Double Standards

 In Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms—which I read for the first time only recently, as part of a magpie-like quest, in reaction to current events, to gather various war materials into a single mental lump—there comes a major plot turn when the protagonist decides not to return to active duty at the Italian front, but instead to break for the frontier of neutral Switzerland. He has become, in effect, a deserter (though not a deserter from a proper army, as his paramour Catherine Barkley consolingly reminds him, but "only the Italian army"). And when Barkley and he together make a thrilling run for the border by lake, dodging Swiss and Italian coast guards under peril of interdiction and refoulement to Italy, they have become, in effect, refugees. 

Hemingway's protagonist, Lieutenant Frederic Henry, is aware of this—and aware that Switzerland like other nations has been known to jealously guard access to its territory—so he makes inquiries as to what happens to refugees who manage to evade border guards and make it into Switzerland. Careful, he is warned, you will be interned. Lieutenant Henry is aware of this risk, but he asks what it would mean in practice. Are we talking outright detention, with zero freedom of movement? (Think of the concentration camps that would be used decades later in France to jail Spanish Civil War refugees.) No, he is told, nothing like that. He would probably just have to check in with police periodically. In the language of some advocates and official government euphemists, Switzerland circa 1919 apparently favored "community-based alternatives to detention."

Henry and Barkley decide that this is an inconvenience they can live with. They therefore escape across the Swiss frontier, and the rest proceeds more or less as they were told to expect. They make landfall and have a cozy breakfast before being politely asked to check in with police. In modern times, they might have been forced to wear ankle monitors (although with their white privilege and the global caste status that comes from having certain passports, probably not). In the closing years of the First World War, however—when Hemingway's story is set—such technology was not available. Instead, they are monitored on the honor system. They also take full advantage of the white and class privileges of their day, creating the impression they are wealthy tourists who will spend cash freely on winter sports, and therefore are allowed to stay in Switzerland un-harassed. 

Lieutenant Henry's and Catherine Barkley's fictional experience discloses a real-world truth. Namely, that migration across borders is often not and doesn't actually need to be particularly regulated—any more than migration within them—since it is a largely self-regulating phenomenon driven by different push and pull factors of opportunity and necessity. And when governments encounter migrants or refugees whose circumstances they do not pre-judge—or that they pre-judge favorably—they often have little trouble recognizing this fact. Borders are frequently open globally for those who have various forms of privilege or money, and who are not preemptively stigmatized by racism, fear, and prejudice. It's only when those seen as "other" apply for the same relief that governments suddenly rediscover the alleged "necessity" of regulating entry, locking people up, and expelling or deporting them across borders. 

Europe is providing an illustration of this same principle as surely today as in Hemingway's time. In the sudden exigency of Putin's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, most European governments—even the ones most notoriously hostile to refugees—abandoned any pretense of needing to police the entry of displaced people. Women, men, and children from Ukraine were permitted to enter and stay indefinitely, because it was clear to everyone that the circumstances in their home country had forced them to flee, that they would have preferred to remain safely at home if they could, and that they would no doubt try to return there as soon as it was possible for them to do so. 

This unrestricted entry and exit of Ukrainian war refugees, it need hardly be said, has not been extended at Europe's boundaries to refugees fleeing the world's other contemporary disasters. In Europe's seas, refugees have to run a gauntlet infinitely more sophisticated, high-tech, and difficult to pass than anything Lieutenant Henry would have encountered in the late 1910s on a Swiss-Italian lake. 

The sea-going European border police, Frontex, are at great pains to make full use of a loophole in their domestic laws: since people who set foot on EU territory are permitted to apply for asylum from persecution, they do everything they can to intercept and turn people away on the high seas before they ever get that chance. (As an aside: Hemingway would depict similar interdictions off the coast of Florida in his To Have and Have Not.) In many cases, these efforts have amounted to brazen violations of international law and the principles of universal human rights. As recent evidence has shown, Frontex has tacitly collaborated with the so-called "Libyan coast guard"—really a gang of mercenaries, pirates and armed militias—to turn migrants around at sea and disappear them into detention centers where they have faced torture, enslavement, and other horrifying conditions. 

When pressed about the seeming double standard of welcoming Ukrainian refugees while going to such extreme lengths to turn away African, Middle Eastern, and Asian refugees, European leaders have mostly proclaimed the two-tier system openly. With varying levels of vitriol, officials in Austria, Poland, Bulgaria, and other host nations have declared that they are treating Ukrainians differently because they themselves are different: they are white, Christian, European; they are "educated"; they "want to work"—and so on. 

Now, who knows how long this spirit of welcome will last. Racial categories are fluid and reflect little more than relative social power, so it's not hard to imagine a future where Ukrainians are re-cast as somehow not "fully" white, not "fully" European, and therefore less worthy of respect and compassion, once the good will of the moment has soured. Lord knows Eastern Europeans have faced this kind of prejudice and discrimination from richer parts of Europe in the past. But whatever may happen in future, the fact remains that today, Ukrainians are permitted to travel freely while others are not; and the reason for the double standard is explicitly defended on grounds of race and chauvinism. 

Meanwhile, the situation at the U.S. border is little better. For the past two years, the U.S. government under Trump and Biden has unilaterally suspended access to standard asylum processing under the so-called "Title 42" policy. As such, it was inevitable that—once desperate Ukrainian and Russian refugees fleeing Putin's regime found their way to the U.S. southern border and requested asylum—some would be turned away. 

