Chris McGreal, Guardian (Manchester), July 24, 2009
The Obama administration has moved to grant political asylum to foreign women who suffer severe physical or sexual abuse from which they are unable to escape because it is part of the culture of their own countries.
The decision, made evident in a court case involving a battered women from Mexico, ends years of dispute over the issue which saw the Bush administration stall moves toward recognising domestic violence as legitimate grounds for asylum made during Bill Clinton’s tenure.
The department of homeland security has told an immigration court that it regards the woman, identified only as 42-year-old LR, as potentially having grounds to apply for political asylum because she feared she would be murdered by her common-law husband who repeatedly raped her at gunpoint and tried to burn her alive when he discovered she was pregnant.
Karen Musalo, a lawyer and director of the Centre for Gender and Refugee Studies at the University of California who is representing a second woman involved in a similar asylum case, said that the move is a significant shift in policy that opens the way for physically and sexually abused women to seek the same protection that those fleeing female genital mutilation are already offered.
“There has been so much controversy and back and forth on this over many years. This finally opens the door to these women to seek protection,” she said.
But women who apply for asylum will still face significant obstacles.
“These are not easy cases to prove,” said Musalo. “LR must prove that in Mexico violence against women is pervasive and that there is a societal perception that this is acceptable. Then she has to prove that the Mexican government is unable or unwilling to protect her, and on top of that she has to show that there is nowhere in Mexico where she can be safe from her abusers.”
LR stands a good chance of meeting the criteria. According to court papers, her husband, who seduced her when he was her physical education teacher at school, forced her to have sex by holding a gun or machete to her head. He broke her nose on one occasion and, when he discovered she was pregnant, doused her bed with kerosene as she was sleeping and set it alight.
But when she reported the assaults to the police they dismissed them as a “private matter”. A judge she appealed to for help attempted to seduce her.
“In Mexico, men believe they have a right to abuse their women because they are like a possession,” LR said in the court submission.
The struggle to have domestic violence categorised as grounds for asylum has long centred on another women, Rody Alvarado from Guatemala, who has been represented by Musalo.
For many years, the US government said battered women did not qualify because they could not show persecution on specific grounds such as race or political opinion. That position was eroded in 1996 in a key ruling over female genital mutilation.
Until then the courts held that the women were victims of cultural oppression and that was not grounds for asylum because they were not members of a persecuted group under US law.
“The harm that women suffer is often a harm that is a cultural norm or accepted within a culture or required by the religion and so some adjudicators had taken the position that can’t be persecution as required by refugee law because it’s a cultural or religious requirement,” said Musalo. “Female genital cutting fell in to that category but the board of immigration said it doesn’t matter that it’s a cultural rite—if it’s a violation of human rights and objectively an egregious harm, it’s persecution.”
{snip}
Opposition to admitting battered women has in part come from politicians who argue that it will open the floodgates. Musalo said similar objections were made over the admission of women fleeing female genital mutilation.
{snip}
But, she said, there was not significant increase in claims. More than 29,000 people won asylum in the US last year on a variety of grounds.
Original article
(Posted on July 27, 2009)
Comments
Wait for the good folks to remind us, because of our ignorant right leaning society, domestic women are the ones who suffer from abuse from which they cannot escape.
I hope Obama has a spare room in the white house.
No more asylum for anyone! Just another way for people to lie (oh, I’ve been abused) to get into America and bring their rotten culture here. They need to stay home and clean up their own disgusting countries.
While I sympathize with her situation, this is not our responsibility. And I’m tired of people using “sob stories” to exploit our good will.
Question: Where, when, and with whom did the notion originate that the USA was created to be a haven for all the world’s persecuted peoples? Who came up with that novel notion? Today we are told it constantly as if it were scripture, and no one dares question it. But who says? The Founding Fathers would be utterly astounded by such a misconstrued notion.
Evil. All Third World women now have a “right” to come here with their broods and get welfare. “Compassion” is spelled t-r-e-a-s-o-n.
While domestic abuse is a sad problem and I have suffered abuse at the hands of a Middle Eastern former husband, I think that this is a domestic Mexican problem and not something for the US to deal with.
So in other words, pretty much any woman and presumably their children that do not come from a Western country are welcome here now.
“LR must prove that in Mexico violence against women is pervasive and that there is a societal perception that this is acceptable. Then she has to prove that the Mexican government is unable or unwilling to protect her, and on top of that she has to show that there is nowhere in Mexico where she can be safe from her abusers.”
Thinking that all the various problems faced by all the various peoples of the planet can all be solved by bringing all those people to America is INSANITY.
It is also, for America, national suicide. But then, if you read AR, you already know that.
So when will we have a president who knows that these policies will kill our country?
Then again, maybe the current president does know that…
Of course it will open the floodgates! They are lying when they said it hasn’t. Do we honestly believe this “refugee studies” lawyer is telling us the truth when saying only a “few” will qualify? Guess they all think we are a bunch of stupid Americans, eh?
