Americans of Iranian descent

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ochotona
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Americans of Iranian descent

Post by ochotona » Fri Jan 24, 2020 6:33 am

The new World War Two era American citizens of Japanese descent.

Illegal detentions at the US border at Blaine, WA.

No customs reasons, no anti-terror watchlist, no immigration reasons (they're citizens).

Nah we're just gonna visit with ya for five hours and ask arbitrary, intrusive questions of our choosing. In a cramped room with 40 other Iranian origin persons and one bathroom.

Just two free pass items missing... Lighter skin, blue eyes?

What is CBP turning into under this President? Gestapo Lite?
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Re: Americans of Iranian descent

Post by dualstow » Fri Jan 24, 2020 6:49 am

What does CBP stand for?
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Re: Americans of Iranian descent

Post by D1984 » Fri Jan 24, 2020 7:12 am

dualstow wrote:
Fri Jan 24, 2020 6:49 am
What does CBP stand for?
Customs and Border Protection
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Re: Americans of Iranian descent

Post by WiseOne » Fri Jan 24, 2020 7:33 am

FWIW....

My mother and sister travelled to Israel a few years back, in order to visit our Palestinian relatives living in Bethlehem. Because they were neither Jewish nor coming with a Catholic/Christian tour group, they were held for several hours for questioning at the border. They didn't sweat it because they figured that would happen, and in fact came prepared with several documents e.g. evidence of my sister's job in the U.S.. As far as I know this is still Israel's MO and no one has ever raised a fuss.

Not justifying the new policy at the Seattle border, just pointing out that it's not a new thing nor unique to the U.S. If the Seattle detentions were happening because there was specific intelligence about some sort of terrorist plot then that's one thing, but if it was simply haranguing people of Iranian descent then that is somewhere I'm sad to see us going.
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Re: Americans of Iranian descent

Post by Xan » Fri Jan 24, 2020 8:02 am

That's also several pretty far cries from WWII-era Japanese confinement.
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Re: Americans of Iranian descent

Post by flyingpylon » Fri Jan 24, 2020 8:15 am

Trump is literally Hitler Roosevelt! ::)
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Re: Americans of Iranian descent

Post by vnatale » Fri Jan 24, 2020 8:43 am

Famed Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren was instrumental in the internment of Japanese-Americans. And, he relatively soon came to regret that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Warren

Internment of Japanese Americans[edit]
After World War II broke out in Europe in 1939, foreign policy became an increasingly important issue in the United States; Warren rejected the isolationist tendencies of many Republicans and supported Roosevelt's rearmament campaign. The United States entered World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.[48] Following the attack, Warren organized the state's civilian defense program, warning in January 1942 that, "the Japanese situation as it exists in this state today may well be the Achilles' heel of the entire civilian defense effort." He became a driving force behind the internment of over one hundred thousand Japanese Americans without any charges or due process.[49] Though the decision to intern Japanese Americans was made by General John L. DeWitt, and the internment was carried out by federal officials, Warren's advocacy played a major role in providing public justification for the internment.[50] By early 1944, Warren had come to regret his role in the internment of Japanese Americans, and he approved of the federal government's decision to allow Japanese Americans to begin returning to California in December 1944.[51]

Warren later said he:
since deeply regretted the removal order and my own testimony advocating it, because it was not in keeping with our American concept of freedom and the rights of citizens... Whenever I thought of the innocent little children who were torn from home, school friends, and congenial surroundings, I was conscience-stricken... t was wrong to react so impulsively, without positive evidence of disloyalty.
— The Memoirs of Earl Warren (1977)[52]

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Re: Americans of Iranian descent

Post by dualstow » Fri Jan 24, 2020 8:55 am

Xan wrote:
Fri Jan 24, 2020 8:02 am
That's also several pretty far cries from WWII-era Japanese confinement.
For what it’s worth, I’ve gotten profiled several times. Each time, it was an east Asian woman (different airports, different women of course) who took me out of line, scribbled on my boarding pass, and said “check” to another agent. Apparently, I look like an Arab when I have whiskers. O0 I genuinely don’t care.
Not that I’m pretending that this is equal to hours of detention and questioning. It isn’t. But, it’s reality. I’d call it erring on the side of safety, but they’re not even erring, in my opinion.

