The global migration and refugee crisis

The Mexican border is only the most recent manifestation of the migration and refugee crisis that grips our globe. It is at the moment the only one getting the kind and volume of attention in the press, in the United States, that the globe’s rolling waves of people taking transnational flight from poverty and danger deserve. The separation of families is an acutely Trump-ian moment in recent weeks, amounting to more than 2,300 children being taken from their protectors, but it is part of a larger fabric as well.

The story through to date: as put forth in explicit terms in May by President Donald J. Trump’s right hand horror-show director, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, “I have put in place a ‘zero tolerance’ policy for illegal entry on our Southwest border … If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law.” Following a slow-to-build but eventually public outcry, President Trump on June 18 issued an executive order that altered the policy so that children would be kept with their families, detained together in ad hoc facilities that are still awaiting court approval. Attendant to those new orders, it remained unclear whether or how the more than two thousand children already separated would be reunited with their guardians. First, the administration said it would make no such efforts; later, the administration said maybe it would — but maybe it would not as well. Clarity is seldom a priority (and seldom to the advantage) of bureaucracy's masters.

For the moment, our subject is first the truth about this crisis in the United States, and second the crisis' place in a larger fabric of family separations around the world. Going back to Sessions' initial statement for a moment: all of this was arguably allowed by law, but none of it was ever required. Setting aside the complications inherent to the family-detention policies of our land, thinking of the 1997 Flores consent decree in particular (it sought to address what happens to children caught in U.S. immigration-detention webs), there is a difference between what Sessions said and the truth.

In his quote, in May 2018, Sessions tipped his hat toward the totalitarian penchant for establishing bureaucracy as a primary ruling mechanism, the activating force that sets the course of a country’s actions as opposed to the democratic and humanistic conducting of government that points, always, to the moral core of the powerful and does not interpret rulebooks blindly or with a prevailing interest in punitive or cruel behavior. In the republic for which humanists and morally righteous citizens stand, it is the human decider that should first set rules and then make careful decisions about the enforcement of those rules, perennially engaging with crises in ways that first help people and, second, protect resources — all of this in measure. 

Recently, one human decider in particular — self-anointed — did in fact act that way when setting up the framework that has been corrupted to serve Trump’s ends. The zero-tolerance policy that the Trump administration enacted this past spring has its roots in the policymaking of his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, who introduced the Operation Streamline program in 2005. With its introduction, the rule of the land became criminal prosecution for border crossings — previously it was the policy of the United States to apprehend and then send foreign nationals back over the border. While Operation Streamline swiftly correlated with a surge in human damage along the Southwest border — incoming individuals afraid of prison started taking more deadly routes to cross; border death rates surged 127 percent — even Bush set an exception when it came to separating families from children. President Barack Obama inherited Operation Streamline in 2008, left it in place, but instructed Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to let the families-and-children exception stand. 

As we’ve seen, despite these easily obtainable facts, since Sessions’ announcement in May 2018, the alternative right has worked overtime to muddy the waters. For example, in an act of statistical obscenity, one that gained traction in recent weeks, The Federalist Papers, a reactionary website, published a story to its Facebook page on June 23 claiming that under President Obama the United States separated some 89,000 children from their parents along the Mexican border. Absolutely not true. 

Despite the grammatically mangled mission statement of the organization, published on their rudimentary about-page, that it shall “get people the power that knowledge gives to motivate them to push back at the erosion of our liberties and restore constitutionally limited small government,” no sources for the 89,000-statistic are ever given. It may be that they are referring to a 2016 Associated Press report that described surges of young people arriving in the United States across the southern border as gangs and drug violence drove them out of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador (among other places). So many refugees in the surge, the report indicates, that the Department of Health and Human Services started relocating these solo arrivals from government facilities to private sponsor families. The estimated number of relocations in this way, 2013– 16, amounted to more than 89,000. This did not work out well for many of the relocated, by the way, but it has nothing to do with taking children from their migrant and/or refugee family units. 

All of this is crucially important to our understanding of the United States’ refugee and migration crisis as it unfolds, but we are doing ourselves and the transnational population of the planet a deep disservice if we confine our assessment to a local level. The movement of peoples —  migrants seeking work, refugees seeking asylum —  around the world at this time has no equal since World War II, and family separations are not a specialty of the southwestern U.S. 

Blasted by war and unrelenting persecution, some 66 million people globally are in motion. About one-tenth of these are refugees from Syria, by the way, where world leaders have either consistently failed to stop the death and destruction that drives the outflow or they’ve openly or secretly participated in it. Across Europe, as Vauhini Vara reports in Foreign Policy, in places such as the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and the Netherlands, hundreds of thousands are seeking protection and a new home because of events like the Syrian war (which is neither civil, nor confined to the parameters of internal conflict anymore). In places such as Germany, there are about one million asking for help, and family separation is happening there as well. Nations such as Austria, Denmark, and Sweden have also ended what were previously policies to keep incoming children — Syrian children, in most cases — with their families. From Vara’s piece, the following: 

In October 2017, Nils Muiznieks, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, wrote that the “increasingly tough” measures were “often incompatible with the letter or spirit of human rights standards.” In an interview, he said the trend toward restricting family reunification was “the most urgent human rights issue” facing Europe. Despite his protests, many countries upheld the new restrictions.

Will the United States follow suit, upholding the similarly hideous policy now in operation at its southern front door? 

We know well that our attention loves to make an entrance, but once the party has gone on a bit, it seldom lingers. Worse, to some extent we’ve simply not been paying attention at all — the nationalist, populist, anti-humanitarian actions we’re watching unfold have been ongoing among our allies for years as they faced their own influx of foreign national peoples. 

If we can lift our head above the waves of lies that the supporters of these policies perpetrate — and the underlying anti-other sentiments that fuel them — perhaps we can glimpse a world in motion and take back our place at the table set in 1948, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights urged governments to protect “the unity of the refugee’s family.” That was a non-binding recommendation attached to the stipulations of the main document, sadly. It ought to be the next United States president’s mission to move that recommendation to the status of stipulation, as a global step toward illuminating the right and the good of humanity against the darkness we presently confront.