The Refugee Dilemma: Rachel Aviv in the New Yorker

Rachel Aviv

I can hardly imagine Donald Trump or any of his supporters read The New Yorker : too many words, to much detail and complexity, but that is exactly what is required when we consider the refugee conundrum.

When Mr. Trump announced his candidacy last summer, he made a splash with his nativist, "Know Nothing"  braggadocio concerning Mexican illegal aliens: "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists." Mr. Trump alluded to numbers:  "If you look at the statistics on rape, on crime, on everything, coming in illegally to the country, they're mind-boggling."

The Washington Post, among others, looked at the statistics, but statistics are numbers, and you have to know how they were collected, what exactly they reflect. Going on the Internet, you see numbers coming from every direction. 

The conservative blogs have numbers. The "American Thinker" says the "Government Accountability Office" says in 2010 "criminal aliens" in federal prisons was 55,00 and in state and local jails 296,000. In 2005, 27% of the total federal inmates were "criminal aliens." This is of a population of 25.3 million non US citizens in the US, of which 10.8 million "without lawful immigration status." In 2009 non citizens came to roughly 8%  of whom almost 4% were "illegal." 

"They" committed 3 million "crimes." The site is not clear if these numbers refer to all non citizens or to illegal aliens committing these "crimes."  A table shows half a million arrests for "immigration" offenses, which are the crime of being here illegally in the first place, but hardly a violent crime against Americans,  and half a million for drug offenses, which could be possession of marijuana--which amount to roughly 35% of all "crimes"  in this group. Then 14% of all arrests of this group for "traffic violations." In categories of crimes involving property around 4%; for "sex offenses" 2%; homicide 1%.  

Screening for eye infections at Ellis Island 

But somehow, the site calculates illegal aliens commit 15 murders, 43 sex offenses and 131 assaults per day, and somehow that illegal aliens make up 3% of the population but commit 22% of the murders, or 10 times the rate for all legal US residents.  Where these numbers come from, how they were calculated is not apparent or even fact check-able.

We'll give these two a new home, happily

The Breibart blog claims 2000 illegal aliens were deported after committing sex crimes and nearly 1000 in Texas committed sex crimes against children "in the last few years." How many is a "few?" If that's 5 years, this comes to 400 a year, which sounds a lot less shocking, although, if it were true, would be nothing to dismiss. Of course, we read "sex offense" as rape, but did that mean an 18 year old male accused of fondling a 16 year old girl?  When I grew up, in the South, a black boy whistling at a white woman had committed a sex offense and was as likely to be lynched as arrested, so maybe we have become a kinder, gentler nation, after all. 

 Breibart also says "illegal traffickers" are responsible for  "90% of the heroin" in America. Of course, by definition, 100% of the heroin should be the responsibility of "illegal traffickers" since heroin trafficking is illegal and all "traffickers" should be "illegal."

This lady arrived with some resources

After saying nearly 39% of "primary offense cases" in the US in 2013 were brought against illegal immigrants, it turns out 76% were "immigration related," i.e., they got arrested fro being illegal immigrants but only 3.8% of all arrested for "sex abuse" were illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants committing 4% of anything hardly strikes me as "mind boggling." 

Arriving at Ellis Island: Not too threatening

The Washington Post which, of course, Mr. Trump disparages until he finds something there he agrees with, destroys Mr. Trump's assertions, mostly by citing the work of various academics, rather than by trying to work with raw numbers, and professors who study crime and crime committed by immigrants from the University of Massachusetts, to Northwestern, to California, to Arizona State all line up disputing his conclusions. "Foreign-born individuals exhibit remarkably low levels of involvement in crime across their life course," is a fair summary of their conclusions. 

Notice the knives; Not disarmed at Ellis Island

So, through all the welter of numbers, you wind up in the same place you started. The numbers don't really help because you know how you present those numbers makes all the difference and if you want to fear immigrants, you will find reasons in these numbers but if you are skeptical, there's plenty of reason to be. Which is why it's so difficult to throw numbers in Mr. Trump's face. He is dealing with belief and fear. No numbers need apply.

Then you read Rachel Aviv's article in the New Yorker about Nelson Kangbo of Sierra Leone, who was adopted by the pastor in his village after his parents died and one day General Mosquito arrived in the village and lined up all the men and boys in one line and all the women girls  in another. He asked the first boy in line whether he wanted to come fight with the general's rebel band or go back to his mother in the other line and when the boy chose his mother, a soldier, without saying a word, put a gun to his head and shot him dead. Every other boy in line chose to join the general.  After four years of carrying an AK -47, being "pumped up" with an injected mixture of cocaine and gun powder called "brown brown," watching the commanders chop off the arms or legs of those boys who tried to slip away and escape, Kangbo got malaria and became worthless as a soldier and was tossed aside.  

Wearing his Tupac T shirt, he wandered back to his adoptive family and he was able to immigrate, legally, to Minnesota, where there is a substantial African immigrant population.  

As you can imagine, the boy was damaged. He was also by this time, quite clearly schizophrenic, as he met the classic definition: He heard a voice commanding him to do one thing or another, telling him he was unworthy of living in America. Auditory hallucinations have long been the sine qua non of schizophrenia.  

Not surprisingly, he tended to react violently when physically threatened.  He impregnated a white girlfriend, who then left him and then he met a Black girl, who liked to party and stay out all night and he impregnated her her three times, and he stayed home days to take care of the children, and worked nights at Burger King. But when she ran off with other men, he argued with her and struck her and was arrested and put on the fast track toward deportation.

You cannot read his story and not feel sorry for this wreck of a human being, but it does make you pause.  You hate to agree with Mr. Trump in any way when it comes to immigrants, but it does make you think about the burden we are taking on when we agree to shelter really damaged people from horrors suffered elsewhere. 

Of course, we took in Holocaust victims, but they really were victims, and had not been tromping around the bush shooting people with AK 47's and bonding with their captors.

The great immigration waves, Europeans who arrived by boat from Italy, Ireland, Poland, Russia were, for the most part joining or bringing with them families and a set of values which governed their behavior, whether rooted in established churches or centuries of tradition of law and social constraint of individual passion. Not to put a fine point on it, however deprived they were, however much they had suffered and been abused, they did not carry the psychological baggage of boy soldiers who were schooled in rape, murder, dismemberment and mayhem. 

Logical Conclusion  of Mr. Trump's Supporters

I am not saying that we should not offer Nelson Kargbo sanctuary, but we have to be clear eyed in what we are offering and to whom. We cannot simply issue him a Green Card and a job at Burger King and wash our hands and feel we have done another good deed. This is not just the wretched refuse of a teeming shore. This is a very troubled human being and if we are offering him anything, we have to offer him quite a lot more than we had to offer the kid who got off the boat with a big card pinned to his collar so he could find his way from Ellis Island to the Lower East Side, where his aunt and uncle and cousins were waiting for him at their cold water flat, and where they will send him to school and feed him and make sure he hews the line, behaves well, develops ambition, refines whatever talents he has and becomes one of those who enriches his new country.

Once again, we must guard on seeing every African immigrant as Nelson Kargbo. A friend from my home town, one of the whitest women I have ever seen, has helped an African lady get her daughter into the United States.  It took a lot of driving and telephone calls to the State Department, but finally, the daughter arrived at Logan, having had her DNA tested to verify she was in fact the woman's daughter. The hoops and hurdles thrown in the way of this family reunion were formidable, but one can hardly imagine this young girl arriving from Africa will be left adrift without resources, guiding hands and protections in the USA. 

We can offer the Syrian refugees, and for that matter, the Mexicans, no less.