They (Obama and his lackeys) have opened the floodgates for those infected with AIDS and now “battered women”??? Guess we all know WHY Obama has done this. Most will be blacks and mexicans who will flood our land some more and displacing even more White Americans. Are we going to stand for this or are we going to fight for our very racial survival?
This should be a fun one for authorities to try to prove or disprove. What’s next, asylum for anyone experiencing back and neck pain? If that were true, you’d have more whiplashes per second than a New York City bus in a fender bender.
wait till Obama pushes the immigration bill. there will be no foreigner left behind. hopefully he’ll be as skillful as he’s been so far on the healthcare bill.
The Africans will be flooding in now. African men are known world wide as abusive to their women.
If women who are allegedly victms of domestic abuse are given political asylum, then the numbers of them that are is in the hundreds of millions, and domestic violence can be easily faked by the man and the woman.
Open border/amnesty dunderheads will celebrate this, missing the significance of already having millions of Mexicans in the country who brought their culture with them (and if you think they are in a race to assimilate, I suggest your next vacation be a tour through California’s central valley).
This ruling will have little effect on anything except creating a few hundred more federal jobs; it’s probably easier just to come as an illegal than go through the hassle of proving a need for asylum. In any case, you people in the American states should still fight this; I’ve given up on California.
America is not even a legitimate country anymore - it is the world’s dumping ground! Somebody tear that vile plaque with its insane babble about taking on the earth’s “wretched refuse” off the Statue Of Liberty and toss it into the ocean. What a way to build a “nation.”
Needless to say this will result in hundreds of thousands of more immigrants each year (if not millions), most of whom will go immediately on welfare.
Mexican women have been doing this for years. When they are granted asylum, they the husband wants a visa to come to the USA to be with his wife, and it is granted!
If they are going to let these women in due to persecution from domestic violence, how about letting in all the white farmers in South Africa and Zimbabwe who are tortured, killed and their land taken away. They are certainly persecuted because of their race which qualifies them for immigration under the country’s guidelines.
The concept of ‘political asylum’ was made very clear by the framers of the legislation many years ago.
The Obama administration has moved to grant political asylum to foreign women who suffer severe physical or sexual abuse from which they are unable to escape because it is part of the culture of their own countries.
And this is what?— about 85% of the world’s women?
Which translates to mean we can expect to import 90 million third-world African females over the next year or two… TO BE SUPPORTED THE REST OF THEIR LIVES, BY AMERICAN TAX PAYERS!
How can this idiot be impeached. We have more than enough criminals and parasites, White and Hispanic, in our country. We don’t need any more hanging on our wallets.
HH is correct…that plaque on the Statue Of Liberty by Emma Lazarus, was another scheme to turn White America into a dumping ground of 3rd world parasites. Take down the whole Statue. America was never intended to be a haven for the world’s “poor, and wretched refuse”!
I so much enjoy not only the articles here, but even more the comments. Very good today. :)
My thought is that I read recently that a non-your-average-feminist, Phyllis Chesler, would like the entire female population of Pakistan to come here since they are so poorly treated by their men. To this I would say: I feel sorry for the women, but, no.
Also, aren’t we glad we are importing men like those described in this article by the tens of millons? Hispanic family values! Ole!
On the other hand, the same people tell us that interracial rape is not a hate crime.
Because we know what the results of that would be…
So let’s get this straight:
So when these women come to this country, (presumably without their wife beating husbands), and reproduce, I suppose that their male offspring are going to magically be nothing like their ancestors in their home country…
In other words, this is just another laughable excuse for completely turning America into a third world country. Who could possibly be against such a wonderful thing? Only an evil ‘racist’ white person, presumably.
How long before the white Americans start seeking asylum in Australia or Switzerland, or the like?
OK, I can live with this.
But for every abuse refugee admitted, a Mexican gets sent back.
I think we generously should invite EVERY NON-WHITE woman and their children to come to our country. To live off the generosity of American taxpayers. With conjugal visitation rights, of course, extended to their husbands. I mean we are literally made of money. Why then should anyone object to Obama’s generous use of our tax dollars.
Nor should we object to millions more third-world primitives coming here to bring their problems and lifestyle with them.
— Anonymous wrote:
I heartily agree with Anonymous — except for taking down the statue, which is itself quite innocent of any such nefarious purpose.
Her name is Lady Liberty Enlightening the World, not Lady Immigation Inviting the World!
Lady Liberty was a gift to the USA from the people of France as a monument to republican government and liberty, and as a protest against monarchy (which they had at that time). It was NEVER, NEVER intended to have anything to do with importing the “wretched refuse” from anybody’s “teeming shore”!
The statue got “hijacked” years afterward by Emma Lazarus and her pro-immigration crowd for the glorification of immigration — a purpose which its builders never even imagined. Regrettably, its original purpose/meaning has been all but lost, and it has been turned into a monument to massive, overwhelming immigration — a complete distortion of its original meaning. That falsification has haunted us ever since.
“Cloward-Piven Strategy of Orchestrated Crisis”.
