04/09/2013
VDARE.com stalwart Allan Wall recently wrote in detail about the plight of the Romeikes, a German family who sought — and were granted, by an immigration judge — political asylum in the U.S. because they want to homeschool their six children, something verboten in Germany these years. (Eric Holder’s DOJ Finds Some Foreigners It Wants To Deport — White Evangelical German Homeschoolers)
As Allan summarized:
The Romeikes left Germany because of the harassment they received from the government for home schooling their children. They had been fined and were facing the possibility of losing custody of their children. They thus moved to the United States.
In general, skepticism about refugee and asylum cases is fully merited. Roy Beck wrote on pp. 55-56 of his 1996 book The Case Against Immigration (free 1.4-MB PDF version here)
Most of the people who enter the country in [the approximately 100,000 annual] refugee slots are not recognized by the United Nations as refugees; Congress and the president merely call them "refugees" so they can use those slots, according to the State Department.
The U.S. refugee program obviously does not follow the internationally recognized definition of a refugee as a person who has fled a home country after facing an individualized threat of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. Incredibly, most people who have been arriving here as "refugees" had never fled their country; most were still living in their home country — under no individualized threat of persecution — when they got their notification that Washington had invited them to come as refugees: 67 percent in 1990, 73 percent in 1991, and 80 percent in 1992.
The United States even allows "refugees" to get their visas now but stay in their home countries until a more convenient year to move. The reason for the official subterfuge is that Congress uses the refugee program as a way to help preferred nationalities — usually with a vocal American constituency — to get around other immigration quotas. For example, long after the fall of the Communist government of the former Soviet Union, Congress, through its Lautenberg Amendment, has required the State Department to bring in many Russians as refugees. A Scripps-Howard investigation by Michael Hedges in 1995 examined internal government documents about the approximately 300,000 Jews, Christian Pentecostals, and other Russian religious minorities who had been allowed into the United States as Lautenberg refugees since 1989. Hedges reported that U.S. memos indicated that by 1993 less than 1 percent of the tens of thousands of Russian "refugees" each year actually met refugee criteria, an incredibly loose operation that allowed significant numbers of hardened criminals to expand crime syndicates in the United States.
Please note the nifty feature I've italicized in the quote from Roy’s book. Then you won’t be surprised to hear that in 2003, when I asked Temple University law professor (and former Assistant Commissioner of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service) Jan Ting if it was true that 90 percent of refugee and asylum cases are fraudulent, he instantly replied "95 percent."
But the Romeikes sound like "the exception that proves the rule": real asylees who are under draconian threat from their own government, with the threat being essentially political in origin.
Nevertheless, the federal administration wants to overturn the immigration judge in a case where the first, obvious question is: How was the Department of Justice even aware of this one-family needle in the haystack of mass refugee admissions and asylum approvals? (See, generically, the invaluable Refugee Resettlement Watch blog for day-by-day, year-after-year documentation of the "haystack.")
Or as Allan put it in his article about the Romeikes, "Does the Obama administration have something against white immigrants? Just asking."
The answer to Allan’s question is "Of course!" And the particulars of this case — our "compassionate" administration’s going out of its way to be both heartless and obnoxious — may be the most convincing validation yet of Peter Brimelow’s idea that the American nation is now living under the boot heels of a "minority occupation government."
The Romeike’s case is before a federal appeals court. But meanwhile, there’s something we can do on their behalf. On March 19, someone launched one of those official White House petitions to which a response is promised by the administration, provided the petition attracts at least 100,000 signers during the month following launch. The petition for the Romeikes is linked here and reads as follows:
We, the undersigned, respectfully request that the Obama Administration grant full and permanent legal status to Uwe and Hannelore Romeike and their children. The Romeikes, a homeschooling family represented by HSLDA, were granted asylum in 2010 because Germany persecutes homeschoolers with fines, criminal prosecution, and forcible removal of children from their families. Every state in the United States of America recognizes the right to homeschool, and the U.S. has the world’s largest and most vibrant homeschool community. Regrettably, this family faces deportation in spite of the persecution they will suffer in Germany. The Romeikes hope for the same freedom our forefathers sought. Please grant the privilege of liberty to the Romeike family.
More info: hslda.org/romeike
As of 3:30 a.m. Eastern Time on April 8, 2013, the Romeikes' petition had attracted 82,901 signers and, thus, needs 17,099 more by April 18.
Getting to 100,000 in the next ten days seems quite feasible, especially if there’s a healthy surge of VDARE.com readers signing and, perhaps, asking your friends to sign, too. (Signing does require a one-time registration — free — at the White House site, but then you'll also be able to sign further petitions without that minor hassle.)
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.