Q&A: Amos Yee seeking asylum in the US

Hi everyone. OK people, newsflash, this just came in: Amos Yee has somehow made it to Chicago and is currently seeking asylum in the US. So I am sure some of you will have plenty of questions as to how this has happened and what is going to happen next - let's try to explore this together and try to shed some light on the situation okay?

Q: Why is it reported that Amos Yee is being 'detained' in the US? 

A: This is standard procedure when one applies for asylum in the US - the authorities will 'detain' when you claim asylum. Think about it: if you claim asylum and then your claim is rejected by the authorities, then they will need to deport you from the country: now that's a lot easier if you're already in a detention center and the authorities can easily put you on the next plane out of the country if it comes to that. Imagine if you allow asylum seekers to go wherever they please, how are you ever going to remove them from your country if their case is rejected? By that token, this is a totally normal procedure. Whilst the words 'detained' and 'detention center' may sound like prison/jail, I assure you it is not. They are not exactly 5-star hotels either, they are basic facilities but detainees are not treated like criminals - they are well taken care of, they are fed, have access to medical care, entertainment facilities but in the US, they are not allowed the internet (hence the radio silence from Alvin Tan when he went through the same process). Now that's going to be hard for Amos Yee: no internet! (That might be good for him you know.)

Q: What will happen next to Amos Yee? 

A: As in the case of Alvin Tan, Amos Yee will have his asylum claim processed by the authorities and it is a process that is slow and tedious. This is mostly because of the large number of asylum applicants from all over the world who see America as the promised land (yeah, all this after they elected Trump as president). When Amos Yee's file is finally looked at (which can take a few months, even a year or more), two things can happen: they can actually chuck his case out and deport him (which happens a lot actually, because of people who 'chance' it by turning up in the US without a strong case and are deemed economic migrants) or they can say, "okay this guy has a valid case which needs to be investigated in more detail". Now one can assume that the latter will almost definitely happen: given the amount of material involved, this will take them even more months to document and compile before it is presented to a judge who will then make a ruling on the case. I must stress that I am really simplifying the process and it is actually far more complicated than you imagine, involving a lot of interviews not just with Amos, but with other parties as well.

We kinda knew this day would come, eventually...

Q: How long will this take? 

A: It is impossible to say. Straight forward cases - ie. cases which they can easily reject - would be pushed out of the system in a few months and the asylum seeker will be deported. With complex cases, it will drag on for months, even a few years if you're seriously unlucky. There are interviews and appeal processes that will have to take their courses. Regardless of how you may feel about Amos Yee, his case is definitely complex and will take longer than your average case. So don't hold your breath for what's going to happen next - there will probably be many months of waiting and no news for a long time whilst Amos Yee's case is processed. Such is the nature of the asylum process.

Q: Is there a way to contact him in the meantime? 

A: No, he has access to his legal team who will facilitate contact with his parents and other family members.

Q: What is the next step? 

A: He will be released from incarceration after a few interviews if they determine that his case is probably genuine and thus will have an above average chance of approval. This was the case with Alvin Tan - the asylum seeker is then issued with some form of ID as an asylum seeker and released from incarceration. They are then left in limbo - they don't have the right to work officially and have a very small allowance from the government in the meantime, but at least they are no longer locked up in a detention center. Alvin Tan is currently at this step but he's having a brilliant time - working in the adult entertainment industry and taking loads of holidays within the US. Fingers crossed, Amos Yee will get to this step fairly soon, then the quality of his life will improve a lot and he can get back on the internet.

Q: Did Amos Yee make the right decision to do this? 

Ooh. It is definitely a high risk move. Look, there's no guarantee that the judge will rule in his favour and it will be a slap in the face of the Singaporean government if they grant Amos Yee asylum. It will tantamount to saying that Amos Yee is justified and that the Singaporean government should not have done what they did to him, it will also reflect very poorly on the international image of Singapore. Once a free American citizen in the US, Amos Yee isn't going to keep quiet either - he will continue his campaign against the PAP from afar, where the PAP cannot touch him. Now with the election of Trump and a significant lurch to the right in American politics, I won't be surprised if they play hard ball and say no to Amos Yee's case. Look they are deporting him to the land of Sentosa, Orchard Road malls and Marina Bay Sands - that's hardly the same as deporting a Syrian dissident back to Aleppo, is it? 

