One significant aspect of immigration that is often overlooked is the way in which it tends to increase tensions between the two countries involved.
Speaking last month at a Washington think tank, Rushan Abbas relayed tales of suffering she had heard about China’s repression of ethnic Uighur Muslims — including the detention of members of her husband’s family in a widespread system of mass internment camps.
Within six days, Abbas’ ailing sister and elderly aunt disappeared from their homes in northwest China. No family members or neighbors have heard from them in more than a month.
Abbas is an American citizen and Virginia resident; her sister has two daughters and both live in the United States. They all assume the women are being detained in the camps, which Western analysts estimate hold up to 1 million people.
Abbas said they had fallen victim to the persecution against which she had been campaigning — and because of her.
“I’m exercising my rights under the U.S. Constitution as an American citizen,” Abbas, a business consultant, said from her 12th-floor office in Rosslyn, Virginia, overlooking the Key Bridge and Potomac River. “They shouldn’t punish my family members for this.”
Why should the USA care how China treats its own citizens? Why shouldn’t China punish the family members of a disloyal citizen? And why should China care what happen to be the rights under the U.S. Constitution?
The neo-liberal world order is a huge, unwieldy mass of contradictions and false narratives. That’s why it is collapsing even faster than the Soviet Union did.