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The Facts of Human Rights Violations of Refugees and Immigrants in the United States

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The Facts of Human Rights Violations of Refugees and Immigrants in the United States

March 2023

Table of contents

introduction

1. The United States has committed many vicious violations of the rights of immigrants of all races

2. The human rights violations against refugees and migrants in the United States today have not changed

3. Multiple factors in the United States have led to the accumulation of refugees and immigrants

4. The United States is the main driver of the global refugee and immigration crisis

conclusion

introduction

America is a country of immigrants. Immigrants from all over the world have been coming to the United States since colonial times. However, the history of the United States‘ treatment of immigrants is full of inhuman tragedies of discrimination, exclusion, arrest, detention, and deportation. Violations of the human rights of immigrants abound and have never stopped. In recent years, the U.S. government has created one after another humanitarian disasters targeting refugees and immigrants to the United States. This report truthfully records the misdeeds of the United States on the issue of refugees and immigrants from multiple angles of history and reality, as well as domestic and international. With lies and double standards.

1. The United States has committed many vicious violations of the rights of immigrants of all races

◆At the beginning of the founding of the United States, white Americans, mainly Anglo-Saxon Protestants, were suspicious of immigrants and tried to restrict or assimilate them. A US president once said bluntly that there is no need to encourage other immigrants except for useful skilled workers and some specific and specialized people. Fearing that the French Revolution would cause riots in the United States, the U.S. government enacted laws such as the Naturalization Act, the Alien Act, the Hostile Alien Act, and the Alien Rebellion Act in 1798 to make it more difficult for immigrants to become naturalized as U.S. citizens. And authorize the president to imprison and deport dangerous immigrants or immigrants from hostile countries. It is worth pointing out that the Hostile Aliens Act is still in effect today.

◆Blacks are one of the earliest immigrant groups in the United States. Blacks immigrated to the United States not voluntarily, but were forced to immigrate. After arriving in the United States, they were subjected to inhuman abuse and no human rights at all. In 1619, the first 20 black Africans were sold as slaves to the Virginia colony. Subsequently, the colonies quickly passed legislation to treat black slaves as “permanent property”, and the children of black slaves automatically became slaves. Since then, racist ideas and systems that discriminate against blacks have taken root in the United States. To justify the enslavement of blacks, whites established an oppressive hierarchy of races based on skin color. The United States “Declaration of Independence” declared that “all men are created equal”, but the original constitution did not recognize the citizenship rights of blacks, and formulated the “three-fifths clause”, that is, the actual population of black slaves was multiplied by five when allocating seats in the House of Representatives three thirds. The history of white people’s enslavement of black people is still causing serious harm to black descendants, making it difficult for them to effectively protect their rights to life, development and political rights.

◆Irish immigrants were severely discriminated against and suppressed in the early days of the founding of the United States. From the 1830s to the 1860s, a large number of Catholic Irish immigrated to the United States. There is a strong anti-Irish immigrant movement in the United States, stigmatizing Irish immigrants and labeling them as lazy, inferior, violent, and dangerous. A large number of early American nativist and xenophobic organizations and political parties were established at this time. In the 1850s, the “American Party” (also known as the “Know Nothing Party”) with anti-Irish immigration as its main platform produced 7 governors, 8 senators and 104 representatives. New York and Massachusetts enacted legislation to deport and deport Irish immigrants. Xenophobes also resorted to violence, attacking Irish immigrants and burning down immigrant churches. Anti-Irish immigrant riots broke out in Philadelphia in 1844, killing at least 20 people. Irish immigrants were regarded as the same kind as blacks, and they were not accepted by white Americans until the 20th century, becoming long-term victims of racial discrimination in the United States.

