Big thanks to Jina for this tip. The implication here is pretty sickening. This is not what Valentine’s Day is for.

“Egao, which roughly means using rude sarcasm to get certain messages across, has become part of the mainstream internet culture in China.” I certainly wouldn’t know anything about that.

Sometimes I really wonder about these big, international competitions…

Mr. Wade (and 475 lawyers and advisors) go to Washington.

Kutch just ridin the wave. Unlike earlier this month, I guess this one’s a “fun flood.”

“The tournament more notorious for poor goalkeeping, administrative nightmares and tragedy rather than high quality football.” This is just not true. You gotta pick your burdens more carefully.

Thanks for your message about Graham Bowley’s coverage of Sahar Gul, the young Afghan girl. I am concerned about the girl’s privacy as well and have raised the question with the Foreign Desk. I do concur that news organizations should be careful to respect the privacy of crime victims. This is a case where, I believe, the benefits of doing a story were outweighed by the potential harm to the girl.
Best,
Art Brisbane
public editor

 So that’s nice.

Oh, that’s rich. You know what’s also like colonialism? Colonialism.

I’m really looking forward to this.

This sounded beyond crazy, but Amanda and I did some asking around and discovered that, in fact, widespread immunity from criminal prosecution is a serious human rights issue in Sudan. While 25% of the population might be an overstatement, it appears that most government officials, including the entire security sector, enjoy functional immunity (also known as “act immunity”), which protects them from prosecution for crimes committed in the course of their official duties. This means that victims of torture by members of the police or armed forces have no legal recourse.

Obviously, this bums me out hard, but it also makes me wonder whether this is a common problem worldwide that I’ve somehow missed. So, internets, learn me a thing: Do these sorts of broad immunities exist in your countries / regions of expertise?

The first is to write about immigration more often.  It’s an issue that matters hugely to me – as far as I’m concerned, it’s the trillion-dollar bill lying on the sidewalk, the thing that’s so obvious and so important that I sometimes can’t believe we’re even talking about other stuff first.  And also, conveniently, it’s something I actually know a bit about.  I got out of the habit of writing about it because I used to litigate immigration cases a lot more often, and out of an abundance of caution, (and, okay, an abundance of superstition, too), I felt that I shouldn’t write about issues that were part of active cases.  But now I’m older, and wiser, and spend less time on litigation, so there’s no reason to hold back.

The second resolution is to try to be more positive, at least occasionally.  I know, you come here for the snark – If you wanted earnestness, you’d be reading Invisible Children’s blog instead.  But a casual reader of this blog could easily get the impression that the only things in life I enjoy are Glenna Gordon’s photographs and making New York Times reporters cry, which is perhaps a bit narrow, as public personas go.  And I have a vague theory that if I spring a surprise positivity attack on people who disagree with me, maybe they’ll be so shocked that they let their guards down, leaving them vulnerable to my winning logic.  Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

So, for today’s post, I thought I’d try to kill both birds with one stone.  Namely, I’m going to write about immigration, and I’m going to do it in a positive way! Maybe! I will try! But this is already quite painful!

Ow.

Anyway, to circle back to the by-now-quite-confusing title: I’ve noticed, in talking to people about immigration, that there is a significant discrepancy between the way immigration proponents and immigration skeptics think about sharing a country.  Immigration skeptics tend to think that sharing a country is like sharing a cookie.  Every time you share it with someone, everyone else has a little less, including you.  Immigration proponents, on the other hand, think that sharing a cookie is like sharing love – the more you give, the more you have.  Or, the more immigrants we allow to join our country, the more awesome country there is for everyone to enjoy.  (And with better food.)

In case there’s any doubt, I’m on Team Love.  Not only do I think that immigration is the right thing to do for altruistic reasons – such as enabling people to escape persecution, or poverty, or cultural norms that crush human potential into a crumpled ball and give it to the cat to play with – but also because it makes rich countries better.  People are productive assets.  If you allow them to live in an environment that maximizes their potential, they will do amazing things.  And when someone else goes to the trouble of founding Google, we’re all better off.

