Category Archives: Immigration and Refugees

Those are not demons at the border

Decline of the west, Immigration and Refugees

On my last post on the subject of immigration I indicated that I believed there was a duty to rescue someone in serious trouble if to do so involved a relatively trivial loss to the rescuer. I used the analogy of a person who refused to rescue a drowning person because he did not want to get his shoes wet. This would morally leprous. Yet, I believe it is a common attitude especially on the right. Many of them don’t want any migrants let alone those seeking asylum

After World War II many in the west were so ashamed by the failure of the west to rescue Jews fleeing Nazi persecution that they brought in new international law that required nations to grant asylum from asylum seekers.  This was enshrined in the International Convention on Refugees signed by Canada along with more than a 100 other countries.

We must remember that often these people fleeing violence and oppression are the most vulnerable people in the world including  women and young children. Sometimes they are children as young as 12 years old  travelling all alone through a long line of unwelcoming countries. Refugees as young as my grand daughter  take the most desperate measures to escape countries and travel to countries they think are safe, dodging predatory criminals along the way. Many of these women and children to end up in the most inhospitable countries where they are shouted at by locals to go back home, treated like criminals, locked up in cages, forced to sleep in the cold on the hard stony ground, and in the most egregious cases even separated from their parents  under the most trauma inducing circumstances while billionaire politicians lie to them that they are illegal when they are not, are and not wanted when often they are. Some countries of the west are now reengaging in the practices from their past that are the most despicable in their histories.

Then when these refugees arrive at the  country where they want to seek asylum because they think they will be safe there they are called, wrongly I might add, illegal immigrants. Every country seems to have its Ted Falk, like we do in Canada, who metaphorically stands at the  border telling them to go home  because we fear what they will do here.

These are not illegal immigrants. They are asylum seekers and they have the right by international law, as included in International Treaties to which countries like Canada are signatories, to come to our country and claim asylum. We have a legal and moral duty to listen to them so that they can make their claim. We are entitled to take our time to assess those claims and if found invalid to send them back. But these are not illegal immigrants. We have to do that even if it costs us a bit of money.  We can afford it. Our shoes will dry out again.

We have to remember what Paul Heinbecker the former Canadian  diplomat and current member of the World Refugee Council said on a recent CBC radio Ideas program, “We cannot continue with this demonization of refugees as equating them with terrorists. We have to recognize that they have a right to refuge.” Those are not demon on our borders. They are on the inside.

The Duty to Rescue

Fellow Feeing, Immigration and Refugees, World of ideas

 

 

The American philosopher Peter Singer designed an interesting thought experiment. He asked people to consider this scenario: Suppose you are alone by a pond and you notice a young child has accidentally fallen into that pond and is crying for help. It is obvious that the child cannot swim and is drowning. Unless you help the child will die. As an innocent bystander you of course are not responsible for the accident. You don’t know the child. He is a stranger. You are a good swimmer and could easily save the child from drowning.  Would you be morally entitled to refuse to rescue the child because you did not want to get your shoes wet? I would think most of us would say no, the bystander has a moral duty to rescue the child. To do nothing would be abhorrent. Such people are not invited out to dinner.

In 1939 before World War II was over but after it was fairly well known that Jews were being persecuted in Germany and the European countries they still occupied, a German ocean liner, the MS St. Louis, was carrying more than 900 Jewish refuges from Germany. They wanted to disembark in Cuban, but were denied permission to land except for a handful of Jews that were allowed in because they had American passports.

The German Captain went to the United States next to try to drop off the refugees there, but they refused to accept the refugees.  After that he went to Canada and Canada refused to allow them in either. It was not our finest hour. He then sailed to various European countries where some but not all of the refugees were allowed in.

Many of those that were left were eventually rounded up by the Nazis and historians have estimated that about ¼ of them died in Nazi death camps. Some later referred to this journey as the “voyage of the damned.” This incident and others like it were instrumental in western countries coming up with a policy after the war of obligating countries to accept asylum seekers who legitimately feared persecution in their home countries. This is now part of part of international law.

