…refugee eligibility has sometimes been determined based on religion/ethnicity, most famously in the Save Soviet Jews law of the early 1970s that went on well after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is not exactly obscure history, since a noteworthy fraction of the current punditariat (the Gessen siblings, Eugene Volokh, etc.) and media moguls (Sergey Brin of Google) got into America under this special privilege for Soviet Jews.
…You didn’t have to be religiously Jewish, just ethnically Jewish.
I knew a Russian lady back in the post-Soviet Yeltsin era who was one of the first of the big wave of Slavic blondes to wash up in the U.S. The INS was threatening to kick her out, so her latest strategy to stay in the U.S.A. was to gather genealogical documents from Russia that would prove, if you looked at them from just the right angle, that she was Jewish and thus qualified for refugee status under the Jackson-Vanik agreement and Lautenberg Amendment. I could never keep straight in my head her complicated genealogical theory of why she was, legally, Jewish — it was like one of those theories that the King of England would commission during the Hundred Years War about why he was also the rightful King of France.
Nor could I understand why being Jewish in Yeltsin’s mid-1990s Russia entitled you to refugee status in America. Practically every time I opened the newspaper in the mid-1990s there was an interview with a Jewish economist from Harvard or MIT about how the Yeltsin government was implementing all the advanced ideas they had told them about.
COMMENTS TO STEVE SAILER:
* Whenever a politician puts the interests of Americans over foreigners it is described as being “un-American”. Whenever a politician puts foreign interests over American interests it is described as being “American”.
* Maybe even less obscure than Jackson-Vanik, does Obama think it would have been un-American to prioritize Jewish refugees during the Holocaust?
* I actually believed the USSR had a right to restrict emigration of highly educated people. Since the USSR was the supposed workers’ paradise and those lucky few received a free education at the expense of their fellow workers, it made sense to not allow someone to leave and take their skills to another nation. It’s one reason I really don’t want Uncle Sam paying for our health care or education. It might make him think we are indebted to him too.
* Current narrative as heard on influential Diane Rehm show this morning: The Syrian refugees America is bring in are mostly women and minors, only 2% are “war age males” or some term like that.
Steve, your country needs you to remind them that the last attack conducted on our soil was carried out by two young men who arrived as minors under refugee status. Steve, please get the refugee/minor status of the Boston Bombers back out of the memory hole and into our short term media memory.
* Was Hussein Obama violently bullied as a child by White Christian boys in Indonesia and Hawaii? That would explain why he hates White Christians so much.
It was his dead beat Black Muslim father who abandoned him as a child, yet he will go all out to defend Islam and Blackness.
Can you imagine how even more hatred Hussein would have in his heart for White Christians if his dead beat father belonged to that demographic and it was his mother who was the Black Muslim Kenyan who had to raise him all by herself.
It is weird that someone can come out of a White woman’s vagina and still have an extreme hatred for White people even though it was his White family members who fed him, clothed him, and put a roof over his head when he was growing up. Hussein is such an ungrateful bastard. His Black family members never clothed him, fed him, and put a roof over his head.
* The whole point of refugee/asylum status is for people who are persecuted by religion, ethnicity, or political opinion. Christians are explicitly persecuted as a group in the middle east, so giving Middle Eastern Christians special refugee/asylum status makes sense and fits the basic purpose of refugee/asylum status.
As a counter example, Christians don’t face religious persecution in South America so it wouldn’t make sense to give South American Christians special refugee status on religious grounds.
* Netanyahu flew to Moscow to see Putin a few weeks ago to tell him not to go into Syria, but then came out of the meeting a lot quieter than he went in. Putin and Netanyahu seem like they could work out a modus vivendi.
* Rabbi Kahane (of the banned Kach party) used to drive secular, atheist Israelis nuts when he made the same point.
As Kahane brutally pointed out, it is easy to worship secular democracy, freedom of religion, gay pride parades, and anti-racism when you have a natural majority, but what do you do when the time comes that you are being outbred/replaced by a rapidly growing minority? Do you keep worshipping “Democracy” and be inevitably replaced? Is Western liberalism (in Israel AND Europe) a suicide cult? Or do you get “racist” and survive?
* You can discuss the merits that Soviet-Jewish immigration has brought America — that’s more of a matter of opinion. (I would argue that there’s been a *huge* net plus, despite the handful of annoying characters in the NYC media world. Sergey Brin is the extreme example you mention, but the tech boom is littered with Soviet Jews… that’s why it also happened the same time in Tel Aviv, as in the US. Just one example.)
But to say that Jews weren’t heavily discriminated against in the USSR is complete nonsense. And you know it’s disingenuous — that’s why the best you can mention as to why Jews don’t deserve refugee status in the US is because AMERICAN Jewish economists consulted Russia in the MID-90s, a different people in a different time!? What does that have to do with Soviet Jews in the 70s in 80s? PS – the vast majority left before 1991.
I’d prefer you flat out said that “I don’t like Jews, and I don’t want them in my country.” Or, “I don’t believe in America taking in ANY refugees, no matter what.” Just don’t retcon history.
* Please stop being a racist. Please stop expecting whites, and only whites, to lower their standard of living to help poor non-whites. Please stop bothering whites, and only whites, about this subject. Please stop being content with only whites giving up their incomes and living spaces to poor non-whites. Stop being so racist. Expect better of non-whites.
Whites have done far more for poor non-whites than non-whites have for other poor, non-white groups. Please stop being racist and ignoring the Chinese, the Indians, the Koreans, the Japanese, the southeast Asians, the central Asians, the south Asians, the west Asians, the north Africans, the sub-Saharan Africans, the Mexicans, the central Americans, and the South Americans, and the Israelis, all of whom do little or nothing to help.
It’s racist to expect whites, and only whites, to give over their territories and their incomes to help poor non-whites. It’s racist to single out whites, who have done so much, and to ignore the non-white groups who do nothing.
It’s also the behavior of a con artist grifter scumbag, the sort of person who scams little old grannies out of their social security checks.
Please stop being so racist and such a lowlife. Please stop insisting on white suicide as some monstrous form of charity.
* Steve doesn’t understand why being Jewish in 1990s Soviet Union made you qualify as a refugee.
Its because a stream of 1980′s movies such as Clint Eastwood’s Foxfire established a narrative that Jews living in the Soviet Union were secretly oppressed anti-communists. A whopper to be sure, but Americans and Soviets didn’t have much contact in those days.
