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[Henry Gallagher]

With these realities as a backdrop, the current presidential administration has been engaged in a war against immigrants and asylum seekers. Trump has famously and repeatedly promised to build a wall on the southern border of the US and has vowed to sharply reduce legal immigration. He has sought to prevent immigrants from requesting asylum and to prevent the children of immigrants who are born in the US from becoming citizens. Many children have been separated from their families at the border, and in some instances future reunification of families might be impossible. [4] Some of these children who are separated from their families have been forcibly medicated with powerful psychiatric drugs. [5] Additionally, against decades of legal precedent, last year then Attorney General Jeff Sessions ruled that fleeing domestic or gang violence would no longer constitute reasons to qualify someone to receive asylum here. [6]

But are these feelings and assumptions correct? In what follows, we undertake to answer these questions in two ways. First, we will examine the characteristics of individuals seen in one faculty-led asylum clinic within a community-based, academic psychiatry department in the greater Boston area who are seeking legal status here in the US. That analysis will provide some preliminary data about a subset of asylum seekers. We will then also examine what is known broadly about asylum seekers and then argue that for humanitarian reasons as well as utilitarian ones, the US has an obligation to ensure asylum seekers are treated fairly and legally.

The number of male and female asylum seekers was approximately equal. (See Table 1.) The ages of asylum seekers ranged from the youngest, who was 8 years of age, to the oldest, who was 54 years of age, and the average of the entire cohort was 30 10 years of age. The median amount of time that individuals had been in the US prior to their evaluations was 3 years. Nine individuals had resided in the US for a decade or longer before they received their evaluations, including one extreme outlier who had lived in the US for 30 years prior to his evaluation. The majority of the individuals who were evaluated had limited formal education, with an average of 9 4 years. Most individuals hailed from Latin America, including 13 (22 percent) from El Salvador, 9 (14 percent) from Guatemala, and 5 (8 percent) from Haiti. Seventeen percent were from Sub-Saharan African Countries, 4 percent were from the Middle East-North Africa region and 6 percent from Asia.

Two-thirds of individuals had family who remained behind in their home country. These individuals described many reasons for seeking asylum here in the US, including escaping persecution for political activities, sexual orientation, religious belief, or because they feared intrafamily or gang violence. All told, 34 percent of those evaluated reported being victims of intrafamily violence, including intimate partner violence.

Most of the individuals fleeing gang violence were from Central America, with El Salvador and Guatemala being the countries most frequently fled. Many of these individuals had family members who were killed by gangs and were repeatedly threatened with death themselves. Twenty-five percent of individuals (many who hailed from sub-Saharan African countries) were fleeing violence because of their political activism. Thirteen percent were fleeing their countries because of religious persecution.

Seven individuals (11 percent) had committed crimes while here in the US. None of these individuals were recent emigres and most of them had lived in the US from early in their lives and had been arrested for drug related charges. Only one was arrested for a violent crime, and that occurred when the individual was in the middle of a psychotic episode and assaulted a hospital worker. No individual had plotted, attempted, or committed murder.

All individuals were deemed to be credible and none of them were thought to be malingering. (See Table 2.) Eighty-eight percent of individuals met diagnostic criteria for PTSD, while 34 percent met criteria for major depressive disorder. Approximately half of the clients in this cohort reported previously receiving some form of psychiatric care, although many of these individuals reported only receiving emergency department care and were not meaningfully engaged in the mental health system.

Ninety percent of participants believed they might, or would be, killed if they were forced to return to their countries of origin, and 95 percent of participants believed that they would face violence if they were forced to return. One-hundred percent stated they believed their symptoms of mental distress would increase if they had to return to their country of origin.

