When a fire broke out recently at a Mexican
detention center for migrants and asylum-seekers in Ciudad Juárez, just across
the border from El Paso, it seemed like cosmically bad luck, a double tragedy:
People forced — by political instability, criminal violence, climate change, or
economic deprivation — to flee their homes, faced a devastating fire while
trying to seek refuge. At least 39 people died. The world took notice. Mexican
authorities launched a criminal investigation.
اضافة اعلان
But was it really so random? Or was this
double tragedy a portent of what is to come in a world where seemingly
unsolvable conflict and climate change are already creating disasters across
the globe?
When I saw the news reports, my mind
immediately turned to my recent trip to southern Turkey, where I went to report
on the aftermath of the devastating earthquake in February. There are more than
3.5 million Syrians in Turkey who have fled the Syrian civil war; I met dozens
of them while traveling in the country. When the earthquake hit, they, too,
faced cosmically bad luck, a double tragedy.
The earthquake was an act of God, but their
situation is man-made. These Syrians cannot return to their homeland because of
the brutal conflict there. But they cannot really go anywhere else, either,
because the Turkish government has — in exchange for 6 billion euros from the
EU — sealed its seafront to prevent anyone from heading to Europe.
The people who died in the Mexican
detention center were similarly trapped. Facing unprecedented arrivals from
South and Central America, the US has pressed Mexico to warehouse asylum
seekers, relying on a Trump-era pandemic policy that it may soon effectively
replace by restarting the practice of detaining families who try to cross the
border without authorization.
This is the morally dubious system that the
rich world has created for managing the tens of millions of people in the poor
world who have fled their homes: Stay there, but we will pay. As more and more
people seek to escape natural disasters, conflict or some cruel combination of
the two, rich countries have demonstrated that they will go to great lengths to
ensure that these displaced people stay as far as possible from their shores,
keeping them stuck in an excruciating purgatory in so-called “third countries”.
It was only a matter of time before one of
these holding pen countries found itself in crisis — an earthquake, a climate
change-induced natural disaster, a new war, or political crisis — destabilizing
the supposedly safe refuge while creating further humanitarian disasters.
Do the grand global commitments the world
made to protect defenseless people in the aftermath of World War II mean
anything anymore? The rich world has developed a shockingly high tolerance for
cruelty in order to keep out desperate people.
I traveled through parts of Turkey with
Ahmed Kanjo. Early in the war, Ahmed had been an Aleppo, Syria-based anchor for
an Arabic-language news station. But since fleeing with his family to Turkey,
he had struggled to make a living practicing our shared craft. I hired him to
work with me as an interpreter.
The earthquake had damaged the apartment
building where he lived with his wife and four children. He sent his family to
stay with his brother in another region for safety from the endless
aftershocks, but returned to Gaziantep, Turkey, to work. So he was bunking in
Gaziantep with his friend Abdul Kadir, a young man who told me he had escaped
from Aleppo after being beaten and harassed by the Syrian intelligence
services.
One evening, Ahmed, Abdul Kadir, and some
of their friends sat cross-legged on the floor, drinking spiced coffee, the air
thick with cigarette smoke. I thought about Ahmed’s work as a television
journalist. He showed me video clips, including one in which he was hunkered
down in a trench, speaking to the camera as explosions and gunfire rang out
around him. Even though I do not speak Arabic I could tell he was a gifted
presenter, cool under fire but able to convey to the viewer the emotional and
physical stakes of battle. Ahmed told me he missed his work.
“Every conversation revolves around where
you are going to go,” he said. “The world thinks the Syrians in Turkey are
fine. They opened a sanctuary, but it is actually a prison.”
The rich world has developed a shockingly high tolerance for cruelty in order to keep out desperate people.
Ahmed and I shared more in common than a
profession. My roots are in Ethiopia, a country, like Syria, famous for
producing refugees. My mother escaped just as a brutal Marxist military
dictatorship took hold. She married an American and they bequeathed to me the
dark blue passport that made it possible for me to move freely in the world, to
have the job that brought me to Turkey, to live a life of freedom. What, other
than the luck of geography, separated my life story from Ahmed’s? Or any of our
lives, for that matter.
