Start Date: November 27, 2025
Baby boomers may remember the TV drama “Mission Impossible” with its tense theme music and eclectic characters. Each episode began with the lead of an elite group of covert agents receiving a tape (a recording device from late 20th century) indicating the mission that the group was assigned. It cleverly self destructed after being played, leaving no evidence.
The “mission” frequently involved entering some mythical eastern European country, in the era of the Soviet Union, and then extracting some scientist or influential person who wanted to escape for asylum in the west. If you are in a truly tyrannical country they often don’t just let you leave.
The team used sophisticated gadgets and devices. The most iconic trick in each show was the use of masks. Somehow they could create perfect flexible masks that, with a little makeup, would allow them to take on a different identity.
This was the era of “checkpoint Charlie”, a real border between Communist East Berlin and West Berlin and the free world. On the East German side there were guard towers and soldiers. Armed military could shoot a person attempting to escape.
The pivotal scene might involve a dissident hidden under a false compartment of an auto trunk or leaving an airfield with a disguise and false papers. We can barely breath. Will they make it out to freedom?
This is asylum.
Masih Alinejad is an Iranian writer and woman’s right’s activist. She now lives in NYC. Even in America she has faced assassination attempts directed from Iran. Her survival is entirely based on living outside of the power of the Mullahs. Her purpose is to speak for those still behind, in hopes of someday being able to return.
More recently we have experienced a very different phenomena, quite inconsistent with the spirit of asylum.
From 2021 through 2024 millions of people marched illegally into America, supposedly to apply for asylum. But they are happy to be photographed. They have smiling faces. They are waving to cameras. No hiding. No disguises. Also they seem to be waving flags. Not American flags, but flags from the countries they are allegedly escaping. Are they lost? Did they take a wrong turn?
It seems that the U.S. has became not so much a beacon of freedom as an ATM, a dormitory, and a health care provider. We are the nation of remittances. People come to make money, some from work but also sometimes via fraud in the billions, and send the assets back to the nation of origin. It is not everyone but enough to have incredible damage to the economy, burdens on housing, school systems, and hospitals, as well as increased violent crime.
This is now so assumed that when there are efforts to remove people, who have made no attempt to pursue a legal process to become American residents, we see mass riots. A pair of scenes in Los Angeles were particularly striking. One was a young shirtless man in jeans, standing on a vandalized car in the midst of arson fires, looting, chaos, and the destruction of downtown. He was waving a huge Mexican flag. There isn’t a wall keeping him here. Later I saw a photo of a petite dark-haired woman holding a little cardboard sign which said “No one Loves Mexico More Than Those who Refuse to Live There.” There is certain logic to her thinking.
Here are some examples of how the system is failing both conceptually and catastrophically
Ilhan Omar is from Somalia. It is one of the most corrupt nations on Earth and engages in piracy as a major enterprise. So it may not be surprising that a massive, $10 billion or more, fraud scheme has been discovered operating within the Somali migrant community in Minnesota. Yet the United States displayed the hospitality to give her family asylum, though it seems for no specific reason other than Somalia being a mess. Since then she has been elected to Congress and is now worth millions. (Funny how that happens).
Her response to this generous welcome has been to take every opportunity to describe how awful the country is. A particularly humorous complaint is that she feels uncomfortable around white men. That seems to be a rather compelling reason to not leave Africa for Minnesota.
No this is not racism. In fact the ultimate failure of asylum is the Tsarnaev family. They are the closest thing to Caucasian as you will ever encounter. The Caucasus Mountains run through southern Russia in republics including Chechnya. So the next time you want to refer to some Celtic or Anglo-Saxon white person as “Caucasian” you are pretty far off the mark.
The Tsarnaev brothers were Russians who were ethnically Chechen. They are part of a family of six from Russia that were given asylum in the United States. It is not clear why [1]. They were given shelter and settled in Massachusetts and benefited from various forms of social welfare benefits [2].
The father returned to Russia by choice [3]. The mother was arrested for high level shoplifting and escaped to Russia where she is a fugitive from American justice [2]. One sister had arrests for drug issues. Another sister was arrested for threatening to bomb the home of a romantic rival [2]. She was taken rather seriously because of her brothers.
The two Tsarnaev brothers were by all accounts treated well and attended school. But they became unhappy. They could have returned home as their parents did. But no, they decided to “bite the hand” that took them in and provided for them by bombing the Boston Marathon. They were successful and achieved the largest terrorist attack on the United States, post 9-11. Roughly 500 were injured, 17 experienced amputations, and 5 individuals died.
Google AI tells me that “Asylum is protection granted by a government to a foreigner who fears persecution or serious harm in their home country due to their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group, allowing them to stay in the new country instead of being deported”
“Yes”’ for Ms. Alinejad. But not so much for many others. Certainly not those that would defame, defraud, or blow up our citizens. It seems that we have lost the premise. At times I think our policy is more suited to a mental asylum.
REFERENCES
[1] Nikitin, Vadim, “Boston Bombers: Is America’s Skewed Asylum System to Blame?”, Foreign Policy Association, https://fpa.org/boston-bombers-is-americas-skewed-asylum-system-to-blame/
[2] Griffin, Drew, “The Tsarnaev family’s run-ins with the law”, CNN, April 2, 2015, https://www.cnn.com/2015/04/01/us/tsarnaev-family
[3] Speckhard, Anne, “The Boston Marathon Bombers: the Lethal Cocktail that Turned Troubled Youth to Terrorism”, Perspective onTerrorism, Vol VII, Issue 3