The attraction people have to public office baffles me. You
must will yourself to work every day and enact policies while keeping in mind
that someone, somewhere is going to get royally screwed. Often, administrators
can rush to make seemingly uncontroversial mandates while being completely
disengaged from the very real human ramifications they have, hundreds of miles
away from Capitol Hill.?

One example of these seemingly ?safe? decrees would be the
deportation agreement recently made between the United States and Vietnam. As
with similar agreements with Laos and Cambodia, the Socialist Republic of
Vietnam will accept U.S. deportations of illegal immigrants who came on or
after July 12, 1995 and have formal deportation orders. Reasons for deportation
orders include criminal offenses such as murder, rape, drug trafficking, etc.
Sounds totally reasonable ? get dangerous criminals out of the country. Vietnam
is doing us true Americans a favor by taking back these ungrateful immigrants,
right??

I hope none of you took me seriously ? Rush Limbaugh
excluded ? since the situation is far more complex than that. Not only are many
immigrants South Vietnamese who served with the United States in the Vietnam
War or their direct relatives, but many other hundreds if not thousands of
immigrants face deportation for countless insignificant crimes. Deportation is
usually the result of conviction for an aggravated felony, which sounds like
such a heinous term that deference to the authorities is given right
away.?

In reality, that term has been expanded to many non-violent
crimes and now can be applied to any crime that carries a sentence of two years
or longer. For example, among the cases for deportation, one involved a man
deported to Cambodia after he was convicted of indecent exposure. Problem is,
he was nabbed not for shaking it a playground, but for urinating at a
construction site.?

Aggravated felonies also involve crimes related to child
abuse, which sounds perfectly reasonable. Tell that to the woman deported to
Cambodia for spanking her kids with un-lit incense sticks. That?s right ?
separation from her children for the rest of their lives, just for disciplining
her kids with thin pieces of scented wood. Even a bad check is grounds for
forced exit from the country.

This also underscores another major issue. Judges are not
allowed to exercise any sort of discretion on a case-by-case basis when
determining deportation. The fact the crime happened, not the degree of the
crime committed, is the sole determinant of deportation. The immigrant could
have served all of the jail time for a minor offense, started a family and
lived the life of a complete model citizen and still stand to be torn from his
wife and children and never see them again. He will be transplanted back to a
country he may have never been to since he was a child, or even remember, not
knowing the language or anyone living there. How can he be expected to survive?
How will his family go on without a father?

This is all without saying how deportees will be treated
outside of the United States. When the deal between Cambodia and the United
States went through, the Cambodian prime minister immediately followed with the
statement that deportees would all be relocated to the country?s largest and
most dangerous prison immediately upon arrival into the country. Vietnam is
still haunted by a spotty human rights record, and its authoritarian communist
regime is criticized by the U.S. State Department.?

And we are telling people to go back? Would you knowingly
return a runaway child to his or her abusive parents? Isn?t that what the
United States is doing here? Some may say ?it?s not our business how they are
treated over there,? but to that I will rip out my hair and ask what the hell
do you call ?Operation Iraqi Freedom?? Hasn?t it been the unstated foreign
policy of the United States for the last six years to make it our business? Or
is that just because we didn?t find any WMDs?

There is hope, however. Twelve congressmen, including one on
the House subcommittee on immigration, are calling for the delay of this action
and urging the government to give a closer look to how such an act will affect
real human lives.

For too long, America has touted its superiority over other
nations because of its purported acceptance of all people and its claim that
all people can achieve the ?American Dream? with hard work and perseverance. So
I ask, who deserves the ?dream? more: some well-off college kid born with
rights of a citizen or an immigrant who came from a war-ravaged country with
almost nothing and worked themselves to the bone all his or her life, all the
while never experiencing such rights??

Charles Lim ([email protected])
is a junior with no declared major.