My ex and I were also stopped in Miami by a passport control guy whose tag read R ISLAM. He gave me look that I know well because I get from Pakistani cabbies. Didn’t like my wife’s paperwork, and we were stuck in some office waiting for a fax until the moment our flight boarded. (Shrug). I know it was personal.

Back to the big picture. Should we insert something about how ICE wasn’t very kind under Obama?

I have to agree with the quote above. This is not WWII-era Japanese-American internment camps. And even our camps, while something to be ashamed of, were orders of magnitude kinder than the Japanese were. We should hold ourselves to a higher standard even though we’re already better, but...we’re already better.
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Re: Americans of Iranian descent

Post by ochotona » Fri Jan 24, 2020 10:43 am

Sure, it was FDR, it was Obama, and it's Trump. Is it worse now, or better? I don't know, I don't have a way to measure. But it's intolerable in any case. It's a slippery-slope from arbitrarily and illegally detaining people to worse things.

I have never been arrested or detained by LE. I don't know how I'd feel if I was detained for five hours at the airport. My parents are from China, what if we got into a war with China? Are my rights going to be respected?

I expect three words from the CBP agent at the airport: "WELCOME HOME SIR".

I haven't been disappointed yet. But the Americans of Persian ancestry in the news article I read obviously were.

If you don't stand up for others when they are in trouble, who will stand up for you when you are in trouble?
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Re: Americans of Iranian descent

Post by vnatale » Fri Jan 24, 2020 10:51 am

ochotona wrote:
Fri Jan 24, 2020 10:43 am
Sure, it was FDR, it was Obama, and it's Trump. Is it worse now, or better? I don't know, I don't have a way to measure. But it's intolerable in any case. It's a slippery-slope from arbitrarily and illegally detaining people to worse things.

I have never been arrested or detained by LE. I don't know how I'd feel if I was detained for five hours at the airport. My parents are from China, what if we got into a war with China? Are my rights going to be respected?

I expect three words from the CBP agent at the airport: "WELCOME HOME SIR".

I haven't been disappointed yet. But the Americans of Persian ancestry in the news article I read obviously were.

If you don't stand up for others when they are in trouble, who will stand up for you when you are in trouble?
The general assumption is that "I will never be in trouble"....until you are.

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Re: Americans of Iranian descent

Post by Tortoise » Fri Jan 24, 2020 12:56 pm

I assume OP is referring to this story from a few weeks ago?

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-release ... 81286.html

It sounds like an isolated incident based on the fact that there was a very big group of Iranian-Americans who attended an Iranian pop concert in Vancouver, and the border agents were probably not aware of it beforehand.

They were given orders from DHS to exercise their best judgment regarding suspicious-looking activity, and this sounds like an exceptional situation that very well may have appeared suspicious to the uninformed border agents.

I don't know if it was necessary to detain any of those people for hours, but bureaucracies are kind of notorious for taking way too long to do fairly simple things. This is not something new.

Shit happens, people. Look for trends, not isolated, exceptional incidents.
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Re: Americans of Iranian descent

Post by dualstow » Fri Jan 24, 2020 1:21 pm

ochotona wrote:
Fri Jan 24, 2020 10:43 am
Sure, it was FDR, it was Obama, and it's Trump. Is it worse now, or better? I don't know, I don't have a way to measure. But it's intolerable in any case.
Intolerable? What is the alternative? To become a citizen of Iran? Of China?

I think it's something we should definitely try to keep an eye on/ keep in check, but what we cannot change through elections and activism...we have to tolerate in the meantime.
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Re: Americans of Iranian descent

Post by ochotona » Fri Jan 24, 2020 6:01 pm

It is an intolerable way to treat American citizens for whom there is no probable cause for the commission of a crime. Full stop.

habeas corpus !

Who said anything about being a citizen of another country? How does that get brought into the discussion. I was born in Chicago. My parents were legal immigrants. But if we go to war with China, how will my countrymen treat me?