◆The anti-Chinese movement is the most notorious atrocity of discrimination and exclusion of immigrants in American history. Beginning in the mid-19th century, a large number of Chinese laborers were trafficked to the United States by Americans as coolies, and by 1880 the total number had exceeded 100,000. The Chinese workers undertook the most arduous task in the construction of the Central Pacific Railway in the United States, with thousands of deaths. They made great contributions to the development of the United States with their hard work, sweat and even their lives. However, affected by the serious racist atmosphere in the United States, the Chinese workers did not receive the respect and kindness they deserved. With the completion of the relevant railway project, the ungrateful side of the United States, which crossed the river and demolished bridges, was quickly revealed. In 1875, the U.S. Congress passed the Page Act, restricting the entry of Chinese workers and women into the United States. In 1882, the “Chinese Exclusion Act” was further formulated to completely prevent immigrants from China and prohibit Chinese immigrants already in the United States from obtaining American citizenship. This is the first and only law in the United States that prohibits all members of a specific ethnic group from immigrating to the United States on the grounds of race and nationality. It was not officially repealed until 1943. In order to resist Chinese immigrants, the U.S. Immigration Service established an immigration detention center on Angel Island in San Francisco in 1910, and it was not closed until 1940. Not only that, Chinese immigrants at that time were also severely violently attacked. On October 24, 1871, 19 Chinese immigrants were killed by hundreds of whites in the Negro Lane area of ​​Los Angeles. In 1877, the Chinese houses on Negro Lane were set on fire by white people. In 1876 and 1877, there were two successive riots in the United States where white racists attacked Chinatown in San Francisco. On September 2, 1885, white miners rioted in the Stone Springs mining area in Wyoming, destroying the Chinese workers’ residential village and killing at least 28 Chinese immigrants.

◆Japanese immigrants were once discriminated against and excluded by the United States. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, although Japan experienced the Meiji Restoration and broke away from Asia and entered Europe, Japanese immigrants were still discriminated against and rejected by the United States because of their skin color and culture, which were very different from those of the United States. Anti-Japanese sentiment was particularly high on the West Coast of the United States. The city of San Francisco implements the “Segregation of Japanese Schoolchildren” policy, which prohibits children of Japanese descent from entering public schools. In 1907, the United States and Japan reached a so-called “gentlemen’s agreement”, that is, the United States restricted the entry of Japanese immigrants, and Japan voluntarily prohibited immigrants from going to the United States. In 1913, the California state government enacted the Alien Land Act, which prohibited Asian immigrants, including Japanese, from owning land. In 1917, the U.S. Congress enacted the Asian Restricted Area Act, which prohibited most Asians from entering the United States as immigrants. After the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, the Japanese were completely prohibited from immigrating to the United States. After the Pearl Harbor incident broke out in 1941, 120,000 Japanese immigrants and their descendants were forcibly moved from the west coast to internment camps in the interior by the US government. They had to pass a loyalty review to completely remove the suspicion of enemy aliens. The U.S. government did not formally apologize for the incident until 1988.

◆White immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe were once strongly excluded by the United States. Immigrants from Italy, Poland, Greece, Russia and other countries were the main body of American immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1911, the U.S. Congress issued the “Dillingham Commission Report”, claiming that immigrants from southeastern Europe had made limited contributions to the United States, but instead damaged America’s unique race, culture, and system. To limit immigration, the report recommends cultural tests and a national quota system for immigrants. Racists try to use the theory of evolution to prove that immigrants from southeastern Europe belong to the “inferior” non-white race, which will pollute the Anglo-Saxon white blood in the United States. The xenophobicists launched the “Americanization Movement”, trying to deprive the immigrants of Southeast Europe of their language and culture, and force them to be completely “Americanized”. Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company, required his company’s immigrant workers to attend what he called “melting pot school.” White supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan have recruited millions of members to intimidate and attack immigrants from southeastern Europe across the United States. The Russian October Revolution broke out in 1917, causing the first round of “Red Scare” in the United States. The U.S. government determined that there were communists among the southeastern European immigrants, and used it to arrest and deport a large number of southeastern European immigrants.

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◆ Fear of immigration eventually led to race-based immigration quotas. Following the “Chinese Exclusion Act”, the US government enacted a series of laws restricting immigration. In 1924, Congress finally passed the Immigration Act of 1924. The law stipulates that the annual number of immigrants from each country to the United States shall not exceed 2% of the number of immigrants living in the United States in that country at the time of the 1890 census. Since Americans were dominated by immigrants from Northwest Europe before 1890, the Act effectively prohibited Asian immigration and restricted Southeastern European immigration. The distribution of immigration quotas in various countries is actually based on the skin color, race and religious beliefs of immigrants. The main purpose is to ensure that the majority of Americans are Anglo-Saxon Protestants. It was not until the passage of the “Immigration Act of 1965” that restrictions on the ethnic origin of immigrants were officially abolished, and immigrants from all countries obtained relatively equal rights to enter the United States.

