Welcome the Headhunters to the U.S. People Collection

By Diana Hull
Volume 22, Number 3 (Spring 2012)
Issue theme: "Immigration profiteers"


Our country is obsessed with becoming a Noah’s Ark nation, determined to bring together, through various programs, every possible variety of people and cultures on the face of the earth. The churches and others, who resettle refugees for institutional profit, facilitate this activity, hiding their greed for continuing U.S. reimbursements under the usual mantle of doing good deeds.

The worst, but not only offenders are the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Lutheran Church, and other assorted religious and non-profit organizations. The justification for what has become a hugely expensive refugee agenda, as well as the less known but also destructive Diversity Visa Lottery, managed by the Department of State’s Bureau of Consular affairs, is to bring the alleged rewards of extreme diversity to a supposedly ethnocentric America.

All of the refugee program’s successful applicants receive a green card and become lawful and permanent U.S. residents. The same status is given to Visa Lottery winners. But, in the attempt to make the lottery as inclusive as possible, the decision for 2013 is that, because we have many folks from Bangladesh here already, they are excluded now to make way for residents, for example, from South Sudan, who are currently invited to apply.

In discussing the refugee problem, Don Barnett, a specialist on this topic, says that the “choice about who is admitted to the U.S. as a refugee has been surrendered to the U.N.,” even though our nation pays for this program. “By 2001,” Barnett says “about 45 percent of the refugee stream was Muslim,” and he estimates “the cost of this program to U.S. taxpayers is ten times the official estimate of $1.1 billion, because welfare and multiple other costs were omitted.”1

All these misguided policies have arguably been made possible because Americans have been lectured by every authority figure imaginable, that diversity is wonderful, good for our souls and our personal growth. Travel to faraway and exotic places no longer suffices if we want to understand people who see the world very differently.

So few Americans assume anymore that a cosmopolitan outlook can be achieved by traveling the world on the Renaissance Cruise Line, because multicultural understanding is no longer reserved for the educated and wealthy. As a matter of equity, we now provide it gratuitously to people in lower-income areas, because refugees live there and partake of all the U.S. welfare Programs available to Americans.

So the aforementioned $10 billion is the cost of bringing diversity to everyone, whether or not they want to appreciate the profound variations in human behavior or not. For this kind of money, even the poorest among us, it is claimed, can have a profound educational experience when living, for example, next door to a family of Dayak tribesman from Palangkaraya, Borneo.

The migration of Borneo headhunters to either California or Maine can happen quickly, when either the State Department or the U.N. notes what the media, who educates us on these topics, have written about their unusual folkways. A few years ago, the Dayaks were thoughtlessly invaded by neighboring Madurese from Eastern Java, and the Dayaks were so upset, it might qualify them for refugee status immediately, and if that doesn’t work, they are welcome to try the U.S. “diversity lottery.”

Therefore Americans, especially those who are the “least among us,” may be able to get to know the Dayaks firsthand, whereas limousine multiculturalists can secretly count on the fact that this unwanted intimacy probably won’t happen to them. But social justice and opportunity are the point here. Why deprive less affluent areas of an enlarged appreciation of the way others live and the thrill of witnessing customs rarely observed, even on carefully supervised travel tours the poor can’t afford?

Dayaks would be welcome because, for one thing, most head-hunting groups are not yet part of our “people collection,” and such an omission, could possibly be race-based.

Neither is our language collection complete. At 374, we could still add many more “tongues,” including whatever dialect is spoken in the Dayak region of Borneo.

This means more jobs for translators in doctor’s offices and at the DMV. And appreciably more money will be needed for criminal defense purposes as soon as the first male Dayak gets caught in the act of lopping off a head, a body part he then carries about on a pole. The first impaled head will likely belong to a Maldurese, his enemy, who could also be invited to live here with us after being treated unfairly in Indonesia.

But wait, others persons could also conceivably be targets of the Dayak, who have a historical ways of expressing indignation. But for American risk takers it’s a small price to pay for the benefits accruing to all of us as we learn to appreciate other folk’s ancient traditions. And that, indeed, is the best talking point for diversity and the reason for refugee rescue and diversity lotteries, not how many severed heads will be exhibited on poles, pursued as part of the Dayak’s responsibility to preserve their cultural heritage.

Others would argue that we have sufficient diversity already, living close to people from places like Somalia and Yemen. Now, in America, some Muslim sects still cut out parts of the genitals of 8-year-old girls. And in some Oriental markets in San Francisco, the limbs of live animals are cut off for food, before these suffering creatures are returned to their cages and the next customer decides what parts they want to take home for supper.

So why be bigoted when it comes to an indigenous folk custom like cutting off a head and then drinking the blood of an enemy? What’s the harm in ripping out and eating a human heart when the person is already dead?

Thus the Dayaks will come to live among us through many routes, but mostly because they aren’t here yet. Their entry will likely be facilitated by any one of the consortium of U.S. churches who get taxpayer funds or by the Department of State to resettle diversity visa winners in U.S. communities.

Since worshippers of the American Indian have now ennobled even the once murderous Texas Comanche, why not give the head hunters of Borneo their due, even if there is some chance that a U.S. farmer, tilling his field, could be startled one day when a Mandau ax is implanted in his head. But individual misfortune must be weighed against the imperative to welcome Third World people and the fight to end bigotry. Besides, these folks, it is said, are more “in tune” with nature than we of the decadent West.

The point of diversity visas is to sweep away any remaining physical and emotional distance between Americans and all the exotic primitive people of the world who have so much to teach us about life’s higher values. We are, after all, a superior race and one of unparalleled arrogance — god-like in the ability to overcome the conflict and violence that have always been suffered by others who tried the same thing, albeit on a more modest scale.

We claim this superiority in the face of thousands of years of history that proved these kinds of mergers to be unwise — up to the recent slaughters between Russians and the Chechyans, Tutus and Hutus, Israelis, and Palestinians.

Yes, but Americans will write another history, the diversity crowd advises — one in which our moral superiority will prevail over any bred in the bones proclivities to care first for ourselves, then for family and nation. And never mind that Borneo natives and Maldurese never did mix well when competing for turf in their respective homelands. We blithely assume that, once in America, hundreds of cultural groups will rise above battling for ascendancy and will become part of that great global village that Hillary is always talking about.

But don’t count on there being such a village quite yet. Beware of axes and protect your head with a bicycle helmet whenever you walk among the wild men of Borneo who could be setting up shop in South Central Los Angeles, along with their poles.

But the essential point of the refugee project and the visa lottery is for the U.S. to expand its “world class” people collection. These two programs carry an underlying message, that Americans have advanced way beyond other human beings — are no longer territorial and have overcome any tribal antipathies.

We are then, in effect, not simply exceptional, but are, indeed, superior beings. But if ever there was a truly “racist” position, this is it. 


Endnote

1. Barnett, Don, (May 2011), Refugee Resettlement: A System Badly in Need of Review, Center for Immigration Studies.

 

About the author

Diana Hull is the West Coast Editor of The Social Contract.