For more than 70 years, the world has enshrined in national laws and global agreements a promise that was described as vitally important: anyone who cannot live safely in their home country can seek refuge in another country.
If these people can prove that they are in danger of a certain type and if they meet the conditions of stay required by the host country, the country is obliged to receive them.
This ideal was never fully respected, not even in its early days, after the Second World War, when welcoming refugees was seen as both a moral and a practical imperative in order to rebuild shattered societies in the name of the common good.
But the very powers that proposed and defended the measure have been eroding that pact in recent years, gradually undermining their own obligations — hence, those of the world — with a responsibility that in the past they characterized as crucial to global stability.
Analysts say the process reached a new extreme last week when the UK government announced a new plan for thousands of foreigners who have applied for asylum in the country. Instead of processing their requests, the British intend to take them to Rwanda, a distant country that is almost a dictatorship and in which most migrants have never set foot, so that they become someone else’s problem.
London did not invent the practice of shutting up refugees and asylum seekers in faraway places. For years European governments have been paying despots and warlords in countries like Sudan and Libya to detain migrants on their behalf. Australia outsources this work to a number of island nations sometimes collectively described as the gulag archipelago. The US pioneered this practice when, in 1991, it diverted ships full of Haitians to Guantánamo, Cuba.
The rise of right-wing populist politics, the backlash in Europe against the 2015 migration wave and then the coronavirus pandemic, all accelerated the practice and others like it: physical barriers, armed patrols, and “deterrent” policies that intentionally heighten the danger. of migrant travel.
The result is not exactly that the global refuge system is finished. European governments are taking in millions of Ukrainians displaced by the Russian invasion, for example. What the measure announced in the UK highlights instead is that this system, once seen and presented as a universal and legally binding obligation, is today being treated in practice as voluntary.
“It’s a tremendous shame for a country to offer accommodation to Ukrainians and less than a month later to announce that it will send all other migrants 6,500 km away,” says Stephanie Schwartz, a migration policy scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.
The erosion of an ideal
Engagement with refugees and asylum seekers has always been more conditional and more self-interested than described.
In the post-World War II years, even as Western leaders pledged to safely resettle Europe’s refugees, they forcibly returned 2.3 million Soviet citizens, many of them against their will. According to estimates by historian Tony Judt, one in five were later executed or sent to the gulag.
Still, as the Cold War raged, they increasingly emphasized their respect for refugee rights and pressured allies to do the same — as a way of portraying their bloc as superior to communist governments, which sometimes barred citizens from to run away. Western countries’ compliance with the rules continued to be irregular, privileging refugees from communist countries or others that offered them some political gain.
But the real change came when the Cold War ended in 1991, just as the West lost that incentive. Global refugee populations soared in the early 1990s to 18 million, according to the United Nations — nearly nine times the number they were in 1951, when the world formally enshrined rules for this group in a convention.
But in the 2010s, with the increase in flow mainly from poorer countries, the reaction became very different. The US adopted policies towards Central American migrants similar to those it had used towards Haitians, negotiating with governments, especially the Mexican one, to prevent refugees and migrants from reaching its border. Europe and Australia have adopted similar strategies.
The result has been the creation of concentric rings of detention centers, some of them notorious for their brutality, on the periphery of the borders of the world’s richest countries. Most are along routes taken by refugees or close to the boundary they hoped to reach, giving governments a semblance of compliance.
The new proposal announced in the UK, to send people to the far reaches of another continent, takes this process a step further, highlighting the real workings of the new system.
Some argue that enshrining new agreements or eliminating old ones altogether could distribute global responsibility more sustainably—particularly at a time when increased displacement caused by the climate crisis blurs the differences between economic migrants and political refugees.
But world leaders have expressed little interest in these plans. And if the problem is that governments don’t want refugees and can’t be compelled to take them in, replacing one little-respected pact with another wouldn’t change much.
The emerging order
Europe’s apparent double standards — while governments welcome Ukrainians, continue to do everything to prevent the entry of migrants from the Middle East — have made the implicit norms of the new refugee system especially clear.
Increasingly, governments selectively enforce the ostensibly universal rights of refugees, and often apply them on the basis of which demographic groups should receive domestic political approval. For example, while announcing the expulsion of asylum seekers already in the country, the UK apologized for not welcoming more Ukrainians.
Governments have also learned that as long as they do not hold each other accountable for breaking international standards, there is no one but their own citizens who can stop them — and they are the ones who often call for such measures.
Right-wing populist parties have seen their support base grow dramatically over the past decade, thanks in part to their championing a backlash against immigration and portraying refugee rules as a conspiracy to dilute their national identities.
Some traditional parties resisted this trend — Germany took in 1 million refugees while watching the rise of the far-right — but others concluded that limiting non-white immigration was necessary to save their parties and possibly their democracies. Asylum seekers fleeing war or famine were forced to pay the price.
It was not the founding intention of the global pact on refugees that domestic political cycles would determine which families displaced by disasters could remake their lives abroad and which would be condemned to live in squalid refugee camps or end up in mass graves.
But if that is what is going to happen, then the reaction of the British public to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s proposal and his unusually brazen defiance of the pact could prove revealing. “It’s inhumane, it’s morally reprehensible, it’s probably illegal and it could very well be unworkable,” David Normington, a former Home Office official, told the BBC.
But, in the eyes of the British government or others, whether or not the plan is truly viable may ultimately depend not so much on laws or morality as on what the British public is willing to tolerate.
