cents of each dollar actually reach the poor, whose absolute numbers are now increasing.)

If we are willing to weather the short-term tempests of social error and have the courage to change our minds, I here advance a "destructive di- lemma." No answer is a good one, but one answer may still be better than another. The problem bears special reference to the United States because this is the country the tired, the poor, the homeless, the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free.... the wretched refuse of [our] teeming shore" hun- ger for and idealize, even as its own wealth is no longer created in abun- dance and as it painfully tries to resolve its political profligacies and debts.

I mean to provoke thought on the following matter: Excepting some excellent national institutions (our military, eleemosynary, scientific, and higher educational institutions) and some worthy national figures in the public light, we, at home, have become spoiled, materialistic, hedonistic, demoralized. Castigating these serious faults and our deteriorating morals is in the air; everyone recognizes our syndrome of cultural decadence. We stereotype our thinking. We are mindless, short-finned, and superficial. Our media trade on sensationalism, smut, divisiveness, violence. We think talk-show information or possessing a B.A. is being educated. We are cynical about politics. Confrontation and litigation, not toleration, com-




promise, and community mark our common, defensive, irritated stance. Our public discourse is vile. Our civic life is withering. Disdaining risk, we bring suit. We glamorize crime. Quite brutally, our culture is sliding down the tube. It is nothing praiseworthy anymore. It is nothing to write home about.

That the Western tradition is golden and the greatest ever known in history only sadly casts today into the shadows of the coming night.

My puzzlement is this: Is it time for new blood, new, unspoiled peoples to bring with them into the richer nations their fresh ideas and personalities craving social stability, a chance at excellence, justice, and responsible freedom - the good things in life they have not yet enjoyed, and perhaps making any sacrifice they have to, to gain these joys? Is it time for Amer- ica as a still richer nation to acknowledge that a stricter but more gracious asylum to newcomers, even while moderating their numbers and restricting their rates of entry, may be the best thing that has happened to Americans in decades? In other words, not the character of the uprooted but the character of their destination is what we should look to for answers.

If the civic values of the destination country are solid, self-confident, and uncompromising, newcomers cannot help imbibing the models of a nation proud of its culture. Anne Swardson of The Washington Post's Toronto bureau wrote, "New immigrants immediately ingest Canadian values, standing in line for the streetcar in their saris and turbans, sending their bilingual children to French schools to learn a third language." The

message is that adjustments depend less on the ethnic idiosyncrasies of the incomers than on the climate of a strong and moral receiving culture.

On the other hand, is it really time to resurrect, if we need to, the settlement house? the holding compound? the detention camp? Are these alternatives not far more dismal than closing the borders? I wonder whether a moral nation can countenance the shadows of indentured servitude if this is the nearly certain lot of those to whom we are prepared to extend even a humble hospitality.

Later on, I list rules of thumb addressing general problems of immigrant peoples that warrant serious thinking by citizens of sovereign nations. These rules of thumb face in both directions: they obligate both citizens and newcomers to some very basic reciprocities.

II. Myths

First let us examine and dispel, if we can, certain sustained myths that

may obstruct clear thinking on immigration and related issues. Myths oc-

cupy both sides of the controversy. They occupy the minds of those who believe immigrations are trespass; they have got out of hand and ought to be prevented, at least constrained. They also occupy the minds of those




who forget the globe is spatially finite and contains, even with our ingenuity, finite resources; they think the world lends itself to migrations of any size, even massive movements of peoples between borders that are artifi- cial and dysfunctional.

Myth I. A new communitarian perspective is necessary. Today we are a global village.

This is false. The rhetoric of the global village is mindless and dangerous; it arouses Utopian hopes that can never be met. Idealism about ulti- mate human fraternity is not a substitute for prudent international law. It cannot replace frank recognition that a certain exclusivity and preference for being with one's own kind (however this may be defined), and loyalties to one's history, traditions, and sovereign state are not likely to disappear soon. We are still tribal animals. We will always prefer groups we like and believe we are like.

Villages have distinctive characters; they are inherent communities. Village groups are ethnically and genetically inter-related - so their mem- bers make concessions to each other for peace, order, and security. Frater- nity and easy sociality are natural to village life and perspectives. Sharing is natural. Good will and friendship are natural. Language and culture, customs and moral codes are homogeneous. Small groups do things together, agree on goals, generally cooperate without force, pull toward common purposes.

