Human Cargo Page 12
As it happened, Salaam’s sister, Rania, was now marked as well. There was no choice but to flee. Rania left directly for Jordan, on forged papers; she was accompanied by their father, since as a woman she could not travel alone. Their relatively well-off parents bought Salaam a ticket and visa to travel to Turkey.
Now the long journey into exile began, eventually to bring not only brother and sister but also their parents and remaining sisters to California. Salaam and Rania knew where they wanted to go: San Diego’s Chaldean community is well known to Iraqis; furthermore, an older brother, I man, was already settled in El Cajon. The question was how, with no genuine passports or visas, to get there.
From Turkey, Salaam traveled, by bus and car, to Turkestan, where he bought another visa, a forged passport, and a plane ticket to Amman. After several weeks, he was reunited with Rania, and the two now found a smuggler willing to traffic them to Mexico, via Guatemala, for $10,000 each. This involved living for a while in a safe house, catching a plane for Guatemala City, and making their way, in the company of a guide and four other Iraqis, up Guatemala’s western coast toward the border with Mexico. The last part was through jungle. At daybreak they reached the frontier, which lay along a river. The water was high and fast flowing. Their guide directed them to the shallowest point and Salaam and Rania, hand in hand, holding tightly to each other, set out, the water swirling around their shoulders. Several times they lost their footing and thought that they would be swept away. But they reached the other side and were taken to a safe house to rest. They had now been traveling for thirteen days since leaving Jordan, and had nothing but the clothes they stood up in.
In Mexico City, the smugglers abandoned them, but they had tickets for a plane to Tijuana. When the party disembarked, only Salaam and Rania managed to get through the immigration controls; the other four were taken into custody.
Salaam and Rania now took a room in a hotel. Their brother, Iman, arrived, having crossed the border at San Ysidro on his legitimate asylum seeker papers, bringing with him a further $2,000 for each of them to pay a smuggler to get them into California. Very early one morning, Salaam and Rania were driven to the crossing at San Ysidro and told to walk, without looking right or left or pausing for anything, through the checkpoint, past the lines of cars waiting for border inspection, past the immigration controls. It had all been arranged with bribes. They didn’t believe it, but it worked. They found themselves in California, in a parking lot near the border, where a smuggler was waiting with a taxi to drive them to their brother. The next day, they asked for asylum. In the months that followed, their parents and two sisters also reached San Diego. Rania has since married and works as a pharmacist; Salaam is studying American medicine for the qualifications he needs to practice as a doctor in the United States.
What Salaam remembers most about the journey is the sense of responsibility he felt for Rania. The worst moment was crossing the river, with the current pulling at their legs, and the Mexican and Guatemalan soldiers standing on the bridge, within sight, with their guns, but fortunately looking the other way. That was bad, just as it was bad leaving Jordan on a forged passport, knowing that if it was discovered he would be deported to Iraq. The journey was hard for him, but far harder for his sister, who had no knowledge or experience of danger and hardship. As for him, what he witnessed and went through in Abu Ghraib had hardened him, and in comparison, his travels do not strike Salaam as very interesting. It is the past that preoccupies him.
• • •
FROM PRO BONO lawyers who handle the cases of asylum seekers, I heard about the extent to which “aliens” have been swept off the streets since September 11, 2001. Immigrants and visitors to the United States now face an array of legal and bureaucratic hurdles.* Shortly after the attacks, on the orders of Attorney General John Ashcroft, the U.S. resettlement program, which in recent years had seen some 70,000 asylum seekers granted new lives in America, was frozen. As I had seen among the Liberians in Cairo, people whose immigration had already been approved were put back into the system for new checks. Families split between different parts of the world pending reunification in the States remained in limbo. The infrastructure of organizations caring for them, such as the International Rescue Committee, began to crumble, as their funding is calculated according to the number of new arrivals. Then arrests of “suspect aliens” started, beginning with Muslims and Arabs. At first, the number of detainees was conscientiously published each week. But when, before many weeks had passed, the figure reached a thousand, the bulletins stopped. All that was known was that foreigners working or studying in the United States, many of whom had been there for many years and had families and children, suddenly found themselves picked up and charged with technical violations of immigration law, such as failing to notify the authorities of a change in their university major. On the pretext that this was the simplest way of holding in custody and interrogating possible terrorists, some of these people have been held for months before being deported. Others have been caught under an ex post facto law, making immigrants who came to the United States lawfully subject to deportation for acts—such as traffic offenses—that were not grounds for deportation when they committed them.
Another Ashcroft proposal enacted in the wake of September 11 requires visitors from twenty-five predominantly Muslim countries to register and submit to fingerprinting immediately on arrival, and then report back to the authorities after forty days in the United States. Some forgot; others misunderstood or did not take the ruling seriously. In a little less than two years, at least five thousand people are believed to have been arrested and taken into custody, of whom just four were eventually charged in connection with terrorism, and just one actually convicted of “support of unsuspected terrorism.” In this context, what first took place at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba can be seen as an extreme version of the current U.S. hostility toward noncitizens: 650 men and boys—some as young as thirteen—were held incommunicado, without access to counsel, and with no hearing at which to determine whether or not they are in fact “enemy combatants” in the first place.
