US sends Russian political asylum seekers back to Russia

[ionelv]

It appears that US extradited Russian draft dodgers and asylum seekers to Egypt which immediately sent them on to Russia to be arrested on the spot. How far you have come, America, the land of broken promises:

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, the tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

If Trump were president in 1987, my dad would have been delivered back to communist Romania on the spot despite his legitimate claim for political asylum. The irony is that dad would have loved Trump and his humanoid hemorrhoids.

PS: The practice of sending back Russian draft dodgers started in 2023 or earlier, so it is not just the GOP that is reneging on its promises to the world’s downtrodden.

Comments

[ioplokon]

It's not refoulement if there's a layover!

And yeah, I am just forever angry and bitter about how fucking shitty Biden was on asylum & for nothing (a guy up here told me Biden had "open borders" just the other day). Like, Andry was put in detention during Biden's term before Trump kidnapped him to El Salvador.

[ionelv]

Biden was just as shitty on human rights violations for non-citizens as Trump or Obama. Some might recall that executions by drone, including US citizens (guilty or as collateral damage), and caging immigrants started under Obama.

[ioplokon]

I call it "vice signalling" when the Dems do it. They are cruel to immigrants and refugees in order to show they are Serious People & not "soft" or naive. It's really horrible. And not much better elsewhere. The reason Europe has been silent on all the El Salvador shit is because they want to do the same thing. I think the UK worked out the economics of how many people they'd need to deport for these kinds of schemes to be viable and it was astronomical. The arithmetic of hell.

[ionelv]

I consider the UK and Australia the closest to US on immigration matters (e.g the UK Rwanda immigration scheme or Australia's offshore detentions centers). The sad part is that the convergence of "tough on immigration" schemes from both right and centre left all over the West has more to do with the centre left's fear of getting pummeled at the ballot box on such sensitive issues after the right blew out of proportion immigration issues for decades now. It baffles me that right-leaning people in the West are so blind and don't see that their loss of job security has more to do with union busting, off-shoring and free trade and less with actual immigration.

[ioplokon]

At this point, I think Americans identify as consumers first, workers second...

The centre left tacking right on immigration is so frustrating because there is zero electoral payoff. Sentiment on immigration is primarily influenced by the media and secondarily influenced BY POLICY. That is to say, stricter immigration policies tend to make people more anti-immigration. So if you're just chasing polls, it is a mise-en-abime. And people just have received ideas about what the parties are good at. We are finally breaking the illusion that right wingers are good at the economy, but the perception that they are more authoritarian about immigration is just correct & no one will vote for the diet version.

Not that there are no challenges in arguing for a more humane or even a functional immigration system. People tend to have this unbridgeable divide where if you describe a specific immigrant or refugee's situation, they'll say "Yes, that is exactly the kind of person we want in this country!" but then if you try to make a policy to do it they start freaking out about The Hordes. This is where we end up back with media ecosystem problems...

[ionelv]

I had to look up mise-en-abyme which is neat little concept and I can think of a few more phenomena that captures this chase for the illusive centre: FUD as the stick that hurries it along, normalizing abhorrent positions by shifting the Overton window and dreaming up illusory short term gains for long term losses in the public discourse. The whole right vs left shift has been happening for a very long time (and is more pronounced in the Anglo-sphere with US being the absolute leader as it has drummed up its up-by-bootstrap libertarian mythology and inched closer and closer to an imperial and now authoritarian presidency).