Via Statewatch, a story of four Air Horizon passengers being prosecuted by the French government for objecting to a forced deportation on their flight. Probably the most chilling aspect is the insistence by cabin crew, policy, the airline and the state that it’s perfectly normal to share a plane with a hysterical man crying “I am not a slave” as he is assaulted and gagged by a glove shoved into his mouth.
This is the reality of European immigration policy, whether we like it or not. And as bizaare and Kafka-esque as it is to prosecute people who object to being made a part of the machinery of expulsion, the fact is that the young Congolese man was safer on a commercial flight than using another means.
Perversely, I’m glad that four articulate and well-connected Europeans are being prosecuted for doing their moral duty. It seems to me that every time we accept a narrowing of human rights as a trade-off for better security, we do so on the unspoken assumption that the person suffering will never be ‘one of us’.
Thank you to the four of them.
There is actually a good reason to have immigration restrictions.
If you want a picture of near unrestricted immigration, read up on the US, particularly New York City, during the 19th century. Nobody would chose to allow that again.
Jet,
I can’t read french, so I didn’t read the liberation article. But, in neither the statewatch article nor in Maria’s post did anyone suggest, or even imply, that there should not be restrictions on immigration. So, why raise your point? True advocates for open boarders are extraordinarily rare. And, if you think there were no immigration restrictions in the US in the 19th century, you are hopelessly ignorant. Start by looking under “Chinese Exclusion Act.”
Matt,
I’ll be patient and remind you I said “NEAR unrestricted immigration”. But if you don’t think having a US population almost 50% immigrant is “near unrestricted”, then perhaps we should discuss some common terminology so we might improve our dialogue.
My point was, and sorry if it wasn’t obvious, that any policy of immigration restriction is going to cause people without the right to be in the country to be expelled. So this poor guys fate is bound to happen unless a country is willing to accept 19th century USA. With the poorly ventilated housing where entire blocks would get TB. With the exploitation of labor so that we have 1 dead immigrant for every foot dug of the Great Lake canals. Of the crime, gang warfare, and poverty that made Somalia look industrialized. Either that, or guys screaming on airplanes.
Matt: I can read the Frenchy-French (hoorah!) but there’s a translation of that article at the bottom of the first link.
Ignoring Jet will improve your quality of life, as I shall demonstrate by not doing so:
[Jet:] if you don?t think having a US population almost 50% immigrant is “near unrestricted”,
That’s pretty dismal even by your own lamentable standards. “Near unrestricted” immigration would, in the usage of lucid persons, be measured with respect to the number of would-be immigrants, rather than the number of persons resident, isn’t it?
I do not argue that “near unrestricted” is an indefensible claim, of course, only that it should be defended, if possible, other than by non sequitur.
des,
Do I need to run my comments by an editor so that your fragile abilities of comprehension aren’t so harshly tested?
”..if you don’t think having a US population almost 50% immigrant is [THE RESULT OF] “near unrestricted” immigration,”
Nice to see you deflecting the conversation to semantics ya damned troll as I would hate to see a real discussion about the harsh realities of both sides of the immigration debate break out.
Yes, they could, of course, strip the guy naked, tape his mouth, shove him in a metal container and ship him with the luggage, thus sparing the documented passengers unnecessary disturbance - y’know, the way it’s done by more advanced societies these days. But don’t worry, they’ll learn.
True advocates for open boarders are extraordinarily rare.
Not so rare if you hang around with the right people. Like me, for example.
Jet, you witless tosser, you have in fact still given us no reason to think it was ‘[THE RESULT OF] “near unrestricted” immigration’.
But you can have your nice argument with the nice Libertoonian now, if you like.
des,
Don’t get angry, we can still be friendly even if we didn’t get started off on the right foot.