The attacks launched by George W. Bush and John Ashcroft and approved by Congress on America’s vast immigrant population have not gone unchallenged by liberals among both the Republicans and the Democrats, who regard them as frightening harbingers of an ever greater erosion of civil liberties. As the journalist Anthony Lewis noted in the New York Review of Books in the autumn of 2003, paraphrasing Martin Niemöller, the outspoken anti-Nazi German pastor, what is happening today to refugees and immigrants, the “aliens,” could very well happen tomorrow to American citizens, and the fact that there is so little real protest only makes future action against citizens that much more thinkable. The USA Patriot Act has already given government agents the power to subpoena any individual’s records, including a U.S. citizen’s, with a university, library, or telephone company. While people wait for more terrorist attacks and for yet more repressive measures taken in their wake, the emphasis is shifting all the time, away from openness and tolerance and accountability, toward secrecy and obfuscation. Prejudices on the part of certain judges hearing immigration appeals grow more marked; postponements and adjournments become the order of the day, as do layers of investigation by one government agency after another; the appeals system becomes more meaningless; nothing is as clear as it once was; and human rights lawyers learn of changes in policy not in directives but by reading between the lines of speeches. Nuances have taken on new power.
• • •
THE DETENTION OF asylum seekers has a long history in the United States. Introduced along with the first immigration controls in the late nineteenth century, it was abandoned in the 1950s, only to be revived in the 1980s in response to the influx first of Haitians and then of Cubans. They were incarcerated in camps and federal prisons in an attempt to deter too many others from following. To this day, the rule of limited parole for pregnant women, juveniles, and other vulnerable people, and blan
ket detention for the rest remains in place for all those reaching the United States without valid entry documents. Once they pass a screening interview, and provided they satisfy certain criteria, they are in theory eligible to be paroled, but many continue to be detained just the same. Though not criminals, they can be—and often are—held indefinitely: for six or seven months before they come before a judge, then for the two or more years before the appeal, then many more months while the law winds its convoluted course, only then to be denied bail and not told when they will be released. The conditions in which many are kept are both inhuman and degrading. They can be stripped, searched, shackled, manacled, chained, and denied access to lawyers and to their families. Though in theory the conditions of detention of asylum seekers are regulated by UNHCR, of whose executive committee the United States is a member, these rules are routinely breached, and, since September 11, increasingly so.
The numbers of detained asylum seekers keep on growing. People are held in state and local jails, in federal prisons, in private contract facilities, and in “servicing processing centers.” Most are places singularly unsuited to long stays. Frequently denied access to interpreters or the help of nongovernmental organizations, shunted from prison to prison without explanation or warning, many of those detained are reported to be falling ill, the trauma of what they have fled exacerbated by the fresh trauma of uncertainty and hostility. Lawyers visiting their clients report a sense of growing helplessness and confusion and say that the women detainees in particular suffer acutely from fear, loneliness, and an inability to understand what is happening to them. Physicians for Human Rights and the Bellevue/ NYU Program for Survivors of Torture not long ago carried out a series of interviews with detainees who had been held between one month and four and a half years. They found that 86 percent of them were suffering from measurable levels of depression and half were diagnosed as having post-traumatic stress disorder. Even when bail and parole are recommended, many asylum seekers cannot meet their requirements; so they remain in detention.
A number of the detainees are unaccompanied children: that is, they are under the age of eighteen and have traveled the world alone, without other members of their families. Like adults, they are obliged to prove that they can meet the definition of a refugee under the 1951 Convention. Under several different international rulings, including the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, children should be imprisoned only under exceptional circumstances, and then for the shortest time necessary. Yet the number of unaccompanied children detained in the United States doubled between 1997 and 2001. And although the United States has sought to draw up humane rules for these wandering children, none are in fact binding. Not long ago the care, custody, and placement of unaccompanied minors was transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS has a long history of dealing with refugee children). Guidelines were drawn up for newly arrived children traveling on their own, drawing heavily on the liberal spirit of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. In practice, however, a third of these children wind up in secure jail-like facilities, originally designed for young offenders, where they can spend months or even years. Amnesty International, in a 2003 report on children in immigration detention, Why Am I Here?, found widespread human rights violations across the country: children spent long periods in solitary confinement and were subjected to physical and verbal abuse, strip searches, and the use of shackles.
“I am tired of seeing so many depressed people,” an immigration judge told the director of one of the detention centers not long ago. “You should do something about it.”
*This was not the first such program: Operation Wetback, launched in June 1954 to stop immigration by undocumented Mexicans, sent 750 patrol agents to the Southwest.