Some of the individuals in our study had committed crimes, but given that approximately 1 in 3 Americans will have been arrested by age 23, [11] our cohort had far lower rates of arrests than that of Americans generally. Our data are in line with national data that show immigrants are much less likely than native born Americans to commit crimes or be incarcerated. [12]

Deporting individuals back to their countries of origin under these circumstances seems cruel, to put it mildly. The 8th Amendment of the US Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment and the United Nations Convention against Torture forbids countries from transporting individuals to any country where there is reason to believe they will be tortured. The individuals we have seen would experience a worsening of their psychiatric symptoms and face either harm or death upon arrival in their home countries. Deporting these individuals would appear to be not only unethical, but illegal as well.

There are a number of points where modern Biblical chronologies disagree with each other. For those who do not assume gaps in the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 the largest area of dispute is the assessment of the varying merits of the Masoretic Text, Septuagint (LXX) and Samaritan Pentateuch. Evidence is given which suggests that the Septuagint and Samaritan traditions have suffered chronological revision in the course of transmission. The various alleged uses of Septuagint and Samaritan chronology by New Testament writers are surveyed and found to be explicable by ways other than by supposing that the New Testament writers followed the Septuagint or Samaritan Pentateuch. Future areas of chronological research are considered.

There have been many attempts to derive from the Bible a date for the creation of the world. Some believe that the Bible does not give data indicating a date for creation. It seems to the author that the Bible does give such data, since it gives the vital information required to calculate the length of specific periods. It does this by indicating the ages at which people begat successive generations (Genesis 5 and 11). Where there is danger of confusion1 we are given the essential information we need to create a chronology.2 This paper is not an attempt to create a Biblical chronology. Rather, it is an attempt to clarify some issues in Biblical chronology, so that some common ground can be established amongst creationist chronologists.

We must ask the question as to which versions have changed the figures? This can be answered by means of both external and internal evidence. I examine here whether any of the versions has a proven history of changing chronological information.

Most Christians nowadays know very little about the Septuagint. There is a general understanding that the New Testament has used the Septuagint, and some therefore assume that it must be in some way inspired. Most people are not aware that the Septuagint as a whole shows significant differences from the Masoretic Text from which English Bibles are translated. These are spread all over the Septuagint and would take a long time to list. A few illustrations of these differences will be given:

From this very incomplete list of variations it should be obvious that merely to say that the New Testament uses the Septuagint, and therefore its figures are more reliable, is to raise more questions than it answers.

I will give a few more examples of chronological easings in the Samaritan Pentateuch that do not correspond to the Septuagint. This shows not only that the whole process is complex, but also, by showing that the Samaritan Pentateuch is sometimes alone in its chronology suggests that revision is a tendency of this version.

The evidence we have considered so far has suggested that chronological revision has been a characteristic of both the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Septuagint transmission. We must here consider the question of textual families. The Samaritan Pentateuch and the Septuagint share a number of readings that they do not share with the Masoretic Text. It is often stated that the combined witness of the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch against the Masoretic Text is strong because they are independent. However, Bruce Waltke, who studied the Samaritan Pentateuch for a doctoral dissertation,36 has argued that we should rather consider the combined witness of the Masoretic Text and either of the other two texts as strong, while the combined witness of the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Septuagint is of little textual significance.37 This is because, as a broad generalisation, the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Septuagint may be visualised as two sub-branches from one branch of the textual tree, while the Masoretic Text is the other branch. Agreement from less related witnesses is more likely to represent the original than agreement from close sub-branches, which may only represent their immediate predecessor. When this axiom is applied to the chart of the readings of the three versions above, it will be seen that there are good grounds for ascribing the originality to the Masoretic Text. The Masoretic Text frequently agrees with one, but not the other of the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Septuagint. Take for instance the ages in Genesis 5. The Masoretic Text and the Samaritan Pentateuch are in agreement for the first five names until Jared. Thereafter, except for the ages of Enoch and Noah, who were indisputably good, the figures diverge and the Samaritan Pentateuch has calculated the ages so that the remaining three antediluvians (Jared, Methuselah and Lamech) die in the Flood. At this point the Masoretic Text agrees more with the Septuagint.

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