In no way at all is the world a village, or its varied peoples, languages, histories, cultures, and moralities homogeneous and readily harmonious. We might wish it were true, but this mythical analogy of the global village can mislead us in many self-destructive ways. The same problems invade the metaphor, "family of nations." Its connotations are illusory if we mean much more than that our common human nature requires we try to be brotherly to each other and that, by mutual agreement, we can no doubt share much more than we realize.

Perhaps sloppy thinking derives the idea of a "global village" from the truth that we live in global times. We do indeed. Institutions and com- merce have gone global. Banks and bus'ness have gone global. Environ- mental impact and economic interdependence have gone global. Traveling as never before has gone global. Ideas have gone global: communication, media, computer networks, ASCII, E-mail, worldnet, and FAX machines have stretched and reduced our global perspective. Sign language and traf- fic symbols have been global for some time.

Terrorism has gone global too. Myth 2. Wealthy nations owe some part of their wealth to have-not

nations. First-world nations do not owe anything to third-world nations except

good will, civility, desistance from harm, respect for rights of independent




nationhood, and respect for the autonomy and dignity of every person. Accordingly, no nation or a people has a right to anything from another sovereign nation or people except to these foundational human duties and civilities, and to what they agreed to, contracted for, or promised. Rich nations have no enforceable duty to give their wealth away. They did not steal this wealth or manipulate the felicitude of plentiful resources, a pro- pitious geography, a productive populace. They did not steal their good luck. Unless they transgressed equitable laws or broke treaties, they did not prosper at anyone's expense. If first-world nations have retained or increased their wealth, then they have worked for it. Their citizens have saved, invested, postponed indulgence, and exercised initiative and discipline. There is no other way. If we think otherwise, then in my judgment we have fallen prey to foolish slogans, to fear of reprisal, to irrational, impulsive sympathy, to false ideologies.

Myth 3. Immigration was widespread yesterday and nothing was wrong with it.

That is true. It was indeed a great boon and benefit. In America, it gave birth to a pluralism already part of the founders' hopes. It still can be if we are careful to take account of the differences that relate, today, to the effects of migrations of dislocated peoples. 1. Populations are growing at a pace that seems to threaten natural resources and natural space. 2. Re- sources, for many reasons, deplete faster than they revitalize. 3. First- world nations are "post-industrial", whereas now most refugee peoples are low-skilled. 4. Fugitives from Asiatic, Arabic, African, and Latin Ameri- can countries carry with them cultural habits different from those of Euro- pean countries; yet it is these fugitives who most often suffer deportation from their home conditions. 5. Mass movements are occurring on a scale before unknown.

These startling differences between yesterday and today make remedia- tion of asylum-wandering an exceedingly difficult problem for which to find stable and reliable, humane solutions. It is certain that the old ones do not, without cautious rethinking, fit the slot.

The story is not one-sided. Compelling but fallacious illusions go in the other direction.

Myth I. Ethnic and cultural diversities destabilize. Not necessarily. American justice and liberty, for example, as its foun-

ders interpreted it, attracted - and were intended to attract - diversities of religion, culture, nationality, and economic status. Pluralism literally defined the plan of independence. Today, these same types of diversity are already present in vast and scattered conglomerates in numerous nations. Immigrants do not alone import them; diversity is often resident and indigenous. Its natural development is to breed itself in continuous cycles.




[America may be a special case, one we can learn from. The general truth that diversity is present and non- destabilizing in many nations, bears important qualifications. (1) American citizens endorse and are familiar with diversity; Americans never were a homogeneous people. (2) Ameri- cans have already learned the incommensurable value of positively em- bracing cross-cultural diversity; it enriches native cultures and generally creates prosperity-making advances. (3) America is a large territory. Spatially expansive geographies tend to absorb novelties, innovations, and custom- and-convention departures a more easily than small ones. (4) Diversities developed gradually in America; they were not foisted upon a resident people unprepared and overnight. A timely readiness seems to have pre- vailed in that each influx was, in its time, absorbed into the whole.]

Myth 2. Where antagonisms occur between environmentalists and con- flicting interests, the primary value should always be environmentalism. This should warn us to reduce populations by vastly restricting entry to aliens.

