We Are Keeping Out Exactly The Immigrants We Should Be Welcoming -- Honored Clemson Grad Kept Off A Plane, Separated From Her Dog And Life In SC
I linked in another post to Benjamin Wittes' excellent piece, "Malevolence Tempered by Incompetence: Trump's Horrifying Executive Order on Refugees and Visas":
The document also takes steps that strike me as utterly orthogonal to any relevant security interest. If the purpose of the order is the one it describes, for example, I can think of no good reason to burden the lives of students individually suspected of nothing who are here lawfully and just happen to be temporarily overseas, or to detain tourists and refugees who were mid-flight when the order came down. I have trouble imagining any reason to raise questions about whether green card holders who have lived here for years can leave the country and then return. Yes, it's temporary, and that may lessen the costs (or it may not, depending on the outcome of the policy review the order mandates), but temporarily irrational is still irrational.Put simply, I don't believe that the stated purpose is the real purpose. This is the first policy the United States has adopted in the post-9/11 era about which I have ever said this. It's a grave charge, I know, and I'm not making it lightly. But in the rational pursuit of security objectives, you don't marginalize your expert security agencies and fail to vet your ideas through a normal interagency process. You don't target the wrong people in nutty ways when you're rationally pursuing real security objectives.
When do you do these things? You do these things when you're elevating the symbolic politics of bashing Islam over any actual security interest. You do them when you've made a deliberate decision to burden human lives to make a public point. In other words, this is not a document that will cause hardship and misery because of regrettable incidental impacts on people injured in the pursuit of a public good. It will cause hardship and misery for tens or hundreds of thousands of people because that is precisely what it is intended to do.
An example of how this is keeping out people who not only have a legal right to be here but who clearly are not Islamists is this Clemson grad, Nazanin Zinouri. Rachael Myers Lowe writes at The State:
Nazanin Zinouri recently earned her PhD in industrial engineering from Clemson University. She was also awarded the 2016 Janine Anthony Bowen Graduate Fellow award at Clemson which recognizes outstanding academic performance.For the last 6 months, she has worked at a Greenville technology firm as a data modeler, her Linkedin page states.
Now she's stuck at Dubai International Airport where she was taken off a plane headed for home earlier Saturday.
She flew to Iran January 20th to visit her family. When rumors began to fly on Wednesday about a new Trump administration executive order blocking immigrants from several Middle eastern countries, including Iran, she rushed to buy a ticket back to Greenville.
"Only a few hours after the order was signed, I got to the airport, got on a plane and made it Dubai. After waiting in line to get my documents checked and after 40 minutes of questions and answers, I boarded the plane to Washington, only to have two TSA officers getting in and ask me to disimbark the plane!!!" she wrote on a facebook post.
No one warned me when I was leaving, no one cared what will happen to my dog or my job or my life there. No one told me what I should do with my car that is still parked at the airport parking. Or what to do with my house and all my belongings.They didn't say it with words but with their actions, that my life doesn't matter. Everything I worked for all these years doesn't matter.
I just had to say it...
This woman is exactly the sort of immigrant we want here. As for her legal status, a friend of hers, Shivakumar Chinnam, writes in the comments below her Facebook post, "She is on student visa. Finished her Phd recently."
I would guess that the American company she works for has applied for and probably gotten a work visa for her.
Also, for anyone who knows the slightest thing about Islam, it is plain that she is the opposite of a radical Islamist.
She is pictured here in a strapless top with her doggie and another.
Dogs, under Islam, are generally seen as impure and unclean -- though there's some disagreement on that.
Of course, women who are Muslim who don't have dogs and don't dress in extremely Western ways may also be valuable members our society -- but if we are actually looking to have a very good idea as to who is a danger to Americans, this woman shows substantial evidence that she is not.
If danger to us and our society is truly what we're actually looking to protect ourselves from, then we should be welcoming this woman back, not doing the very ugly thing of keeping her off a plane and from the productive life she's built in this country.
> for anyone who knows the
> slightest thing about Islam
Maybe you should teach somewhere.
Crid at January 29, 2017 5:13 AM
I'm sure none of the Cuban refugees on their way to the US were "good" people deserving of us keeping our word. No lawsuit/media screaming for them against Obama? Why?