In the aftermath of World War II, the world
created a system to protect people forced to flee because of war and
persecution. Refugee is a legal designation for someone fleeing across an
international border because of persecution or conflict, which is technically
distinct from the broader category of migrants, people who move from one
country to another for other reasons — economic or physical survival, for
example. These categories have always been more porous than we would like to
admit, but in a world beset by conflict and calamity the difference begins to
feel quite academic.
Like a lot of postwar commitments, our
commitment to refugees has, over time, come to exist more in theory than in
practice. It is officially a shared global responsibility, but in reality, the
burden of hosting these people has fallen overwhelmingly on poor and
middle-income countries, with rich countries largely footing the bill.
At home, rich countries create an
impossibly narrow path to asylum that excludes almost everyone with a valid
claim while preserving the possibility, however scant, that a lucky few will
pass through the eye of a needle. But in reality, the eye of the needle has all
but closed. The US and Europe acknowledge the existence of a category of person
called “refugee,” who is worthy of special protection, but we make the barriers
to seeking that protection nearly insurmountable. Instead, we treat the people
who seek to prove their worthiness like criminals until proven otherwise.
The governments of rich countries may well
be satisfied with this bargain, in which those forced to flee their homes are
provisioned at the expense of rich country taxpayers with the basic needs for
human survival. But even this meager program, which does considerable violence
to the original idea of refuge, does not enjoy a great deal of support among
the citizens of the rich world. Instead, we appear headed for a Hobbesian
future in which we simply accept the awful fate of certain peoples as the bad
luck of geography.
It appears we have no choice but to
continue on this gloomy path. The politics of migration have become completely
toxic. In 2015, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany boldly declared in the face
of an influx of refugees to Europe: “We can manage it.” Germany took in more
than 1 million people fleeing conflict and persecution, the vast majority of
them from Syria. Germany did manage. But voters across Europe rebelled. The
following year Merkel and other EU leaders struck their bargain with Turkey to
stop the flow of migrants.
No one else stepped up. Of the roughly 32
million refugees in the world today, the US’ current cap for resettlement is
just 125,000. In 2022 the US came nowhere near meeting it, resettling just
25,000 refugees. The Biden administration struck its deal with Mexico after a
political uproar — stoked by Republicans and their allies in the news media —
greeted the arrival of tens of thousands of Venezuelans escaping from their
country’s economic and political collapse.
“It’s clear that there’s pretty radical
polarization of political views,” said David Owen, a philosopher who writes
frequently about the moral and ethical dimensions of migration. “The space of
policymaking is moved quite far to the right.”
It is hard to imagine a leader with the
moral courage to do today what Merkel did back in 2015. Even the ostensibly
“good guys” in the rich world want to seal the borders.
Canada — and its liberal Prime Minister
Justin Trudeau — has long portrayed itself as a country willing to welcome
refugees and eager for skilled immigrants to replenish its workforce. But the
truth is that, facing an influx of people illegally crossing via the US border,
Canada acted like any other country: At the end of March, Washington and Ottawa
struck a deal that allows Canada to turn back more people who try to cross the
border from the US. As the French say: “Chacun pour soi et Dieu pour tous.”
Every man for himself and God for all.
Here are some of the headlines from the
weeks between when I sat drinking coffee with Ahmed Kanjo in Gaziantep and when
the detention facility in Ciudad Juárez burned: the British home secretary glad
handed with the officials from the repressive government of Rwanda, a country
with a long record of human rights violations to which Britain hopes to exile
asylum seekers. More than 80 migrants died in a boat that sank off the coast of
Italy. A UN inquiry concluded that the EU had “aided and abetted” human rights
violations by underwriting the Libyan Coast Guard to patrol the Mediterranean
Sea and detain would-be migrants.
These human beings who yearned for safety
and freedom, when facing a second cataclysm, were simply left to suffer and
die.
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