Now here's an immigration issue no one talks about

From the Daily News:

New York's metropolitan area is home to more women and girls who have been mutilated in female circumcision ceremonies — or are at risk — than any other U.S. city, experts estimate.

The global practice is a local issue, thanks to illegal surgeries performed here — but immigrant girls are often sent back to their parents’ homelands to undergo mutilation.

The centuries-old practice, based on beliefs about premarital “cleanliness,” has immigrated to the U.S. along with families from parts of West Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. The surgery is most widely done on infants and teens. It severely reduces sexual pleasure and can cause major health complications.

For some immigrants, the initial procedure may have been done back home, but the pain is compounded here.

When she was 15, Jaha Dukureh’s father made her go to a Manhattan doctor’s office to get her vagina — almost entirely sewn up during an infant circumcision ceremony in her native Gambia — cut back open so she would be ready for a forced arranged marriage to a 45-year-old man.

She believes the doctor knew it was for an underage wedding — a Gambian marriage counselor arranged the procedure.

“I was awake,” said Dukureh, now 23. “I screamed the whole time when they were doing it.”

“People think that female genital mutilation is an African issue, but it is a U.S. issue,” she said. “You have it everywhere Africans migrate to. I felt like if someone knew what I was talking about, most of the things that happened to me, they wouldn’t have happened.”

I guess we never hear about these things because the local pols are too busy remarking about how Vibrant! and Diverse! immigrants are and are busy trying to cover up the backward practices they brought with them. Joe Crowley's bill mentioned in this piece isn't going to do a thing about the problem, either.