华尔街日报大发雷霆:哪个神经病在管庇护政策?

发表:2002-08-01 18:22
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二十年前,1982年4月17日,天津的一个28岁的青年,通过收听敌台和在图书馆钻研《国际法》,知道了西方民主国家都有义务接受政治避难者,于是,他来到北京,跳进英国大使馆,被拒绝了;他又跳进希腊大使馆,被扔了出来。土尔其大使馆一样不收留他。最后,他翻墙跳进了美国驻北京大使馆。中国警察随即把美国大使馆包围了起来。形势十分紧张。中国要人,外电纷纷报道。

这个青年的名字叫张胜利。他于当天被美国大使馆“礼送”出来,当即遭到中共警察的逮捕。他的运气很糟。虽然当时的美国总统里根坚决不喜欢共产党,但当时的美国驻华大使是恒安石,一个内心钦佩共产党的左倾幼稚官僚。负责陪同张胜利离开大使馆的美国外交官查理.马丁最后紧紧地拥抱着张胜利,流着泪连声说“对不起”,眼看着张胜利被戴上手铐押走了。

多年之后,张胜利来到了美国,先是投奔FBI,要求叛变,人家嫌他不够资格,建议他申请政治避难。没想到,这才是他美国磨难的开始。政治避难被拒绝,上庭,再拒绝;上诉,再驳回。再上诉,再驳回。上个星期,张胜利的寻求美国自由的道路终于走到了头,随时面临遣返。显然,一回国,他必然再被捕坐牢。

华尔街日报看不过去了,昨天发表长篇编辑部文章,质问“哪个王八蛋管政治避难”,大标题是:让张胜利留下来!

美国移民局和在美国的大陆留学生等对寻求避难的中国人都有偏见。中国所有被遣送回去的,没有不被劳教和罚款的。其他国家包括古巴都没有。

这本身就是足够的理由取得避难。但看看移民局批准避难的比例,中国人大概5%左右的被批准,而从恐怖国家来的(伊拉克、阿富汗)申请避难,70%到90%被批准。这么大的差距,华人社区没人发出任何声音!

如果有人为他们说话,怎么会有遣返?建议这位老兄马上去加拿大,直接去边境,说要避难。加拿大政策要宽松多。关键是美国的移民政策歧视华人!(起码在这点上)。至于说“在美国的大陆留学生对寻求避难的中国人有偏见”,让我举例说明吧:去年,中国一个女记者在纽约申请政治避难被拒绝,她把卷宗转移到华盛顿DC,要我帮忙,她说,华府某著名大学法学院的人权辩护项目在帮助她准备出庭材料,可是,该校一个中国留学生却故意把她在香港《九十年代》发表的批评中国政府的文章翻译的完全扭曲。她说:那个法学院的留学生一定是故意要害她。我一看,果然翻译得很离谱,恶意的,若把他的译文递交上去,必定被拒绝。

最近炒得很热的北朝鲜难民冲击北京使馆区的故事,让我联想到二十年前天津青年张胜利和三十年前广州街头的乞丐儿童黎智英。张胜利的避难要求被拒绝后,他命运就充满了监狱、劳改营,逃亡,磨难,最后一事无成;黎智英游泳到了香港,一个不认字的地皮无赖硬是闯出一片天地。

中国政府一千个不是,一万个混蛋,他们没有遣返朝鲜难民,而是把他们放生到自由世界,我们可以企望,不出十年,这些难民中必定有英雄出世。你我沾他们光也未可知呢。

中国人,太需要一些逃生的渠道了。可惜,现在世界上,谁也不敢接收中国难民。香港回归了,台湾吓破了胆,东南亚国家普遍害怕共产党。欧美被资本家的贪欲给劫持了。谁也不得罪中国政府。我们中国人将逃无处逃,死无葬身之地啊。(智叟)

THE REAL WORLD
Let Zhang Shengli Stay
Are lunatics running the asylum policy?
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT, WALL STREET JOURNAL

NEW YORK--Zhang Shengli is running out of options. He came by our office here this week, hoping a talk with the press might help save him from being deported to China--where he fears he would go straight to prison. I think his fears are well-founded, all the more so because he is not flashy, not brilliant, not famous. Mr. Zhang is a sturdy 48-year-old fellow with thick eyebrows, a warm smile and what he describes as "so-so" skills in house painting and carpentry. In many ways, his greatest obstacle to freedom is that he seems so ordinary. But 20 years ago he did something that was not at all ordinary. On April 17, 1982, he took a running leap at the heavily guarded U.S. Embassy in Beijing and hurled himself over the wall. Once inside, he asked for asylum. He knew it was a risky bid. "You survive, you gain freedom; you fail, you go to jail," is how he explained it to me.

He failed. After fruitless attempts to enlist help from the British and Greek embassies in whisking away Mr. Zhang undetected, the U.S. Embassy staff expelled him later that same day through a main gate. One of the officials then at the embassy, Charles Martin, witnessed what happened next. Chinese security officers, who had ringed the compound after they saw Mr. Zhang go over the wall, hustled him into a car and drove off.

But Mr. Zhang didn't give up. In 1997 he made his way to the U.S. itself and asked again for asylum. His mistake, one expert tells me, may have been that instead of simply lying low and disappearing illegally into the Chinese community, he trusted the system and applied to the immigration courts for asylum. He has had no luck. This month, the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld the November 2000 ruling of a Boston immigration judge, Patricia Shepard, that Mr. Zhang is to be "removed and deported back to the People's Republic of China." Time is fast running out.