But if you are seriously questioning my description of US 19th century immigration policy as “near unrestricted” and yet the US had, at one point, nearly 50% of the population as immigrants, then we should move the debate to the dictionary and to what exactly the word “near” and “unrestricted” mean. http://www.dictionary.com should give you a head start ;)
But perhaps I’m not being generous enough in my interpretation of what you wrote. You could be inferring that the US could have reached 50% immigrants without an extremely lax immigration policy. But surely you couldn’t have meant that, as that would just be silly.
And any man who says he isn’t a tosser is a liar.
OK, Jet, I’ll play nice. What I questioned and question is that “lax” is necessarily especially near “unrestricted”.
In particular, it is not possible to infer, as you demanded we should, “near unrestricted” immigration from a percentage of immigrants in residence. I don’t need to know anything about 19th century New York (which is exactly the amount I know) to reject this claim.
Consider an island with one (1) inhabitant and a very restrictive immigration policy. Only one (1) person needs to satisfy it, and there’s your cherished 50%. It works just as well with 10 million, you could accept all of w 10 million candidates or 10% of 100 million: your claim is still a non sequitur.
If you exhibited evidence that almost no one was turned away (which may well exist), then that would be evidence. Or a law saying “What the hell, let ‘em in!”
If P is “50% of the population are immigrants” and Q is “there are few restrictions on immigration” then P simply does not imply Q, and all your bluster isn’t going to change that.
This is petty, of course, but considering the levels of interpretive charity you habitually extend to others, it’s also not especially ungenerous.
And I have a dictionary, thanks very.
But this guy was an illegal immigrant, le sans-papier. You can have all 100% of a country made of immigrants and it’ll still have nothing to do with this case, if they are all legal.
Des,
I must apologize for my presumptuousness. With your name and use of terms such as “witless” and “tosser”, I should have realized you might not be that familiar with American history. Especially if you are the product of the Scandiwegian school system.
But here is my hint at why the answer is obvious. Ellis island was not an anomaly of US federal policy. It was the culmination of the huge infrastructure built to handle the large numbers of immigrants coming to the US. So if the federal government built huge facilities to process immigration, perhaps they knew the immigrants were coming? If they not only knew about them, but processed them, then perhaps they had a set policy? If this policy was set to allow near unfettered immigration, in as much as enough immigrants arrived to account for 50% of the US population, then it would be obvious to anyone with this knowledge that the 19th century US immigration policy could accurately be descried as (relative to other countries’ policies) “near unrestricted”?
But alas, my attempt to point at a real life example of one of the most liberal immigration policies in history, so that a qualitative discussion of immigration policy might erupt, has been defeated at the hands of the historically challenged or anally-retentive.
Jet: Lots of immigrants still doesn’t imply unrestricted immigration.
Call me “anal retentive” if you like - this is certainly so much more dignified than “tosser”! - but I am making a basic methodological point about supporting claims, and you are declining to get it. I do not claim to be surprised, and I won’t continue.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was certainly news to me, though, although I do not have you to thank for bringing it to my attention.
If you want to make the case against unrestricted immigration, what’s stopping you making it in Micha’s general direction?
There’s a bit of German grafitti up at the train station nearest to my office. It says : Kein Mensch ist illegal. That pretty sums up my opinion of forced deportations. I am no doubt the very image of the strawman Jet is raising to make his case, since I actually do advocate almost completely unrestricted immigration. In almost every case in recent centuries where immigrants have actually done what most people are afraid they might do - ruin the economy, lower wages, change the cultural and linguistic balance balance and make the native population and those who identify with it into minorities - it’s been the work of white immigrants into non-white areas. And in the majority of cases in the last 200 years, it’s been Anglo-Saxon immigrants specifically who’ve been responsible. Texas, California, Australia, New Zealand, western Canada, parts of South Africa - all places where local populations who either couldn’t or wouldn’t control Anglo-Saxon immigration saw their standards of living decline, their languages endangered, their cultures threatened or extinguished, their political power reduced and ultimately turned into minorities in their own homelands. There are a few other non-Anglo-Saxon cases in the last couple of centuries - France tried it but mostly failed; Russia tried it and mostly succeded - and a couple of non-white ones - China in a few places; a couple of others in the last two centuries in odd corners of the world - but not nearly so many or on a comparable scale.