I do understand where Team Cookie is coming from, though.  Immigration means change, and change is scary.  And there are some resources – like admission to a fancy college, for instance – that are limited.  The more immigrants there are applying, the harder it will be for your kids to get in.  At a macro level, that’s not a bad thing.  It’s pretty awesome for America that the smartest young people in the world are willing to not only come here, but pay our universities six-figure sums of money in order to do so.  But if your son has slaved his way through school, only to be fobbed off with admission to UCLA instead of Berkeley, it stings a little.

But I don’t think that’s really the problem.  People can get over having to go to UCLA.  I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to a person who was anti-immigration because of an encounter with a specific immigrant they couldn’t compete with. That’s because in this culture, we respect competition when we’re actually faced with it – when was the last time you heard someone complain that Yao Ming was doing a job that should have gone to an American?  (Or, presumably, several Americans stacked on top of one another.)

The welfare state is another commonly-mentioned cookie: if we allow immigrants to come here, won’t they just swamp our public services?  Personally, I find the premise of this argument extremely unconvincing – immigrants expand the population and the tax base, and create jobs, bolstering our economy’s ability to fund a social safety net. (Undocumented immigrants already subsidize social security to the tune of billions of dollars.)

But, perhaps more importantly, whether or not to allow immigrants to come to this country, and whether or not to allow them free access to the welfare state, are separate questions.  (If you look closely, you will see that they are made up of not-same sets of words! Really!)   If the burden on the welfare state is the real issue, there are a variety of orderly and reasonable solutions to that problem. Off the top of my head, for instance, we could deny immigrants eligibility for most social welfare programs until they become citizens (we already do this, btw), and/or have immigrants, or groups of sponsors, post a bond to cover the cost of the services our culture finds it illegitimate to deny, such as emergency-room care.  Or, to put it more simply, if this is a money problem, why don’t we try solving it with money before we try solving it by shooting ourselves in the pockets?

So what is Team Love to do to convince Team Cookie?  Would they, if presented with sufficient quantities of research and logic and heart-wrenching photos of the children who could be saved by allowing them access to opportunity, change their minds?

Or is the real problem something else? Something that is hard to describe, because the English language has no word for “nostalgia for a lost future in which progress would just solve one’s own problems, not other people’s”?

Given the history of the region, including Chad’s involvement in the Darfur conflict, this development obviously raises some important questions.  Chief among them: What to buy the happy couple as  a wedding gift?

Fear not, readers, we’re on it.  Our annotated Deby/Hilal wedding registry is here:

1. A Battle Tank

   

   Brought to our attention by CBlatts’s attempt to find “the most expensive thing on Amazon,” the JL421 Badonkadonk (no, really) apparently has a bitchin’ sound system.

2. A Relaxman Relaxation Capsule

   

   To relax in after a rough day rocking out in the battle tank, obviously.

3. Some uranium ore

   

   Mahmoud Ahmedinejad wishes he were getting married so he could register for this too.

4. A Le Creuset casserole dishSelf-explanatory. It’s a wedding.

Yo are you forreal with this article? It’s not all bad but I’m definitely gonna need some bullet points for this one:

• “Haiti: Miserable, but it photographs well”
• “The West’s eternal basket case…”
• “The Haitians outdid the stereotypical Israeli in pushing, shoving and trampling.”
• “A few of them wanted very much to help me with my suitcase but when I aimed the camera at them, two of them pulled a finger across their throats in a gesture that seemed to need no translation.”
• “Photographers say that the suffering and misery in these areas photographs wonderfully.”
• “Poverty, ignorance, disease are rampant.”
• “Life has a different value here.”
• “The entire country looks like one big slum”
• “It is impossible to leave this beautiful, sad country without attending a voodoo ceremony.”
• “…a few young men and many old black women wearing colorful dresses and red ribbons in their hair, who looked as though they had been taken from a slavery history museum…”

On a brighter note, hat tip to the FT for the pun of the week. Congrats. I’m sure it means a lot to you guys.

