Aliens fleeing U.S.!

A turn in the tide? As a result of the Bush administration’s order that male foreign visitors from Muslim and Arab countries register with the INS, hundreds of Pakistani men who have overstayed their visas have been streaming to the Canadian border in order to claim asylum status in that country and avoid deportation from the United States. Canada can’t handle the flow and the men cross back into the U.S., when they are arrested for deportation to Pakistan, and their families end up stranded near the border in places like Burlington, Vermont. (That these men have large families with them suggests that they have been established in America for some years, though it’s not clear why the wives are not being deported along with their husbands.) The New York Times, of course, treats the whole affair as nothing but a sob story, notwithstanding the fact the every one of these men has been residing here illegally.

Though their overall numbers are not that large, it nevertheless seems like the first time that aliens from a Third-World country are fleeing from the U.S. instead of flooding into it. May it be a harbinger of much bigger changes to come.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 26, 2003 02:11 AM | Send
    

Comments

The next step is to not admit them in the first place.

Posted by: David on February 26, 2003 2:50 PM

On what basis are they applying for asylum in Canada? Political persecution in America? The Canadian authorities will probably let them in and accuse America of all sorts of bad things, Soviet Canucks that they are! If I were Pakistani I’d be embarassed to see my compatriots running hither and yon, anywhere but Pakistan.

Posted by: Adam on February 27, 2003 1:50 AM

I think they’re applying for asylum in Canada on the basis that America is about to deport them back to Pakistan, where they claim they face persecution. Excuse the schadenfreude, but I do get a kick out of the idea that, at least in this situation, there is some other Western country that is even more welcoming to illegal third-world aliens than we are, and that the aliens actually have to flee America in order to get help from that other country. It is, as they say, a reversal of stereotypes. But isn’t that what all good liberals believe in?

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on February 27, 2003 2:05 AM

How can we expedite this? Mark Kirkorkian notes in National Review Online that the INS may be dismantled this weekend but the same old lousy polices may still be in effect.

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-krikorian022803.asp

“But the real test will come when a major enforcement action creates a storm of protest and outraged congressmen demand it be discontinued — will the White House stand by its men and tell the complainers to lump it? Or will it do as so many have done in the past, and sacrifice law enforcement to special interests?”

Even with that, our annual rates of immigration will still remain the highest in the world. That is, unassimilable.

Posted by: Bob Vandervoort on March 2, 2003 10:18 PM
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