With Record Numbers of Displaced People, Deterrence Policies to Stop Their Movement Are Mass Murder

…. At the time of Alan Kurdi’s death, the words of British-Somali poet Warsan Shire became a rallying cry in support of the million-plus migrants risking their lives to seek safety in Europe:

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land

….  Proponents of deterrence policies recognize that “no one puts their children in a boat, unless the water is safer than the land”; they just choose to make the water more perilous still. Consider President Donald Trump’s tweet in the wake of reports about horrific conditions at migrant detention centers, including those intended to hold children: “If Illegal Immigrants are unhappy with the conditions in the quickly built or refitted detentions centers, just tell them not to come. All problems solved!”

… the Hague is not in the habit of holding contemporary Western powers accountable for crimes against humanity. But the assertion that migration deterrence policies are no less than murderous on a mass scale is a proposition that must be embraced and taken to its logical conclusion. The current immigration policies of the U.S. and the EU should already be understood as necropolitical; that is, they organize the lives of migrants in constant proximity to death, to bare life. Risk death by staying in a country destabilized by war, violence, economic and climate devastation, or risk death by fleeing to a purportedly more stable, prosperous state. There is no option which is not framed by exposure to death.

… In a world where the number of displaced people is inexorably rising from conflict and climate decimation, wealthy countries will have only one of two options when it comes to mass migration: acceptance and opening borders, or genocide through deterrence. In order to avoid the latter, the entire racist, nationalist logic behind migrant deterrence must be rejected.

… Mass migration cannot be stopped. As of last year, according to new statistics from the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the population of people on Earth displaced by conflict or persecution reached 70.8 million — more than double the number recorded in 2012.... 

….. The rhetoric of the American and European far-right, too often parroted by the liberal center, might lead one to believe that the weight of this global migration crisis is bearing down on the EU and the U.S. It is not...….. Last year, the U.S., with a GDP of nearly $20 trillion, took the fewest number of refugees in 40 years in 2018: only 22,491 people. As a point of comparison, in 2015, Lebanon housed around 1.2 million Syrian refugees in its population of 4.5 million people; one in five People.

… It is fair and correct to blame far-right figures, parties, and media institutions for stoking fears of desperate migrants bringing terror and crime…… 

Far-right parties like France’s Front National, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, and the United States’ Republican Party used high-profile terror attacks that involved migrants, like the 2015 Paris massacres, to shutter borders and enforce migrant detention and deportations. People of conscience, however, must aggressively correct this false narrative: The vast majority of terrorist violence in the U.S. in recent years has been committed by far-right white nationalists. The same is true of terrorist attacks in Europe in recent decades, the vast majority of which have been committed not by immigrants or refugees, but by European citizens with ethno-nationalist or separatist motives.

…. When it comes to economic concerns, the far-right has been successful in establishing the myth that migrants are a burden on taxpayers, draining scant state resources. A recent major EU-funded study, however, found that “in the European countries which host the majority of EU migrants, these households are a net benefit to the public purse.” 

...… It is high time that the left vocally rejects the right-wing myth that immigration, even on a large scale, is incompatible with safety and prosperity. Wealthy countries can, and indeed must, accept and manage migration en masse, now and in the coming years. The alternative is intolerable.

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