I think this undermines any historical claim that immigration from the developing world is likely to pose a threat to anyone. So, since it would be racist to just restrict white immigration, I’m for opening the borders.
Jet: Please explain exactly what negative elements of American society and/or New York city in the 19th century were caused by the high levels of immigration. Specify which of those were less present in US cities possessed of comparable size and economic conditions but with fewer immigrants. I’ll accept Canadian and - heck - even British cities in a pinch.
If indeed there was a “narrowing of human rights”, then more power to the four. But as near as I can tell from the article, the human right in question, which caused the four to protest, is having a peaceful flight, without being bothered by a kicking and screaming deportee. They just wanted to get off the flight, no? They weren’t asking that the mistreatment of the Congolese man stop.
I do take jet’s point that: if
the man from Congo was an illegal immigrant, and if the French authorities were in their rights to deport him, and if the immigrant resisted by kicking and screaming, then some mistreatment is probably to be expected on an airplane flight. The level of this mistreatment, I think, determines whether a “narrowing of human rights” occurred.
Jet,
You’re right- I glossed over the “nearly”. I suppose that’s becuase, by the time period you’re looking at, there was a complete restriction on immigrants from Asia, and this seems to make the “nearly” inappropriate to me. It might have been “nearly unrestricted” for white immigrants, but that’s another story. And, I’m curious about what you mean by 50% immigrant. Do you mean 50% foreign born? I ask because the census dept. says that at the highest, only 14.8% of the US population was foreign born (in 1890). That’s a lot, but a lot short of 50%. So, what do you mean? Are you counting the children of immigrants, or just counting NY city or what? (I believe the percentage of foreign born in NY city now is about 38 percent, though I’m far from sure that’s accurate.) But, on any plausible reading of ‘immigrant’, there was no time since 1850 at least (earliest date I have stats for- google of US population foreign born to get the census dept. stats) more than 14.8, so I just have no idea what you are talking about. And, if one is born in the US, one isn’t an immigrant, even if one’s parents were.
Micha- you’re right that anarchists often support few restrictions on movement, but thankfully there are not many anarchists! (I had in mind people like Joseph Carens, Howard Chang, or Robert Goodin, who support eliminating many barriers to movement, but do not call for totally open boarders.)
Andrew, I think what the four objected to was not the inconvenience or distress of sharing an airplane with the man being forcibly deported, but in being made complicit to some pretty appalling treatment and, above all, being faced with the reality of deportation. But that’s certainly debatable as there is some ambiguity in the various accounts.
The four men - and the pilot - don’t make a policy argument against forced deportation. Their objections seemed more in the character of a visceral human reaction to the wrongness of the man’s treatment and fate. What strikes me most about this incident is how far removed most discussion on immigration and asylum policy is from the ugly details of its implementation.
But as to a narrowing of rights (and leaving aside those of the Congolese man which have been systematically reduced by the European Council of Justice Ministers in the past 5 years), do you not think it is a narrowing of rights that people who objected to being on that flight - and did so in a civilised and peaceful fashion - are now the subject of a criminal prosecution…?
Andrew - sorry - overstatement in my last para. I just re-read your comment and paid proper attention to your statement of ‘more power to the four’ if there is a narrowing of rights.
“Andrew, I think what the four objected to was not the inconvenience or distress of sharing an airplane with the man being forcibly deported, but in being made complicit to some pretty appalling treatment and, above all, being faced with the reality of deportation.”
How do you infer that? Call me a cynic, but unless proven otherwise, the most natural motive is that the four just wanted a peaceful flight - just like some people on a plane ask to be moved so they don’t have to sit next to a baby, who might scream. I myself might (probably?) have the same reaction, so I’m not disparaging them; I jsut don’t think they should be made into heroes, unless of course they are really resisting because of the mistreatment.
