My Unsolicited Immigrant's Perspective on Recent News
I came to America in 1991 when I was 6 years old. My parents had immigrated earlier and I had been living with my grandparents in China for a year and a half at that point. When the time came for my grandfather to take me to the consulate in Shanghai to get my visa, my father called and told me on the phone, “Shanshan, you must remember one thing, VERY important! If they ask you, tell them you are not a Communist and that you oppose Communism.” I etched this into my memory because I was told it was the most important thing, and then later... nope, no one asked the 6-year-old anything about her political beliefs.
It was one of those vignettes of childhood that you just accept at the time because you lack the context of history and psychology to understand it, but then something happens in your adult life and you realize it's actually part of a much larger history, a personal lens to viewing the Afghanistan boondoggle and why the exact nature of the disaster is still so misunderstood by the Western news media today.
So here's my contention. Most people who want to immigrate to the US from developing countries are desperate for economic opportunity and suffer from corrupt and incompetent governments unaccountable for their well-being. Western society has decided that the inability to make a living is not a legitimate reason to immigrate to the West, but they would be happy to rescue you if you are a victim of political oppression or gender oppression, especially if it's at the hands of one of their established enemy regimes. Thus, if you want to leave your country and come to the Land of Opportunity, you must first make yourself out to be a martyr for the American ideal of democracy. You must loudly lament your inability to protest once a year and pick your politicians every couple of years, even if the real reason you want to go to America is because you want to have a job, not be kidnapped or robbed every time you come into a little money, or have your subsistence wiped out by extreme weather events every few years.
The problem is, American journalists who shape the story are blind to this dynamic, and they duly hand-wave about this "oppression" without pressing for details. And so continues a reinforcing cycle of Americans diagnosing every country's most inhumane and feared problem as the lack of political and social freedoms, and hopeful immigrants learning that to declare themselves political refugees is the best way to be welcomed into American hearts and minds and onto American soil.
For the first 10 days of the recent media storm around the Taliban takeover of Kabul, I saw dozens of headlines about Taliban oppression driving tens of thousands of Afghans to the Kabul airport. Also dozens of opinion pieces lamenting the loss of rights for women and girls and vague allusions to "rumors of" and "reports of" women being oppressed again. There was constant footage of Afghans crowded against fences on the non-US-occupied side of the airport, although I don't recall seeing many women in the throngs. The writings of the American journalists did not describe at all what I felt I was seeing - desperate people who feared that their country was on the verge of economic collapse and mass unemployment now that the Americans were pulling out with their planes and their dollars.
Over the 20 years of the US war in Afghanistan, $2T were reportedly spent by the US government. No doubt, the largest benefactors were the US military industrial complex and its financiers, but over $110B were spent directly on building up the Afghan security forces and economic development, not to mention the local economy supported by the Westerners on the ground. By contrast, the GDP of Afghanistan in 2020 was $20B, compared to $4B in 2002. I remember the first time I'd ever heard of Afghanistan: I was in elementary school in the mid-90s and we were learning to do research. I was supposed to look up average life expectancy around the world, and according to the CIA World Factbook, the country with the lowest life expectancy was Afghanistan at 40-something years. Today, Afghanistan is still in last place at 53 years - ranked #227 out of all the countries in the World Factbook.
So which is the true bogeyman? The prospect of economic collapse after the Americans withdrew from the country, or the Taliban who were able to walk into Kabul with zero resistance? We're not seeing the obscenely violent footage of killings the likes of which we saw from the Middle East during the ISIS years, certainly not from lack of effort given what rumors the media has been willing to report and then liberally extrapolate from. Perhaps the true driver of despair is seeing the president of the puppet government flying away with a helicopter crammed with $169M in cash? Or the knowledge that the US-funded jobs program is gone? How can you not be motivated by the view on the other side of the fence of tens of thousands of ethnically Afghan-looking men and women walking onto a US military plane each day, off to start a new life?
And here is an American journalist asking leading questions through an interpreter! Are you worried about the Taliban? Are you worried about oppression? Yes! Yes, you are! Tell them what they want to hear to get yourself on that plane, then go and work your ass off to create a better life in your new country! That would certainly be my first instinct.
There should be no shame in trying to save yourself from abject poverty. It is not "greedy." What is flawed about the American framework is that our mental construct of what is a "deserving" reason for welcoming a refugee into our country is disconnected from the humanitarian crises that most refugees face. So we are told that refugees are dying to come to the US to preserve their political freedom and avoid persecution, we sleep well at night knowing we upheld our national virtues of spreading democracy and free speech everywhere, and we are shocked that democracy is not spreading like wildfire all around the world these days. The media always makes a point of being deeply suspicious that the Taliban is only telling us what we want to hear about their plans, but be realistic, the power dynamic here is such that everyone is telling the journalists what they think Americans want to hear.
Of course, unlimited airlift for all the world's economic refugees is not possible. And at least trying to filter out Taliban sympathizers for immigration into this country seems like a wise move for preserving the values America was founded on. But it is worth recognizing that much of what is being reported today by American journalists is a flawed "mirror, mirror on the wall" exercise to have our own values reflected back at us, and we are still not seeing Afghanistan clearly even after being there for 20 years. We keep asking the wrong questions. While we have learned that "it's the economy, stupid" is a good way to understand our fellow Americans, we rarely see past the authoritarian regimes when trying to understand foreign events.