Removing America's Welcome Mat
Dec. 10 -- It's been a little more than a year since the United States granted Jean-Pierre Kamwa political asylum.
But when he recalls his first days in the country, he gets so upset his speech quickens, his voice gets louder, and the native of Cameroon can barely be understood through his accent.
Before he left Africa in November 1999, Kamwa was hopeful about his journey.
At home, he had been an activist and member of an opposition political party. He had been jailed several times, for periods of up to a year. And then his colleagues began disappearing, he said — most likely, killed.
Fearing for his life, he headed to the United States. Kamwa arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport with a forged passport, and says he promptly approached an immigration officer to explain his situation.
The immigration officer responded by slapping a pair of handcuffs on him — and Kamwa says he spent the night cuffed to a bench in an office.
But that was only the beginning. Kamwa found a life in America that seemed to him no different than the one he would have faced in Cameroon. He was to be detained indefinitely.
"I was crying, I was scared, because it was very strange to me," Kamwa said. "Why I come to the country, they treat me like that?"
The Siren Song
Kamwa's tale is relatively benign considering all the fates that can meet someone who arrives illegally in the United States. He was handcuffed and put behind locked doors, but after five months in captivity he eventually won his freedom.
Other immigrants face terrible dangers — a crossing in a leaky boat across shark-infested waters, being abandoned in the middle of a lifeless desert, exploitation, slavery, rape — and still confront the risk of being sent back once they arrive.
Yet they keep coming. According to the U.S. Committee for Refugees, at least 64,000 asylum seekers filed with the Immigration and Naturalization Service last year. More asylum seekers sought refuge with the United States than Canada, Germany, or even the famously liberal Scandinavian countries.
In October, more than 200 asylum seekers arrived off the coast of Florida after a perilous eight-day journey from Haiti in a wooden freighter. Like Kamwa, they were rounded up by authorities and detained.
Unlike Kamwa though, the Haitians will likely be sent home. The Haitian Refugee Center in Miami said 19 of them have already been sent home because they were caught at sea and failed to reach U.S. soil. None of those who made it to shore has been sent home so far, an INS official said.
The Haitians are seen as economic migrants — people who have left their homes only to seek a more prosperous life. The INS says economic migrants are not eligible for resettlement in the United States.
Kamwa came to the United States as an asylum seeker — that is, someone who can demonstrate that he or she was persecuted, or has a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.
They are like refugees, except that refugee status is usually defined before the asylum seeker arrives in the United States. Refugee status is typically bestowed on a group of people, but an asylum seeker who arrives in the United States can become a refugee if he or she can prove membership in the persecuted group.
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