I think we agree that there is a policy and its implementation. If there is more wrong implementing the policy than there is right in the policy, then the policy should change. My guess (is this a Larry Summers’ guess?) is that there is more right in the policy, but I freely admit I could be wrong, and that I don’t know enough about the particulars to judge.
Des you left out the “near”, an important qualifier.
Matt, you are absolutely right. I wasn’t even close with those numbers and mixed up NYC immigrant population with overall US.
Scott, besides being racist, you are wrong. Some of the bloodiest immigration (multi-cultural intra-national) conflicts have occurred in non-Anglo-Saxon cultures. For starters, how about Black September in Jordan (at least as deadly as the 1860’s NYC riots)? But, anyways, measured by crime rates, poverty, and unemployment, cities with lower levels of immigration were much better off in 19th century US.
Anyone who thinks their country’s infrastructure could magically build new housing, add new jobs, and assimilate new cultures at a rate fast enough for open borders to be feasible, need only look at 19th century USA.
ISBN 1560252758 is the best place to start if you want to see the results of 19th century US immigration policy. Don’t worry, the movie only encompasses about 3 pages of the book.
Likewise - in retrospect I think some more detail about the particulars of the objections are needed. I’ll have a dig around in the French press and post what I find tomorrow.
“measured by crime rates, poverty, and unemployment, cities with lower levels of immigration were much better off in 19th century US. “
Which must explain why immigration rate had zero effect in antebellum Northeastern towns, as measured by extent of pauperism.
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/Econ_113/PS1.pdf
clone12,
1823 aggregated data? Hardly a data set anyone would accept as indicative of 19th century US immigration. Let’s move forward 41 more years into that policy and see how it effected NYC’s crime rate and poverty level. It isn’t the areas of virtually unlimited arable land to the West that was the problem. It was the rapid population growth in urbanized industrial centers where the quality of life dropped to inhumane lows, that contain the lesson to be learned.
Now is as good a time as any to state that I am for generally increasing immigration rates to all industrailized nations. But open borders fly in the face of history.
Here’s another book to make my point: Keyssar, Alexander. “Poverty.” The Reader’s Companion to American
History. 1991.
Start reading about page 850 and hit the groovy stuff on 860-861. The majority of the poor were definitely immigrants, especially in the higher populated industrialized areas.
If anyone disagreeing with me does actually pick up a history book and read about US immigration in the 19th century, please don’t feel stupid about what you said here. It really isn’t your fault that you didn’t know. I mean, how could you have known there were books out there by people who had studied primary sources, aggregated data, made conclusions, had their work peer reviewed, and then put it all down for you and I to read?
Oh, and clone12, in 1823, poverty (paupery) wasn’t really a subject studied. You’ll find the primary sources a bit ambiguous for your uses, regardless of the good Brad Delong’s usage. Those numbers are probably only slightly more accurate than Michael A. Bellesiles mystery county records. As far as investigation into poverty levels and causation, that didn’t really begin in earnest the US for a couple more decades.
If P is “50% of the population are immigrants” and Q is “there are few restrictions on immigration” then P simply does not imply Q, and all your bluster isn’t going to change that.
As Montaigne used to say, before asking what a fact means, you should ask if it’s actually a fact. And in this case, it ain’t.
The foreign-born population of the US has never been anywhere close to 50 percent. The highest it ever reached was about 15 percent at the turn of the century. And that was, in fact, a period of near-unrestricted immigration.
Jet,
Antebellum era goes all the way up to 1861, which contains more than half of 19th century.
Secondly, if you’re going to ramp down foreign immigration to NYC because it might reduce the quality of life there, why don’t you also shut off internal migration to NYC as well? Should there be laws restricting someone from West Virginia to move to NYC?
Anyone who thinks their country’s infrastructure could magically build new housing, add new jobs, and assimilate new cultures at a rate fast enough for open borders to be feasible, need only look at 19th century USA.
