No Sympathy

So to summarize your story [“No Way Home,” June]: Cambodia is hot. Cambodia sucks. Boy comes to the U.S. with his parents. Boy joins a gang, and never bothers to get citizenship, despite living here fifteen years. Finally, after being in fairly regular criminal trouble as a juvenile, he’s eighteen when charged with a felony and deported. (By the way, what objective journalist would travel all the way to Cambodia to talk to a criminal and not press him on what precisely he’d done?) Poor fellow feels “betrayed.” What part of this is unfair? This is not a “good kid,” accidentally picked up by The Man on his way to Sunday school. This is a habitual petty criminal, who finally strayed into the big leagues, and got punished. I say “good riddance.”

All those folks said such nice things about him—did any of them perhaps feel that they should intervene? Stop his self-destructive course midstream?

“It’s not right to send people to a country they do not call home without giving them the opportunity to argue for a second chance and to show what they’ve done to turn their lives around.” What? The lack of objectivity at letting this statement stand unchallenged is staggering. This punk got lots of second chances, and third chances, and probably fourth and fifth chances too. Eventually (I would hope much sooner) his chances ran out.

“Should people be deported when the U.S. has been involved in creating the conditions that led to their becoming refugees?” Personally, I’d love to challenge Mr. Hing on the deep racism in that statement. As if it logically follows: refugee, thug, criminal? This country was built on refugees. Economic, war, political, religious—aside from autochthones, we all are refugees and the children thereof. By his logic, we’re all apparently free from culpability for our personal behavior? If the consequences of Moek’s deportation were so severe, perhaps he should have followed a narrower path? The rest of us manage to understand that lawbreaking leads at least to jail, so we don’t do it. Or is your author suggesting somehow that Cambodian refugees are too stupid to understand the logical consequences of criminality? Don’t want to be deported, separated from your family, your home, sent someplace else? To quote a film: “Stop breaking the law, loser.” In fact, the crying shame is that of the 1,500 “caught in the process,” only 145 have been deported. 0.100 is a pretty crummy batting average.