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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dennis O'Bell who wrote (50056)	10/7/2002 7:43:00 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 281500

Hi Dennis O'Bell; Re: "If you think, without personal experience or knowing anyone who has come from there and survived the culture shock, that it was so easy to go about day to day life in an eastern block country like Romania or Bulgaria I guess there isn't much more to say." When people are running from a truly repressive regime (i.e one that is life threatening), they will agree to live in the most squalid of conditions imaginable. I do not deny that these regimes exist. For example, people who were escaping from Cambodia under Pol Pot. And there are plenty of other examples. Afghanistan was a great example, but for the inhabitants of Baghdad (as opposed to the Kurds or Shia rebels), Iraq is not one. There are no massive refugee camps filled with barefoot escapees from Baghdad. Most of the time, people's choice of residence is determined by economic rather than repressive conditions. Whether you can find a job or not is far more important than what kind of shit you have to go through if you drive into a lamp post. For example, people left Hong Kong before the repressive Chinese took it over, but then came back: Hong Kong. Hong Kong reported that emigration fell to 12,900 in 1999, down from 19,200 in 1998. Emigration reached a peak 66,200 in 1992, following the military crackdown against pro-democracy protestors in China in 1989, and was 40,300 in 1996, a year before the former British colony reverted to Chinese sovereignty in July, 1997. Since 1996, more than 300,000 émigrés have returned to live and work in Hong Kong after obtaining residency and passports in their adopted countries. migration.ucdavis.edu Similarly, the vast majority of the boat people who escaped from Vietnam and got interned in Hong Kong decided that life in Vietnam was better than life in a Hong Kong concentration camp, and returned to the undeniably repressive regime in Vietnam: Final U.N. flight returns Vietnamese boat people CNN, May 28, 1997 They left hoping for new opportunities, washing up on the shores of countries like Hong Kong seeking freedom from a repressive government and the chance to participate in a stronger economy. Wednesday, the last of Vietnam's boat people to voluntarily return home from Hong Kong refugee camps boarded a United Nations flight and came back to the land they fled following the communist victory in Vietnam. ... Hong Kong took in many refugees. But by the mid-1980s, Asia and the rest of the world was suffering from what was dubbed "compassion fatigue." Hong Kong started trying to force Vietnamese to repatriate, efforts that produced regular riots in the camps. But as economic conditions in Vietnam improved, a U.N. High Commissioner of Refugees program of voluntary repatriation took hold, running for almost a decade. With Wednesday's final flight, *57,000 people have voluntarily returned to Vietnam.* ... While the saga is over for the voluntary returnees, the story continues for nearly 3,000 boat people remaining in Hong Kong. Some are there because Hanoi won't take them back, and others because they can't find a third country to accept them. ... cnn.com -- Carl P.S. Your personalizing this issue to suggest that I have no contact with people who have lived in repressive regimes is uncalled for. I have very personal contacts among immigrants to this country from a very wide variety of areas, most of them repressive to one degree or another. I don't talk about it on the internet because I value my (and their) privacy, and besides, who the hell would believe my stories anyway. So instead of unverifiable second hand stories, I'm providing you with links. By the way, you can assume that I know something about the places and events and technologies I comment on. If I didn't, I wouldn't be able to dig up links to support my position.