◆Since the 1920s, Hispanic immigrants, especially Mexican immigrants, have become the most excluded objects in the United States. In 1924, the United States established the Border Patrol, and the vast majority of immigrants apprehended by the United States each year since then have been Mexican immigrants. In 1929, the United States made illegal entry a felony in an attempt to prevent Mexican immigrants from entering the country. During the Great Depression, tens of thousands of Mexicans were deported from the United States. After the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965, Mexico became the largest source of immigrants to the United States, and arrests and deportations of Mexican immigrants often accounted for 90% of the total. In the late 1970s, Mexican immigrant arrests approached 800,000 a year, rising to 1.5 million by the late 1990s. The influx of Mexican immigrants has once again fueled strong xenophobia in the United States. Huntington, an American political scientist, pointed out in the book “Who We Are” that Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants “may eventually turn the United States into a country with two major races, two languages ​​and two cultures.” Hispanic immigrants are often targeted by white supremacists in the United States. In 2019, a man who believed in white supremacism drove thousands of kilometers to El Paso in the west of the state because he hated the continuous “invasion” of Hispanics in Texas, and shot and killed 23 people in a Walmart supermarket. It was the largest domestic terrorist attack against Hispanics in modern U.S. history.

◆After the “9·11” incident, Muslim immigrants became the focus of monitoring and exclusion in the United States. Shortly after the “9.11” incident, more than 1,200 people were arrested and detained by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, most of whom were Arabs and Muslims. Many have been held for months without charge and denied access to lawyers and family members. Most ended up being deported for minor immigration violations. More than 80,000 adult males from 25 Islamic countries were required by the U.S. government to have their fingerprints and photos taken, 13,000 people entered deportation procedures, and 2,870 were detained. The “Patriot Act” enacted by the United States after the “9.11” incident has greatly expanded government power, enabling the US government to monitor and deport foreigners suspected of being related to terrorism at will, and Muslims have become the main target group. The “9.11” incident had a strong impact on American society and made “Islamophobia” penetrate into the American political arena. In 2017, the U.S. government issued the “Muslim Ban”, requiring citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen to be prohibited from entering the United States for at least 90 days.

2. The human rights violations against refugees and migrants in the United States today have not changed

◆In the 21st century, successive US governments have increasingly restricted immigration and treated immigrants harshly and inhumanely. The arrest, detention, deportation and deportation of immigrants are carried out on a large scale every year. In 2019, the U.S. government arrested 850,000 immigrants, which will rise to more than 1.7 million in 2021, the highest since 1986. The number of immigrants in detention is growing rapidly. In August 2022, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection detained more than 203,000 illegal immigrants from Mexico. So far, in fiscal year 2022, a total of more than 2.3 million refugee immigrants were arrested at the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2013, more than 430,000 immigrants were deported by the United States, reaching a record high. In 2019, there were still 360,000 immigrants, and more than 100,000 immigrants were deported every year. During mass arrests, detentions, expulsions, and repatriations, the human rights of immigrants have been violated, and humanitarian disasters have occurred frequently. In September 2021, more than 15,000 refugees from Haiti gathered in the border town of Del Rio, Texas, waiting for the slim chance of entering the United States. U.S. border law enforcement brutally treated the refugees, with patrols on horseback and whip-wielding charges into the crowd, driving them into the river. CNN commented that this scene is reminiscent of the dark age in American history when slave patrols were used to control black slaves. On October 25, 2021, the United Nations Human Rights Council condemned the United States for violating international law by systematically deporting Haitian refugees and migrants on a large scale without assessing their individual status.

