Ter Apel, a small, unassuming Dutch town near the German border, is a place tourists rarely have on their itinerary. There are no lovely old windmills, no cannabis-filled coffee shops and on a recent visit it was far too early for tulip season.
When foreigners end up there, it is for one reason: to claim asylum at the Netherlands’ biggest refugee camp, home to 2,000 desperate people from all around the world.
Many of the American refugees, like Jane-Michelle Arc, a 47-year-old software engineer from San Francisco, are transgender. In April last year she flew into Schiphol airport in Amsterdam and, sobbing, asked a customs officer how to claim asylum. “And they laughed because: what’s this big dumb American doing here asking about asylum? And then they realised I was serious.”
Arc said the US had become such a hostile environment for trans people that she had stopped leaving the house “unless there was an Uber waiting outside”. She said she had been abused on the street and using the ladies’ toilets, and resolved to leave the country after a frightening incident when she feared a woman was going to run her over with her truck.
Didn’t realize you were less dead if you’ve been killed by roving fanatics on the street instead of the government. Clearly less deserving to live.
PS: ‘it’s only asylum worthy if the government is trying to kill you’ would invalidate a gigantic number of legal asylum claims in the US and Canada from people fleeing gang violence made worse by US intervention in the Central and South America. So that maybe isn’t the best line of reasoning to go down to determine who is ‘deserving’ of asylum.
It’s not that you’re less dead, it’s that there are less chance of it happening in San Fransisco than in Saudi Arabia. Stop twisting my words please.
Same for your PS. I never said only. It does augment the chances of it happening if it’s your government thought, since you would be handed to them. Most gangs are deeply embedded in the government in Latin America, I would say it’s essentially the same.
It isn’t black and white and these things do need to be taken into account. Right now, it sounds like your are saying sending this person back to SF and sending the person next to them back to Saudi Arabia are the same.
It sucks that we have to pick who deserves to have asylum. Its a shitty system but how likely that person is to die or worse if they go back should definitely be part of the thought process.
No, you are demanding that I say that in order for her to ‘deserve’ asylum. I’m saying ‘are they literally in Saudi Arabia?’ is a shit standard.
If someone’s life is threatened because of where they live, they should be able to apply for asylum.
Again, do you believe that someone is likely to survive being run over by a truck? Her life has already been endangered, you just don’t take that danger seriously because it happened in San Francisco.
I believe the chances of getting run over by a truck are less than the certainty of getting executed.
I was pretty clear. How deadly the truck is has no importance, it’s how likely it is to happen.
The standard is a gradient depending on how likely you are to lose your life or come to serious harm imo. How likely, not if it’s remotely possible.