The Refugee Detectives
17th March 2018
Every now and then The Atlantic does some honest real journalism. This looks to be an example of that.
Setting the stage: The author is looking to hire someone, preferably a ‘refugee’, to clean house.
The other trait distinguishing these résumés was that nearly every one contained what I, as someone whose job often involves listening skeptically to people’s stories, would call irregularities, little details that seemed odd, that begged for explanation. An Afghan with no formal education claimed to know a language not spoken in any country she had visited; an African doctor whose CV could have gotten him a job with the World Health Organization in a week was working a cash register in Bridgeport. Two refugees claimed to be from, respectively, Zambia and Tanzania, countries without war or persecution that could justify asylum. (The refugees had almost certainly claimed different nationalities in their application for asylum.) Another said she was from the Democratic Republic of the Congo—a major generator of refugees—but spoke languages that suggested origin in the now relatively safe country of Rwanda. It was as if the center had sent me a dozen jigsaw puzzles, all with either missing pieces or extra ones.
All of the refugees were qualified to clean my house. (The doctor was overqualified, and I wondered whether I should be cleaning his.) But detail after detail hoisted my eyebrows. An asylum officer had heard each story—or some variant of it—and judged the claimant credible enough to welcome him into the United States. For my part, it was hard not to conclude that most of the stories were shot through with lies.
All parts of our immigration system are broken. One of the reason why people come to the U.S. illegally is that it’s like pushing a rope through an obstacle course of soda can pull tabs to get in legally. This situation is an illustrative example. Granted that government employees aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer, this is TSA-level incompetence.
Remember this the next time somebody want to put the government in charge of your health care.