Since the
terrorist attacks of September 11, many things have changed in the United States, some of
them more obviously than others, depending on where you're standing and looking. Within a
few weeks, the nation got educated by the media about Afghanistan, its citizens and the
different ethnic groups living there, about their history and how it became possible that
such a brutal regime as the Taliban could establish itself. The US government and the vast
majority of US citizens showed great restraint in condemning all Muslims for the attacks
or in taking revenge on Middle Eastern immigrants, with a few despicable exceptions. Not
only did the media show us the Afghani people, but people from countries in the region
like Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and others. Gradually, we learned about their views of
the world and particularly America, with the verdicts often being contradictory, showing
their love-hate relationship with our country.
One might think
"well, as long as they stay there, they can think of us what they want, who
cares?" While this ignorant attitude might work well for those Americans who have no
desire to look over their fence, it doesn't work for the ones who deal with
immigration on a professional or personal basis. As a consequence of the attacks on our
country, the government immediately searched for ways to root out the ones who don't like
us, be it the ones already living in this country or the ones trying to enter the country
as immigrants, asylees or any other type. One way the government dealt and is dealing with
the problem was to detain thousands of Arab immigrants all over the country. Every week we
read about new people being detained by the FBI for questioning in an undisclosed place
and without issuing the detainees names, a practice that was questioned and contested in
federal appeals courts by Civil Liberties advocates. (See our Headline Archives)
After it became public that some of the terrorists had lived in the US for many years or
had applied for student visas, the INS was put under scrutiny in order to determine
loopholes that allowed terrorists to slip into the country by legal means. When the INS
mistakenly sent the visas of Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi to their former flight school, Congress and
public cried for a cleanup of the Immigration Agency and for a change in immigration
policy. In the following months, the Congress talked about restructuring the INS and about
new policies that should become effective in a short time. In 2002, we saw proposals by
the INS that would restrict a visitors visa to only 30 days of stay in the US; the student
visa policy was tightened and made it much harder and in many cases impossible for foreign
students to study in the US.
On the
enforcement side, tightened airport security and Border Patrol help increasing the safety
of our country. Added to this list since March 17, 2003 as part of the Department of
Homeland Security's "Operation Liberty Shield" is a new asylum rule that
automatically detains people seeking asylum who come from countries that are associated
with Al Qaeda, while their cases are examined. This process can take six months or more.
Before this new rule, detention of asylum seekers only happened in select cases.
Furthermore, as you might have been reading in the immigration headlines over the past few
days, over 10,000 Iraqis living in the US are detained for questioning by the FBI.
Many civil
rights and immigration activists are against blanket policies that target a certain group
like Muslims or people from the Middle East (and Asia). They say, it is sending the wrong
message. However, the message is certainly contradicting: On the one hand, the Bush
administration calls the military conflict in Iraq "Iraqi Freedom," a fight to
liberate the Iraqi people. On the other hand, if Iraqis and people from other Muslim
countries try to immigrate into the "land of the free," they are now treated as
potential terrorists and stripped of their freedom for several months.
These practices
of tighter security and especially the preventive measure of detention raises the question
whether immigration should be treated as a national security issue or as a
social/economical issue. We will continue this discussion soon.
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