Author: Oliver De Bono (Page 2 of 2)

I remember following the sudden collapse of the Afghan National Government and Army in the midst of the US withdrawal very closely on Twitter. The mood was somewhat apocalyptic and the image of people trying to clasp onto US military cargo planes is my jarring abiding memory of that moment. Jane Ferguson’s piece on PBS was very good I thought. The collage of footage is incredible and conveys the sheer desperation of so many people. I also thought it did a good job of contextualizing Biden’s speech in terms of Vietnam and refuting his claim that this was nothing like that in such devastating terms. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be a western journalist in Kabul then. There were still some ANA forces who had not disappeared, there were the Taliban of course, as well as ISIS-K, and a great number of desperate people. I also remember the takeover of the Taliban as this great unknown: would the violent reprisals start right away or would they wait until the last US forces had departed? I read Jane Ferguson’s piece in the New Yorker reflecting on that moment and her dilemma about going to cover it and risking getting trapped or worse. 

I found the NYT two part piece fascinating. I can’t imagine how much labor over so many years went into producing it: the result, however, is a systematic deconstruction of the Pentagon’s air strike assessment criteria and the bureaucracy that surrounds it. The story is that the US government was negligently killing thousands of civilians without any accountability while maintaining a narrative that it was minimising civilian casualties. The series also did a great job of bridging the gap between the very technical and data-driven aggregated review of casualty assessments and telling the human stories of the people whose families were killed in the airstrikes. Both parts are necessary to dismantle the Pentagon’s own sanitary narrative of surgical, “precision” bombing campaign. When surviving members of families devastated by the airstrikes address the pentagon, crying out how such a powerful military could have thought that their house was habouring terrorists, Captain Urban’s rigid and corporate responses ring very hollow. But if the investigation had not been so thorough, I as a reader naively would have trusted Captain Urban’s statements because I wanted to—I wanted to believe that the US military wouldn’t have done this and some civilian casualties are inevitable. This piece is so effective therefore that is manages to make you reevaluate what you take for granted. There are also so many small, but devastating details: the woman from the US overseas development agency who said the children probably lived in the house but who was dismissed, or the disillusioned, anonymous US officer who could not distinguish the result of the US’ bureaucratic bombing of Raqqa from Russia’s indiscriminate bombing of Aleppo. I’m very curious to know how one would cultivate sources in government or the military especially as the source has a strong incentive not to say anything and even if they wanted to how would you find them?

CALAIS, FRANCE — The Mayor of Calais, Natacha Bouchart, has criticised “activists” in Calais coming from “European countries and Great Britain” to “ease their consciences” in an interview with BFM’s Apolline de Malherbe. 

Bouchart’s comments blaming activists in Calais come mere weeks after she attacked the UK government in an interview with Le Figaro. Bouchart, who has served as Mayor since 2008 as a member of the centre-right Republicans party, spoke with de Malherbe on Face à Face, BFM’s morning political talk show, on September 17th. She said that the activists “encourage” migrants “to stay in places that are not suitable for them.” She went on to say that “by helping and accompanying them in Calais, by not wanting to contribute to the proposal of the State services to remove them from the town or the coast, the activists are helping to organise the fact that they may cross at some point.” The Office of the Mayor did not respond to a request for comment. Her remarks show difficulties in her relationship with local aid organisations, the national government in Paris, and the new UK government. 

The interview took place in the context of the Maritime Prefecture of the Channel announcing the deaths of eight migrants who were trying to cross the Channel in a small boat on September 15th. On September 3rd, 12 migrants, including six children and a pregnant woman, drowned trying to make the crossing. According to the International Organisation for Migration, 47 people have now died trying to make the crossing this year.

Utopia 56, a French aid organisation that operates in Calais, took to X to criticize Bouchart’s comments. The organisation’s X account said, “According to the mayor of Calais, when you help, you become an accomplice to the smugglers and are responsible for the deaths in the Channel. You can discuss this with the sea rescue services, @NatachaBouchart. This dangerous rhetoric serves the extreme right and leads to violent attacks.” Utopia 56 did not respond to a request for further comment. 

Felix Thompson, a spokesperson for Calais Appeal, an umbrella group of 8 grassroots organizations in Calais, told me, “Nobody here would encourage anyone to cross the channel or break the law.” He said, “We do humanitarian work, keeping people alive, clothed, and fed.”

He also echoed Utopia 56’s concern about the far right in Calais. “It’s gotten worse since the European parliament elections,” he said. On June 9th, National Rally, a far-right political party formerly known as National Front, won the largest vote share in France the latest European Parliament elections. Weeks later, after President Emmanuel Macron called a snap election, the National Rally took control of 10 of the 12 constituencies in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, where Calais is the largest city. He told me that swastikas had started appearing near a safe house run by the group. He also told me, “I have friends who are volunteers and also people of colour who’ve had urine thrown on them.