Exactly. Because as we all know, the USA failed to survive its horrid experiment with immigration, the constitution was dissolved in 1908, and North America reverted to a patchwork of petty fiefdoms, city-states, and warlordism.
In fact, it wasn’t until the New Corn Month in the Year of the Jaguar, 23rd cycle, that the armies of the Restored Mayan Emperor, 17 Rabbit, were able to unite the green-eyed mongrel hordes of the north under His glorious dominion. All hail 17 Rabbit!
Oh, wait. I though we were playing “alternate history.” In this continuum, the United States became the greatest economic and political powerhouse the world has ever known, completely dominating the global stage for nearly a century. The city of New York is considered a world city, one of the jewels of civilization. So never mind.
“In this continuum, the United States became the greatest economic and political powerhouse the world has ever known, completely dominating the global stage for nearly a century. The city of New York is considered a world city, one of the jewels of civilization.”
Yes, but unlike say the country in question for this purposes of this post—France—the 19th century US actually assimilated its immigrants into the American culture.
clone12, I was just picking a data point we could agree was emblematic of a high density industrial center. I’m sure we can find another.
HP,
And just because this was the way it was, means there was a more optimum policy? Using your logic we get: India’s a thriving Democracy, I guess the British occupation was the best way to get there. Or how about Japan? Japan is a thriving Democracy, I guess nuking them was the best solution. Or how about, the US is the richest, most powerful nation in the world. Letting in everyone who wanted to come and letting them fight it out between themselves for scarce resources, living in cramped TB infection housing, horrible murder rates, and jobs that barely paid anything at all, had to have been the optimum solution. Hell, now I’m all for open borders. What’s a hundred years of human hell when we have the Glorious Balance to look forward to in the future.
Some commenters on this thread have expressed or implied a belief in ‘open borders’. In some cases, judging by the comments some of the same people have made on other threads, this strikes me as the mirror image of the confused/obtuse/hypocritical position of the UK Conservative Party on immigration. (The Tories believe in unrestricted movement of capital + highly restricted movement of people. You lot, by contrast, believe in reining in the evils of global capitalism but letting global people movements rip…)
But assuming you can make your position cohere – and I know you can, I just worry that some of you aren’t prepared to put in the intellectual yards to do so – that still leaves the following questions:
(1) What proportion of people in France, or the UK, share your belief in completely open borders?
(2) If the answer to (1) is, as I believe it to be, considerably less than 10%, does this operate as a democratic constraint on policy? (This is a genuine question, not a rhetorical one – I’m up for a discussion on it, but let’s have no comparisons with, say, popular support for the death penalty; immigration policy is more obviously something which should be up for democratic debate and decision, and the fact of having a not-completely-open-border policy, as opposed to how open, how operated, etc. is not, unlike the death penalty, a human rights issue in itself.)
(3) If (1) does operate as a democratic constraint on policy – i.e., if we agree that we have to continue maintaining some immigration restrictions UNTIL we can persuade enough people to support a completely open-border policy – then, granting that anything short of a completely open-border policy implies a classification of migrants into legal and illegal, how in the meantime should we enforce this classification? Is it generally desirable, or indeed fair, to enforce a law but let anyone off if they refuse to comply – or escalate their non-compliance beyond a certain point? (I can already see people reacting to this colourless use of language – ‘non-compliance’ – when compared with the human details in the Statewatch story, by marking me down as some statist monster. But truly – I’m not condoning the particular actions of the French police in this area – I’m just more interested in the general question: first because it’s a real question, and one not always best illuminated by particular details; and second because it’s a better question for a forum like this, where inevitably there will be incomplete/asymmetric information about any particular case.)
I want to know what was so darn bad about New York in the 19th Century, or all of the United States in the 19th Century, for that matter, since immigration was essentially unregulated until the late teens or early 20’s of the last century. I thought we did pretty well during those years.