◆The “immigrant truck” tragedy reflects the rampant human smuggling and trafficking in the United States. On June 27, 2022, a trailer truck secretly carrying illegal immigrants was found on the outskirts of San Antonio, Texas. The truck came from Laredo, a Texas border city 150 miles away. Local human smugglers planned to use the truck to drive illegal immigrants through San Antonio ships to the US mainland. The truck was abandoned on the side of the road due to mechanical failure. When it was found, there was no water and no air-conditioning in the cabin, and there were nearly 100 people crowded in it. As the local temperature reached a maximum of 38 degrees Celsius, 53 people died of the sweltering heat. It was the deadliest immigrant death in the United States to date. Due to long-term ineffective law enforcement and absence of justice, human trafficking and forced labor have become increasingly rampant in the United States. In recent years, thousands of human smuggling and trafficking cases have occurred every year, and tragedies similar to “immigration trucks” have occurred frequently. 557 illegal immigrants died.

◆After the outbreak of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, the US government used the epidemic as an excuse to expel illegal immigrants on a large scale. In 2020, the U.S. government invoked Title 42 of the U.S. Code to prohibit the entry of immigrants under the pretext of preventing the spread of the epidemic. Scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention believe that this approach lacks public health justification and will instead increase the possibility of the epidemic spreading. The U.S. government has carried out more than 1.8 million deportations, deporting at least 215,000 parents and children, including 16,000 unaccompanied children. Immigrants who were temporarily not deported were sent to detention centers, where they continued to suffer inhumane treatment.

◆The United States has set up the world‘s largest immigration detention system. There are currently more than 200 detention facilities in border states. In order to save costs, the U.S. government often hands over the construction and operation of immigration detention camps to private companies, forming de facto private prisons. Conditions in the camps are harsh and can easily lead to physical and mental illness or death. In July 2019, after visiting several border patrol stations on the U.S.-Mexico border, U.S. Democratic Congressman Ocasio-Cortez said that she saw with her own eyes that women who were detained had no water to drink, and the detention managers gave them to drink. Water in toilets, Border Patrol stations treating immigrants like animals constitutes systemic abuse. CNN reported that a total of 21 people died in US immigration detention centers in fiscal year 2020, more than double the number of deaths in fiscal year 2019 and the highest number of deaths since 2005. Of the more than 1.7 million immigrants detained in the United States in fiscal year 2021, as many as 80 percent were held in private detention facilities, including 45,000 children. The El Paso Times reported on June 25, 2021 that the problem of private contractors has exacerbated the horrific chaos at the Fort Bliss holding site in the United States, where nearly 5,000 children, and about 1,500 children are being held in “livestock paddocks.” In such a crowded and poor environment, it has brought them serious physical and mental trauma.

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◆U.S. immigration policy has caused serious humanitarian disasters to immigrants. In order to prevent illegal immigrants from entering the country, the U.S. government has implemented a “zero tolerance” policy for illegal immigrants since April 2018, forcibly separating them from their underage children and detaining them under very harsh conditions. Footage provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows some of the children being held in cages, covered only with thin blankets. On June 18, 2018, the then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Hussein stated at a meeting of the Human Rights Council that separating immigrant children from their parents constituted “government-sanctioned child abuse”. UN human rights officials also called on the United States, as the only country in the world that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to join the Convention as soon as possible and respect all children’s rights. Hundreds of thousands of people in 50 states of the United States held demonstrations with the theme of “Family Should Be Together” to protest against the “zero tolerance” immigration policy that resulted in the separation of at least 2,300 children from their families.

◆U.S. law enforcement never stopped mistreating immigrant children. In 2019, thousands of children were still separated from their parents, and 20% of them were under 5 years old. After the outbreak of COVID-19, the U.S. government enforced Title 42 of the U.S. Code, exacerbating the humanitarian disaster of children being separated from their parents. CNN reported on April 23, 2021 that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection is also detaining more than 5,000 unaccompanied immigrant children, many of whom have been detained for longer than the legal time limit. Statistics show that among the 266,000 immigrant children detained by the US government in recent years, more than 25,000 have been detained for more than 100 days, nearly 1,000 have spent more than a year in detention camps, and many have been detained for more than five years. . The New York Times reported on June 26, 2019 that when an inspection team consisting of lawyers, doctors, and journalists inspected the detention center at the Clint Border Shelter in Texas, they found that children were kept in a prison-like environment, hundreds of children were held in a cell with little adult supervision, in conditions that members likened to a “torture facility”. The United Nations website reported on July 8, 2019 that Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, was deeply shocked by the dire conditions of the US detention centers, which were overcrowded, lack of medical care and food, and pointed out that the detention of immigrant children may constitute a crime prohibited by international law. Cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. The British “Guardian” website reported on October 11, 2021 that between 2016 and 2021, there have been more than 160 cases of abuse of asylum seekers, including children, by US border law enforcement agents, involving US Customs and Border Protection, Border Patrols and other major law enforcement agencies.

