Not All Asylum Seekers Are For Real, As The Germans Learned The Hard Way

There are many coming to our shores and borders now claiming to be asylum seekers. Many have legit reasons for their declarations; many don’t. Some are under the illusion that we, as Americans, have to take care of the whole world; some of us realize that it is not only impractical, but suicidal to our society to do. We cannot be our brother’s keeper of the whole world- we would be driven into poverty and dissolution ourselves.

The other nations of the world have to learn to take care of their own problems in their own lands. While there are genuine social disasters going on in countries like Guatemala, Syria, the Muslim part of China and other places, there also those coming in from Africa, China, Mexico, South America who are just wanting and believing that they deserve a piece of the pie that we baked. Sorry folks, there is only so much pie to go around. And that which we have we really should be sharing with those needy within our own borders- the homeless, the poor Natives, the poverty stricken, the elderly and the handicapped.

A famous example of unwarranted intrusion into another country occurred in Germany a couple decades ago, which made the news not only in their country but in the rest of the world as well. A number of Sudanese ‘students’ had interred themselves in the Frankfort Airport as a last ditch effort to prevent themselves from being expelled from the country for being ‘falsch Asylbewerbers’ -phony asylum seekers. They had hunkered down in the transit room at the airport and were claiming passionately that they would be tortured and possibly killed if they were returned to their native Sudan. They beseeched the German public in the name of both their God and the German’s not to force them out. They made a hunger strike to emphasize their point and to win sympathy from the public.

The ongoing incident made headlines throughout the nation. For two months the back and forth between the seekers, the police and the German authorities went on. A Koln psychologist examined them and claims to have found “Severe traumatization and acute suicidal possibilities.” Foreign journalists at one point who came to interview them were locked in an office to keep them from interfering. The matter was batted around like a tennis ball between all involved parties.

It finally came to a head and a decision was made. The German Constitutional Court rejected their bid for asylum. The seven young men where herded onto a plane by the police. They screamed and begged for mercy and again repeated the gruesome fates that awaited them. The newspapers the next day applauded or condemned in the strongest possible ways the decision and its reverberations. Time would eventually prove what an Academy Award acting job the seven Sudanese had put on. The German Magazine Stern, a popular leading national periodical had covered the situation and decided to go a step further. They sent veteran reporters Uli Hauser, Micheal Stuhrenberg and photographer Pascal Maitre down to the east African country to see if they could learn the fates of the rejected young men.

Flying into Khartoum, the three realized that it would be almost impossible to find the seven in a city of 3.3 million. Plus it was dangerous. Everywhere in the streets were men patrolling with Kalashnikov’s. The search quickly proved itself to indeed be difficult. The German Embassy could find nothing of their whereabouts. The address’s the young men had given to the them proved to be false. The seven had disappeared into the vastness of Khartoum and of the huge desert country. After two days of searching nothing was found.

Fortune arrived in the form of three students who were aware of the incident and had some insight into where one of the boys might be. With their aid they found 25 year old Ihab El Tayab Mohammed Ali living in a plain, six story house on an unpaved street in the city. When asked why he gave a false address to the German officials he claimed that he was afraid of the Secret Police here at home coming after him. His brother-in-law laughed and said that he was never in any danger. He was not arrested. He says he made a ‘dummheit’ (a stupid mistake) by going to Germany in the first place.

Despite this, Ihab says he will not forgive Germany for sending him back. Ihab argued that he had felt himself politically oppressed in Sudan, though his father stated that Ihab never had anything to do with politics. He had just wanted to travel and get money. His father had paid out 6,000 German Marks, approximately a hundred times a local government officials salary, for a Romanian visa and the flight to Frankfurt. Ihab had never been a student; he was now and had been before the flight a mechanic in his father’s auto shop. He had not been arrested upon returning. None of them had. He stated that he had a friend who had gone to Germany, claimed asylum, studied and then ended up working in a supermarket. He himself then mentioned that many asylum seekers came really to earn money.

In a later interview with Opposition leader El Hussein Ahmed, a true dissident who had been imprisoned and tortured by the government, said that no one in the Opposition had ever heard of these seven. He was glad these phonies were sent back because of Germany being sympathetic to the plight of the rebels in Sudan. “They just manipulated our difficult situation to their own uses,” said Ahmed. “Their lies could have made Germans have less belief in our true stories of oppression.”

At a second address in Omdurman an old woman answered the door and said that Mohammed Kustifa wasn’t home but told the reporters that he had ruined them with his adventure. His family had financed his flight into the European lands and it was all lost. In a third neighborhood with no street names Yasir Mahjoub Khalifa aged 20 was found to also not have been a real student. He had bought a ticket for Moscow with a stop in Frankfurt. He got off in Frankfurt and requested asylum. He was also not politically active.

Their venture finally brought the three reporters to to a remote side town and a fourth of the seven asylum seekers. Nassir Murbarch Ezzedin El Fahi was now a shoe salesman. His father had come up with the idea to go to Germany. He hadn’t even finished high school. His mother was raising him alone now. She said, “Why couldn’t they allow these seven in? What difference would it have made?”

The moral to the story (if you want to call it that) is:

What are the real truths behind many of those who come to our shores now? Are they real or are they pretenders?

While I was in Germany in the 1990’s there was also a wave of Africans running into the country. Most of the ones I met most were Nigerians pretending to be Liberians, because the political climate in that violent land gave them an excuse for asylum seeking that Nigeria didn’t have. They could also claim to be from a small village which did not have a hospital and therefore they didn’t have a birth certificate and thereby no passport. The Germans, normally big on identification, just accepted this as being the truth as they didn’t know what else to do.

This gave many Africans a very effective loophole to get into the country purely to earn money under false premises. Similar things are happening in our country right now- just look at our border in the south. ———-

Most of the material for this piece was gleaned and translated from a September 9th, 1995 article from the German periodical Stern. Stern is a weekly magazine published in Hamburg, Germany that was started in 1948. It has a basic leftist stance.

Author: rfreed

I was born and I died. Being a disembodied entity makes it very cheap for me to get by. Not having to worry about eating or having a place to live gives me a lot of freedom to squander my time writing occasionally funny articles. See more almost funny stuff at http://inyear252509.wordpress.com/