It’s appalling not only that such a brutal approach to deportation takes place (and this man’s ill-treatment is not the worst of all possible outcomes, according to the rest of the material in the statewatch website), but that for merely protesting what was not only a terrifying ordeal in the passenger cabin (complete with death and suicide threats) but also seemed to be an inhuman act on the part of authorities, these bystanders are being prosecuted.
How is that an actionable offense?
I imagine it’s because the plane was ready to go and they made a scene and messed up the schedule.
“In fact, it wasn’t until the New Corn Month in the Year of the Jaguar, 23rd cycle, that the armies of the Restored Mayan Emperor, 17 Rabbit, were able to unite the green-eyed mongrel hordes of the north under His glorious dominion. All hail 17 Rabbit!”
HP,
Now THIS is the type of government I can support. By the way, can anybody tell me the quickest way to the ball court? I hear this afternoon’s tournaments will be most exciting.
Yes, but unlike say the country in question for this purposes of this post—France—the 19th century US actually assimilated its immigrants into the American culture.
Yeah, right. When my grandfather got off the boat from Calabria in 1904, en route to Philadelphia, he was greeted with candy and rose petals, and there were no “Jet’s” around saying that letting people like him in was going to ruin the country.
And pigs can fly.
Oh no, now I’ve been labeled anti-immigration (even though I explicity said I was for higher levels). I suppose one of you will now go all fascist on me and I can expect a knife attack in the street. I’ll be watching for you Kvetch.
Finland deported a group of Romas (gypsies) a few years ago by forcibly injecting them with heavy sedatives before they were placed on the plane.
“I am not a slave”
Are so.
Nyah.
-
Jet’s piffle only stays on the table with the magical realism of a chosen point in time when prior immigrants became amortized, honorary de facto natives. That point can be New Year’s day 1801, or 1787, or 1492 but it’s arbitrary no matter.
You can trot out that Bering land bridge all you want, but it’s still a debatable idea. There are native traditions that claim a far earlier continental origin, and recent anthropology has thrown some weight to those claims.
Regardless, the central argument isn’t one of immigration or inheritance anyway, it’s the patrimonial dilemma, the first born gets the land and the rest of the sons go off to make their respective livelihoods elsewhere; or the farm’s divvied up into smaller and smaller shares until finally there’s a generation that doesn’t own enough land to feed itself; OR the community expands and gathers new territory and divvies that up.
This is not a new problem, unique to enlightened democracies. Specious specious to claim France had an inadequate solution to the same problem, France was already settled up - the US was looking at a Europe-sized land mass sparsely populated by disposable savages, plenty of room for the pioneer/settler/citizen nexus to work its guilt-free transformation on.
The real real real dilemma is the chronological entitlement of forbears - the ancestor automatic master to the heir; the way just being born gives you privileges your grand-children won’t experience.
Unless you put them, in order of importance, above your own gratification
Jet, you’re talking out of your ass. There is very little chance you know the relevant data better than I do, and I know that you are dead wrong. Compare poverty levels and immigration anywhere in the second half of the 19th century in London to those in New York: Poverty was more acute in London, immigration was lower. Find another large port city in the US with substantially lower immigration and higher standards of living. You won’t find one. You are either clueless of simply lying.
As for the racist crack, I stand by what I said. The last 200 years have seen almost exclusively white - and overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon - immigrants doing the things that most people fear as a result of immigration. Not all cases, but almost all successful ones. Even in Jordan, I note that the Palestinians did not manage to get rid of the Hashemites. You failed to even find an actual counter example, even though there are several.
Really man, get a clue.
Ajax, that’s crazy talk.
Scott, you almost had me. But then I realized there I’d be crazy to believe some dude on the internet over Alexander Keyssar (http://ksgfaculty.harvard.edu/Alexander_Keyssar) and to a lesser extent, Herbert Ashbury. And comparing New York to London says nothing, absolutely nothing, about immigrants impact on New York City. There is probably a case to be made that those who came to America had it better off, even in the horrible conditions they lived and worked in, than they had it from wherever they came from. Maybe you should work that angle. Keyssar says, poverty rose in America and it was disproportionately immigrants who made up that poverty. So you can say I’m talking out my ass all you want, but I gave a credible reference and you gave….well, rhetoric.