His mouth tight with worry, Mr. Zhang describes the welcome that awaits him back in China: "They will be waiting for me at the airport. They will handcuff me. They will not even give me a chance to go home. I will go directly to jail."Given China's record of manhandling dissent, he's probably right, though our immigration authorities prefer to maintain otherwise. Mr. Zhang, with his bulldog desire for liberty, his criticism of China as a "communist tyranny" and his persistent history of seeking asylum in the U.S., has by now made himself quite visible to the Chinese authorities. But Mr. Zhang has not achieved prominence enough among Americans to secure his own safety. Instead, he occupies a precarious niche, exposed in his quest for liberty but not protected by it. His story cuts to the core of one of the big dilemmas of the free world. When citizens of unfree nations ask for asylum, it may not be possible to help them all.

But surely there comes a stage at which an individual has shown enough will and taken enough risk so that it is simply wrong--and damaging to our own principles of freedom and human dignity--to turn him away. Where is that line? And to what standards should asylum-seekers be held? In the post-Sept. 11 climate, as America continues to discover how horrifically some holders of Saudi and other Middle Eastern passports have abused our trust, it's tougher to argue for keeping a welcome mat out.

But Mr. Zhang's case has nothing to do with terrorism. All he threw over our embassy wall was himself. And when we refused his request, he left peacefully. Since he reached America, his problems have been in part that his story of past persecution in China has been hellishly tough to prove. With highly limited resources and no certainty about his future, he has been hard put just to scrape by, with the help of the Chinese dissident community. His English is still poor (he spoke with me through an interpreter). And when he began applying to the courts, he was unable to locate a witness who could even say whether he was indeed the man who once came over the U.S. Embassy wall.

Add to that the tall order of certifying details of the rest of his existence back in China. Compound it all with the labyrinthine requirements of U.S. immigration policy, which can get confusing even for the English-speakers who actually administer it at the Department of Justice. As one spokesman told me the other day, while trying to explain some of the official statistics, "There is absolutely nothing in the immigration system that's simple."

On top of that is an immigration policy that in some ways encourages our immigration officials to view the simple desire to live in America as a sort of irritating and suspect trait in foreigners. What you get is Mr. Zhang, in his white T-shirt and sneakers, with a desperate look in his eyes, unpacking on a table at our office big bundles of documentation he has amassed with great effort and care, none of it sufficient to satisfy the system.

According to Mr. Zhang's sworn statement, given in 1998 when he first filed his case with a U.S. immigration court, here's what happened after he was rejected at the embassy in 1982: He was sentenced in China to two years at a labor camp near his native city of Tianjin. The following year he escaped, made his way again toward the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, and was again nabbed by Chinese security forces. This time he was sentenced to three years in a prison camp in western China.Released in 1986, he returned to Tianjin, but as a former prisoner he no longer had residency status. He lived with his parents. He married in 1988 and soon his wife bore a son. Mr. Zhang supported his family by peddling clothes on the street, harassed periodically by authorities.

In 1996 he saw an ad in the paper offering American business visas for $1,000. This inspired him to make another bid for freedom, He scraped together the money and traveled to San Francisco, where he tried to defect. But he wasn't sure how to go about it. He went to an FBI office, where officers sent him to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, where officials gave him forms to fill out and sent him away. He ran out of time and money. With the Chinese government probably none the wiser, he went back to China.

And he tried again. In 1997 he pulled together the fee for another visa, came again to the U.S., and this time applied through the courts for asylum, hoping eventually to bring over his wife and son. He got help from the Chinese dissident community, notably a New York-based group called Freedom and Democracy in China, whose chairman, Ni Yuxian, testified in 1998 that Mr. Zhang had already, by then, "been actively involved in the democracy movement for mainland China."

In September 2000, Mr. Zhang joined a much-publicized protest at New York's Lincoln Center, wearing a sign that said "Eliminate the one party dictatorship in China"--and his picture appeared in the Chinese-language World Journal. This past March he attended a meeting of the Overseas Chinese Democratic Movement and appeared in a group photo, along with such famous dissidents as Wei Jingsheng, on the cover of another U.S.-based Chinese-language publication, Beijing Spring.

Whatever impression all this might have made on Chinese state security agents, it has meant--officially--nothing to U.S. authorities. The immigration court's Ms. Shepard brushed aside his dissident activity, sniffing: "I give these almost no weight whatsoever." She further noted that Mr. Zhang couldn't even come up with a witness to prove his story of persecution in China.Undaunted, Mr. Zhang found fresh legal help. And this year, at last, he was able to locate the former U.S. diplomat, Mr. Martin, who in 1982 spoke with him during his brief interlude at the embassy and then saw him detained in the street. Mr. Martin, now working in the private sector, confirmed in a May 31 affidavit that Mr. Zhang was indeed the man who 20 years ago jumped the wall. Mr. Martin attested that Mr. Zhang has "been persecuted in the past on account of his allegiance to American ideals, and his protest activities since arriving in the United States would put him in even greater risk of persecution should he be forced to return to China."

No dice, said the board, which on July 15 rejected Mr. Zhang's application and ordered him booted. His lawyer, Kevin Reilly, plans to try another avenue of appeal, later this week. But barring interventions by Congress or the attorney general, he has little hope. America simply isn't that generous these days. This past year, U.S. immigration courts ruled on the cases of 46,824 applicants, and granted asylum to some 40%, including 2,624 Chinese--roughly one for every half million souls living under Beijing's tyranny.

Listening to Mr. Zhang, as he pleads the case that he is "looking for safe haven" but deeply scared by now of ending up in "a Chinese communist jail," it seems to me that surely America could find a little more room for those who risk so much to come over the wall.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Wednesdays here and in The Wall Street Journal Europe.

送交者: 智叟

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