Removing America's Welcome Mat
Dec. 10, 2002 -- 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.
An INS official in Miami said she could not comment on asylum claims, but the officials at the Haitian Refugee Center said some of the Haitians who arrived in October have already filed for that status. Lawyers told the Miami Herald at least 100 applications are expected to be submitted to immigration judges by this Friday, and another 100 or so next week.
No doubt the Haitians will face the same harsh road to acceptance that Kamwa faced.
A Punishing System
Current federal law mandates detaining persons who attempt to enter the United States without proper documents — a detention that can last months or years, until their claims are verified.
A 1999 Amnesty International report condemned the INS detention system, calling it a "labyrinth," and recounted stories of some asylum seekers who had become so desperate they attempted suicide.
"Asylum seekers are shunted from one facility to another, across state lines, without any explanation other than that their bed space is needed. There is no effort to keep them near their families or their legal representatives. There is also some evidence that 'troublesome' detainees are … put into local or county jails as a form of punishment," the report said.
In the wake of the terrorist attacks on Sept.11, 2001, future asylum seekers can only expect more scrutiny. The Federation for American Immigration Reform points out that several of those implicated in the first attack on the World Trade Center, the 1993 bombing, had applied for or entered the United States as asylum seekers.
Ramzi Yousef, the chief organizer of the bombing, entered the United States in September 1992 without a visa, was briefly detained for illegal entry, and granted asylum pending a hearing.
Mohamed Salameh, who rented the truck used in the bombing, entered the United States in 1988 on a visitor's visa, applied for legal residence status — presumably asylum seeker status — was turned down, and continued to be in the country on appeal of that decision, according to FAIR.
The bombers' spiritual leader, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, also applied for political asylum and received legal residence, FAIR said. All three men were convicted and are serving time for the 1993 attack.
Aimal Khan Kasi, who shot to death two CIA employees in an anti-American rampage outside the agency's suburban Virginia headquarters in 1993, and Hesham Mohamed Hedayet, who killed two people at Los Angeles International Airport on July 4 of this year, also sought to stay in the United States as asylum seekers, according to the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies.
The INS came up for yet more criticism last month, after news reports revealed that Border Patrol agents had discovered that one of the Beltway sniper suspects was an illegal immigrant from Jamaica who had been detained and released him.
Michelle Malkin, author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists Criminals & Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores, condemned the agency in a recent column, saying it "recklessly releases illegal aliens like sniper suspect [John] Lee Malvo — and then watches them disappear to commit brutal crimes against American citizens."
Nativist Sentiment
But asylum seekers say their trials don't end once they are freed. When Kamwa was granted asylum, he says he experienced yet another roller coaster of emotion. He had escaped the detention center, but he says he had absolutely nowhere to go.
The pro bono lawyers who had helped him had left the city. He had no family and knew no one in New York, and he had only a slim grasp of English. He spent the next few months in a homeless shelter, which was run like a detention center itself, he said — albeit one full of drunks and drug addicts.
Kamwa now lives in federally subsidized housing and works for a nonprofit community organization in New York. Yet even with his status legitimized, Kamwa and others who come to the United States fleeing persecution still face challenges.
When thousands of Somali refugees, fleeing civil war in their homeland, were allowed to resettle in the United States, they set their sights on towns in Maine, which they admit attracted them with generous welfare benefits.
After the mayor of one of the towns asked the Somali community to discourage others from coming, saying, "our city is maxed-out financially, physically and emotionally," a political firestorm erupted there.
Lewiston Mayor Larry Raymond insisted he is not a nativist or a racist, but was only pleading for the survival of his overburdened town. But the World Church of the Creator, a white supremacist group, is planning to hold a rally there in January.
"We need to be activists just as much as blacks were in the '60s. It worked for them, and certainly it would work for white people too," Matt Hale, the group's leader, told The Associated Press.
No Stopping the Flow
Despite all the obstacles, immigration experts say people will keep coming — with and without documents, legally and illegally — simply because they have no other choice.
But asylum seekers are often suspected of coming to the United States under false pretenses, in search of welfare benefits, higher wages or a higher standard of living.
Even if they are economic migrants, "it's not a case of [being] better off," but survival, said Martha W. Rees, a professor at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Ga.
One Haitian who knew several of those who arrived on the boat in Florida told the AP: "Most people don't make enough to survive … Some days you eat, some days you don't."
America's economic reputation beckons many immigrants, experts said — but the reputation for freedom is stronger. And an even greater influence than that, they said, is convenience and logistics.
Kamwa said he came to the United States because there was a valid visa in the passport a concerned relative gave him in order to flee. He says he would have been just as happy to go to France, because Cameroonians speak French, or South Africa, which is closer to home.
Most migrants head to the country that is easiest for them to get to. For many in Latin America, that's the United States or Canada. But these countries are also attractive because there are ties between the aspiring Americans and established communities.
For example, many Mexican migrants have relatives in the United States who established themselves in the country under government-sponsored guest worker programs in the 1950s and 1960s, Rees said.
And America's "incredible diversity," said Eleanor Acer, a director at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, makes it a goal for that many more migrants.
Not Proportionately More
In relative terms, statistics show the United States does not take in a significantly higher number of asylum seekers than its counterparts in the first world. The asylum seeker applicant population for the United States in 2001 was 0.02 percent of the entire country's population.
Relative to population, Britain got nearly six times the amount of asylum-seeker applications: 0.12 percent. For Canada, the proportion was 0.14 percent — seven times what it was in the United States. For Sweden, it was 0.18 percent.
These numbers don't mean that migrants are responding to calls to stay away, though.
"People believe the United States is the home of human rights and democracy," said Acer, who is head of the LCHR's asylum project. They learn it in school, they read it in the newspaper, they pick it up from the message that the U.S. government encourages around the world, and so they look to it with hope, Acer said.
More importantly, migrants don't respond to government controls. Kamwa says the way he was treated when he arrived was totally at odds with what he had learned about America.
"People come here because by the way Americans talk about their country, it's more safe, it's more secure," he said. After he had been detained, he termed it "hypocrisy."
"It was a big disappointment the way they treat people," he said. "They have to learn how to treat people in these situations."
The contrast is not lost on the world community. Upon releasing a recent report on international migration, Joseph Chamie, director of the U.N. Population Division, noted that governments are putting out two fundamental and often conflicting messages.
"The first is 'Help Wanted,' asking for migrants to come in … from computer programmers and nurses to janitors and fruit pickers," he said. "The second message that comes across is 'Keep Out.'"
Migrants are hearing the first message more clearly than the second, Rees said. They are being employed in carpet factories, fruit orchards and chicken plants across America, she said — and every day Americans benefit.
That's the first thing critics of immigration policy have to realize, Rees said. "Our laws don't really effectively keep people out, they just keep them underpaid."
"We don't sanction employers," she said. "If we really want to stop people, stop the employers."