As promised, I’ve looked in the French media for more information about the motivation of the passengers who protested, but with no success.
I’m still inclined to interpret their actions as a protest against the treatment of the man being forcibly deported (rather than annoyance at the unpleasantness and inconvenience of it all);
“Worse still, we are guilty of having had some sensitivity, some pity, some human reactions, of having refused to accept the spectacle of someone else’s suffering as “normal”“
However, there’s certainly room for ambiguity all around.
Jet: you whine about being called anti-immigration moments after you accuse Scott Martens of being a racist? Methinks you’re an idiot.
Enough already, Jet.
It is probably wrong to rely too much on Herbert Ashbury for a picture of 19th century New York. There is a reason that his Gangs of New York is subtitled titled “an informal history.” It was written in 1928, before many of the techniques of social history were widespread. So no quantifying, just a scan through old newspapers. More recent historians have modified Ashbury’s picture of New York. The result is something less sensational. Not that New York was some sort of paradise, but people did come there in droves rather than fleeing to less populous US areas.
Jet,
Here’s something to consider: Most economists who look at immigration (to the US at least- that’s what I’ve read about) indicate that the over-all patern is thus: The immigrant is poor when he/she arrives, usually much poorer than the average native. As time goes by, the immigrant gets better off, and his/her children are much better off, usually close to as well off as natives, if not better. But, the immigrant is almost always better off than he/she was in her native country (otherwise, why come?) And, there is a benefit to the natives as well, and increase in GNP and the like. So, the receiving country wins all around. The natives are better off, and the immigrant is better off. The party most likely to lose is the country of emmigration. This is all compatible w/ most of what you say- immigrants to the US, especially those living in NY city, were very poor, and there was an increase in the percentage of poor people living there. But, they were better off than they were in their home countries, they benefited the natives, and their children were not especially poor, at least by local standards. Given this, I don’t see what the problem is. Yes- other policies could have made things better, but no one here denies that. Other large and crowded cites had similar problems, but without the benefits that immigrants brought. So, given this, I wonder what your point is.
Call me a cynic, but unless proven otherwise, the most natural motive is that the four just wanted a peaceful flight
It’s not like they asked that the guy being deported be thrown off; they asked to leave the plane themselves.
The Statewatch story says the charges against the four are:
“having prevented the departure of the Air Horizon flight RN 322 from Paris to Dakar, encouraging passengers to get a person who had not been admitted into the [French] national terroritory and his escort to disembark, contravening security regulations and take-off procedures, causing a delay of 4 hours and 9 minutes”
Also:
The captain ordered the policemen accompanying the migrant to leave the plane, which they did, to cheers by the flight’s passengers.
And:
The captain announces that he has decided, by virtue of his powers, that the sans-papier should be let off and asks us, me and two other persons, for our passports in order to support his position. When we were called to retrieve them, we were immediately handcuffed and transferred to the prison of the police station in Charles-de-Gaulle airport.
I see nothing ambiguous in there. They weren’t simply objecting to the lack of peacefulness, but to the way the person was being treated by police. That’s why they are being charged with obstructing police work and actively preventing deportation of a person.
And what about the cases, mentioned on the same Statewatch page, of people who died in flight while being deported? How exactly did they die? I’m guessing it wasn’t due to allergic reactions to airline food.
I dunno. Suppose if a loud drunk was there instead of the paperless guy - they would also want to get him ‘disembark’ and cheered as he was getting kicked off the plane.
They wouldn’t be getting arrested for that, though. They would not have risked anything. In fact, they would not have needed to persuade the captain to disobey the police, the captain himself would have called the airport security people to get the loud drunk off the place.