Also early in 1939 an unidentified Canadian immigration agent was asked how many Jews should be allowed to immigrate to Canada. His reply is now infamous: “None is too many.” Few of us Canadians are now proud of what we did.

As I have argued elsewhere, the first principle of morality is the golden rule—fellow feeling. It is the basis of all morality. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That is fundamental.

As Alexander Betts and Paul Collier argue in their book Refuge, referring to the thought experiment of Singer and refugees from Syria, “Like the drowning child, fleeing Syrians appeal to our common humanity…it is the raw compassion that is at the bedrock of the human condition. We might think of it as the first principle of the heart. It is not saintly to experience such a sense of compassion: it sociopathic not to experience it.”

We have some minimal moral obligations even to far away strangers. We have that obligation just because they are humans. I don’t think we have a duty to be saints. We can never sustain sainthood so I don’t believe we have to accept so many refugees that it would eviscerate our own society. But if the costs are low or even trivial, we have a duty to act. For example I am not sure that we have a duty to rescue a drowning child if it would seriously endanger our own lives. But if the cost is trivial, such as wet shoes or dirty clothes, we must act.

We don’t have to bankrupt our country to save refugees, but if it is readily within our means we should rescue them. If we don’t do that we are already bankrupt.

Pulling up the Castle’s Drawbridge

Immigration and Refugees

 

Immigration is a very emotional subject. Like war, it brings out the best and worst of people. Most people love their country. Many of them love their country passionately. Many people love their country as it is. They don’t want it changed. They don’t want people to come in and change it. I understand that.

However, we also have to remember the difference between immigrants and refugees. Immigrants are looking for a better life. No one blames them for that. We all do that in different ways. But refugees are different. As Betts and Collier have argued, “At its core, refuge entails the principle that when people face serious harm at home, they should be allowed to flee and receive access to a save haven, at least until they can go home or be permanently reintegrated elsewhere.”[1] International law recognizes this important distinction. We should too.

Very few people believe in open borders. I have never met anyone who advocated that anyone who wants to come to Canada should be allowed to do that. Almost everyone agrees that we need to control our borders.

The people who bug me the most are those who are immigrants or children of immigrants and then want to pull up the castle drawbridge and keep others out as soon as they get here . That seems particularly mean-spirited. Our current Member of Parliament—Ted Falk—seems to be one of these. He is constantly accusing the current Liberal government of allowing porous borders that allow illegal immigrants to pour in. He forgets this distinction between immigrants and refugees.

Some Mennonites fit into this category.  They seem to forget that they are descendants of recent immigrants. They also forget that many Canadians did not welcome their ancestors here with open arms. After World War II many Canadians thought they were dangerous Communists or Nazi supporters. Many of the original Mennonite immigrants were seen as dirty unwelcome people. Many Canadians thought Canada could do better.

Isn’t it unseemly for us to deny the right of emigration to others? That doesn’t mean we have to open up our borders so any one can get in. It does mean we should have some fellow feeling for the latest people suffering as a result of displacement in other parts of the world.

Donald Trump’s former Chief of Staff Mike Kelly was considered to be one of the saner heads in his administration. That is not a huge complement. Kelly  was interviewed on TV about immigration. He sounded reasonable. He looked tough but kindly.

Kelly said the United States is an open country that welcomes newcomers but some are a better fit than others.  Most of those who don’t fit in, he said, are rural with a low level of education. Many of these don’t speak the language. They won’t work as well as others. Of course Kelly forgot to mention that his own grand parents were both immigrants. One was Irish the other Italian. His Italian grand father never spoke English. He had a low class job. Yet his grandson became the Chief of Staff of the President of the United States! The family did fit in. Rather well in fact.

Too often the descendants of immigrants believe the funnel into the country should be closed after they get in. Too many of them think we have too many immigrants. Now that they are in at least. Before they got in not so much. We want immigrants with skills, but we don’t want them with too many skills either. After all, we don’t want them taking “our” jobs.