You are my countryman! And you're not doing that well thus far.
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Re: Americans of Iranian descent

Post by Tortoise » Fri Jan 24, 2020 6:18 pm

If you get sassy and argumentative with the wrong bureaucrat, you're likely to get your ass detained for a while -- no matter what your ethnicity is.

Given that most of the Iranian-Americans who were detained were young adults, who as a group tend to be less mature and more argumentative, it's quite possible that a few of them got uppity and just pissed off the wrong bureaucrat.

We probably don't have all of the relevant facts here. There are at least two sides to every story.
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Re: Americans of Iranian descent

Post by ochotona » Fri Jan 24, 2020 8:58 pm

Tortoise wrote:
Fri Jan 24, 2020 6:18 pm
If you get sassy and argumentative with the wrong bureaucrat, you're likely to get your ass detained for a while -- no matter what your ethnicity is.
I hate bureaucrats with guns. I went to HS with a guy who went into CBP, and he was and is a psycho. All of this stuff you hear about FB pages where CBP "fans" were discussing raping AOC and all... I totally believe it. This guy thinks and speaks just like that. I just cut-off my relationship with him, even though we were close when we were kids.
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Re: Americans of Iranian descent

Post by dualstow » Fri Jan 24, 2020 10:37 pm

ochotona wrote:
Fri Jan 24, 2020 6:01 pm
Who said anything about being a citizen of another country? How does that get brought into the discussion. I was born in Chicago. My parents were legal immigrants. But if we go to war with China, how will my countrymen treat me?

You are my countryman! And you're not doing that well thus far.
“How does that get brought into the discussion”
I don’t know how it could not be.

How will your countrymen treat you? Certainly, some ignorant ones will treat you poorly. My wife is of Chinese extraction, and I’ve thought about that scenario now and then. (And, it probably goes without saying: Jews are maligned all over the world because of the actions of Israel, an ally. It doesn’t even take a war).
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Re: Americans of Iranian descent

Post by Smith1776 » Sat Jan 25, 2020 2:15 am

dualstow wrote:
Fri Jan 24, 2020 10:37 pm
Is anyone successfully using Veracrypt in MacOS Catalina?
Never used Veracrypt, but I am not impressed how Catalina broke a crap ton of my third party apps.

My fault really -- I should have read reviews on how Catalina's 64-bit nature would break many 32-bit games in particular.
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Re: Americans of Iranian descent

Post by Kbg » Sat Jan 25, 2020 11:41 am

Sometimes I think people are just stupid...merits of a specific case aside, if you are going through security in ANY country, be chill, answer the questions politely, just don’t mess with these people. They have the power to make your life miserable for short to long periods of time...shorter is better.
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Re: Americans of Iranian descent

Post by ochotona » Sat Jan 25, 2020 12:19 pm

Dualstow, the oldest trope in the book applied to Chinese, Jews, now Iranians is whipping out the "well, they better be glad they're here and not there"; AS IF that should make it acceptable to mal-treat US Citizens. This is intertwined with all of the dual-loyalty bullshit that even got applied to President Kennedy and Catholicism for crying out loud.

It's never correct to treat US Citizens that way the people crossing at Blaine WA were treated.

https://news.google.com/search?q=blain% ... id=US%3Aen

In the words of AA, that's "stinking thinking". It's right up there with, "Well, look at what she was wearing, she deserved to be grabbed. She should be glad that she gets the attention from the fellas", "or a good girl would have nothing to fear from men out in public, she must have done something to provoke them".

STOP. Just stop.
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Re: Americans of Iranian descent

Post by Xan » Sat Jan 25, 2020 12:50 pm

ochotona wrote:
Sat Jan 25, 2020 12:19 pm
Dualstow, the oldest trope in the book applied to Chinese, Jews, now Iranians is whipping out the "well, they better be glad they're here and not there"; AS IF that should make it acceptable to mal-treat US Citizens. This is intertwined with all of the dual-loyalty bullshit that even got applied to President Kennedy and Catholicism for crying out loud.

