Just last week, Moroccan troops attacked a crowd of migrants rushing to climb a fence into Spain, killing at least 23 people, according to human rights groups monitoring the Moroccan-Spanish border. A scathing statement by NGOs in both countries blames the deaths on a security deal between the two governments and “European policy to externalize EU borders, with the complicity of a southern country, Morocco.”
“Nobody’s going to call anyone else because they all do it,” said David Owen, a British political philosopher and the author of “What Do We Owe to Refugees?” “This has to burst at some point. Either we decide that human rights just don’t matter, or at least some people’s human rights don’t matter, or the international community will start taking this more seriously.”
We envision a planet with nations and borders, but a growing part of humanity lives in camps. Most displaced persons are likely to die in limbo, without ever being resettled. Refugee camps and temporary shelters have increasingly been turned into long-term, if not life-long, homes. And that burden is unfairly distributed: 83 percent of the world’s refugees are hosted by low- and middle-income countries.
Meanwhile, the residents of the world’s more comfortable places unknowingly support governments doing the dirty work. President Donald Trump fantasized aloud about electric walls and a trench of alligators, but perhaps our most impenetrable border protection is the psychological isolation that separates the things we do from the way we prefer to think of ourselves.
A Supreme Court decision handed down Thursday could clear a backlog of people waiting in Mexico, allowing a limited number of asylum seekers to enter the United States while they wait for the cases to be resolved. But the effect will be modest, experts warn, as long as Title 42’s overarching ban on asylum seekers remains in place. “The real problem at the border is title 42,” said an ACLU attorney, Lee Gelernt. “This doesn’t change the ground.” (In fact, he added, the ruling could ease government pressure by averting criticism of Title 42.)
In the concrete realm of borders and checkpoints, certain patterns appear from one place to another. For example, many governments show punishment and hardship, effectively making asylum seekers a crime in their eagerness to deter potential arrivals. Migrants are imprisoned, families are separated and asylum seekers are detained in distant locations, creating a feeling of abandonment and exile.