BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Ted Cruz Blocks Bill, Claims Hong Kong Refugees Could Be Spies

Following
This article is more than 3 years old.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has blocked legislation to provide immigration relief and refugee status for Hong Kong residents fearing persecution. Whether attempting to seize the mantle of anti-immigration leadership within the Republican Party for a future presidential run or for other reasons, Cruz prevented a bill from becoming law that passed the House of Representatives by voice vote. Cruz alleged the bill could lead to spies infiltrating America, a charge that critics point out blocked Jewish refugees in the 1930s and was used to discriminate against (and intern) Japanese Americans during World War II. This is the second recent bill a Republican senator blocked with an anti-Chinese justification, raising the prospect this will become a recurring tactic to stop immigration legislation.

On December 7, 2020, the House of Representatives passed by voice vote “The Hong Kong People’s Freedom and Choice Act of 2020” (H.R. 8428). The official summary of the bill explains its key parts:

-        “Hong Kong shall be treated as a [Temporary Protected Status] TPS-designated country for 18 months starting from this bill’s enactment. (Qualifying nationals of a TPS-designated country may not be removed from the United States and shall have employment authorization while the designation is in effect.)

-        “Furthermore, Hong Kong shall be treated as separate from China for the purposes of various numerical limitations on immigrant visas. (Hong Kong is part of China but has a largely separate legal and economic system.)

-        “For the purposes of seeking refugee status or asylum, a Priority Hong Kong Resident (and certain family members of such an individual) may establish that the individual has a well-founded fear of persecution if the individual asserts such fear and (1) had a significant role in an organization that supported the 2019 or 2020 protests related to China’s encroachment into Hong Kong’s autonomy or the Hong Kong National Security Law enacted in 2020; or (2) was arrested, charged, detained, or convicted for participating in the nonviolent exercise of certain rights.”

On December 18, 2020, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) sought unanimous consent to have H.R. 8428 pass the Senate and head to the president’s desk. Ted Cruz rose to object and made what critics believe are questionable assertions to justify his objection.

First, Cruz said, “This is not a Hong Kong bill. It is, instead, a Democratic messaging bill because House Democrats made, I think, a cynical decision to try to exploit the crisis in Hong Kong to advance their longstanding goals of changing our immigration laws.” He then accused Democrats of embracing “open borders” and said, “[T]heir preference is to make all immigration legal. This bill advances that longtime partisan political agenda that the Democrats have.”

The bill that passed the House had 23 cosponsors, and 6 of them were Republicans. Democrats have done a poor job enacting “open borders” policies, if that has been their goal: 3 to 4 million people are waiting in legal immigration backlogs, according to government data. While disapproving of Democrats using the situation in Hong Kong to enact what is a Hong Kong-specific bill, Cruz has not criticized the Trump administration’s efforts to use the coronavirus pandemic to enact numerous long-standing policy preferences on everything from asylum to family immigration and H-1B visas.

Second, Cruz asserted the refugee standard would be “dramatically lowered” in the bill and that China would use the legislation to send spies to America. “This bill, instead, is designed and would dramatically lower the standards for both refugee and asylum status to the point where individuals would qualify even if they cannot establish an individualized and credible fear of persecution,” said Cruz. “The Senator from Connecticut just listed that as a virtue of this bill – that no longer would you have to establish a credible fear of persecution; instead, this bill would dramatically lower that standard. There is no reason to lower that standard, and there is particular risk when doing so, we know, would be used by the Chinese Communists to send even more Chinese spies into the United States.”

Immigration experts question Cruz’s characterizations of the bill and its impact. “Sen. Cruz is correct that it does ‘change’ the standard,” said attorney Ira Kurzban, author of Kurzban’s Immigration Law Sourcebook, in an interview. “Using the word ‘lower’ improperly suggests that we have never recognized persons with certain characteristics as presumptively eligible for asylum. In fact, current law gives preference to Chinese (and other) nationals who are automatically defined as refugees under 101(a)(42) because the person ‘has been forced to abort a pregnancy or to undergo involuntary sterilization, or who has been persecuted for failure or refusal to undergo such a procedure or for other resistance to a coercive population control program . . .’”