◆ Even if illegal immigrants escape detention and deportation, it is difficult for them to be treated equally by American society, and they may even become victims of criminal activities. According to the judgment of the U.S. Supreme Court, illegal immigrants enjoy the equal protection rights stipulated in the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But in fact, illegal immigrants are often subject to legal and institutional discrimination, and it is difficult for them to enjoy basic rights and benefits. The 1996 “Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act” canceled most of the public relief that illegal immigrants should have enjoyed, and even prohibited the descendants of illegal immigrants born in the United States from automatically obtaining citizenship and enjoying public benefits. Many illegal immigrants have become victims of human trafficking and forced labor in the United States. The Associated Press reported on December 10, 2021 that illegal immigrants who smuggled into the United States for many years were forced to work on farms for a long time, living in dirty and crowded trailers, lacking food and clean drinking water, and being tortured. Threats of violence by regulators. The workers’ identity papers were withheld and they were unable to seek help to flee the predicament. The U.S. Department of Justice website reported on November 22, 2021, that an indictment in a human trafficking case recorded that dozens of workers from Mexico and Central America were trafficked to farms in Georgia, U.S., where they were illegally imprisoned and forced to work under harsh conditions. Become a victim of “modern slavery” in the United States. After they were lured into the farm by the promise of high salaries, they were forced to dig onions with bare hands under the supervision of gunmen. They were only paid 20 cents for each bucket of onions dug. At least two of them died and one was sexually assaulted multiple times.

◆To this day, serious discrimination against immigrants and their descendants still exists in American society, and the problem of “Asian hatred” has become particularly prominent in recent years. According to the “StopAAPIHate” 2022 survey, the organization has reported 11,467 incidents of hatred against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (Asian American Pacific Islander, AAPI) in the past two years, only 49% of AAPI citizens feel it is safe to go out, and as many as 65% are concerned about the safety of family members and elders. Among the AAPI citizens who encountered hate incidents, as many as 72% believed that racial discrimination was their biggest source of stress, even surpassing their worries about physical health during the new crown epidemic.

3. Multiple factors in the United States have led to the accumulation of refugees and immigrants

◆The deep-rooted racial discrimination in the United States is an important reason for the immigration problem in the United States. Racism pervades US immigration policy and attitudes towards immigrants. The United States was originally a country dominated by Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and the culture of this group is still regarded as the core of American national identity. Non-Anglo-Saxon Protestant immigrants were often seen as an “inferior” race. With the influx of Hispanic and Asian immigrants, the United States has become more racially and culturally diverse. In recent years, 40% of the new population in the United States has come from immigrants. Immigrants will contribute more and more to U.S. population growth as the white population ages. Demographic changes have left many whites deeply concerned about their status, which in turn has led whites to support conservative political positions more strongly, regardless of political affiliation. According to the survey, 56% of American voters believe that the United States is still a racist society, and 70% of blacks believe that more than half of whites believe in white supremacy.

◆Political polarization in the United States has led to worsening immigration issues. In recent decades, the immigration issue has increasingly been closely tied to issues such as economy, race, ideology, and cultural values. The Democratic and Republican parties have attacked each other, and it is difficult to reach a compromise. The Democratic Party accused the Republican Party of embracing nativism and white supremacy for the sake of white votes, and inciting words and deeds of xenophobia and racial discrimination. Republicans have accused Democrats of increasing minority votes and congressional seats by accepting immigrants. Due to partisanship, the U.S. Congress has failed to pass a substantial immigration reform bill since it passed the comprehensive Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986. Although both the Democrats and the Republicans had put forward their own immigration reform proposals, they quickly entered a dead end.

