The US policy of diverting Haitian refugees began in 1991. It was sort of a loophole: If the refugees didn’t arrive on US shores, the United States was technically under no obligation to hear their claims. While no one was fooled, Washington adhered to US law, which was written to comply with international obligations, as in many countries.
Years later, another wave of refugees followed worldwide, reaching 20 million in 2017, a figure that has risen slightly since then, although as a share of the world’s population it remains smaller than its peak in 1992. The current refugee crisis is almost certainly smaller than that after the World War II, which displaced tens of millions of people from their homes in Europe and Asia and devastated entire societies, but almost forced the world powers into action.
But by the 2010s, when the influx of refugees increased mainly from poorer countries, the reaction was very different. The United States applied similar policies to people from Central America as it did to Haitians, negotiating agreements with governments, particularly in Mexico, to prevent refugees and other migrants from reaching the border. Europe and Australia followed similar strategies.
The result: concentric rings of detention centers, some notorious for their brutality, just outside the borders of the world’s richest countries. Most are walking along the paths of refugees, or near the borders they had hoped to reach, giving governments a fig leaf of compliance. Britain’s new proposal, by transporting people to the far reaches of another continent, goes one step further and underscores how the new system really works.
Some argue that enshrining new international agreements, or scrapping the old ones altogether, could share global responsibility more sustainably, especially as an increase in climate refugees pushes the boundaries between economic migrant and political refugee. However, world leaders have shown little interest in such plans. And if the problem is that governments don’t want refugees and can’t be forced to take them in, replacing one half-ignored agreement with another would change little.
The Rising Order
Europe’s apparent double standards – as governments welcome Ukrainians but go to extraordinary lengths to keep refugees from the Middle East out – has mostly exposed the unwritten norms of the new refugee system.