http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=7fe1b555-69d3-499c-b9cc-3deaebd50a26
A glaring double standard on refugees
The portrayal and treatment of Ukrainians fleeing war and of Haitian, Central American and Mexican asylum seekers also fleeing deadly violence could not be more different
By Nikolái Ingistov-García
. . . .
Over the course of that weekend, I watched how the Ukrainian refugee crisis grew day by day. I read that Airbnb was paying for thousands of refugees to stay in their rooms. Thousands of Europeans in dozens of countries opened their doors to Ukrainians. I was encouraged but bothered at the same time. Media outlets all over the world from the left, right and center praised the courage of these refugees, and some reporters called them heroes.
An overwhelming majority of my students in my classes at UCR are Latino. Several of them are refugees from Latin America, and a few are “Dreamers.” I asked if any of them noticed anything with this growing refugee crisis in Eastern Europe, and several were quick to point out the double standard.
A few weeks before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine started, my class watched interviews about the forced sterilization of Latina refugees at an immigration detention center in Georgia. We discussed the Latino children fleeing Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala who are being held in U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement detention centers to this day. The double standard in the me-dia’s portrayal of the Ukrainian refugees in Europe compared with the images of Haitian, Central American and Mexican migrants at the Mexican border was obvious to everyone in my class.
I thought about the tens of thousands of refugees fleeing Ukraine and the tens of thousands of refugees who have had to flee their homes in Central America, Mexico and other parts of Latin America because of wars, dictatorships, gang warfare and cartel terrorism. Refugees and migrants who are uprooted from their homes all go through trauma whether they come from Latinoamérica or Eastern Europe.
The images of people fleeing Ukraine shook me as I remembered my family’s histories from Ukraine and Mexico, with both sides leaving their homelands for a better life.
. . . .
Ukraine and Mexico came together to form my family in the borderland of Los Angeles. My Chicano-Mexican-Russian-Ukrainian border-crossing identity hurts as I watch Putin’s war unfold while more waves of Latin American and, very recently, Ukrainian refugees arrive at the Tijuana-U.S. border. My hope is that out of this tragedy, future refugees that come to the Mexican border, whether they are from Honduras or Ukraine, are treated with equal dignity — which all of them deserve.
Nikolái Ingistov-García is a lecturer in Spanish languageand Latin American Studies at UC Riverside.
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Ukrainian refugees are “courageous heroes.” Meanwhile, equally brave and deserving refugees of color from Haiti, Latin America, and Africa are dehumanized, degraded, and removed to potential death or danger without a thought and in violation of law.
They are often called by the misnomer “illegal migrants” — or worse! Ironically, however, the refugees arriving at Southern Border, even if not “invited,” are exercising internationally and domestically recognized legal rights to apply for asylum and other legal protections from involuntary return, some mandatory!
Of course, as intelligent humans, they don’t wait in vain or line up for “imaginary invitations” that will never come! We have no viable refugee programs for Haiti, Africa, and Latin America. Indeed, after four years of Trump and one of Biden we barely have any refugee programs anywhere! Even worse, we have immorally and illegally closed legal ports of entry to asylum seekers. So, having left refugees no viable legal avenues for seeking refuge in the U.S., a right guaranteed by both statute and international convention, we dehumanize and degrade them for using the only “self-help” methods available! Talk about chutzpah!
It’s actually folks like Vice President Harris, Secretary Mayorkas, AG Garland, and his band of scofflaw lawyers at the DOJ who are the “illegals” in this scenario. The Biden Administration is hardly the first to turn refugee and asylum laws as well as the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of our Constitution on their heads.
The Trump regime gloried in violating the law and mistreating refugees simply for the cruelty, racism, and hate involved. Shockingly, with a some exceptions, life-tenured Federal Judges gave them a pass — particularly at the Supremes which developed their own “special double standard” to dehumanize and “Dred Scottify” immigrants of color!
The Biden Administration sweeps their own gross misconduct and racially charged “double standards” under the rug! Under Garland, the DOJ has “gone along to get along” and even disgracefully defended illegal, immoral, and deadly removals without any process at all. In doing so, they have advanced some of the same discredited myths and disingenuous pretexts developed by Miller, Sessions, Barr and the Jim Crow White Nationalist nativists!
The “mainstream media” give excruciatingly detailed coverage of the humanitarian plight of Ukrainian refugees. Meanwhile, the similar humanitarian plight of vulnerable equally deserving refugees of color, like Ukrainians many of them desperate women and children, gets little coverage outside of a few specialized reporters.
Of course, beyond the rhetoric, the Biden Administration has actually done very little to help even Ukrainian refugees beyond hollow expressions of sympathy and using them as “props” in the “war of words” with Putin. Leadership is a combination of rhetoric backed with action!
Our refugee and asylum systems are in shambles, without the leadership and expertise in place to respond to either predictable refugee flows or humanitarian catastrophes in a practical and effective way. That needs to end! But, unfortunately, its hard to see the current, spineless (non) leadership from Harris, Mayorkas, Garland, and others in this Administration getting the job done!
🇺🇸Due Process Forever!
PWS
03-21-22