*There are today four main categories of immigrant in the United States: relatives of U.S. residents (69 percent); those who come for specific jobs (13 percent); refugees and asylum seekers (8 percent); and those who take part in the lottery, which is open to countries that sent fewer than 50,000 people over the previous five years (6 percent).
• PART THREE •
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ARRIVING
• 4 •
FAIR GO
Australia and the Policy of Mandatory Detention
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We have to remind ourselves that geographically we are Oriental, we are not European. We are an island just off the south-east coast of Asia, and are part of the Oriental world. There our fate is set…. The decision we must make as Australians is this: are we going to look after our coloured future or our cultural future? … I could imagine a much finer race existing in Australia in a hundred years if their colour was the colour that so many Australians seek to attain on the beaches.
THE RIGHT REVEREND E. H. BURGMANN, ANGLICAN BISHOP OF GOULBURN, JANUARY 1946
In the summer of 1966, when I had just left university in London, my father took me and my younger brother, Richard, to Australia. It was, in some sense, to take us home. Born in Melbourne soon before the First World War, the eldest son of a writer and journalist, my father had left Australia for Europe in 1937, to catch and report on the last days of the Spanish Civil War. What he wanted to do was join the other young writers and painters drawn so powerfully abroad by a longing for a culture and history that they felt Australia lacked. Europe, thought my father, would be fun; it would be where he would learn about life and music and writing. His first real story, filed for the Daily Express, whose staff he had just joined, was about the refugees streaming across the Spanish border into France, the loyalist soldiers and their families escaping Franco’s reprisals.
All his life, my father would retain a feeling of ambivalence about the country in which he was born. He loved its smells, the color of the light, and the constant heat, and wherever he went he remarked on eucalyptus trees; and later, when he came to build his own house in Italy, he surrounded the terrace with them. We grew up on what he called chop picnics: fires made on the beaches of Greece and Italy, over which he grilled the lamb chops of his boyhood journeys into the bush; but he felt trapped, whenever he went back to Melbourne, by the sense of loss of people and ideas. Australia remained both home and not home; he would return again and again, at first a little resentfully, later, after he became ill, with growing pleasure and recognition. His ambivalence about Australia, his longings and his rejection, colored the constant moves of our childhood.
We sailed for Perth from Naples, early in July, on board the Leonardo da Vinci, pride of the Italian shipping lines, making its last journey to Australia. Air travel had put the long sea voyages out of business. On board were 1,700 migrants, people who had accepted Australia’s generous invitation of citizenship and a new life. The scenes of farewell on the docks at Naples were noisy and tearful and the Leonardo da Vinci sailed out of harbor festooned in paper streamers spinning in the wind, to the sounds of a brass band playing jauntily on the quay. Far out at sea, sad people continued to wave from the upper decks. The journey was very quick, by the standard of most crossings: fourteen days, with a single stop in Aden. The only episode to mar the boisterous feeling on the lower decks was when the captain announced, over the loud speaker system, that it had just been decided in Canberra that the draft for Vietnam would henceforth apply to new settlers. A mutiny threatened, but it was quieted, if I remember rightly, by an assurance that military service could also be deferred.
The migrants were, of course, all white. Most of them were Italians, in the late 1960s still among the most numerous of Australia’s postwar settlers, the destination for migrants from the south and Sicily having long shifted from the United States to the suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney. “Italians,” read a government poster of 1951, “make good Australians.” There were some British, a few central and eastern Europeans, a handful of Spaniards; but no Asians, no one from the Middle East, and certainly no Africans. There was no sign of the small nu
mber of “distinguished non-Europeans” the government had said it was keen to welcome.
In Perth, our first port of call, the passersby were conspicuous by their whiteness. In the middle of the nineteenth century, significant numbers of Chinese coolies had been allowed in to work the Victorian gold fields, followed by Afghan camel drivers and Japanese pearl divers. But since 1901 a White Australia policy, an unashamedly racist process of selection among immigrants, had been in place to keep out “all peoples whose presence was, in the opinion of Australians, injurious to the general welfare”—people who were not, in other words, white. In the language of the day, the 7,500 Jews who found safety in Australia soon after the shameful Evian Conference of 1938—at which world governments declined to accept all but a very small number of Jews fleeing the Nazis—became “reffos” (refugees), as did the other “aliens,” the Baits, Czechs, Slavs, and Poles whom Australia agreed to take in the postwar years of displacement and labor shortages. But still no yellows or blacks. As T. W. White, the Australian delegate to the Evian Conference, had said, Australia had no racial problem and “we are not desirous of importing one.”
And the reffos did not always have much of a life, the young men living in strict, segregated camps, many having just come from the displaced persons camps of occupied Europe. They tended to be regarded little more favorably than the Aboriginals, whose harsh treatment continued to be widely disregarded even by contemporary historians, whose settler forebears had chosen to recognize only an empty continent, waiting to be claimed and redeemed by early British settlers. And it was now that the idea of the “good refugee” was born: the one who, fleeing Communist persecution, waited patiently in a camp far away to be selected as “genuine” and invited to Australia.