Week 7 - RIchard Nguyen - A02

This week’s readings focus on the criminalization of immigration. Brown’s article, Refugees, Rights, and Race: How Legal Status Shapes Liberian Immigrants’ Relationship with the State, explains how refugees frame their position when seeking legal immigration to the U.S. via refugee status. In particular, Brown states that refugees view themselves as having lost a country, as well as having lost a valuable support system.

“They feel entitled to benefits from the state not simply because of their lost relationships but because these individuals view the United States as complicit in those losses (Brown 152)”. This quote resonates with me on a more personal level because my parents and grandparents shared the same view as Liberian immigrants when they sought asylum during the Vietnam War. Since they were Southern Vietnamese, they were directly affected by U.S. involvement. My mother lost close friends and family, and her father, due to being a ranked officer for the Southern Vietnamese military, was detained and sent to a re-education camp. The U.S. were definitely complicit with my mother’s losses.

I bring this up because the current U.S. administrations views on refugees seeking asylum status are deplorable. Framing the South American refugees, or the “migrant caravan”, as a bunch of crime lords and drug syndicates is unacceptable. Unfortunately, this is only the most well known instance of criminalizing refugees in the current U.S. administration. Less well known is the fact that the Trump Administration attempted to deport Vietnamese refugees who immigrated before 1995.

“A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, Katie Waldman, confirmed that the deportations of these Vietnamese immigrants were off the table for now. But she characterized resistance to the policy as dangerous, saying “dangerous loopholes and misguided court decisions” were forcing the government to release “violent criminal aliens” rather than deport them” (NYTimes 2018). The Trump Administration attempted to frame these Vietnamese refugees as “violent criminal aliens”, in order to justify deportation. This is ridiculous, as the following info-graphic shows that most detainees have never committed a crime:

When did this anti-immigration sentiment start taking shape in the U.S? I am sure that this is not a recent development; it must have came from years and years of groundwork, but have been exacerbated due to the rhetoric of the current U.S. administration? One reading points to the privatization of the U.S. prison system as a start, but are there more?

Sources

Dunst, Charles. "Trump Administration Quietly Backs Off on Deporting Vietnamese Immigrants." The New York Times. 22 Nov. 2018. The New York Times. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/world/asia/vietnam-trump-immigrants-deport.html>.

For image: White Collar Crime Prosecutions for July 2018. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/530/>.