It's a 90 day hold against SOME Islamic countries not all. Is that BAD? It does not fit "discrimination against Muslims" dialogue for sure so let's not discuss that.
I KNOW people that years in refugee camps after surviving being "boat people". 90 days would have been a gift from heaven. It sucks to be some people right now. That's life.
Bob in Texas at January 29, 2017 5:35 AM
Correct me if I am worng, but I thought it was illegal to work in the US on a student Visa.
If she has completed her education, and was back in her home country ahe should not have been allowed to return on a student Visa.
She needs to get her company to bring her back legitimately on an HIB.
Isab at January 29, 2017 5:36 AM
I'm with Isab. It sounds like she is working here illegally on a student visa. If she was working under the correct visa then just call her employer and explain the situation. H1B visas are hard enough to get that most employers are quite understanding. Her new boss would probably send someone to deal with her car and dog if she just overnighted them a copy of her keys.
90 days isn't a big deal. You can't have it both ways Amy.
Ben at January 29, 2017 6:24 AM
If so, then there is not an issue; she's not an immigrant, but a returning resident. If not, then she's working here illegally.
The 9/11 terrorists hung out at strip clubs and drank heavily; all the better to fool the Americans into thinking the 20 bearded Middle Eastern young flying school students were the opposite of radical Islamists.
According to one of the hadiths, Muslims are encouraged to do that in order to fool the heathen enemy.
==============================
I would question the timing of her visit to Iran, just days after the swearing in of a president who advocated blocking entrants from terror sponsoring or affiliated countries. Unless she's been reading only Persian newspapers, she knows that Iran is at the top of that terror sponsoring country list.
I wonder if the timing of this trip was intentional - a stunt to embarrass the Trump administration, to show the net catching dolphins as well as tuna.
As Isab points out, it's a 90-day injunction, not a permanent ban. And it's not like these countries and some immigrants from them haven't done things to warrant a bit of suspicion.
Conan the Grammarian at January 29, 2017 7:23 AM
As for that PhD rendering her harmless, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a marine biology student at the University of Massachusetts when he planted several bombs at the Boston Marathon. And he was not on a student visa, he was a US citizen.
Conan the Grammarian at January 29, 2017 7:41 AM
Here is the text of the executive order. The only nation mentioned specifically in it that I can find is Syria.
People, we've done this before, with little to no public outcry..
Remember the outrage when Barack Obama's state Department stopped processing the applications of Iraqi refugees for six months after the discovery of two al Qaeda terrorists living in Kentucky?
Remember the outrage when Jimmy Carter temporarily invalidated the visas issued to Iranians for future entry into the US?
Conan the Grammarian at January 29, 2017 8:37 AM
Depends on the visa. One may apply for an F-1 student visa and be permitted to work.
https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/students-and-exchange-visitors/students-and-employment
But...if she were no longer a student, she'd need a work visa, probably an H-1B or similar. Or working on a green card.
I R A Darth Aggie at January 29, 2017 8:45 AM
Coney: One nation is not seven, and it certainly doesn't include all refugees, as the Obama order does.
This boy Donny is fuck out of his mind. I say we blame the people who voted for him. Any buddy got a problem with that?
Crid at January 29, 2017 9:05 AM
"She flew to Iran January 20th to visit her family. When rumors began to fly on Wednesday about a new Trump administration executive order blocking immigrants from several Middle eastern countries, including Iran, she rushed to buy a ticket back to Greenville."
Kind of curious if she was just visiting that she didnt have a round trip ticket already.
However I can understand if it was one of those fares with horible change fees, that it might have been easier to just try and get another one way ticket on a earlier flight.
Frankly this whole story smells, but as Glenn Reynolds says, Slate morphed into Solon so slowly, I hardly noticed.
Apparently nobody told Benjamin Witte that the policy and the list both were products of the Obama administration.
Isab at January 29, 2017 9:12 AM
I wonder if the timing of this trip was intentional - a stunt to embarrass the Trump administration, to show the net catching dolphins as well as tuna.
They seem to be doing a fine job of that without her help.
Kevin at January 29, 2017 9:46 AM
While Trump's callous response to the humanitarian disaster in Syria is reprehensible, he did not cause the situation and is not responsble for the safety of Syrian refugees.
