This will be about: refugees, immigrants, and international law. If you’re not into that, please skip what follows. I intend talking particularly about the situations in Mexico, the USA, and the UK.
First, Mexico. A large percentage of would-be immigrants to the US come through Mexico. They are from Haiti, Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Africa, leavened by some who were enticed to work in Brazil etc but then pushed out by an ebbing economic tide.
It’s not easy for Mexico to stop this tide of people, many of whom have braved the horrors of the Darien Gap and lack everything except courage. The reasons are:
1. A long and porous and difficult to police border, in a zone rife with the possibility of indigenous unrest. (The Zapatista uprising is in recent political memory.)
2. The Mexican government generally implements the UN definitions of human rights (we’ll discuss this in a moment) and so, finds it difficult to prevent the ingress of the caravans of immigrants. However, the complication is that these immigrants don’t want to claim asylum in Mexico. They are lured by the USA. This means that the Mexican INM can legally stop these passing-through migrants and deport them. And this has happened quite a lot recently.
Mexico does have a policy of offering asylum to immigrants and I found one such recently in the local Home Depot. You see very few Black people here in the north of Mexico so it wasn’t hard to guess he was probably Haitian. Even if he was from Africa, half of Africa speaks French, so I could not resist addressing him in that language. He was Haitian and had taken advantage of the citizenship program.
Secondly, the USA. I’m not sure what percentage of Americans fail to realise that Mexican immigration to the USA has been negative for quite a while. In other words, more Mexicans leave than arrive. So the USA’s problem is this tide of people fleeing economic ruin, gangs, repressive regimes, failed states, who simply see no way of ever returning because if they could, why would they have left in the first place? When you choose crossing the Darien Gap and risking your life trying to transit Mexico in the face of the cartels and INM, what drives people to that? I recall when I was in Nicaragua I went to the volcano and looked into the red hellhole that Somoza had his enemies flung into. Not a lot has changed.
Third, the UK. This issue — known as “the small boat problem” — is, for those of us old enough to remember, reminiscent of the Kennedy era and Cuban refugees. Almost every day, hundreds of asylum seekers launch rubber boats from the French coast and head across the Channel in a perverse reenactment of Dunkirk. The problem that follows is tearing apart the Tory party because it’s a conundrum that is, on the face of it, insoluble. It goes like this:
If (say) Ali, an asylum seeker, crosses the Channel in a small boat, he has to be rescued under International Law or if he makes it across he can make a claim for asylum. So let’s assume a humanitarian law firm applies for asylum for him. The government is legally obliged to house him until his claim is heard. And it appears to be honouring this.
Let’s move on. If his claim is allowed then he gets to immigrate. If not — ah, there’s the problem. What happens to Ali? Under international law you are not allowed to send him back to Syria because it is classed as an “unsafe” country.
States are forbidden from expelling or returning ( refouler ) a refugee or a person seeking asylum to a territory where his or her life or freedom would be threatened.
This means that once an asylum seeker has crossed into your territory, you cannot legally expel them or return them.
This has led to two reactions. First, the USA wants to “secure its southern border”. It is no use to allow people to cross and have Border Patrol arrest them. You cannot legally send them back. And so “secure the southern border” this week led to the deaths of a mother and child in the Rio Grande when Texas militia prevented the Border Patrol from saving their lives by placing concertina wire across the only boat ramp.
Secondly, in the UK, the Tories have pinned their hopes on deporting failed asylum seekers to Rwanda, in central Africa. Because it’s a “safe” country. (I’ve lived in Africa. None of it is safe.) And so, Ali, the Syrian, having made it to the UK, will be flown to Rwanda, where he will have the wrong skin colour, speak the wrong language, and be of the wrong religion.
Please write your solutions to the above problems, on the back of a postage stamp, with a used lipstick, to Mr Rishi Sunak, and Mr Joe Biden.