Bit different, don’t you think?
Is it so hard to accept that somewhere in the world there may be people with a conscience and some empathy, too?
Oh Jet, you nasty nasty man - to dismiss my wearisome labors so out of hand that way.
-
“Crazy talk” as opposed to crazy thinking, how ‘bout?
Works for me.
The simplified streamlined version of what I said above, murky as it was, is:
We’re all migrants, immigrants, whatever. All of us, even the Norwegians, even the French.
You just pick some formal date from which to assert your nativeness and proceed, backing your assertions with force; but it’s totally arbitrary, it has no fixity - it isn’t real, it’s made-up.
White Americans are immigrants by choice and/or accident - red ones too, unless the origins of their branch of the primate tree were, as some of them insist, on this continent. Black immigrants, many of them, were, as we know, not exactly seeking new citizenship when they first arrived, but still - they’re immigrants in the most basic sense.
That’s logic, bub - not spew.
Like I said, the issue isn’t natives vs. immigrants, it’s haves against don’t-haves - as usual, as always.
“Crazy talk” can be kind of a choice at times, amusing and fun; crazy thinking is more like a disease or a genetic defect - compulsive and potentially harmful.
I actually choose to write like this, Jet, I really actually do. Whereas your bizarre clarity is something you couldn’t stop even if you tried.
Expanding on catfish’s point — Asbury (jet, please note the author’s surname) is something of an unreliable narrator. Luc Sante, who was a consultant on the film version of Gangs, wrote a fascinating and nigh-exhaustive history of 19th century New York: Low Life. Asbury is one of his sources but Sante points out the hyperbole and errors in Asbury’s accounts.
So maybe you want to try again, jet? Or better yet, admit that you have no particular expertise in this area and just shut your cakehole.
M, seemed to desire an end to my participation, and I usually am perfectly willing to excuse myself when people don’t want to listen anymore.
But I see several people have latched on to my use of Asbury, but seem to have forgotten about Alexander Keyssar. There is a reason I mentioned Asbury second as he was merely the interesting story teller that prompted my learning more. So Skeeter, you still have the tough one left to discredit. Good luck with that, I think you’re going to need it.
Ajax, from where I’m from the phrase “crazy talk” is a lighthearted pejorative only used with friendly intentions. I understand what you’re saying but think you’ll have a tough time getting very many people to agree with you. Let’s just leave it with we both agree more people should be allowed to cross borders. But what exactly did I say that prompted this “Whereas your bizarre clarity is something you couldn’t stop even if you tried.” Or should I just expect to called a fascist nazi over and over for daring to disagree? These liberal debates hardly ever seem very liberal to me.
Jet-
Hyperbole, hyperbole. It’s like a brand-new motorcycle to me.
From where I’m from everybody’s crazy. Batshit. Gone.
It’s the ones who wore it and danced with it and every long once in a while set it down for couple of minutes and made perfect stunning sense that I miss terribly, these days.
Out here in where-I-am-now-land the people are cold-hearted stone mentally-ill and fermenting bad gas in great noxious clouds.
-
The reason it’s important to me isn’t that I think we need to get more people across more borders more often, but that the whole idea of these tissue-thin rules and lines of order needs to be seen as what it is. Gauze. Temporary dressing.
Rule-worship, including the patriotic love of arbitrarily-boundaried fictions, while the land itself, the real actual stuff people claim to love - the dirt and the trees and the water and the birds and all of it - is poisoned and laid waste just to keep things as they are, is the framework for the dispute. Changing the rules, adjusting the rules - how about we start trying to get the reason for the rules back on the table; get the goal of all this rule-making clearly stated, and then let the rules form around that?
Because if that happened the beneficiaries of this hellish misbehavior would be picking up aluminum cans by the roadside, instead of smirking in their gated communities.
That may seem like a long jump from immigration policy, and it is sort of, but only because the thread didn’t expand far enough quickly enough. Like the rest of human ethical thought, more’s the pity.
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