I recognize that immigration policy is tricky. Illegal immigrants in a country like the US are a problem because so many have come in to that country over the decades. I recognize too that it is not fair for people to come in illegally and jump the queue past those waiting patiently to get in, often for years. Yet current policies, particularly in the US are harsh and cause incredible harm and hurt that I believe most Americans would not countenance if they saw it. If they really saw it. I think too many Americans have an irrational fear of immigrants. Fear, like resentment, is such a powerful force that it makes people make irrational decisions. There must be a better way.

 

[1]Alexander Betts and Paul Collier, Refuge, (2017) p. 4

 

 

Trump should trade Americans for Mexicans

Immigration and Refugees, Trump

 

As in many countries around the world, Immigration is a big topic in the United States. People on all sides get very worked up about immigration policies. Many in the US  think that Trump won the last election and will win the next one as well because of his immigration policies. Those policies are very popular. Millions of Americans support him for that alone.

People from around the world want to come and live in the United States. They have been convinced that this is the best place in the world to live. So they want in.

To compound the problem, for decades people have been getting in to the country illegally and staying. That is a fact. People have been crossing the border between Mexico and the United States without permission. I don’t know how many. The truth is that no one knows how many, but the best estimate, accepted by most people is 11 million people. Of course most of these came in to the country legallyat border crossings.  Then once in the country many of them overstay their legal welcome.  Not all of these are from Central America.  In fact, many of them are—get ready for this–Canadians!

It is true that recently the numbers of people arriving at the southern American border have climbed steeply. Many of them are there as a result of Trump’s policies. I will talk about that later.

To make things even worse, Americans have left those illegals in the country often for decades. Many of them were children brought to the U.S.  by their parents without them having any say in the matter. Many of them now know other country as they have lived in the US their entire lives. These are the so-called “Dreamers” that so many Americans are prepared to leave in the country. Sometimes even Trump wants to welcome them, though at others times he is quite willing to dump them–after all he has a very short attention span.

Although Americans fear the damage that will be caused by illegal immigrants (and legal immigrants in some cases) the facts do not support those fears. The border is secure. It is not as porous as many fear mongers claim.

American taxpayers spend roughly $19 billion a year to secure their borders which is about the same that they spend on all other federal criminal law enforcement agencies combined. Obama started “getting tough on illegal immigration, long before Trump made it an issue. He increased Border Patrol Staffing to an all time high of nearly 21,500 in 2011 Even more drastically, during Obama’s administration nearly 2.5 million immigrants were deported. That was 23% morethan during the administration of Republican George W. Bush. In fact, Obama deported about as many illegal immigrants as the previous 17 Presidents combined! That was why he was called by some ‘the deporter-in-chief.’ He was certainly not soft on immigration as some have suggested.[1]

Unauthorized immigration in the US is currently at its lowest level since 1972. The only increase in arrivals has been unaccompanied children fleeing gang violence and drug cartels in Central America whose activities are significantly fuelled by drugs demands in America.According to Ana Gonzales-Barrera, writing for the  Pew Research Center, November 19, 2015 In recent years more Mexicans have been leaving the US than arriving at the border.

Many Americans keep saying the illegals should get in line. Why should they be allowed to jump the queue? The fact is that getting in line is not so easy for most undocumented don’t have the required family or employment relationships to get in line at all. Even if they do there are huge barriers. According to Americans for Immigrant Justice,“For example, married children of US citizens from Mexico must wait more than 20 years for a visa to become available.” An exception has been made for Cubans, who can come to the U.S. and get a work permit while waiting for their visas, and to a lesser extent for Haitians since the 2010 earthquake.

Others think that undocumented immigrants make no genuine contribution to the American economy. For example they think they are all paid cash and thus pay no income taxes on their income. The facts again are very different.  Most make a significant contribution to the American economy. For example, undocumented immigrants paid roughly $12 billion in state and local taxes in 2013. 2/3 of them pay into the Social Security System even though they are not eligible to collect benefits! It is estimated that they pay $15 billion a year into a system for the benefit of Americans!  In fact it has been estimated that if American lawmakers could fix their severely challenged immigration system, the federal deficit could be reduced by about $200 billion.

