The Lawyer's Committee for Human Rights has issued a report called "The New Normal", which surveys the legal landscape post-9/11. Chapter 3 focuses on laws and policies that affect immigrants and refugees.
Much of what is contained in the report will be familiar to readers of LegalWrites. It reviews the latest status of the September 11 detainees, of special registration, and of community interviews, all of which I discussed briefly in Target: Immigrants. It also looks at CLEAR, which is the newest assault on immigrant rights.
The report also examines policies affecting refugees and asylum-seekers, a topic I haven't yet covered here. It singles out three policies as particularly egregious.
The first is Operation Liberty Shield, a fortunately short-lived policy calling for the detention of all asylum seekers from certain Muslim and Middle Eastern countries (the usual suspects). The idea behind this policy seems to have been that terrorists could seek to enter the U.S. by hiding among refugees and seeking asylum, and that in fact the threat of this is so great that it justifies imprisoning people who are fleeing persecution or torture, just because of the countries they come from.
The second policy is the sharp decline in the number of refugees granted asylum who are being re-settled in the U.S. which was first reported for 2002 and continues this year as well. Again, apparently the threat of terrorists sneaking in as refugees is so great that it justifies the mistreatment or abandonment of people who have already experienced persecution or torture and have had to flee their homes for that reason.
The third policy has potentially the most serious implications. It comes from an April 2003 decision by Attorney General John Ashcroft, which orders the detention of all refugees from Haiti. Haiti? Apparently, Muslims may be seeking to enter the country via Haiti and therefore such migration must be strictly limited, said Ashcroft. Even the State Department was taken aback by Ashcroft's action.
One has to wonder with the author of the page linked to above whether Ashcroft will soon "discover" that Muslims are seeking to enter the U.S. through Mexico and lock down in the same way. Bad as the mistreatment of Muslim immigrants and refugees is, such migrants represent only a fraction of the total immigrant population. The majority of migrants are from Latin America, primarily Mexico, and most of them travel through Mexico. The Haiti decision represents a worrying step towards closing America to immigration for real. I devoutly hope that this fear remains only a paranoid imagining on my part and never comes true.