The gas bag of hypocrisy about the management of the U.S. southern border has now swollen to staggering dimensions on all sides. On the one hand, we have the Florida governor paying for migrants from Texas to be flown across the country under false pretenses and deposited on Martha's Vineyard—which, if the stories of people being misled as to where they were being taken are true, surely amounts to a rights violation on a grand scale—something akin to kidnapping or enforced disappearance.
Yet, DeSantis claims that these flights were voluntary and made with full knowledge as to their destination; and whether true in this case or otherwise, certainly a great many of the transportation schemes from Texas to northern cities that have been undertaken in recent months by border state demagogues (Abbott has also been working this angle) have involved migrants who willingly signed up for the trip. After all, many asylum seekers have family members already in the country, with whom they are seeking to reunite, and who live in northern cities. The Republican governors' grandstanding therefore provides a free opportunity to travel to a place they were already trying to reach.
Thus, stripped of the cruel rhetoric and demagogic showmanship, the right-wing governors' ploy in fact amounts to a public service. They are providing free travel at the taxpayers' expense to people who are lawfully inside the country (asylum-seekers are supposed to have access to the territory of the country in which they are seeking refuge, while their claims are being adjudicated) and who wish to voluntarily travel within the United States. What's not to like? In what way is this an anti-immigrant gesture? The border conservatives seem to be failing manifestly to "own the libs" to the extent they think they are doing so.
Meanwhile, the White House decries these voluntary transportation schemes as "inhumane," while nonetheless continuing to involuntarily expel asylum-seekers at the southern border to a far worse fate. After all, the majority of people currently being bused or flown across the country come from three countries: Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba. This is not because these are the only countries that send asylum-seekers and refugees to the United States. It's because they are the only nationalities whom Mexico will not take back as expellees under the Title 42 policy.
The Biden administration, then, is mostly trying to expel asylum-seekers summarily, and does so routinely when they happen to be Haitian or Central American. It is only a handful of exempt nationalities whom Mexico refuses to take in who end up setting foot on U.S. soil in the first place, where they can then be shuttled to some further destination or otherwise. The White House denounces their voluntary transportation to New York City (including by some Democratic municipalities in Texas) as wrong, but meanwhile they would expel them to danger in third countries without even a chance to seek asylum if they could. Who's being inhumane here?
To be sure, the administration has publicly tried to end Title 42, whereas the right-wing states have cruelly sued to extend it. The executive branch's position in ongoing litigation is that they are seeking to reverse the policy, which has used the pandemic as a pretext for more than two-and-a-half years to set aside U.S. and international asylum rules for most nationalities. But reporting indicates that the Biden team is also working behind the scenes to expand the scope of the policy, in a manner at odds with their official stance. Specifically, they are pressuring Mexico to start accepting expulsions of Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans, in addition to the Central Americans they already take back (Haitians, meanwhile, are being expelled directly to their home country, despite the grave humanitarian and political crisis unfolding there).
It would seem that the administration's objection to the border state demagogues' political theater isn't really that it's "inhumane" to transport Venezuelan asylum-seekers to New York City or Martha's Vineyard—since they are meanwhile seeking to expel the same individuals to Mexico. What the administration really objects to is having the plight of asylum-seekers made visible at all. It would be far easier for them, from a political point of view, to have everyone expelled automatically at the border and never allowed to set foot on U.S. soil or make their claim in the first place. Out of sight, out of mind.
So both sides of the U.S. political spectrum are behaving as utter hypocrites here, and both actually seem to be in perfect agreement that they don't want asylum-seekers in the first place and wish they would go away. The people who lose at both sets of hands are the desperate people seeking refuge in accordance with international law. Oh, and the people already living in the United States, including U.S. citizens. We lose too, since both the theatrical stigmatization of refugees and their quiet expulsion by federal authorities serve ultimately to deprive the country of a would-be taxpaying supplement to the workforce at a time when the labor market desperately needs them to stave off inflation.
It seems to me that the far more beneficial and just outcome for everyone would be for the U.S. to simply start applying its own asylum laws again in full. Asylum-seekers—regardless of nationality—should have access to U.S. territory while they pursue their claims, as international law requires, and should be able to travel wherever in the country they want to go. If some states and municipalities want to provide them with free transportation to where they need to get to, either as a public service or as some misguided piece of right-wing agitprop, all the better.
But if the U.S. really and truly doesn't want so many asylum-seekers coming to the country, they could also stop making conditions of life so intolerable in the places from which these refugees depart. One notes that among the people currently exempt from Title 42—due to Mexico's unwillingness to accept them—are Venezuelans. This is also one of the nationalities of people the Biden administration is trying to get Mexico to take on an expulsions basis. Mexico, though, has a better idea (as reported by Reuters): they would first like the U.S. to create more legal pathways for Venezuelans to migrate to the United States lawfully (great, I'm on board); and second, they ask the U.S. to ease the sanctions that have crippled the Venezuelan economy and forced so many people to leave home in the first place. Imagine that!
Of course, the Venezuelan government is a corrupt and despotic regime that bears much of the blame for the country's current problems. The same could be said of the governments of Iran, Cuba, Afghanistan, and so on. One can recognize the awfulness of the ruling power in all four of those countries, though, while also realizing that U.S. sanctions in every case seem to only be making the problem worse, and punishing the very people they are supposedly trying to help. This is not just. As a character retorts when asked about sanctions in Thomas Keneally's The Tyrant's Novel—set, with modest efforts at disguise, in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, at that time under heavy U.S. sanctions—"surely you're not arguing that one evil justifies another?"
Wide-ranging sanctions are indeed an evil, for the simple reason that they amount to collective punishment. The people they primarily harm are the ordinary citizens of a country who had no part in their government's horrible decisions. And "far be it from you," we wish to protest, with Abraham, "to kill the innocent along with the guilty! Far be it from you!" As Thomas Hardy once wrote, a doctrine of collective punishment "may be a morality good enough for divinities, [but] it is scorned by average human nature[.]" We should scorn it here. If the U.S. wishes for Venezuelans not to have to make the perilous journey across the Darién Gap to seek safety here, perhaps they should stop throttling the Venezuelan economy, and make it somewhat more possible for people to make a safe and decent living in that country without ever having to depart.
No comments:
Post a Comment