Tyranny at DHS

There is an appalling article in today’s New York Times about an Italian man, a frequent traveler to the U.S. to visit his lady friend in Virginia, who on arriving at Dulles Airport on April 29 was arrested and incarcerated for ten days for absolutely no reason, based on a bizarre story invented by immigration authorities that he had asked for political asylum. The suggestion is that they made up the asylum story out of some petty desire to get back at him. What sort of people would use their positions of official authority to practice such tyranny over a helpless individual? Such are the personnel at the Department of Homeland Security. Will the DHS agents who did this be punished?

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Hannon writes:

On the bright side, this story indicates that the police state mentality of Customs, INS and who knows how many affiliated agencies could in theory be useful in any campaign to tighten immigration control. If we ever do get to the point of halting Muslim immigration, these folks won’t be shy about it. I do feel for the Italian gentleman, though. There is no excuse for that kind of treatment.

I’ve heard that men are often attracted to police work because of the raw power it gives them, but I don’t think they hold a candle to government workers who enforce regulations of any kind. I’ve had to deal with them and they are on another planet. Thinking is obviously discouraged; just play the rule book and if anything doesn’t conform to the rules, crush it.

James P. writes:

“What sort of people would use their positions of official authority to practice such tyranny over a helpless individual? Such are the personnel at the Department of Homeland Security.”

I fly from Dulles all the time, and most likely the “official” involved was some recent immigrant from Africa or the Middle East who doesn’t even speak English properly. Most of the people one interacts with at “security” are not white English speakers or native-born Americans, or so it seems to me. Needless to say, petty officials routinely get to impose petty tyranny on the public in most of the countries these people come from, and perhaps that was the case here.

Of course, one could also note several meta-stories here: border enforcement bad and arbitrary, Bush administration making America look bad to foreigners, Bush administration security measures useless, war on terror not “real”, just a pesky nuisance for regular people. The NYT undoubtedly wants its readers to think that if we actually took serious steps to control our borders, more bad things like this would happen, and we don’t want that, do we?

Speaking of border control, did you see this WSJ story? Yet more sneering contempt from the media on the subject of controlling immigration. The fact that none of the major Presidential candidates wants to control the borders does not, of course, prove that the political elites in this country contemptuously ignore the will of the people. No, no, it proves that the American people actually like immigration!

You will note the irrelevant photo of European immigrants arriving in 1920. Wow, the immigrants arriving today must look just like that!

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 14, 2008 08:24 PM | Send