If anything, I think Amos Yee would have been far better off going to a country like Sweden or Germany, but he's always had a love affair with America. That's a tactical mistake on his part - he had one chance to claim political asylum and he should have done it in the country where he would have the highest chance of success. He most certainly doesn't have the luxury of shopping around for the nicest country he'd like to live in. If Amos Yee's asylum case gets rejected in the US, it's not like he can casually stroll onto a plane and head over to Frankfurt or Stockholm and try his luck there - oh no. He would be put on the first plane back to Singapore and handed over to the Singaporean authorities, who would lock him up in jail for a very, very long time and then he would have to serve NS after he is done with his extra-long jail sentence. The price of failure is very high indeed, that's why I would have cautioned him against trying his luck with the American system but he must have consulted a lawyer about his odds.

Why did Amos choose the US over Sweden?

Q: How did Amos Yee sneak out of Singapore then? 

No one would know except Amos himself and I'm sure he would reveal all at some stage. You see, On 29 September 2016, Amos Yee was sentenced to 6 weeks' jail and fined $2000 for wounding religious feelings. He began serving his jail term on 13 October 2016. He spent 21 days at Tanah Merah Prison. His request for home detention was successful, so he served the remainder of his jail term at home. This means that his 6 weeks' jail term would have come to an end on the 24th November 2016 - did he  simply logon to the www.ns.sg portal sometime in late November or December and apply for an exit permit and have it granted online just like that? Amos Yee had already registered for NS (ie. he had submitted his pre-enlistment documentation) on the 27 November 2015. He has turned 18 in October this year so he is overdue for his NS as he's not in full time education. 

Given the messy situation with him being charged with crimes and spending time in jail, MINDEF must have decided to postpone his BMT until he was done with the justice system - which he was, effective as of the 24th November this year. Did MINDEF try to get him into the next batch of BMT or did he effectively slip through the net? Should the authorities have impounded Amos Yee's passport given his flight risk or have even monitored his movements a lot more closely? But then again, if he has yet to commence his BMT, he would have been free to go for a holiday as a civilian - I went for a holiday in Thailand a few weeks before my BMT started. Would impounding Amos Yee's passport have been an overkill? Another possibility of course is that Amos Yee sneaked out of Singapore on a fake passport - he could have obtained say a Malaysian passport on the black market and if you're a Singaporean male leaving Singapore at Changi Airport, the immigration officers would check your exit permit and you need to have all your paperwork in order. But if you hold any other passport, passing through passport control at Changi Airport is a breeze.

Did Amos Yee just waltz out of Changi airport...?

Q: Wait, are you telling me that they don't really check...?

A: Well, yes and no. Given that I have renounced my Singapore citizenship years ago, I used to carry all my paperwork with me to prove that I have given up my Singapore passport when I entered Singapore on my UK passport. Have I ever been subject to any cross-examination or scrutiny? Nope, not once. I am usually rushed through if there is a long queue of people behind me and once in a while, I get asked unusual questions like, "do you have a good job in the UK?", "are you rich?" and even, "can you still speak Chinese?" Sometimes when I am leaving Singapore, I get asked the question, "did you enjoy your stay in Singapore?" It feels more like casual chitchat I would get from the staff at a restaurant or hotel rather than the kind of interrogation one would expect at immigration control. Thus I can just imagine Amos Yee breezing through Changi Airport with a fake passport and boarding a flight with ease.

Q: Do you think his parents (or at least his mother) is in on this? 