◆Since the United States entered the mid-term election cycle in 2022, the two parties have used refugees and immigrants as political chips. Illegal immigration has skyrocketed. Some Republican governors have successively used passenger cars and chartered planes to transfer refugees and immigrants from the state to cities controlled by the Democratic Party in an attempt to embarrass the government. In September 2022, the Republican governor of Florida sent a plane to transport 50 refugees from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, and the Republican governor of Texas sent more than 100 Latin American refugees directly to the Vice President’s residence by bus. outside. These refugees were promised good jobs and salaries before they were transferred, but when they arrived at the destination, they found that the local area still could not properly resettle them.

◆Conservative politicians and media in the United States play up the threat of immigration and incite anti-immigrant sentiment. U.S. extreme right-wing forces and conservative media concocted the so-called “Great Replacement Theory,” claiming that white Americans are being intentionally replaced by immigrants and ethnic minorities. This extreme concept has triggered many terrorist incidents against immigrants and ethnic minorities in the United States. The 2019 El Paso Walmart shooting was the worst anti-immigration incident that resulted from this belief. Since 2018, white supremacists are the most deadly extremist violent group in the United States. In recent years, the Republican Party has played the immigration threat card in the election campaign, successfully arousing conservatives’ attention to the immigration issue, and launched a large number of extreme anti-immigration measures, resulting in serious violations of the human rights of immigrants. Deterred by the opposition of conservatives, and in order to win over white votes, the Democratic government dare not easily relax the deportation and detention of immigrants, which has caused humanitarian disasters of immigrants to continue to be staged on a large scale in the United States. Conservative politicians and media in the United States also exaggerate that immigration squeezes out the employment opportunities of low-skilled workers in the United States, lowers their wages, squeezes out their welfare resources, and increases local government financial expenditures in education, medical care, relief, etc., and regards immigration as a contradiction in the United States. However, they ignore the long-term and overall positive effects of immigration on the U.S. economy, including sending a large number of laborers, taking over low-end jobs that Americans are unwilling to do, and slowing down the aging of the population.

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4. The United States is the main driver of the global refugee and immigration crisis

◆The United States has always pursued a policy of hegemonism and militarism. In the 240-year history of the founding of the country, only 16 years have not fought a war. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said frankly: “The United States can be called the most warlike country in the history of the world.” The warlike actions of the United States have triggered many refugee flows. Since 2001 alone, the US invaded other countries and caused more than 800,000 deaths, and the victim countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria alone produced more than 20 million refugees. A study by Brown University’s “Cost of War” project found that since 2001, the United States has spent US$6.4 trillion on military operations in 85 countries around the world in the name of “anti-terrorism”, directly resulting in the death of at least 929,000 civilians and the displacement of 38 million people.

◆In Asia, the involvement of the United States in the Korean War resulted in the death of more than 3 million civilians and about 3 million refugees. Official data from South Korea alone shows that there are more than 132,000 Koreans registered as separated family members. Many elderly people lament, “I’m afraid I won’t be able to see my relatives in North Korea in this life.” In the 1970s, the United States failed in the Vietnam War and retreated hastily from Saigon, resulting in countless refugees fleeing Vietnam.

◆In the Middle East, in 2003, without the authorization of the UN Security Council and with strong opposition from the international community, the United States launched the Iraq war on fabricated grounds. According to the Global Statistics Database, from 2003 to 2021, about 209,000 Iraqi civilians died in wars and violent conflicts, and about 9.2 million Iraqis became refugees or were forced to leave their homeland. The United States has been deeply involved in the Syrian war and the Libyan internal conflict by supporting multiple agents, which has caused local wars and conflicts to be delayed until now, and political reconciliation and social stability are nowhere in sight. According to data released by the United Nations, the military intervention of the United States has caused at least 350,000 lives in Syria, more than 12 million people have been displaced, and 14 million civilians are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. The Syrian refugee problem has been called “the greatest refugee crisis of our time” by the United Nations. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, the nearly 20-year war in Afghanistan has caused 2.6 million Afghans to flee abroad and 3.5 million people to be displaced.

