Deportation taken a step too far

by Charles Lim

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

The attraction people have to public office baffles me. You must will yourself to work every day and enact policies while keeping in mind that someone, somewhere is going to get royally screwed.

Often, administrators can rush to make seemingly uncontroversial mandates while being completely disengaged from the very real human ramifications they have, hundreds of miles away from Capitol Hill.

One example of these seemingly “safe” decrees would be the deportation agreement recently made between the United States and Vietnam. As with similar agreements with Laos and Cambodia, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam will accept U.S. deportations of illegal immigrants who came on or after July 12, 1995 and have formal deportation orders. Reasons for deportation orders include criminal offenses such as murder, rape, drug trafficking, etc. Sounds totally reasonable — get dangerous criminals out of the country. Vietnam is doing us true Americans a favor by taking back these ungrateful immigrants, right?

I hope none of you took me seriously — Rush Limbaugh excluded — since the situation is far more complex than that. Not only are many immigrants South Vietnamese who served with the United States in the Vietnam War or their direct relatives, but many other hundreds if not thousands of immigrants face deportation for countless insignificant crimes. Deportation is usually the result of conviction for an aggravated felony, which sounds like such a heinous term that deference to the authorities is given right away.

In reality, that term has been expanded to many non-violent crimes and now can be applied to any crime that carries a sentence of two years or longer. For example, among the cases for deportation, one involved a man deported to Cambodia after he was convicted of indecent exposure. Problem is, he was nabbed not for shaking it a playground, but for urinating at a construction site.

Aggravated felonies also involve crimes related to child abuse, which sounds perfectly reasonable. Tell that to the woman deported to Cambodia for spanking her kids with un-lit incense sticks. That’s right — separation from her children for the rest of their lives, just for disciplining her kids with thin pieces of scented wood. Even a bad check is grounds for forced exit from the country.

This also underscores another major issue. Judges are not allowed to exercise any sort of discretion on a case-by-case basis when determining deportation. The fact the crime happened, not the degree of the crime committed, is the sole determinant of deportation. The immigrant could have served all of the jail time for a minor offense, started a family and lived the life of a complete model citizen and still stand to be torn from his wife and children and never see them again. He will be transplanted back to a country he may have never been to since he was a child, or even remember, not knowing the language or anyone living there. How can he be expected to survive? How will his family go on without a father?

This is all without saying how deportees will be treated outside of the United States. When the deal between Cambodia and the United States went through, the Cambodian prime minister immediately followed with the statement that deportees would all be relocated to the country’s largest and most dangerous prison immediately upon arrival into the country. Vietnam is still haunted by a spotty human rights record, and its authoritarian communist regime is criticized by the U.S. State Department.

And we are telling people to go back? Would you knowingly return a runaway child to his or her abusive parents? Isn’t that what the United States is doing here? Some may say “it’s not our business how they are treated over there,” but to that I will rip out my hair and ask what the hell do you call “Operation Iraqi Freedom?” Hasn’t it been the unstated foreign policy of the United States for the last six years to make it our business? Or is that just because we didn’t find any WMDs?

There is hope, however. Twelve congressmen, including one on the House subcommittee on immigration, are calling for the delay of this action and urging the government to give a closer look to how such an act will affect real human lives.

For too long, America has touted its superiority over other nations because of its purported acceptance of all people and its claim that all people can achieve the “American Dream” with hard work and perseverance. So I ask, who deserves the “dream” more: some well-off college kid born with rights of a citizen or an immigrant who came from a war-ravaged country with almost nothing and worked themselves to the bone all his or her life, all the while never experiencing such rights?

Charles Lim (celim@wisc.edu) is a junior with no declared major.