Contrariwise, in some areas of ecological concern, environmentalists have overplayed their hand. Some living species and depleted soils and waters have been restored; some are not worth restoring, or their use-up value overrides their preservation. Everyone panicked in the last century when whale oil dried up; but along came ingenuity and its payoff: electric- ity. This scenario occurs continuously in cultural history where the rule of law protects human freedom and allows ingenuity its rewards. Technolo- gies, substitutes, inventions, discoveries - all have devised replacements for diminishing natural resources. Human ingenuity is a constant in human affairs. Environmentalists and population control adherents that recommend absolutist immigration prohibitions advocate groundless extremes.

Noxious fumes and poisonous chemical contaminants of water, air, foli- age, and agricultural lands no doubt require acute caution, especially when pervasive or irrevocable. Rain forests have to be watched, and fresh lake waters have to be saved. Industrial pollution in Eastern Europe is horren- dous and perhaps irremediable. Recently we have become aware of overfishing off Newfoundland and coastal Eastern United States. If not diminished, overfishing will close off a food source for millions of people. Already international battle lines are drawn on issues regarding proportion- ate catches and species propagation. On the other hand, oxygenizing sys- tems have restored the feed-in rivers near Cleveland, Ohio: 30 species of fish now swim where before were only nine. Species come-backs are start- ing to make news in conservation circles and publications. Gene research promises new and possibly increasingly fertile species of nutritious, water- borne edibles.

Catastrophizing human misuse, habitation, and waste sets into action opportunities for disgraceful political gains, self-aggrandizement, corrup-




tion. We have seen this happen in many countries. When the realities and potentials of environmental destruction arouse public fear so that hatreds lodge against people thought not to belong to the dominant culture, oppor- tunists have a chance to enhance their power by exaggerating these fears and antagonisms. By scapegoating outside groups, they claim credit for policies that turn out to be visionary, counterproductive, superfluous pork in the barrel.

Myth 3. Citizens-in-residence are innocent of depleting their resources. This is false. Citizens already have depleted their resources so severely

that no new technologies may be able, as they often have in the past, fully to repair the damage. Indigenous populations cause unfulfillable demands for energy, water, farmland, and open spaces - not aliens, not newcomers. It is the California farmer who has excessively drained water from the

below-ground water tables that are the last resort for millions. It is the American rancher who has overgrazed the prairies. It is native American and Canadian mining corporations that have stripped parklands of some of their most unrecoverable species and beautiful spectacles. In-resident citizen overgrazing and logging abuses on public lands are already notorious.

Japan buys American raw timber - but who cuts and sells it? The Levia- than State caused the Chernobyl disaster and the death of lovely Lake Baliol.

Degradation of the environment goes both ways. In James Bay, Canada,

today, Cree Indian tribes (paradoxically, called "outsiders"!) are suffering monumental losses of their natively secured hunting, fishing, species, and

living territories. Construction by the Quebec government of a huge hy- dro-electric system has flooded, irreversibly imperiled, and destroyed vast tracts of historically Cree habitation. Researchers and officials never col- lected test data confirming the propriety of the dams, never confirmed the

necessity for the project. Anticipated corporate and national buyers of the water have not materialized and probably will not. (America is standing stubborn.) This project is one of the most egregious lapses of environmental responsibility of which I have become aware.

Myth 4. We can regulate most of these population problems, or new

technology will solve them for us. I do not think we should be so optimistic, because political regulation

already fails in many areas of public life. We have not solved the drug problem through regulation. We saw with the implosion of the Soviets that no one can solve production or distribution through political regulation. Historically, regulations on trains and airplanes and trucks have only caused scarcities, neglect of capital improvements, and very unfair market dislocations.

In short, we should have learned by now that unintended and very often

counterproductive consequences result from policies issued by govern-




ments. Sadly, this can be true of asylum policies as well. Political policies simply have too often failed. Why, then, should we count on governments to resolve the complex and painful problems of millions of dislodged peoples moving aimlessly here and there from one inhospitable jurisdiction to another, settling for indentured servitude in order to eat? What are we to think of the paradox that frequently it is governments that have caused the holocausts of asylum? Today, thousands of hapless Sudanese, Rwandans, Kurds, Serbs, Bosnians, Croats - are displaced by the nationalist wars of power-seekers. Shall we count on governments to rectify these wretched problems in any reasonable and positive way? We do need to govern where and when and how many wandering people shall enter our nations. But we should not anticipate great success, or dump our angers on the newcomers. It is better to say right from the beginning, as one worried organization has argued, We regret very much, but "The welcome mat is threadbare just now."

