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How many people emigrate from a country where they are a member of parliament?
Here is more, from the Guardian and the Telegraph, on Hirsi Ali’s departure from the Netherlands to the United States and the American Enterprise Institute. The Dutch immigration minister, Rita Verdonk, who is running for the leadership of the VVD, the party to which Ali herself belongs, has announced that she is investigating the various lies Ali told to get asylum in Netherlands, with the possible punishments including loss of citizenship, even though Ali has lived in the Netherlands for 14 years and is a member of parliament. To preclude the investigation and punishment, Ali has announced she is settling in the U.S. It’s not clear when she applied for a U.S. green card (legal permanent residence), but apparently she already has it, perhaps on the basis of her promised employment at AEI. Ali had previously admitting lying about fleeing from war-torn Somali, whereas the truth is that she had lived in safety with her family for 12 years in Kenya, and then arrived in Germany en route to Canada where her husband was waiting for her. She got off the plane and illicitly crossed the border into the Netherlands where she requested asylum. (More revealing details, not in the Guardian and Telegraph stories, are provided by a VFR reader.) The new furor has been set off by a tv program which showed that her claim of being forced into a marriage was untrue.
Question: if a major part of Ali’s asylum claim was already publicly known to be a lie as of 2002, why did Rita Verdonk not investigate and punish Ali over that? Email entry |