Refugee and Crime

Ryota Ogura 

ASA2 sec2

response to - I am a man with heart

To summarize the story, 8 years old Cambodian refugee who is smart enough to go premed, commits a repeated crime as he grow up, from shoplifting to armed robbery, until he is charged in his 20’s, which he think is not fair because other people snitched on him. After all , due to the support of his family and lawyer, he was sentenced only 5 years of probation and 400 hours of community service despite all the other further crimes he has committed. In the story, he talks that according to the law, he could have been deported because he had signed the deportation agreement. He states, however, “ I signed because I knew they can’t deport me to a Communist country (Cambodia).”

I felt really strange after reading this. The facts that he was academically successful and that he changed his mind and now behaving good does not justify the problems. My first impression of this story is that this is the abuse of his status. My understanding of this system is that if you are refugee and arrived the U.S., and if are busted after made much money made by robbery, you still can bail out in short time, and importantly, no deportation because the mother country is unstable.  This is abuse of the refugee system.  Also, he mentioned that his group used to rob Chinese or Vietnamese store with good insurance, so that stores can claim more payouts than they lost. This kind of ethnicity-centered crimes may create the new social prejudice on the certain ethnicity.

Q:He is Cambodian refugee and committed felony, should he go back to Cambodia?