09/26/2023
We reported extensively on the German home-schooling Romeike family (above) in 2013, when the Obama Administration weirdly resisted their asylum request:
Although the Obama Administration prevailed in court, it for some reason did not in the end deport the Romeikes — see Memo From Middle America | The Homeschooling Romeikes Allowed To Stay — To Bolster Administrative Amnesty, by Allan Wall, April 8, 2014. But now the Biden Administration is trying to do it again: Evangelical Christian family begs Biden administration to stop their deportation back to Germany where it’s illegal to homeschool their kids — while MILLIONS pour across open US border, by Emma James, Daily Mail, September 25, 2023.
Background: 20th century Germany, having gone through the First and Second World Wars and been ruled by the Nazis, reacted by passing laws against various kinds of Wrongthinking, and by increasing German Federal control of education.
One of the ways the German government controls Wrongthinking: banning homeschooling.
Wikipedia says
Homeschooling is — between Schulpflicht (compulsory schooling) beginning with elementary school to 18 years — illegal in Germany. The illegality has to do with the prioritization of children’s rights over the rights of parents: children have the right to the company of other children and adults who are not their parents. For similar reasons, parents cannot opt their children out of sexual education classes because the state considers a child’s right to information to be more important than a parent’s desire to withhold it.[21]
I have no idea what constitutes sex education in modern day Germany, and I’m not sure I want to, but I’m not reassured by stories like this: It’s not all anal sex’: the German schools exploring love, equality and LGBT issues, by Abby Young-Powell, Guardian, November 23, 2016.
Germany started modern sex education in 1969, and made it mandatory in all schools in 2002.
There are lots of public health types who think this is a Good Thing:
Sexuality education is mandatory for all school types in Germany [24]. By attending school, all young people in Germany thus have access to fact-based health information in the field of sexuality and contraception. Furthermore, for Islamic girls and boys, and for girls and boys under strict religious influence and/or with low obtained or aspired levels of education, the school as the place for sexuality education provides important compensation for the fact that their parents are available more rarely as contact persons for sexual matters.
Sexuality education for young people in Germany, J Health Monit. Journal of Health Monitoring, July 2022.
In fact, religious parents do teach their children about sex, and right and wrong, but their ideas of “wrong” may include things the State doesn’t want to call wrong. This brings us to the Romeike family, below.
Image courtesy Home School Legal Defense Association.
Uwe and Hannelore Romeike fled Germany’s anti-homeschooling laws in 2008, and claimed asylum in Tennessee. They did not come either illegally or “undocumented,” but with regular passports on a tourist visa and applied for asylum while, as the law requires, they were “physically present” in the United States.
Of course, as absolutely everyone knows, the point is that the Romeikes are white Christians, and therefore they are (a) hated and (b) disbelieved when they say they’re persecuted. As VDARE.com’s Allan Wall wrote in 2013, in More On The Romeike Case — What’s Wrong With Wanting White Immigrants?, Slate’s Sally Kohn [Twitter] was attacking Christian supporters of the Romeikes in an article titled Glenn Beck’s Favorite Immigrants [April 10, 2013] subtitled “Conservatives rally around a controversial family facing deportation. Take one guess why.”
Kohn started:
Did you know that Glenn Beck has pledged $50,000 to the legal fund of an immigrant family facing deportation from the United States? As of April 9, a petition to the White House to grant the family permanent asylum, organized by Christian conservative groups, topped 100,000 signatories, the threshold to trigger a response from the administration.
Confused? I can explain. The Romeike family aren’t just any immigrants. They are evangelical Christians from Germany. And, oh yeah, they’re white.
Kohn didn’t seem to understand the difference between “applying for asylum,” which the Romeikes did, and “visa overstayers,” which is what millions of illegals have done. Also, she seemed to think that the fact that Germans can visit on tourist visas (owing to a visa waiver) is white privilege — unlike “people from Mexico (or China or India or the Philippines),” which are non-white countries filled with potential economic migrants who want to immigrate illegally to the U.S.
Below, the Center for Immigration Studies’ Jon Feere, who favors deportation generally, asks why “Instead of flying to the U.S. and clogging our courts for years, why didn’t [the Romeikes] litigate in European courts?” (USCIS says on its website that “To obtain asylum through the affirmative asylum process you must be physically present in the United States. You may apply for asylum regardless of how you arrived in the United States or your current immigration status.”)
Mark Krikorian, who is actually the head of CIS, makes the obvious rejoinder:
But it’s also lost on no one that European Christian homeschoolers had their DED [Deferred Enforced Departure] (like DACA) revoked, while others have not.
This is obviously true. But it’s also lost on no one that European Christian homeschoolers had their DED (like DACA) revoked, while others have not. https://t.co/KgE2rDoHQU
— Mark Krikorian (@MarkSKrikorian) September 26, 2023
The Deferred Enforced Departure was granted by the Obama Administration in 2014, and as Allan Wall said at the time, was not a recognition of their persecuted status — which might have allowed other homeschooling families to apply for asylum — but just another DACA-like handwave by Obama. See The Homeschooling Romeikes Allowed To Stay — To Bolster Administrative Amnesty? [April 8, 2014].
This whole thing is symbolic of the displacement of the Historic American Nation.
The worst thing you can say about the Romeikes is that they might have replaced a couple of American Christian music teachers. Two of the Romeike children were born in America, according to the Daily Mail, above:
After moving to the US, the couple had two more children, Sarah, 12, and Rebecca, 10, who were born in America.
Their other five children, Daniel, 26, Lydia, 25, Joshua, 23, Christian, 21, and Damaris, 18, were born in Germany, but are facing deportation.
Daniel and Lydia both married American citizens….
If the Romeikes were felons, The New York Times and Washington Post would be running sob stories about them.
But because they’re white Christians, they get nothing.
And here they are on the Ingraham Angle, saying “America used to be a free country.”
German family facing deportation: America used to be a free country pic.twitter.com/5z0UcD0bGx
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) September 26, 2023
James Fulford is writer and editor for VDARE.com.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.