This Marxist strategy was invented in the 1960s by two disciples of the late Saul Alinsky: Professors Cloward and Piven of Columbia University. The strategy was designed to bring about a complete break-down of society by overwhelming it with impossible demands. The whole point being that the government was not expected to function; it was expected to collapse under the intolerable burden of those demands.
It is necessary to bear in mind that Obama, Dohrn, Ayres, Hillary Clinton, Rahm Emanuel, and numerous others now in positions of great power are disciples of the radical organizer Saul Alinsky. In fact, Hillary wrote her master’s thesis on Alinsky!
“Cloward and Piven were inspired by radical Marxist organizer [and Hillary Clinton mentor] Saul Alinsky: “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1989 book, “Rules for Radicals”. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to live up to its own rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist rule book with a socialist one.”
Strategy for forcing political change through orchestrated crisis:
“First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Cloward and Piven, the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
“Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles, Cloward and Piven published an article …in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called “crisis strategy” or “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.”
http://tinyurl.com/bcnzhy http://tinyurl.com/b8wqqb
“It’s difficult to overestimate how much influence [NY’s Mayor] Lindsay had on the 1960s. He was on the cover of Time and Newsweek. He was very handsome, very photogenic—and not very bright. When you run into people from the Lindsay Administration, the conversation can quickly turn to the question of which was the bigger Lindsay disaster: The welfare explosion or the battle of Ocean Hill-Brownsville?
“The first was the welfare explosion in 1965. New York City had a black male unemployment rate of 4 percent. We were in the midst of the greatest economic boom in U.S. history. The city was thriving. Five years later, there were 600,000 more people on welfare. Now, this was a tragedy in many ways, especially for the city’s African-Americans. They were on the up escalator of jobs and participation in the economy, but they were pulled off the up escalator and shunted off into welfare. The effect on the city was twofold: Fiscal calamity and family breakdown. It’s fascinating that this policy was specifically chosen.
“In “Broken Cities: Liberalism’s Urban Legacy” in the March-April 1998 issue of Policy Review: The Journal of American Citizenship, Steven Hayward quotes an infamous New York City welfare commissioner whom The New York Daily News dubs “Come and Get It Ginsburg.” The city actually was advertising for people to come on to welfare! What was the logic? It was the logic of the Kerner Commission Report. It was the sense that African-Americans were so damaged that what they needed was not help making it into society, but a respite from society; in effect, they should be pensioned off.
“People sometimes argue that this welfare explosion was the price of good intentions. Nonsense. The theorists behind this movement are two people named Piven and Cloward, who are still alive. It’s difficult to imagine how they get through the day knowing what they did. One’s at Columbia University, and other is at City University of New York. Their logic is that, if you expanded the welfare role sufficiently, you would bankrupt the city, force a political crisis, and set people at each other’s throats. The idea was that New York was at a median point, so if New York exploded like this, then the rest of the country would have to respond. Well, they succeeded in part. People were at each other’s throats, and the city did go bankrupt. ” http://www.3daudioinc.com/3db/showthread.php?p=193329
When aliens swarm a country and are encouraged to place their culture above that of the host country’s (multiculturalism and diversity) those aliens have no loyalty towards the host country. Therefore why should the legitimate citizens of the host country accept the hoards of alien swarms? Divide and conquer is a stratagem as old as history and Washington is pushing it with a vengeance. How much longer will we tolerate politicians who are engaged in destroying this nation? We are NOT powerless in our ability to stop them…
30 ghw: The Reds have been deliberately moving us toward a crisis, on the assumption that in the resulting dust up, they and their allies will prevail. I’m sure that the Reds in the Weimar Republic thought the same. As it now stands, the only real weapon they have against those of us unconvinced of the value of multi-culturalism, is to threaten our jobs. If the economy collapses, what weapon will they use against the American people? Even White liberals actually agree with us on race, as shown by their choices of neighborhoods to live in and schools for their children. What will Mr Sensitive and Compassionate do when he loses his job, join a Jamaican street gang?
— Schoolteacher wrote at 1:42 PM on July 31:
They may or may not be right, I don’t know. But both sides are basing their hopes on the assumption that they will win.
I’m not so sure. History is full of surprises. I wouldn’t take anything for granted.
33 Anon: All over the world, all my life, people have been killing each other over the sorts of things that have become policy in this country. The Left must know that, so why do they continue to provoke us? The only thing that keeps this country from chaos is its prosperity, which won’t last because we produce so little wealth anymore. The Left isn’t stupid, so they know that as well. We are not privy to the inner thoughts of the people who really rule this country, so we can only guess at how they figure things will play out, look at historical precedent, and try to prepare ourselves accordingly.
On further thought, I’d have to say that my Weimar Republic analogy misses the mark, because there is no organized Right in this country. Can we claim a single Senator or Governor as one of our own? So we still must prepare for the future, knowing that there is no Great Man, no Party to lead us.
Re #34: A friend has told me that my words ” Great Man” and “Party” appear to be implied praise of Hitler and the Nazi Party. They are not, I intended generic, not specific references.