He is, however, responsible for the safety of the American public. And his order limiting entrance from countries identified by his predecessor as dangerous, while short sighted and probably doomed to be ineffective, is within his prerogative as president.
And it is not unprecedented as his predecessor did the same thing, supported avidly and fully by the media and the cultural thought leaders who now denounce Trump.
So, "Donny" may be "fuck out of his mind" but the real villains are the ones who failed to offer an alternative. He was voted in because the people lost faith in the politicians, the ones who continually failed to do their jobs for 40+ years and govern the country; the ones more interested in scoring political points than in governance.
The Dems, who now need to take lessons in in talking to the very people whom they are to govern, offered only a corrupt status quo as an alternative to Trump. The Republicans offered nothing inspiring either.
If Trump proves to be a disaster, which is possible, it will not be the people who voted for him who are to blame, but the ones who turned politics into a bloodsport and drove away qualified candidates, who left us with a Hobbesian choice of accepting a corrupt government or having effectively no government.
And maybe the fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves. Maybe we sat by too long and didn't vote out the entrenched political interests, instead waiting for a messiah to drain the swamp for us.
Conan the Grammarian at January 29, 2017 9:47 AM
If Trump proves to be a disaster, which is possible, it will not be the people who voted for him who are to blame
We'll have to disagree. I'm big on personal responsibility, not fobbing it off on society or some other nebulous group.
Kevin at January 29, 2017 10:03 AM
Let me guess, you live in a state that was going to go for one or the other candidate overwhelmingly and in which you could freely vote for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein, thus absolving yourself of any personal responsibility for the election's outcome.
The rest of us live in the real world, and our only real choice was Hillary vs. Donald. One or the other was going to win. And voting for a third party while sanctimoniously washing our hands of the whole thing was not an option. We had to pick the lesser of two evils, however flawed our choice was going to be.
Conan the Grammarian at January 29, 2017 10:15 AM
Let me guess, you live in a state that was going to go for one or the other candidate overwhelmingly and in which you could freely vote for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein, thus absolving yourself of any personal responsibility for the election's outcome.
No, not at all. My state was rated "safely Trump" from the time he won the GOP nomination until Election Day.
And, as I said above, I would never absolve myself of responsibility. Personal responsibility is rather the point.
Kevin at January 29, 2017 10:21 AM
So, you are in a state that was going to for one or the other candidate overwhelmingly. That means you could safely vote Hillary and say Trump's failures were not your fault, absolving yourself of any and all responsibility for what may come.
I, on the other hand, live in a toss-up state and had to make a difficult choice, Narcissus or corrupt kleptocrat. A vote any other way would have been akin to trying to bail the Titanic with a teaspoon. Millions of voters had to make the same choice and did. Blaming them is fruitless and does not get to the heart of the problem.
To be sure, voting is kinda like a Spanish prisoner dilemma. You think the other voters will confine their votes to Trump vs. Hillary and you cannot vote Stein or Johnson because that would be a wasted vote and would allow the wrong lizard to win. So, you're stuck voting for a lizard - all to prevent the wrong lizard from winning, however difficult it is to determine which one is the wrong lizard.
You'll never be able to say with any certainty that Hillary would have been a better president, he record does not support such a claim. But feel free to argue that.
In short (I know, too late), I'm not going to accept Crid's proposal to blame Trump voters. And I'm not going to foist the blame on some nebulous entity like society. I am going to say that we have been ill-served by our political parties and our politicians (as if they could do anything but ill-serve us). Trump may be a product of our collective indifference to politics, but he's also a product of our parties offering incompetent and/or corrupt politicians in all but a few elections and allowing a massive mission creep on the part of the government they're supposed to be minding for us.
And maybe we are collectively responsible for the mess our government has become. Perhaps our collective indifference has allowed corruption and incompetence to take root and flourish.
So long as Trump continues to question the need for and cost of various government departments and programs, he may turn out to be what we needed after all, if only for a short period. Societal course corrections are often unpleasant, and are rarely accomplished with soft words spoken by gentlemen.
Conan the Grammarian at January 29, 2017 11:35 AM
The courts have spoken. The question is, will Trump comply?
