A 2013 report issued by Sanctuary for Families found that practitioners are being imported into the United States from FGM-prevalent countries:
Typically, FGM in the U.S. is carried out by traditional practitioners who operate covertly and illegally. When U.S. health care providers carry out the procedure, they frequently come from countries where the practice is prevalent, and they operate on girls from their own communities at the request of a child’s parents.
In fact, genital disfigurement has become so common in America’s immigrant communities that the Department of Justice has taken to printing Arabic brochures for immigrants, encouraging them not to disfigure young girls by removing their sexual organs.
The United States government, however, will inevitably face an uphill climb as it continues to resettle more immigrant populations who abuse and disfigure women.
As one taxi driver in Washington D.C. told The Atlantic, “I stood over her to make sure she cut enough… I wasn’t going to let my daughters have those things!” A mother facing the decision had been told by her community, “If I don’t do these things, the girl will grow up horny. She’ll be like American girls.”
As The Seattle Times reports: “Kadija Ahmed [a Somali immigrant and mother of three] says she knows Americans find it difficult to understand her religion and culture, the underpinnings of a country where she was married at 13 to a much older man who paid her parents 100 camels for his beautiful young bride.” Ahmed told the paper, “Everything we do comes from religion – how we eat, how we dress, how we talk to people… Anyone who thinks this is wrong or weird is not respecting my culture or my religion or who I am… and they should be educated.”
It may be regarded as one of the great ironies of the 21st century that Ted Kennedy’s lasting legacy may be having making the United States an infinitely more dangerous place for young girls and women—as immigration has resulted not only in widespread female genital disfigurement, but has also produced thousands of cases of rape, sexual assault, and murder of young girls, which never would have occurred if not but for his 1965 immigration law.