III. Fundamentals

"Society disintegrates when no common morality is observed, and history shows that the loosening of moral bonds is often the first stage of disintegration, so that society is justified in taking the same steps to preserve its moral code as it does to preserve its government and other essential institutions."

When he said these words, Lord Patrick Devlin had in mind other moral codes than I have in mind. If we universalize these ideas, broaden them to refer to universal values without which no society can long exist, or is worth existing, they are deeply meaningful for our problem. I have in mind as "moral bonds" certain tenets of civic virtue - what I said earlier we owe to all others: non-harm and respect for their personal dignity of being. These moral attitudes sustain the foundations of civic order and justice. They enhance the individual. They maintain social order. No individual or group has a right to undermine the very principles that sustain or encourage the liberties that people may, purposely or innocently, de- structively misuse to undermine these principles. Toleration is not an absolute value. It requires contexts, concrete objects of attribution, historical or experiential vindication. Incomers have to be prevented from practices, however much they cherish them, that tend to undermine and dislodge the civic virtues already in place and that hold the host society together. If the host society loses its center, the incomers will lose theirs too. For the most part, the indigenous people, those already at home, can be expected to know what these virtues are: responsibility, promise-keeping, good faith, reliance, independence, self-discipline, honesty. They, therefore, have the prerogative, and duty, to excoriate those who ignore or sully them; and this




excoriation and moral scolding must lay itself both on newcomers and natives. If people are equal one to another, it is as wrong to permit an incoming group to practice ways strongly disruptive of the sustaining eth- ics of a resident people as to permit the latter to forbid alien practices if they do little harm.

No group's rights or values are more privileged than any other's where they have to mix because an immigrant group has been "let in", and where one set of rights or values is not fundamental to social existence and cultural identity. Only education and persuasion in multiple ways can pull one group around to accepting the root standards and values of the dominant culture when these standards carry heavy moral weight.

Esthetic repugnancies. Here we draw the line. If we give the moral highground to the natives and their already established institutional conti- nuities, they do not also prima facie deserve superior status for their esthetic preferences, no matter how much approved and entrenched. I think we have to try to put up with what, to us, is tasteless, noisy, disheveled, gaudy, and odorous. Unkempt gypsies and smelly billygoats tethered in bathtubs may have to be tolerated until their obstreperous presence become a clear public nuisance, or until the outsiders learn that social acceptance is a nice thing to count on. Nations used to pluralistic diversity should simply include these sensory shocks in their repertoire of toleration for the distasteful. Over time, education, generational change, and the hope of upgrading one's lot will likely, for most newcomers, do the rest if the native-born reliably cherish and keep faith in the higher-value models.

I would not think much of this esthetic component of the mixing of peoples if I did not think esthetic responses are psychologically very rudi- mentary. Antagonism to what we are not familiar with generates itself, in my judgment, out of an implicit, non-rational, instinctual disaffection with ways of being that repel us we-know-not-why. A primordial sense of order, symmetry, and beauty underlies much of our allegedly rational affinities or objections to things, even some of our moral prejudices. We rationalize our attractions or revulsions to styles and manners we see around us that are strange. Newcomers bring in these novelties. I think we have, pa- tiently, to wait until diversity begins its meltdown. Pondering on generational differences, our own young people generally spawn more obnoxious idiosyncracies and absurdities than any adult populations we agree to har- bor for reasons of humanity. Doctors Without Borders can serve us here as models of holding our sights higher than dwelling on some transitory disgust.

IV. Realities and Values

No one can foresee what reality factors converge to shape the choice as to whether, or how, an established nation should admit aliens who want to




cross its border. Conditions change. Disease controls may be a primary concern at one time but hardly significant at another. A rogue people may entreat entry at one time but are nowhere around at another. Rogue people present difficulties for nations that understand justice as an individual ethic; for the likelihood is that innocent persons who may yet belong to rogue nations but whose needs for entry are valid will be excluded. Cases like these are unfortunate and tax our sense of fairness.