It's never correct to treat US Citizens that way the people crossing at Blaine WA were treated.

https://news.google.com/search?q=blain% ... id=US%3Aen

In the words of AA, that's "stinking thinking". It's right up there with, "Well, look at what she was wearing, she deserved to be grabbed. She should be glad that she gets the attention from the fellas", "or a good girl would have nothing to fear from men out in public, she must have done something to provoke them".

STOP. Just stop.
ooookay. So what do you want us to do?
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Re: Americans of Iranian descent

Post by dualstow » Sat Jan 25, 2020 4:56 pm

I didn’t mean any offense, ocho, so if you believe me then let’s just deescalate a little bit here.
I don’t know what the ideal balance is between security and making people feel violated — cf stop-and-frisk — but I suspect that it varies from individual to individual.
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Re: Americans of Iranian descent

Post by dualstow » Sat Jan 25, 2020 5:40 pm

Maybe it’s too soon to add this inconvenient truth and its companion unpopular opinion, but you’re a big boy and I think you can handle it:

The United States was built by white, Christian Anglo-Saxons. All kinds of people from all over the world have contributed significantly, but they were able to do so because of the framework provided by said Anglos. It feels funny just typing that in this decade of ‘wokeness’ and ‘white privilege’, but it shouldn’t. Water boils at 212ºF, Wednesday follows Tuesday, and that’s who founded America.

Does that give the descendants of those fine people the right to crap on the rest of us? Certainly not. But...it happens from time to time. Sometimes a select group of ignorant people does it to a small group of innocent people. I would like to think we’re making progress. Slavery has been abolished. The Klan is something of a joke in all but a few backwater holdouts. Gay people can get married and lower their taxes.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that it happened to the Irish and the Italians first, US citizens. How quickly we forget, because they’re now considered to be white.

Still, there’s a lot of rough stuff going on, and sometimes it’s even perpetrated by our own government. That’s why we’ve got checks and balances, and at least two parties to fight things out, as you know.

Ocho, you were mainly talking about US citizens, but maybe there’s someone out there even more liberal than you who thinks it is “intolerable” that Mexico is now turning migrant caravans away before they even get to the States. There is someone even more liberal than that person, who thinks there shouldn’t be any political borders, period. You’re not “right.” You’re just another person with an opinion somewhere on the spectrum, as are we all.

As someone who was born here, I would certainly be pissed off if I were detained and questioned in my own country, for ten hours. But, I am ready for it to happen. If I feel I am wronged, maybe I will be inspired to protest, to support the political opposition, and so on. Now you’ll want to say, “Because I’m not Iranian, I didn’t speak up when they came for the Iranians.” Well sorry, but I don’t think it’s gotten to that point yet.

You mentioned the accusation of dual loyalty. It’s already happened. A friend blurted it out in college, and I couldn’t believe it. Diane Rehm suggested that Bernie Sanders secret held Israeli citizenship and so on. Yeah it sucks, but what is going to do, sue her? Sticks and stones. (Actually, I get offended all the time, but it’s short-lived).

When they start deporting American-born Iranians who have committed no crimes, then I will start to panic. Not before.
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Re: Americans of Iranian descent

Post by Libertarian666 » Sun Jan 26, 2020 11:20 am

I'm a libertarian, as I have stated many times before, so I'm not in favor of border enforcement as a theoretical matter.

But unfortunately open borders and a welfare state aren't compatible. Neither are open borders and a powerful government that intervenes in other countries' business.

Once we get rid of the welfare state and the US government stops interfering in other countries' business, then we can have open borders.

Not now, though.
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Re: Americans of Iranian descent

Post by boglerdude » Sun Jan 26, 2020 11:23 pm

> Once we get rid of the welfare state

So the poor are allowed to die on the street?
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Re: Americans of Iranian descent

Post by Libertarian666 » Mon Jan 27, 2020 10:22 am

boglerdude wrote:
Sun Jan 26, 2020 11:23 pm
> Once we get rid of the welfare state

So the poor are allowed to die on the street?
Have you ever heard of charity?
You should google it.
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