Equally inevitably, expulsions and pushbacks of Ukrainian asylum-seekers gained more media attention and outrage than the expulsion of other refugees at the border—partly because of racism and double-standards, but also—and more sympathetically—due to the blatant hypocrisy of the administration's actions. How could they proclaim solidarity with Ukrainian refugees and Russian dissidents in Europe, and call for greater support for European countries that welcomed people displaced by the conflict, if they were meanwhile actively turning away the far more limited number of people belonging to both groups who managed to find their way as far as the U.S. border?

Predictably, the administration's response—upon being called out on this inherent contraction—was the most craven one available. They left the Title 42 policy in place but—realizing that the expulsions of Ukrainians looked bad in this moment—also issued a memorandum to CBP officials reminding them that they have the power to exempt Ukrainian families on a case-by-case basis. As a result, Ukrainians started being allowed to cross the border and begin their asylum cases on U.S. soil, even as other nationalities remained categorically excluded and continued to be turned away. 

Such an approach solved the Biden administration's immediate image problem: Ukrainian asylum-seekers were no longer being ejected outright (though some were still reportedly being detained in ICE prisons). But the result of approaching the problem through an "exemption," rather than ending Title 42 for all nationalities, is that there is now an even more blatantly discriminatory two-track system for refugee reception at U.S. borders. Ukrainians are allowed in; refugees from Africa, Central America, the Caribbean, and elsewhere in the Global South are automatically turned away. In some cases, this double-standard has reportedly been applied even as a cluster of refugees of mixed nationalities approaches the border together. The Ukrainians are separated out and allowed to cross; everyone else in turned away. 

This is effectively a system of asylum apartheid. The border officers implementing it might as well put signs up: "whites in this line; Blacks and browns keep out."

Faced with such a blatant double standard, some have tried to justify it by appealing to circumstances. A recent piece in the Daily Beast—while acknowledging that ideally Title 42 would end for all groups—argued that "special treatment" for Ukrainians was a step in the right direction in the meantime, due to the horrors of Putin's war. Now, of course, Putin's war is horrible, and Ukrainians deserve to be processed for asylum, but this is hardly "special treatment"—it's merely the application of U.S. and international asylum laws that should be applied to all people regardless of race or nationality. And, as horrible as Putin's war is, it's far from the only of the world's horrors, and there is no moral basis for regarding Ukrainians' asylum rights as somehow ranking higher in order of priority, as more important or urgent than those of refugees from other parts of the world. 

Are Ukrainians fleeing a desperate situation? Yes, of course. But so are others. Would people argue that the situation in Ukraine is somehow worse than the one facing people in, say, Haiti? Have they read anything at all about what's been happening in Haiti for the last year; not to speak of the many years before that? Or how about Cameroon? Ethiopia? Yemen? Burma? Afghanistan? Every one is host to a horrendous conflict right now that creates refugees with just as urgent need for international protection as the war in Ukraine. It is not necessary to minimize either those conflicts or the situation in Ukraine—the world is large enough to hold multiple equally serious crises; and this is why international refugee law does not discriminate. All people are supposed to have the right to seek asylum from persecution.

But perhaps people will reflexively say that Ukrainians are "real refugees"—people forced against their will to flee their homes; whereas Central American and Caribbean asylum-seekers, or others from the Global South, are "economic migrants"—that is, people just looking for work. The reality of course is that people crossing borders from any part of the world are multi-dimensional human beings and may have more than one motive for anything they do. One can't prejudge on the basis of nationality alone what those causes might be in any one individual's case. Indeed, the point of an asylum hearing is to determine whether a given individual has a credible claim for asylum protections specifically or not. Why should Ukrainians be allowed to even start this process and gain access to a hearing, but not people from other parts of the world? Why should Ukrainians be treated as individuals, but other people barred categorically and expelled en masse? 

Take Lieutenant Henry's motives for fleeing Italy, in Hemingway's novel. Were they comprehensible and relatable? Yes. Were they flawlessly noble and admirable? That's much more debatable. If he and Catherine Barkley showed up at the border, would you insist that they be ejected summarily, without the chance to even present their case before a judge as to why they had to cross the border? If you did grant them a hearing, would you insist that they be caged pending the court date? Forced to wear an ankle monitor or other electronic shackle? Or would the honor system seem more than sufficient. And if they didn't show up to their hearing—if they violated the honor system—would this concern you deeply? Or would you not particularly care? And if they were shackled, locked up, expelled, would this seem right to you? Or would it seem excessive, inhumane, even unnatural? 

And if you have one set of reactions toward them, or toward Ukrainian refugees, and another quite different one when posing the same questions about nonwhite refugees, ask yourself why this is. Why are the motives of refugees from the Global South preemptively judged? Why are they categorically excluded? Why is the thought of them entering the country, even just to get a hearing, seen as so frightening and impossible? Is there any basis for the double standard other than the most blatant kind of racism? I'll spare you any more rhetorical questions at this point. Because the answer is no. And unless we want to go the route of the Polish and Bulgarian leaders, and simply declare like them with a shrug that fine, I guess racism is good, we had better reassess and change our border policies now.