Foremost are some prudential imperatives that I think everyone would acknowledge: 1. Periodically reassess conditions at home, including the public attitude. For instance, Negative Population Growth holds that the United States must reduce both legal and illegal immigration (and the re- sultant population increases from "outsider" births) from more than one million to 100,000 a year. Why do they say this? What are the grounds, the facts? Is this opinion widespread? We need to assess the truth. Sev- enty-six percent of the American public, this organization contends, believe that immigration should be reduced until the economy improves. Is this statistic really so high? Carrying Capacity Network forwards the same claim, stressing that it is "the poor, homeless, and unemployed" that principally are hurt by insupportably high legal and illegal immigration. If so, this is a telling argument against those whose primary contention is mere sympathy for the dispossessed outside the borders and a sloganeering cry of "They have rights!" without in the least understanding the delicate nature of an efficable right. 2. Help tumultuous nations to handle their population troubles at home. 3. Whenever possible, use local controls to help incoming groups settle and assimilate. 4. Since geographic dis- persal of immigrants seems more optimal than huge or rapid concentrations where ghettos and polyglot neighborhoods can develop, decentralize the influx (but not so thinly that tribal affections are torn). 5. Keep in good repair the moral fiber of one's own community and nation.

While facts change and maxims gain or lose in importance, something more certain can be said about enduring principles or rules that have to accompany the reality factors that make sense of Ellis Island policies. What, then, are these rules of thumb? What prima facie standards should govern what the local populace, those already in place, requires, prohibits, and permits to those allowed to enter the country? Three categories of value, not exclusive of each other, can put order into these standards: 1. reciprocities; 2. institutions; 3. foundational moral and legal values.

Reciprocities. It is a fact of our nature that we cannot continue to receive without also returning, lest we feel uneasy and conflicted. Since incoming peoples receive services and hospitality, I would ask of newcomers a very reasonable act of justice: I would ask that they give service to the nation that houses them, for a specified time and in a way that comports




with the host country's needs and the newcomer's capacities. Returning service for succor balances out the generosity of admission; it makes it tolerable for both parties to believe each is sharing the burdens of the other. It evens the score, it rationalizes "what is due" while reciprocating to the deserving host something that says, "thank you."

Along with the justice of give-and-take, benefits accrue: newcomers learn what citizens expect of them, how the day-to-day interactions go, how to parley human relationships. To their advantage, they become familiar with a skill or trade or with an activity or interest they did not formerly know. Wonderful opportunities may be opened. Thus do the refugee's own previously confined tributaries flow into the larger mainstream through autonomous efforts that he or she learns to extend. Surely this becoming part of what a displaced person has moved toward is what in the first place that person must want.

Those who decide to welcome others to come inside must reciprocally extend to them the foundational civilities mentioned above, and promise them security of person. Wherever they dwell, everyone has a right to these. Threats and dangers, often hatred, are what most fugitives have fled from. Threats and dangers, often hatred, are what most fugitives have fled from. I believe also that groups have a prima facie right to retain the peaceable features that define their homogeneity and to keep intact their secondary customs if these do not interfere with what they must do to integrate and smooth out their paths. I have heard that the people of the Caucuses, for instance, have a tradition of broad, almost indiscriminate hospitality. American individualism, self-reliance, the nuclear family and the one-house-one-family goal might be hard for such a group to empathize with.

Something else is important. Alienation is not just being homeless. It is a state of mind, a mental affliction. We should assume that emotional and spiritual alienation obstructs many immigrants from adjusting and making their way in unfamiliar surroundings, or even from engaging in the simpler requirements of life. How can one who is inattentive, who has lost bear- ing, becomes depressed, dysfunctional, and loses her identity: "Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here?" - how can this person serve

anything to anyone? These sad ones first need psychological help. The fugitive mentality

needs to transform itself into that of the invited friend - a little deferential, but feeling welcome. If a nation cannot offer to those in need of asylum these reciprocities and hospitality, it is wiser and kinder not to admit them.

Institutions: law and language. More than conformity to any other institution except the sourcewaters of the vital morality, conformity to the law and language of the host country is decisive. That one must know and conform to the laws of the land in which one is a visitor has always been




acknowledged as the required minimum. All types of aliens - legal, illegal, those who hope to be citizens, those awaiting other dispositions, foreign guests, "green card" residents, tourists - have to obey the law. If one wants the protections of the law, then it logically follows that one has an obligation to comply with the law. Here the social contract becomes infal- lible; single, universal jurisdiction is the very definition of a sovereign state. To enter a sovereign state, therefore, acknowledges that one puts oneself under and participates in a single, universal jurisdiction.