If Cruz was consistent, he would call for eliminating this provision in current law but, Kurzban suggests, the senator would be unlikely to do so given the support that the provision enjoys among religious and other organizations. “The provision in current law, which was enacted due to China’s population policies, is a clear case of people entering irrespective of the traditional definition of refugee by simply changing the definition to include them,” said Kurzban.

Kurzban notes the existence of the provision in current law offering refugee status to victims of forced abortion and involuntary sterilization undercuts Cruz’s argument that the Hong Kong bill is an opportunity for spies to come to the United States. The redefinition of refugees based on forced abortion and involuntary sterilization in current law includes everyone from China, not just a limited group of resisters from Hong Kong, said Kurzban.

Senator Durbin responded to Cruz’s assertion that Hong Kong residents seeking protection should be considered likely spies by noting State Department officials used identical arguments in the 1930s against Jews. “We are all intent on keeping America safe, but to categorize a group of people as all potential spies – and, therefore, they are going to all be fed to the lions of Beijing if they are returned – seems to me to be fundamentally unfair and not consistent with what America has learned about immigration,” said Durbin. “There were suspicions in World War II about all those people coming from Europe, and they were turned away, many of them to their death. We can’t make that mistake again. If there is any suspect person, there is a way to determine that with screening, criminal background checks, and the like.”

An analogy is the treatment of another group of Asians as likely spies – Japanese Americans. On February 19, 1942, not long after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, the directive that empowered federal authorities to remove Japanese Americans from their homes and place them in federal internment camps for fear they would be spies and saboteurs on behalf of Japan due to their racial and ethnic characteristics. This tragic policy served no legitimate military purpose. “There was not a single American of Japanese descent, alien or citizen, charged with espionage or sabotage during the war,” according to Richard Reeves, author of Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II.

Recently, Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) inserted what may turn out to be a “poison pill” in H.R. 1044, a bill designed to eliminate the “per-country” limit on employment-based green cards. The language reads: “The Secretary of Homeland Security shall not adjust status of any alien affiliated with the military forces of the People's Republic of China or the Chinese Communist Party.” There is no identical language in the Immigration and Nationality Act for other nationalities, raising the question if the types of objections raised by Scott and Cruz will become new tactical devices to block other immigration bills.

In his remarks on the Senate floor, Durbin noted that approximately 6,700 people from Hong Kong currently in the United States could qualify for Temporary Protected Status under the bill. “One of them is a student of Georgetown, for example, who now has a price on his head from the Chinese Communist Party, and the question is whether we are going to force him to return into imprisonment. I don't think we want anyone who is suspected of spying on the United States at all, but to dismiss all of these people as possible spies doesn’t sound to me – does it sound to you? – as consistent with who we are as a people,” said Durbin.

The bill would restore Hong Kong as an entity separate from China when counting immigrant visas, which Donald Trump took away in 2020, harming people from Hong Kong. Trump’s action put individuals applying for EB-5 immigrant investor visas and other family and employer-sponsored immigrant applicants into the far longer China backlogs, delaying or blocking their ability to immigrate to America.

Ted Cruz said more effective legislation would be his SCRIPT Act, which would prevent the federal government from providing assistance to a film studio if it permitted censorship by China’s government. Here is what Cruz said on the Senate floor in arguing why his bill would provide more help to people from Hong Kong: “Doctor Strange, another movie – comic book movie – in Doctor Strange, they changed the Ancient One’s character from being from Tibet, which is how it is portrayed in the comic book, to Celtic because, you know, the Chinese Communist censors, they don’t want to recognize Tibet – another area that has been subject to persecution and oppression from China – and Hollywood meekly complied.”

Movie censorship is a legitimate issue, but individuals from Hong Kong seeking protection appear to prefer that Senator Cruz support real people over those on the screen. Owen Churchill, the U.S. correspondent for the South China Morning Post, reported: “Asked [Georgetown Ph.D. student from Hong Kong] Jeffrey Ngo for his thoughts on Cruz zapping a bill that would have offered him and other HK activists protected status in the U.S.: ‘Let me think about what is the good word to use. I’m enraged.’” Ngo added, “[Cruz’s] actions today have single-handedly endangered the safety and security of me and others just like me.”

Follow me on TwitterCheck out my website