It doesn’t take much to be horrified by the news about immigrants dying. These deaths are directly linked to fascist leaders, better known in some circles as “authoritarian.” In addition to these foolish regimes, the most important people behind these deaths of people of color are insecure white males. This puts into context the fact that genocide most always has a basis in deep racial hatred.
Many people would assume that I’m talking about a simple tyrant in a third world country like Turkey’s Erdogan or Brazil’s Bolsonaro. I am talking about two so-called beacons of freedom, the United States and the European country of Italy. U.S. President Donald Trump and Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Mateo Salvini are actively and brutishly taking horrific actions against those who only seek to save the lives of others.
In the United States, the persecution is not limited to building a wall, or putting vulnerable children in concentration camps where they live in their own filth.
For many years now, immigration officers at the border have actively entered the desert to empty or break water jugs left by humanitarians. Many migrants crossing the desert die of thirst.
Put yourself in their shoes for a moment. Regardless of why you’re in the desert, imagine yourself about to die of thirst, finding a life-saving jug of water, and then seeing your hopes of survival shattered like the broken jug in front of you. Breaking these jugs is a criminal act because it ensures the death of people. Killing immigrants in the desert is a policy that has been extended. In past times, border patrol officers would break the jug. Now our government workers going after the people who put the water there in the first place.
In January 2019, four women faced jail time for leaving food and water for migrants in Arizona’s Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. Natalie Hoffman, Oona Holcom, MadelineHuse, and Zaachila Orozco-McCormick, No More Deaths volunteers, faced jail time and fines for their “crimes.” The women were charged with misdemeanors, which were used convict them. The charges included entering a national forest without a permit, going off trails, riding a vehicle in restricted areas, and leaving property behind. The “property” consisted of food and water. They affected the pristine natural reserve, and that was the impetus for the conviction. They faced 6 months of jail time per crime, plus fines. In the end, they were given 15 months unsupervised probation and a $250 fine each.
These women were part of a group of people who entered the reserve together. Other volunteers had their charged dropped, but then there was Scott Warren, also one of the No More Deaths volunteers.
Warren is a teacher charged with three felonies for having the audacity to try to prevent the useless deaths of fellow human beings. The “felonies” were related to Warren helping a pair of migrants who were hungry, dehydrated, and had blisters on their feet from their long and exhausting journey from Central America. For this, he faced a possible sentence of 20 years in jail. The jury was hung on whether he had actually committed a crime. At the time of the writing of this piece Warren is still free.
On the other side of the world, Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Salvini is also following in our footsteps with barbaric persecution of humanitarian aid workers. German citizen faced a standoff with the Italian government over the 40 refugees she and her Sea Watch crew rescued in the Mediterranean. Salvini created a harsh policy of closing ports to vessels carrying refugees rescued from the sea.
But Rackete needed to dock her ship, the Sea Watch 3, because of an emergency need.
The ship sat for two days awaiting permission to dock and come ashore with the refugees. A military border control ship prevented them from docking. As a result, Rackete saw no other option than to ram her boat into the border control ship in order to reach port on the southern island of Lampedusa.
It was an emergency need that forced the captain’s hand. Salvini considered this desperate move as an act of war. What Salvini conveniently forgot is that all ports are obliged to allow vessels with emergency needs to dock. As such, it could be argued that it was Salvini who committed an act of war on innocent people.
These examples have a deeper context in what I call the Kill the Migrant Doctrine.
This doctrine started in the United States with the dumping of water and the breaking of water jugs and letting people drown. In 2016 alone, 322 people died crossing the desert. The Mediterranean region saw 3,000 deaths in 2017. The victims have been almost completely people of color mostly from Latin America and Africa.
These murderous laws were put in place by white men. A deeply ingrained racism is at the crux of the matter. Racial hatred is the most important component of this doctrine. In the United States, many undocumented immigrants come from Canada and Ireland, but they are excluded from the immigration debate because they are white and pass the racial test. Its imperative to point out that the US border protection laws include the intent to prevent terrorists from coming though the southern border. But the reality is that many of the Irish undocumented immigrants in the US are aligned with the IRA. I have personally heard first-hand accounts of people I know running into IRA members at Irish pubs in the San Francisco Bay Area. But there is no similar effort on the part of our government to crack down on these undocumented immigrants who are indeed terrorists. Therefore, preventing terrorists from entering the US is a in reality an excuse to exclude people of color because it’s obvious that white undocumented immigrants aren’t scrutinized at all.
The astoundingly high number of deaths are completely avoidable. A very small step these two countries can take to prevent them is to allow humanitarian workers to help refugees, and processing them within the existing immigration framework as undocumented immigrants. These systems exist in most, if not all, countries.
But it’s painfully clear that Trump and Salvini aren’t interested in the well-being of people. They aren’t willing to allow people to survive. They need to die. They want migrants to die. And this is why humanitarian workers are being penalized in criminal courts. Without humanitarians assisting people, many more die in their perilous passages seeking their fundamental right of freedom.
The routes are dangerous. The conditions are deadly. Those trying to help are criminalized. Survival comes at a high risk. Death is a given for a great number of people migrating from their ravaged lands to a safe haven.
And, horrifically, the system was set in place on purpose.
These policies, masked as border protection laws, are designed to kill. The people targeted are being subjected to a slow and quiet form of genocide afflicting brown bodies. This is not an obvious form of genocide as was the internment in concentration camps, better known as reservations, and government sponsored killings of the Native Americans in the United States. This genocide is being conducted one by one in the harshest of all environments on the planet, the desert and the sea. We don’t have soldiers invading indigenous towns and killing all inhabitants, including children, or the overcrowded gas chambers in Germany. What we have is death by intentional neglect of one person, then another, and so on. It happens silently and on an individual basis. It also happens in remote places, away from the eyes of the public. And it’s this very seclusion that makes it possible for people to get caught up in platitudes about stopping immigration to one’s countries.
We have become not only blind to the problem, but we are losing our humanity in the process. Genocide thrives in an atmosphere of ignorance and contempt, and we are giving into them willingly. The leaders of these so-called Christian countries (Heck! Italy hosts the Vatican!) have forgotten the most important of all the 10 Commandments, thou shall not kill.