◆In Europe, in the 1990s, the United States’ intervention in Yugoslavia directly intensified the country’s ethnic conflicts. The wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo resulted in nearly 300,000 deaths and nearly 3 million refugees. In March 1999, under the banner of “avoiding humanitarian disasters”, the NATO troops headed by the United States openly bypassed the UN Security Council and bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days, killing more than 2,000 innocent civilians and injuring more than 6,000. , nearly 1 million people were displaced.

◆The global military intervention of the United States has led the refugee crisis to Europe. Europe believes that it is the United States that interfered in the internal affairs of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and other countries and launched wars that caused a large number of refugees, but the main destination of these refugees was Europe rather than the United States. After the Syrian refugee crisis, most refugees flocked to Europe, triggering anti-immigration sentiment and right-wing populist movements in Europe. The U.S. Republican government not only strongly opposes the admission of Syrian refugees, but also lowered the U.S. intake of refugees to the lowest level in 40 years, and directly banned refugees from seven Islamic countries from entering the United States. The Democratic government has urged the European Union to take in some Afghan refugees, alarming the European Union, fearing that another large influx of Muslim refugees will further fuel a wave of right-wing populism. French President Macron said bluntly that Europe cannot alone bear the consequences of the situation in Afghanistan.

◆In Latin America, the United States has been interfering in the internal affairs of Latin American countries for a long time, resulting in an extremely unstable situation in the region and backward economic development, causing a large number of refugees and immigrants to seek asylum and make a living in the United States. In order to deal with Latin American immigrants, the United States has used both soft and hard tactics, either forcefully expelling and repatriating Latin American refugees, or allowing potential refugees to stay in their own countries for development. The U.S. government’s tough deportation and repatriation of Latin American immigrants has further created turmoil, violent crimes and humanitarian disasters in the region. Democratic Congressman Ocasio-Cortez criticized: “The United States has been responsible for the instability of regime change in Latin America for decades. We can’t set fire to someone’s house and then blame They fled.”

◆There are frequent conflicts between the United States and Latin American countries on the issue of immigration. Refugees deported by the United States are stranded in Mexico, exceeding Mexico’s ability to receive and process them, leading to the deterioration of local social security and causing dissatisfaction from the Mexican government. The U.S. government insisted on the Mexican government to block refugees from its own country and Central America from going to the U.S., but Mexico blamed the U.S. immigration policy for the surge of refugees. The Northern Triangle of Central America, the three countries of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, has been the top source of refugees to the United States in recent years. The U.S. government put pressure on the governments of the three countries and sternly warned potential immigrants not to come to the United States. The tough approach disappointed Central America and caused dissatisfaction in the United States.

◆The eastward expansion of NATO led by the United States is an important deep-rooted source of the Ukrainian crisis. The United States is the instigator and the biggest pusher of the Ukrainian crisis, and it cannot escape the responsibility for the large number of Ukrainian refugees. After the Russian-Ukrainian conflict broke out, the U.S. government advocated keeping Ukrainian refugees in European countries, or allowing them to return to Ukraine as soon as possible, and has been reluctant to accept a large number of Ukrainian refugees. According to data from the United Nations Refugee Agency, as of January 2023, there are more than 7.91 million Ukrainian refugees registered across Europe. It was not until the end of July 2022 that the U.S. government announced that it had accepted 100,000 Ukrainian refugees, but the number is still far from being comparable to that of the European Union, and its focus is on family reunification for Ukrainian-Americans.

conclusion

Throughout the history of the United States’ treatment of immigrants, Africans, Irish, Eastern Europeans, Southern Europeans, Jews, Asians, Latin Americans, Muslims, and almost all immigrants to the United States from all over the world have been brutally treated by the US government. The U.S. government is also interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, launching wars, creating large-scale humanitarian disasters and refugee and immigration crises, shirking responsibility and passing the consequences on to other countries. The United States should seriously examine and correct its many misdeeds on the refugee and immigration issue, effectively improve the situation of foreign refugees and immigrants, stop hegemonism and bullying, stop creating new refugee crises, stop acting as a “human rights defender”, and stop using human rights issues To discredit and suppress other countries.

(Story by Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, March 30)

“People’s Daily” (16th Edition, March 31, 2023)

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