The New Internment Camps

Its one of those “could never happen here” things. Except it did yesterday, and by happening reminds us its happened before. About the time I was landing in Oakland yesterday, the INS had started rounding up over a 1000 Arab men who had voluntarily registered with the INS under the new “Special Registration” program.

Its shocking. Its unbelievable. And it didn’t rate a blurb in my parents’ local paper.

I haven’t found a good story on the topic yet, but even reading Reuters’ minimal coverage you can feel their shock.

Immigration and Ethic Cleasening

Danny has an interesting entry on his dealings with the INS. > right now, I’m lucky because I’m not from an Arab country. Because the simple form-filling errors that I’ve made in the past – me, English-speaking, college-educated, was-studying-to-be-a-lawyer-at-school – would have got me handcuffed, arrested and thrown in jail this week.

And he reassures me that I’m not the only one to whom this looks like ethnic cleasening, or modern term for genocide.

If you come from Iran, or you come from Syria, Iraq or the Sudan you know what to do in this situation. Don’t ever come forward when the government calls your name again. Hide. Because in those countries, such sudden, unexpected, disproportionate and ethnic-group specific roundups (of just the men, by the way, not the women) by government are usually a prelude to something very nasty. Of course, as they say, that couldn’t possibly happen here.

I’m amazed that this sort of behaviour can still happen in California where an entire population is supposedly still ashamed of the concentration camps we setup for the Japanese. Isn’t Farewell to Manzanar still required reading?

Special Registration and Lost Opportunities

The INS “Special Registration” is a program that requires any man, over 16, who has entered the country in the last year, who is a resident or citizen of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, or North Korea to present themselves to a local security office, and to report to the INS their movements through out the country. I first heard of it from Jasmine who was contacted by her university and asked to report any appropiate individuals in her department to the authorities.(the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, or NSEERS). We’re both a little scared for her father, who is Tunisian but a long term resident, and who had been slowly working through the process of getting a visa to visit his mother in Tunis. I can’t help but think of the time we spent two summers ago in Morocco and Tunisia, and wonder if, as a very Anglo American, I’ll ever be welcomed back into the countries and homes of those people.