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InAlienable
Daily Dispatch
October 24, 2019
Yesterday we highlighted a few themes somewhat unique to the U.S. political context - the rise of Trump’s “brand” on immigration as documented by Frontline’s “Zero Tolerance” program, and we also looked at the backlash to Trump among newly naturalized citizens, a group increasing far faster than new immigrants. Today, we step back a bit and try to place this in a more global context.
The new edition of Foreign Affairs includes an interesting article that compares the migration “crisis” in Europe in 2015 with the current spike in refugees migrating from Central America and the dramatic increase in Venezuelans fleeing their country (nearly 4 million refugees), a situation mostly impacting neighboring countries Colombia and Peru, but with clear regional implications.
The European and American crises are alike in a number of ways. The total number of people apprehended at the U.S. border or deemed inadmissible at a U.S. port of entry since October 2018 is now nearly the same as the number of asylum seekers who arrived in Europe in the whole of 2015. Observers on both sides of the Atlantic have also stumbled on eerily similar scenes. The widely published photograph of the bodies of Óscar Martínez and his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria, who drowned while attempting to cross the Rio Grande in June, resembles the picture of Alan Kurdi, a Syrian toddler who drowned while trying to cross the Mediterranean in 2015. Both images have come to symbolize the awful toll of transnational migration in a world of closed borders.
The effects of migration on the European and American political systems are likewise comparable. The rhetoric of xenophobic right-wing figures in the United States echoes—and, in some cases, draws on—the pronouncements of their European counterparts. In Europe, such rhetoric fueled anti-immigrant sentiment and encouraged support for right-wing parties. It has had similar effects in the United States, where rising xenophobia has underwritten the Trump administration’s punitive approach to migrants.
The author, Alexander Betts, draws some interesting parallels between the European response in 2015 to 1.2 million refugees fleeing a variety of conflicts trying to gain entry to the response to migrants from Central America and Venezuela. The initial response was ad hoc, each country approaching things differently. Germany opened its borders. Hungary shut them. However, eventually a regional response emerged. I disagree with Betts about the effectiveness of those strategies. For example, the agreement with Turkey to resettle asylum seekers, for example, has not proven to be sustainable (as he notes), and the EU’s use of Libya as a holding ground for asylum seekers, most trapped in camps in horrible conditions, emerged from EU coordination to offshore efforts with questionable results. These responses did, however, lead to a decline in migration to Europe - which was the goal.
Betts point, however, is not that the EU model should be followed, simply that the principal of regional cooperation needs to be elevated in the discussion about the migration crisis in the Americas. On this front there is an interesting discussion about earlier efforts to grapple with regional refugee flows from Central America in the early 1990s, specifically the International Conference on Central American Refugees (CIREFCA). This agreement provided funding to help people return to their home country, to housing and/or work opportunities, as well as funds for projects to help refugees not returning home, to integrate into their new communities. From Betts perspective a similar program could be launched today under the recently passed Global Compact on Refugees, which encourages, among other things, regional programs that bring together governments, non-governmental organizations and other stakeholders with the international donor community to craft solutions that will help people relocate safely.
There are two items I want to lift up from this discussion. The first, is Betts concept of “survival migrants” is an important insight. Unfortunately, much of the discussion of refugees versus asylum seekers is caught up in near 70 years old Cold War language about people fleeing authoritarian governments, amended later to include people fleeing religious and ethnic conflicts. The traditional categories of refugees still exist of course. However, increasingly people are fleeing unstable economies, climate disaster, and non-state violence. People are fleeing as a survival mechanism, and their reasons do not always map with traditional legal categories. As we know, in the U.S. the Trump administration has sought to restrict the basis for valid asylum claims to traditional categories, moving backwards rather than forward.
The second item I would lift up from Bett’s analysis is more critical, however. And that is the failure to address, even in passing, the fundamental responsibility the United States and Europe have to address - and fund - solutions to these refugee crises because they helped create them in the first place through war, intervention, and economic pillage. I believe the call for regional initiative and multilateral solutions is crucially important. But it is also the case, as we saw in Europe, that these processes become a means to address the concerns of receiving countries, especially wealthier receiving countries, without adequately addressing causes of migration.
That states should address those causes and create “anchors” instead of walls, in Betts term, are well taken. But will they? Democratizing the multilateral for where these discussions take place would seem a necessary parallel movement to any cooperative solution on migration and many other issues. Otherwise the interests of the U.S. and Europe will overshadow truly cooperative, regional or inter-regional initiatives.