Refugees from the Red, White, & Blue
By Tram Nguyen, ColorLines RaceWire
All eyes this week are on the mass exodus out of modern-day Mesopotamia. President Bush has sounded the clarion, and now Land Rovers full of diplomats, foreign aid workers, and dejected weapons inspectors have begun their journey out of Iraq. With cameras rolling in Baghdad, primetime viewers are liable to miss out on the growing exodus of immigrants taking place right under their noses. For the past 27 months, immigrants of color have been carted off, jailed, and expelled from "the land of the free."
In a spirit reminiscent of the internment of Japanese Americans, the government has ordered male immigrants from 25 countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East to line up for "special registration" at their local immigration office. Since the registration began in December, officials have detained 1,745 individuals for not being in compliance with immigration regulations and have issued 4,825 court orders for immigration violations.
National security dictates have opened the floodgates for racial profiling and scapegoating that foster an environment where it’s not safe to walk the streets or talk to strangers. In October 2001, Osama Sewilam made the mistake of asking a police officer in Newark for directions en route to his immigration lawyer’s office to renew his visa. Instead of offering assistance, the officer arrested him and called the FBI. Sewilam spent five months in a detention center before immigration authorities deported him back to Egypt.
In the U.S. today, a working person can report for duty in the morning and never return home at night. Simply being an immigrant, in many cases, is a federally punishable offense. Last August, Juana Jimenez, a food-service worker at LAX, was seized from her home by federal agents for using false documents to obtain her job two decades ago. Jimenez, who is a legal resident, was charged with a felony. The penalty would be deportation back to Mexico for, in effect, trying to work. More than 1,000 airport workers like Jimenez, mostly Asian Americans and Latinos, have been arrested and detained under the Department of Justice’s Operation Tarmac. Not a single one was charged with anything remotely related to terrorism.
The new refugees of this domestic "war on terror" have begun appealing to other countries for amnesty from the Bush regime. More than 2,000 Pakistanis crossed the border into Canada since the U.S. began special registration of Pakistani nationals. Thousands more have fled to other countries. Community leaders in Queens estimate that as many as 20,000 Pakistani immigrants from the New York metropolitan area alone have fled the U.S.
Houman Mortazavi, a 37-year-old Iranian artist who recently registered in Los Angeles, says, "I really bought into the open, western democracy story that we grew up with. I don't know what I’m going to do now. I’ve been seriously thinking of moving somewhere civilized, somewhere where there are no Americans."
While Bush makes claims to defeat tyranny and liberate the Iraqi people, here on American soil thousands of immigrants who’ve been charged with no offenses languish in detention centers. We needn’t look across oceans and continents to find people being denied the basic human right of liberty. If American viewers want a good look at repression, we might want to start by looking at the state of democracy right here at home.
© 2006 ColorLines Magazine.
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