Once again, we are being bombarded with images of refugees massing at the US-Mexico border. Once again, we are being told that the hundreds, thousands who are trying to cross the Rio Grande from Acuña, Mexico, into Del Rio, Texas, are a crisis.
This is the word we use, the way we characterize the results of having a dysfunctional immigration system, one in which the most vulnerable from the Global South are blamed for fleeing conditions no American would accept here.
We call it a crisis, demand action from the president, any action but the more punitive the better. We churn the images, use them as political weapons, ignore the actual stories, the actual causes, and grandstand instead.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, according to the Washington Post, has “sent a fleet of state-owned vehicles to line up for miles as a barricade along the border with Mexico” to create a “‘steel wall’ of cars” designed to block the mostly Haitian refugees from entering.
And the Biden administration has been deporting the refugees, sending them to Haiti even though many have not lived in their home countries for years, and despite the unrest there caused by a political assassination and earthquake.
Deportation. Physical barriers. Public officials telling the “huddled masses” to stay away.
We are nine months into the post-Trump world, into the Biden administration with its softer tone and more humane outlook, and we are still treating refugees as criminals.
What we are not doing, sadly, is engaging in a debate over what this crisis really is. We’re not asking questions about why this scene repeats itself again and again. We are not asking what might cause individuals and families to flee their homeland, to cross dangerous, inhospitable desert lands and waters to reach a place — the United States — that has proclaimed itself the land of opportunity, a land built by immigrants, by refugees.
Let’s be clear here. What we are facing is a refugee crisis. The press uses the word “migrant,” because it is striving for a false sense of neutrality, and because the overly narrow legal framework we put in place at the end of World War II does not account for the kind of environmental and economic degradation that often creates the motivations to take flight.
Legally, the words “refugee” and “asylum” are reserved for someone who can show a credible fear of harm, a threat to life, which usually means war or political persecution. Historically, we have excluded gang violence, domestic abuse and gender violence, and attacks on the LGBTQ+ community from this, just as we have excluded economic and environmental causes even though they are part of a larger fabric of harm. But we live on a planet that is warming dramatically, a planet on which we are experiencing a growing number of extreme weather events — massive hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, and flooding. We call them natural disasters, but there is little natural about them. They are the product of human behavior, and their victims are those humans who are most vulnerable, who already are poor, who are displaced.
What the Haitians at the border are seeking is respite and relief from the violence of poverty and political instability — just as those fleeing Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico are doing, just as those from Syria, Libya, Somalia, and elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa are doing.
Addressing climate change and economic inequality are the real crises, the real diseases, not the desire of the most vulnerable to seek a better life. Instead, we focus our attention on the symptoms, on the people who are suffering, call for border walls and expanded enforcement. We treat refugees as invaders, repel them, claim credit for addressing the crisis and start the process over. We ask the wrong questions, so we constantly get the wrong answers. It is not a question of how aggressively we police the border, but of what we are doing to force people from their lands, to push people to go to take flight.
Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email, hankkalelt@gmail.com; Twitter, @newspoet41 and @kaletjournalism; Instagram, @kaletwrites; Substack, hankkalet.substack.com.
From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2021
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