As I said, many Americans fear immigrants, both legal and illegal. Trump said the day he decided to run for the American Presidency in 2016 that most of them were “rapists and murderers.” Again the facts are different. Most of them are not drug dealers or rapists or any other kind of criminals.

In fact, “A July 2015 report by the American Immigrant Council concluded that undocumented immigrants commit violent crimes at a far lowerrate than native born Americans.  Despite high poverty rates, Latino immigrants in border towns and New York City were more law abiding, with lower crime rates, than non-Latino white and black Americans.”

Many Americans don’t want to admit it, but most criminals and rapists and drug dealers (like most terrorists in the country) are home grown. According to the New York Times,

“The Migration Policy Institute has estimated that 820,000 of the 11 million unauthorized have been convicted of a crime. About 300,000, or less than 3 percent of the 11 million undocumented, have committed felonies. (The proportion of felons in the overall population was an estimated 6 percent in 2010, according to a paper presented to the Population Association of America.)”

Maybe, Trump should be offering to trade Americans for Mexicans!

Fear Porn

2019 Trip to Southwest United States, Fear, Human rights, Immigration and Refugees, politics, Populism, Trump

Fear Porn

 

In recent years many people in the west have characterized refugee issues as security decisions rather than humanitarian issues. This has had important negative consequences for refugees. As Jennifer Welsh said in her Massey lectures, “One implication of this ‘securitization’ of asylum seekers is the tendency to reframe the responsibility to tackle refugee situations as a matter of peace and security and to focus on immediate causes of displacement.”

This approach causes many people, such as my own current Member of Parliament, Ted Falk, to concentrate on the destabilizing effects of the presence of refugees on neighbouring country’s security, communal cohesion, and national identity. People like Falk believe that refugees are dangerous. They fear refugees and therefore make poor decisions about them.

Such irrational fears have spread around the world but particularly to the United States. Of course, as I have indicated elsewhere, the United States is a peculiarly fearful nation. They especially fear the influx of migrants and immigrants and refugees from the Muslim world and from Mexico. It is not an accident that many of these people that they fear have skin colours other than white. In my opinion this is the legacy of the American history of racism going back for centuries to its horrible treatment of indigenous people and importation of African-American slaves and their offspring.

President Trump himself was filled with venom and anxiety at the thought of the approaching brown hordes. Then he turned to filling his supporters with fear. That is something he has a unique talent for. Of course it is easy to mock absurd fears, but fears are important. They are used to generate hate against people seeking asylum. Stoking fear and hate in a democratic state is a very dangerous thing.

Donald Trump capitalized on these fears to get elected President in 2016. It did not matter that the United States had an extremely onerous vetting process of all such possible entrants to the country. It’s not a perfect system, but it is probably the best in the world.

Trump also tried again, with less success, to capitalize on such fears just before the Mid-term elections in 2018. He warned of the so-called “Caravan” of refugees and asylum seekers heading from Central American including Hondurans and others to the United States. Donald Trump and his close ally Fox News ratcheted up the fear to such an extent that millions of Americans feared this group of rag-tag people consisting by most accounts of a lot of women with young children.

The Republicans claimed the Democrats were organizing this crusade and that they believed in completely open borders. Trump was a master of manipulating this to his own advantage. He said he would send 5,200 troops. Later he increased this to 15,000 troops. Not just border guards, but troops. According to the Washington Post, “This appears to be the largest such peacetime deployment of active duty U.S. troops a the border in a century.” This was more troops than the Americans sent to fight super scary ISIS. The American troops were also ordered to secure the border walls (remember many already exist) with razor wire.

Of course all of these security people were being added to a border already hyper-militarized with 16,000 border guards, 5,000 ICE personnel, 2100 National Guards and many deportation agents. All this to oppose men, women and children who might throw rocks.

Many Americans interviewed on television said this was an invasioneven when they were more than a thousand miles away. It became a huge election issue and fired up his base of supporters. This was not surprising since Trump and his Fox allies relentlessly fueled the fears. Sean Hannity, watched by millions of Americans, repeatedly referred to this as “an invasion” as did other Fox contributors. He also referred to it as a “a mob of humanity.” Donald Trump himself repeatedly referred to it as an imminent “invasion of our country.”

