‘ Migration is a natural process. Butterflies do it, whales do it. And humans do it.’

THE INTERPRETER

NYT

November 19, 2021

Welcome to The Interpreter newsletter, by Amanda Taub, who with Max Fisher writes a column by the same name.

Belarus announced yesterday that it had cleared migrants from their makeshift camp on its border with Poland, the latest development in that government’s efforts to extract concessions from the European Union by manufacturing a refugee crisis on its eastern border.

Viewed narrowly, this situation shows how the countries along the migration routes to Europe run a protection racket whose message is, more or less, “Nice little political and economic union you got there. Sure would be a shame if an influx of refugees through our territory were to fracture it.”

As Max wrote last week, Belarus is just the latest in a string of countries that have demanded that the E.U. cough up political and economic concessions in exchange for blocking migrants from reaching its borders.

That is a political crisis for the European Union, where the admission and distribution of refugees have long been a source of turmoil and division between member countries. And it is a humanitarian catastrophe for the refugees, many of them families with young children. They traveled to Belarus in the hope of making it to Europe, only to find themselves trapped in a police state, sleeping rough in freezing conditions, and subjected to tear gas and violent attacks by Polish security personnel.

 

But take a broader view of the situation, and it becomes clear that such framing fails to account for something even more fundamental than regional realpolitik: namely, that migration and even mass displacement are normal, but our political institutions act as if they are not.

It is simply a fact that at any given time, some small percentage of humans will be fleeing violence, disasters, or economic distress. And yet the global system of citizenship, borders, and immigration doesn’t anticipate that such displacements will happen — and lacks the flexibility to handle it when they inevitably do. (International law grants refugees basic protections against deportation once they arrive in a host country, but little more.) “Migration is a natural process. Butterflies do it, whales do it. And humans do it. That’s why we don’t all live in East Africa,” said Jonathan Blake, a political scientist, and fellow at the Berggruen Institute, a Los Angeles-based think tank whose research focuses on political solutions to challenges that transcend national borders, including atmospheric carbon and pandemics as well as migration. “So you can let them move, or you can cause crises by causing them to pool at borders.” In other words, while Belarus’s actions may be the proximate cause of this particular humanitarian crisis, the deeper issue is that we live in a world in which people will periodically flee their homes and try to go to Europe. But the European Union’s legal and political systems are set up for a world in which that does not happen.   That disconnect between reality and political institutions makes it easy for politicians to paint refugee flows and other migration as an unforeseen and unmanageable disaster, said Stephanie R. Schwartz, a University of Southern California political scientist who studies displacement. “By calling it a crisis, governments invoke fear and can use migration as a political tool toward specific policy goals, often with respect to their domestic constituencies, or as we see in Poland-Belarus, foreign policy goals,” she said. “But is it really a crisis if less than 2 percent of the global population is forcibly displaced?”   The “crisis” terminology implies that displacement is an unforeseeable and perhaps unsolvable problem, she said. By contrast, recognizing that displacement is a constant — and that it is set to become more common as the effects of climate change become more severe — highlights the need for a more flexible regional or even global approach. “If we didn’t see this as an urgent crisis that is temporarily happening now, but something that periodically occurs, we might see mobility more as the norm. We might also want policies that embrace that mobility as the solution,” Dr. Schwartz said.   Regional or transnational systems that made it easier for people fleeing across borders to live and work in a country for some medium period of time, subject to renewal and other protections — in effect, visas that are presumptively approved rather than presumptively denied — might help keep people from massing at borders or making dangerous sea crossings, and make displacement seem like a manageable process rather than a sudden disaster. That may sound radical. But in fact, “this isn’t pie-in-the-sky type policy,” Dr. Schwartz said. “The Mercosur countries in South America have reciprocal residency permits along these lines. The E.U. essentially does this within the E.U. countries.”   And it is possible to imagine other systems developing on top of other international groups that already offer some special visa privileges to citizens of member states, such as the Commonwealth of Nations, an association of former British colonies. That is not to say it would be easy. Such policies would have to withstand attacks from far-right politicians and groups who seek to capitalize on xenophobia. And, Dr. Schwartz said, many humanitarian organizations are skeptical of any changes to the current system of refugee protection, which provides limited but global legal rights to anyone fleeing persecution.   “Some refugee advocates worry that opening up additional, regularized legal pathways for refugees would open Pandora’s box of editing the refugee definition and eroding the protections we do have,” she said. “But are those protections really working?”