‘cause Modern Liberals sure as hell would just as well throw you to Somalia.

… Or maybe not, but rather think that yout community (collective) should have a right to suppress your views (invidual).

This is why she prudently rejects collectivist Modern Liberalism.

Hirsi Ali has been offered a job by the American Enterprise Institute, in D.C. What does that tell you about her?

It tells that she has been offered job by the said institution. Duh. Now, it is actually a endorsement for the AEI, as I’m under the impression that it is very conservative/libertarian, fan of Supply-Side Economics etc.

That’s how it goes for a Classical Liberal who loves J.S Mill (Hirsi Ali). You have to find allies whereever you can find them, ’cause Modern Liberals sure as hell would just as well throw you to Somalia.

The usual suspects, of course, inexplicably blame liberals and pro-”Islamists.” They conveniently ignore the truth about who pushed Hirsi Ali out of her position — the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim “friends” who first showed her support.

Fair enough, you ae quite correct there. What you and others miss is that the strong anti-immigration laws and anti-immigrant backlash has been caused by the failure of the Socialist, immigration policies in assimilating the immigrants. The strongly anti-immigrant (perhaps too strongly, IMO) parties get the majority of their votes from native Europeans who actually have to live in the MultiCultural ghettoes.

For once, the blame is not with the immigrants alone, but instead with the “tolerant” paradigm that refuses to address the problems caused by immigration, and problems within the immigrant communities, and dismisses dissenters as “racists”.

Why?

Jill: And like I said in the post, we really need to loosen up our asylum policies. When I said “anyone and everyone,” I was referring to immigrants in general, not just asylum-seekers.

Part of the problem with this is that not everyone agrees on legitimate reasons for granting asylum, and if you allow the politicians to pick and choose who to let in, then the kinds of people they recognize as “real” refugees are going to be limited by the political blinders that mainstream politicians or immigration bureaucrats happen to have on when they approach the issue. To take a real world example, it’s been like pulling teeth getting the immigration bureaucracy to recognize the threat of almost certain death as cause for granting asylum, if the threat comes from your abusive ex-husband — because wife beating is not considered a “political” issue by the immigration inquisitors or their political bosses, and so doesn’t really come into their worldview when they ask themselves who counts as a political refugee. People written off as “economic” refugees are routinely turned away, as if starvation were somehow less of a crisis for the refugee than near-certain murder. Generally speaking, political agencies respond to political incentives, and frankly I don’t trust politicians to pick and choose who counts as a “real” refugee, especially not when most of the candidates already come from marginalized groups that are routinely misunderstood and ill-served by politicians here as well as abroad.

And someone on these boards was recently harshly criticized for suggesting that some elements of the left turn a blind eye to non-Western abuses of women’s rights.

I don’t understand why you cite Haiti as an example of denying refugee status gone wrong.

I was referring to the policy that said you weren’t officially a “refugee” until you made it onto land — so even if you were in the water, three feet from the beach, you could be snatched up and deported. More specifically heinous was the Haitian refugee policy that had Coast Guard employees plucking Haitians out of the water and onto a Coast Guard ship, asking them a few short questions while they were freezing, terrified, fleeing a nation in crisis and quite afraid of authority (especially big men with guns), and using only that to establish whether or not they qualified for refugee status.

Oh, and then there was our choice to hold a whole ton of Haitian detainees at Guantanamo because we didn’t know what else to do with them and didn’t want to award them refugee status. They were only slowly released when nearly all of the women became pregnant, HIV spread through the population, and the medics at Guantanamo were simply unequipped to deal with the situation.

Those are the kinds of refugee policies gone wrong that I’m talking about.

The differences between the two, of course, are that 1) Haiti didn’t occupy the same political signficance as Cuba during the Cold War, 2) Haiti is much further away than Cuba from U.S. shores and thus a similar boatlift would have resulted in significantly larger fatalities, and 3) refugee crises gobble up government resources like anything–relocation, logistical support, screening, etc.

Accepting refugees is fine and dandy when it is of a much smaller scale–obviously the individual examples that you present–but even slightly larger, such as during Kosovo.

“Now, I’m not arguing that we have to let in anyone and everyone…”

Well, why not?

Well, because I do think that it’s reasonable to draw lines. This will surely be an unpopular argument with some people here, but completely open borders would wreak havoc on both our economy and our national security, and would be virtually impossible to manage unless most other countries signed on, and we created a nation-less world. That would bring about its own problems — like how do we provide social aid to everyone? Who gets taxed, and for what? How do we manage a criminal justice system? How do we manage much of anything?

That said, I do agree with this:

It is criminal that there’s a single refugee in this world who cannot immediately find asylum and a new life for herself in another country.

And like I said in the post, we really need to loosen up our asylum policies. When I said “anyone and everyone,” I was referring to immigrants in general, not just asylum-seekers.

Well, why not?

It is criminal that there’s a single refugee in this world who cannot immediately find asylum and a new life for herself in another country. It is inexcusable that this system of international apartheid is maintaining the S.S. St. Louis immigration policy to this day. There’s no room for compromise or moderation when real people’s lives are hanging in the balance, as they are all over the world.

“So, after all, maybe the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists…” – Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

Hirsi Ali has been a favorite of the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant right. She had to have known she was cozying up to forces that would screw her in the end.