All of this was done while the invading “army” without weapons was a couple of months away. What kind of invading forces give the target country a 3 months heads up?

Would young mothers take their children on such a perilous journey if they were not fleeing something they really feared? Like gangs that were to a large extent fueled by American deportees returning to their presumed homeland. These gangs were often fueled by drug money from American consumers. Should we not show some empathy for them? Or should we listen instead to demagogues? These people are suffering; they should not be demonized.

Even other stations, besides Fox, are getting on the bandwagon against these demonsapproaching the border? Trump tweeted, “the caravans are made up of some very tough fighters.” Later in the same day, October 31, 2018, 5 days before Mid-term elections he tweeted again, “Our military is being mobilized at the Southern Border. Many more troops coming. We will NOT let these Caravans, which are also made up of some very bad thugs and gang members, into the U.S. Our border is sacred Must come in legally. TURN AROUDND!”  Clearly he wanted to scare the crap out of people. Some have called it Trump’s scaravan.

Talking about the Caravan while helping a Republican candidate in Florida Trump said this about the Democrat rival,

 

“Andrew Gilliam wants to throw open your borders to drug dealers, human traffickers, gang members, and criminal aliens. That’s great. That’s what we want. Let those people pour in folks. Let them join come join you on your front lawn.”

 

Trump is a master of stoking fears.

There were actually 4 caravans that appeared to be heading toward the U.S. The Washington Postdescribed the situation this way,

 

Military planners anticipate that only a small percentage of Central American migrants travelling in the caravans U.S. President Donald Trump characterizes as “an invasion” will reach the U.S. border, even as a force of more than 7,000 active-duty troops mobilizes to prevent them from entering the country.

According to military planning documents, about 20 percent of the roughly 7,000 migrants are likely to complete the journey. The unclassified report was obtained by Newsweek on Thursday.

If the military’s assessment is accurate, it would mean the U.S. is positioning five soldiers on the border for every one caravan member expected to arrive here.

“Based on historic trends, it is assessed that only a small percentage of the migrants will likely reach the border,” the report says.”

 

It turned out the military planners were not as worried about the potential migrants as the American President. The military report was more concerned about Americanmilitia groups eager to lend their well-armed support. As the Washington Postsaid, “The assessment also indicates military planners are concerned about the presence of “unregulated armed militia” groups showing up at the border in areas where U.S. troops will operate.”

Trump was also quick to characterize the members of the caravan as scary individuals, even though most other reports, other than Fox News of course, said they were mainly women and children fleeing violence in their own countries often caused by gang members that had been deported there by American authorities. Trump described them this way at different times: “many young strong men,” “very tough fighters,” “terrorists from the Middle East,” “hardened criminals,” “lepers,” “people with small pox and TB,”  and “a lot of bad people.” Another Republican added, “pedophiles,” and “wife beaters”. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for anyone else. Added to that, according to the Washington Post, “He also insists the number of migrants heading north is much larger than estimates put forward by U.S. and Mexican officials.” Of course Trump has never allowed the facts to stand in the way of the hateful or fearful messages he wants to send.

Trump said similar things in April that everyone forgot about. Trump painted a picture of a large group of migrants near the border as rapists and pillagers. It turned out to be 400 people requesting asylum which they are legally entitled to do.

Then Trump added that if any of these people throw rocks the troops should fire their guns. Reminds me of the Gaza strip. Is that what American has come to?

It was no accident that Trump made a huge issue of these caravans a few weeks before the American midterm elections of 2018. He did not want to wait until the potential migrants arrived as that might blunt the political message he wanted to use in those elections. Now he is doing it again to gain support for his big beautiful wall.

Trump, together with many of his supporters loves what Bill Maher called Fear Porn. Why is that? I think that Trump like populists and demagogues around the world uses fear to drum up support for his policies. He does that because his ideas have little rational basis. How else can he get people to support them? Porn sells.