I had two stories last week which I never got around to writing about the Rainbow Nation—that would be South Africa—and Somalis.  You never hear about South Africa much in the mainstream media these days and that is (I think) because it didn’t turn out to be such a multicultural dream—a “rainbow” Nation after all.   Like most of the world’s countries if you aren’t a “native” you aren’t so welcome (it is called ethnic nationalism).  And folks, it isn’t the white South Africans (they are pretty much hiding out) it’s the black South Africans attacking the outsider Somalis and other Africans.

This story then at Times Live caught my eye.  Writer Jonny Steinberg is apparently hanging out with some Somalis in a Mitchell’s Plain, South Africa flop-house as he writes this:

Somalis glued to the news—looking for the next move:

Each room had four or five mattresses strewn across the floor; a traveller, I was told, paid R30 a night to sleep on one, his roommates invariably strangers. Everyone in the establishment – the owner, the people who cleaned the rooms and cooked, as well as the guests – was Somali.

The lodge’s little restaurant was packed, each customer’s attention fixed on the television screen on the wall. Standing with remote control in hand, the proprietor switched from Al Jazeera to Sky to CNN: any channel covering Libya earned the lodge’s attention.

With the attack on Libya and the disarray in that country they see an opening to get to the Mediterranean and Europe.

My interest in the coverage was somewhat abstract. I wanted Gaddafi to go lest he slaughter people I had never met. The conversation among the travellers around me, translated into English courtesy of my Somali companion, was considerably more practical. Were civil war to break out in Libya, someone asked, would Gaddafi’s forces be too busy fighting to worry about border control? Would it be possible to walk right through the country to the Mediterranean and get a boat to Europe? And what if Gaddafi were overthrown, another person asked. It would take a new regime a long time to settle. Now would be a good time to get to Europe through Libya.

I was being educated in a whole new way of watching television. These people, I realised, imbibed large quantities of international news each day of their lives. All corners of the planet were of interest to them. They combined what they learned on television with the hearsay of travellers; with e-mails and Facebook postings from long-lost relatives; with rumours. They were always calculating, as habitually as they ate and drank, the question forever in their minds: where to go next?

Hey, or another option is the US Southern border!

….. My companion had been told that if you walked across the Mexican border into the US, you would be caught and jailed. But the authorities would not deport you to Somalia’s civil war. After a year or two in prison, they would give you American papers, and you could call for your family to join you.

“How do you know this?” I asked. “Stories,” he replied. “Just stories.”

That’s the thing. CNN, Al Jazeera, the word of a passing traveller: these are hardly reliable sources of news. To be homeless is to be a gambler. You gather the information you can, you calculate, but ultimately you take a leap of faith into the unknown.

Our author suggests the news from passing travelers might not be reliable, but guess what, they have the US asylum and family reunification process pegged.

Heck, today if you can say you have family somewhere in the US, you might not even get detention when caught at the border.    Here is what happens:  Somali crosses the border and asks for asylum from those bad old terrorist Al-shabaabers in Somalia, gets US immigration lawyer, maybe detained, maybe not, lawyer (at taxpayer expense) gets the asylum seeker through the legal loopholes, asylum is granted and asylee gets welfare benefits/job training and then is taught how to get his “family” to America.

By the way, according to the most recent annual report from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, 22,852 asylum cases were approved in 2008.  This is a must-read report!