Everywhere you look, someone is accusing governments of abusing the rights of people crossing their borders. The United Nations just accused the Czech Republic of human-rights abuses for holding migrants in “degrading” conditions.
Last month, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report in which it demanded that illegal-immigrant families be released from detention centers. Conditions in the centers, the commission suggested, were worse than the abuse and persecution they had fled in their home countries. It demanded that Congress stop funding detention centers.
If we know anything about the human-rights community, it’s that it often combines lofty idealism with dubious anecdotes and shifty statistics that undermine its genuine concerns. Take the U.S. commission’s report: On close examination, it is a dubious farrago of abuse claims used to lobby for a preferred pro-immigrant and pro-union outcome.
The report was supposed to examine conditions at detention facilities for immigrants, but its members didn’t get around to visiting any facilities until the report was nearly finished. They apparently thought they didn’t need to; instead, they relied largely on rumor and innuendo. Indeed, in its initial proposal to study detention facilities — adopted by the commission long before it undertook any research — the commission had already concluded that “egregious human rights and constitutional violations” were occurring.