If he chooses not to, the only entity that could do anything about it is Congress, through impeachment.
Wouldn't be the first time a President thumbed his nose at a court order. Andrew Jackson did it, resulting in the Trail of Tears, one of the more egregious offenses against human rights in U.S. history.
Patrick at January 29, 2017 3:21 PM
Amy, as a Jew you're banned from visiting all of these countries. If you actually did visit, you'd risk being killed or at least imprisoned. Why no protest against that?
Snoopy at January 29, 2017 3:21 PM
Good analysis of the situation here:
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156532225711/the-persuasion-filter-and-immigration
"The Persuasion Filter says Trump opens with a big first offer and negotiates back to something reasonable. If you don’t recognize the method, it looks crazy, random, and racist."
Snoopy at January 29, 2017 3:22 PM
I'm outraged.
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at January 29, 2017 3:33 PM
Yes. Sally is white.
"... Sally Boynton Brown, the executive director of the Idaho Democratic Party who wants to be elected party chair. ... declared that, “My job is to listen and be a voice and shut other white people down.”
On training new volunteers: “We have to teach them how to communicate, how to be sensitive and how to shut their mouths if they are white.”
http://townhall.com/columnists/autryjpruitt/2017/01/28/draft-n2277666
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at January 29, 2017 4:34 PM
As Conan mentions, Obama has done this before back in 2013 (ie- suspending Visas from Iraqi applicabts for 6 months). And, these 7 countries are the very ones that Obama had delienated "risky states" or "states of concern" in 2015 with regards to visa restrictions.
Nothing new to see here.
Ian at January 29, 2017 5:21 PM
Amy, as a Jew you're banned from visiting all of these countries. If you actually did visit, you'd risk being killed or at least imprisoned. Why no protest against that?
Um, why no googling to see the many times I've mentioned this:
Kinsley: "Now there are virtually no Jews in Arab countries—even in a moderate Arab country like Jordan."
http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2006/12/13/aparthuh.html
Also, visiting these countries is on my list right after getting infected with typhus while being stung by hundreds of fire ants.
Amy Alkon at January 29, 2017 8:24 PM
Another:
http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2007/07/the-forgotten-r-1.html
"The "Forgotten" Refugees Of The Middle East
No, not the Palestinians, but the Jews who were run out of Arab lands..."
Amy Alkon at January 29, 2017 8:25 PM
"Also, visiting these countries is on my list right after getting infected with typhus while being stung by hundreds of fire ants."
And after "camping"!
Meanwhile, I'm sure you're not offering the basic story as typical of an immigrant population which has been subject to laws regarding their suitability as guests. That would be misleading. What we have, like the TSA's idea of security, is faulty enforcement of a sound law and principle.
The solution is NOT "ignoring the law".
Radwaste at January 29, 2017 9:37 PM
I laugh. The Left is so predictable. The whole purpose of doing it this way was to get the Left to throw more temper tantrums and embarrass themselves further. And it's working. More Trump voters for 2018.
It's inevitable that whenever there is a policy change, there are going to be exceptional cases and outliers that get caught out in a manner that is unfair. That's why you always need an appeals process. I don't know if there is one here; if there isn't, there should be. But the existence of outliers does not mean the policy is morally invalid. And as Conan has noted, it's just building on steps that the Obama administration took previously. It should be clear that a lot of these "refugees" are really revolution exporters, and it pays to vet them very carefully.
It's unfortunate that Nazanin Zinouri was caught out. On the other hand, I agree with Isab that this deal has signs of political dirty-trickery, something intentionally set up to create a sob story for the Leftist media to exploit. I'd be curious as to Zinouri's political connections. Given the rather astounding degree to which the Left is now making it clear that they prefer Muslims of dubious loyalty to American citizens, it's not beyond the pale. Lefty activists and jihadists have something in common: they both perceive themselves as being so important that they should be exempt from the moral dictates of their belief systems.
Cousin Dave at January 30, 2017 6:48 AM
According to Al Sharpton, Jesus Christ was a refugee too, so Trump is bad.
Also Al knows about Alabama.
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at January 30, 2017 12:21 PM
Okay, would you rather have an administration who does the right thing ineptly, or an administration that does evil competently?
Alan at February 2, 2017 7:38 PM
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