A: Definitely. You cannot compare Amos Yee to Alvin Tan - Tan was a lot older and wiser when he made his escape to America (ironically via Singapore). Amos is barely 18 years old, he has barely spent any time outside Singapore. I don't doubt that he is intelligent, but is he grown up and mature enough to deal with life in an American detention center? Amos needed money to get his plane ticket to Chicago and I imagine he must have persuaded his mother to have given him that money - after everything he has gone through, I can't imagine there being anybody left out there who's willing to just give him a few thousand dollars on a trip like that. Would you donate to Amos Yee's cause? At least Alvin Tan had a business in KL which still generated some money for him whilst he waits for his asylum claim to be processed - Amos Yee made some Youtube videos which got a lot of hits but is that enough to sustain him as a Youtuber? No. He is probably still pretty much reliant on his parents and the generosity of the American government.

Who's going to pay Amos Yee's bills in America?

Q: How will Amos Yee adapt to life in America? 

A: I know a lot of Singaporeans will say that life in a detention center in the middle of winter in Chicago is going to scare the shit out of Amos Yee and he'll be begging to return to Singapore by January but I beg to differ. When I first moved to London, I loved it so much and decided to stay - 19 years later, I'm still here and still loving it. Look, jiat-kentang white bananas like Amos Yee and myself will never ever be happy in Singapore. We'll only be truly happy when we've settled in the West and have renounced our Singaporean citizenship. Whilst I question Amos Yee's judgement in choosing America over Sweden or Germany, I don't doubt that he is probably extremely happy that he is now in America with a hope of starting life anew there, so far away from the Singapore that he hates, far away from the people and the government who hate him as well. If his asylum case is approved, then I don't doubt that Amos Yee will assimilate faster than you can say Big Mac and fries. He'll become more American than the whitest American person in Chicago. Oh yeah, assimilation won't be a problem for him at all - in fact, it'll be a pleasure for him. 

Q: What does the future hold for Amos Yee in the US?

A: Well, there's the simple question of how he's going to make ends meet. Even if he is granted asylum, he's going to have to find a job to pay the bills. Life in a big city in America like Chicago can be expensive and let me remind you that Amos Yee left school at the age of 16 with just 'O' levels - going to university isn't even an option until he does some bridging courses to get him up to the same standard as 18 year old Americans when they complete high school. Oh and let's not forget that America is one of the most expensive places to do a degree! Compare that to Germany and Sweden where you can get a degree for FREE: okay you've gotta pay for stuff like transport, lodging, food, clothes etc but you don't need to pay university school fees. But Amos isn't interested in university, otherwise he may have done his 'A' levels (which would have been the most logical thing to do if he had any intention of getting a degree).

Will Amos make the most of his new life in America?

But allow me to point out that even though I do have a huge stack of paper qualifications (degrees, awards, scholarships, you name it I've got it) - so fucking what? I don't use any of that in my work - yes I work on sales and distribution in corporate finance dealing with high yield bonds. Half the time I'm using my wit, charm and initiative when dealing with investors and the other half of the time, I'm confronted with brand new shit that I've never encountered before and I'm learning/improvising on the spot. Listen, no degree from any university in the world can teach you this kind of fire-fighting, problem solving skills that I have to use on a daily basis - it's only the kind of thing that you can learn after many years of work experience. By that token, so what if Amos Yee doesn't have a degree when paper qualifications are not really that useful in the real world - especially in America?

Q: Can Amos Yee do the Youtube thing from the US? 

A: He can try but I seriously doubt he will succeed. You see, his rant about LKY was unique and stood out because nobody in Singapore dared to say anything disrespectful when LKY finally died. Singaporeans have a culture of censoring themselves, so Amos Yee gained notoriety pretty quickly. But in the US, you can say what you want on the internet, on TV, on Youtube, there is a far more established culture of freedom of speech unlike Singapore. So by being in America, Amos Yee has lost his USP because so many people are very outspoken in America. To capture the attention of the internet, you need to extremely high production quality these days, you need to be entertaining and you need to be great at social media - Amos Yee's videos have poor production quality and involve him talking at a camera for ages. Most of his videos would probably bore the hell out of your average Youtube viewer. Popular Youtubers get loads of product endorsements - I'd like to see a brand out there which will touch Amos Yee, it's going to be extremely hard to monetize his fame/notoriety. No, he'll just have to find something else to do with his talents.

It's not easy making a living from Youtube.