It is not so well accepted that learning the host language - emphatically not demanding that one's own tongue be publicly acknowledged! - is a bare required minimum for those who hope to stay. Through language, newcomers learn substantial, practical information and coping values. Only through language can the subtler aspects of the lifeways of those already in occupancy be assimilated and used. Language is our primary channel to education and culture transmission.

Law compliance also depends upon knowing the language. Common language equates with common values. Sharing common values turns alienation into true and comforting asylum. I would make the established and unifying language compelling in the schools, and a necessary criterion, like law compliance, for continued residency (except in hardship cases). Lan- guage unifies a people more than any other teachable skill. Accordingly, incomers cannot expect that they have a right to learn in their native language. They can only expect that they have a right, if they choose, to keep it alive. If an immigrant does not take the language requirement seriously, I believe the newcomer alone is principally responsible for the problematic vicissitudes of residency.

A greater need exists than ever before for immigrant aid societies in the social-private and voluntary sectors to grow and increase their outreach. Law and language requirements can be greatly eased if immigrant aid societies do their work well. The American Committee on Italian Migration, for instance, has a strong presence still. It played an enormous role in helping the vigorous Italian migration of late last century adjust to the mores and economy of America. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) saved the lives of the poor and hounded of Eastern Europe as they sought entry and habitation in the New World, bedeviled by antisemitic pogroms and the evils of ideological scapegoating and slaughter. Ethnic and religious aid societies that broadly represent the ethnic origins that these committees serve, are ready to help those of any background who are destitute. The social sector always goes to work first and most efficiently. When uncorrupted, the natural sympathy of our human nature, tempered by reflective intelligence and sometimes the persuasions of good government, can relieve the suffering of homeless wandering.

The meaning of the word "education" is a duct, or channel, through which something flows. Remembering its etymology, we know that the




asylum-seeker needs to be channeled in a direction advantageous both for him and for the society in which he desires membership.

Foundational moral and legal values. Samuel Pufendorf wrote that each of us has a duty to aid others "...insofar as I can contribute to your security and further your interests without destroying my own". I would recommend that we think long and hard about devising means to instill in newcomers certain strategic standards, mores, and virtues, and not only the basic ones essential to social harmony. Possessing these auxiliary niceties, newcomers can more rapidly further their interests while contributing to the interests of those who offer them hospitality.

A nation's history mirrors that nation's consuetudes and hopes. Instill- ing these standards, mores, and virtues is done well when we teach the influences that brought that nation into existence and sustains its health. Among the values that shape civilized nations are the interpersonal civilities constitutive of our appetitus socialis. Well-taught history shows these values at work. Also in a nation's history dwell the ideal social values and their struggle for recognition and survival: justice, liberty, benevolence and sharing, legal equality, the sacredness of property and promise, and individualism in cooperation with the common good. History tells us what a country is and how it became that way - what holds it together. The legal philosopher Edgar Bodenheimer wrote: Societies that disregard certain very fundamental norms of human conduct will "...suffer crises, break- downs, and eventual disintegration unless... [they are] brought into conformity with the existential needs of human beings."

One special value needs to be reinforced with certain ethnic groups when they cross borders in search of a better life. That is the dignity, independence, and equality of women. The abuse of women worldwide in backward cultures is unspeakable and insufferable, and scarcely, in this age, credible. Help offered by any nation should demand elimination of any practice that demeans the autonomy and dignity of women.

When we teach newcomers to bond themselves to the maintenance values of the nation they enter, native citizens also learn it better. Many homeborn never get the message because it is not, for them, made visible and explicit. It takes the criticism and irritations of those new to a country to make conscious what residents take for granted or bury in complacency. Everyone knows that naturalized citizens often become better citizens than the homeborn. Perhaps this is what we mean by "And the meek shall inherit the earth."

Pace University Received December 26, 1995



Date post:	20-Jan-2017
Category:	Documents
Upload:	virginia-black
View:	212 times
Download:	0 times

Asylum: A Global Phenomenon

Documents