For those of you who don’t have a Google News Alert set up for “torture” or “horrific abuses inflicted upon vulnerable children, golden retrievers, and baby bunnies”, Sahar Gul is the young Afghan girl (reports of her age differ, but at most she is 15 years old) whose husband and in-laws burned and beat her for her refusal to engage in sex work. Graham Bowley is the New York Times reporter who, in his own words, “wouldn’t be turned away” by hospital workers who told him that the abused girl was too traumatized to speak with him.

And yes, “reporter barges into tortured child’s hospital room, demands previously-reported-in-multiple-media-outlets details of atrocities inflicted upon her, then publishes self-congratulatory report about doing so” is exactly the sort of thing that makes us clutch our Advil bottles and bang our heads against the wall. (It’s important to take prophylactic anti-inflammatories before incurring self-inflicted head wounds, by the way.)

But the online reaction to Bowley’s post detailing his pursuit of the story has already hit most of the points we would have made. Dan’s response over at “Finding My Tribe” sums up our feelings exactly. Even the (generally nutballs) NYTimes commenters seem to agree:

“But I realized that despite the delicacy of the situation, I should have pushed past ‘no.’” Thank you, Mr. Bowley, for making me want to throw up.

- NYT Commenter “AH”

So we thought instead of (just) adding some more outrage coals to the fire, we’d take this opportunity to talk about professional responsibility and retraumatization. There’s a reason the UNICEF guidelines for interviewing children specify that interviewers must “avoid questions, attitudes or comments … that reactivate a child’s pain and grief from traumatic events.”

The risk of retraumatizing someone you’re trying to help is an issue we’ve both grappled with in our work representing asylum applicants. You try to balance the need for convincing detail with the harm inflicted on the client, but that necessarily entails asking people questions that no one should ever have to answer, like “and what were you tied to during the second gang rape?” Questions like that have the potential to do all kinds of terrible things, like triggering painful flashbacks, or causing physical distress, so the decision to ask them needs to be weighed very, very carefully. If they have the potential to save the victim’s life through a successful asylum case, then they are probably worth it. Probably.

Here, however,  it’s hard to know why Bowley needed to interview Sahar Gul at all – he himself notes that the AP had already done so. So he was balancing the harm of re-traumatizing a tortured child who did not want to be interviewed against…what, exactly? His desire not to be scooped by the AP during his first week in Kabul? We can see why that might be a concern for the reporter, but why should Sahar Gul give a toss?

If you would prefer that the paper of record not engage in such behavior, we suggest that you email the New York Times Public Editor at public@nytimes.com. If you like, use this script:

Dear Public Editor,

I recently read your reporter Graham Bowley’s description of his attempts to interview Sahar Gul, an Afghan girl in her early teens who was the victim of horrific abuse at the hands of her husband and in-laws. Bowley states with apparent pride that he “pushed past ‘no,’” and interviewed her after hospital workers informed him that she did not wish to speak to reporters, and was too psychologically fragile to repeat her story.

It’s difficult to formulate a response to this story that does not begin with the words “what the…” As Bowley notes in his article, Gul had already been interviewed by other news organizations. Her story had been told, and was already available to the press and public. Bowley was not adding substantial new information through his reporting (the mango juice does not count). Rather, he appears to have returned to the hospital to soothe the burns to his ego from getting scooped by the AP.

How is it possible that this was not only acceptable journalistic behavior for a Times employee, but that Bowley and his editors saw fit to crow over it by publishing a blog post about the reporter’s heroic success in overcoming the resistance of a traumatized child?

Once again: what the …?

Sincerely,

[Your name here]

And, if you’re looking for more information on the issues discussed in this post, the DART center has a great info sheet on interviewing trauma survivors of all ages, and Jina Moore takes on the particular issues with reporting on rape here.