Q: Do you feel sorry for his parents? 

A: Sigh, yes and no. As you know from my blog, I don't get along with my parents either. I tend not to talk to them as they have not listened to a word I've said in the last three decades anyway - they don't know what I do for a living and I can't be asked to tell them. Like what kind of parents have no idea what their son does for a living? I should tell them that I'm a really famous gay porn star in London or that I run the biggest meth lab in England and see if I can get a reaction out of them. I know a lot of Singaporeans will feel sorry for Mr and Mrs Yee, but Amos turned out the way he did as a result of their poor parenting skills. For crying out aloud, he was just a kid when he first got into all that trouble in March 2015. If you want to have a child, you jolly tell take responsibility as parents to make sure your child stays out of trouble. Amos Yee didn't just wake up one day and decide to make a video to piss off the entire Singapore - I read his blog, I know he had a miserable time at secondary school and yet his parents did not do enough to address the situation back then. Did his parents not care enough, why did they just look the other way then?

So perhaps I'm a bit biased, but I'm not letting his parents off the hook so easily. I do feel sorry for them because I know that they will get harassed by Singaporeans over this latest development. But at the same time, I still do blame them for having let Amos Yee down in not having done so much more to address his behavioural issues when he was in secondary school. I feel for Amos - it's the huge generation gap that's the problem. Mr and Mrs Yee must be only a few years older than me, yet it seems evident that they are struggling to understand their own son despite having brought him up; whilst there can be people like me who can watch from afar and say, yup, I can see exactly what is going wrong here. As the saying goes, 当局者迷, 旁观者清. If Mr and Mrs Yee couldn't deal with Amos, they should have sought help from a third party.  Stop blaming the child for misbehaving - his behaviour is still ultimately the responsibility of his parents.  I'm very sorry if this sounds quite harsh, but ultimately, they are the ones to be blamed.

Q: Will Amos regret burning bridges with Singapore, like he can never ever return you know...

A: Duh, in case you people don't get it, Amos hates Singapore. But let me be more specific, the one aspect about Singapore that Amos Yee hates the most is Singaporeans - the way Singaporeans worship the PAP and LKY drives Amos Yee mad and if you have ever seen his videos or read some of his postings on social media, you don't see any love or affection for Singapore. All I saw was rage, angst, hatred, frustration and bitterness. Okay, if you are happy with your life in Singapore - good for you, I'm glad you're happy but what makes you think that Amos Yee would ever want to return to Singapore, even if it's just to visit his parents? Is there anything left in Singapore for Amos Yee to return to? Let me spell it out to you: this guy had virtually no friends when he was in secondary school and he was so miserable there. He became public enemy number one and got beaten up twice in public, not to mention an unprecedented amount of online abuse. The government has chucked him in jail twice already. And on top of that, he has a terrible relationship with his parents and he has no siblings. It's a fucking miserable situation.

With all that in mind people, can you tell me if there's anything at all, that may want to tempt Amos Yee to return to Singapore? Did you think that he would miss the laksa, the satay and ice kachang and all the other delicious local dishes so much that he would return to Singapore? In fact, I challenge you to find me someone in Singapore who has had a more miserable time between April 2015 to December 2016 than Amos Yee. Life in Singapore may be pretty good for some people, but it has been fucking awful for Amos Yee. If I was Amos Yee, I would want to leave and never ever return to Singapore ever again. Amos Yee has far more reason to hate Singapore than anyone else. There is no one at all, nothing in Singapore for Amos Yee but a lot of enemies - so why the fuck would he ever want to return to Singapore? I get the feeling that the retards who ask this question are the suaku idiots who are so poorly traveled that they have failed to realize that there is a very big world out there with a lot of countries that a lot nicer than Singapore.

Why would Amos ever want to return to Singapore?

Okay, that's it from me on this topic. I could go on writing but I'll end here, please let me know what you think about this issue and if you have any other questions regarding this latest twist in the Amos Yee saga, do leave a comment below and we'll talk about it. I wish Amos Yee good luck and hope his case gets processed swiftly. Many thanks for reading!