Earlier this month. Bouchart said the UK government’s stance was “hypocritical” given its labour laws and lack of repatriations. Working in the UK requires fewer official documents than in France, so the UK is seen as a more attractive option by many migrants. She said it was necessary to use a “fist of iron to deal with this government” and that “there will have to be a showdown” at some point. The X account of Officers and Commissioners of Police, the majority union of internal security officers in France, quote tweeted the interview saying, “Are we finally going to call into question the Touquet accords?” referring to the 2002 agreement that allowed Britain to externalise its border on the French coast without the opportunity to claim asylum there. Sarah Berry, who works for Roots, an aid organisation in Dunkirk, France, told me, “What we really need is safe routes for migrants to get to the UK and claim asylum”. 

Home Office figures say that 1519 migrants arrived in the week ending September 22nd and that 623 migrants had been prevented from leaving France or returned in the same time. The Home Office released figures today showing that 192 migrants arrived in the UK on small boats from France last week.

The figures come as immigration takes centre stage at the Conservative Party Conference. The four-day conference began yesterday. The Times of London reported that former Minister Andrew Griffith said that the party could win back voters by focussing on immigration. Meanwhile, Conservative party leader-hopeful Robert Jenrick has pledged a hard cap on migration to the UK, saying that the former Conservative government had been “too liberal” in its approach to migration. 

Earlier this month, Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to discuss migration. The Prime Minister told journalists he was “interested” in Italy’s development of an external migrant processing centre in Albania and that he had “long believed that prevention and stopping people travelling in the first place is one of the best ways to deal with this particular issue.” It is unclear what lessons the Prime Minister has taken from the visit and whether his policies will be acceptable to the French.

I really enjoyed reading perspectives from such different corners of the world and Ukrainian society. I used to be a Slavic major and I have followed the war in Ukraine very closely on Twitter; reading some of the accounts from 2022 reminded me of the shock and chaos that unfolded then, and it really did feel like a paradigm shift in which anything could happen. I enjoyed Allan Little’s overview of the conflict and his explanation of the historical context. I read Catherine Belton’s book Putin’s People, which explains how the KGB never really relinquished control of Russia and how many of the current Kremlin elite’s worldviews are informed by Soviet ideas of a greater Russia and a traditional Russian sphere of influence. It was interesting to see his experiences chatting to older Russians chime with this sense of a greater Russia.

I was very interested by Gia Kourlas’ piece in the NYT. What does it mean to profile one small segment of Ukrainian society in the midst of a war? I saw an article of a similar genre in the Times of London today profiling a casino in Beirut that is undeterred by the prospect of war with Israel. I think the effect of these pieces is that they can show how far war penetrates society. It leaves nothing untouched. Wars, like pandemics, touch more things than you could possibly think of by yourself.  I think there is also something very interesting about profiling dancers who are attuned to the effects of trauma on the body. This subject matter allows the journalist to show how the war has affected on a physical as well as situational level. I also like how the article draws upon the history of ballet dancing in Ukraine and is able to locate the dancers within the history of their country and culture. This all adds up to a profile of Ukraine as a country and society without ever having to say Ukrainians are x,y, or z.

I was fascinated by the topic of refugees and technology. The report by Preputnik, Nzuki, Yayboke, and Strouboulis did a great job of giving an overview of the implications of Ukrainians being so internet and smartphone-connected and how this is generally unprecedented in historical refugee populations. When I was reading the report, I kept thinking about how there must be a million human stories of technology being some kind of deus ex machina event in refugees’ lives. For example, being able to begin the asylum process online, receiving money from the UN on the DIIA app, or connecting with someone to take you and your family in abroad through social media. However, there must also be all kinds of horror stories of people being exploited in ways that were not previously possible. In this report and the article on HIAS by Zumhagen, technology was generally presented as a positive thing: for example, refugee preferences being taken into account in ways that were never before possible in granting them aid etc., but I think a job for journalists now and in the coming years will be telling the stories of the fewer people for whom technology was not helpful and may have actually made things much worse.

I find Governor Abbott’s bus policy fascinating. It seems that his aim is to impose the realities of irregular migration on Democratic cities that would have otherwise been insulated by geography from feeling its effects. It was interesting to note in the Bus by Bus NYT piece that Abbott had chosen the destination cities because they were run by Democrats who support Biden’s border policies. We talk about NIMBYism in the context of land development, but it seems to me that there is a fair amount of migration NIMBYism in the US too. On one level, Abbott has successfully highlighted the hypocrisy of those who supported looser border policies for Texas when they did not feel the effects. Now, there is broader support in these democratic cities for curbing migration. I noted in Donaldson’s timeline of the migration crisis in NYC that Eric Adams, at one point, said that the migrant issue would “destroy New York City”. So, Abbott has been very successful in his goal and on some level, I think there is a moral case that the burden of migration should be shared across the country. I thought the detail of the Cuban migrant who said that the Texan Governor was “very generous” for the bus ticket was wonderful. However, we must also acknowledge that Abbott seems to have malicious intent. It was striking that Texan officials do not provide any warning or notice when the buses are going to arrive. Moreover, they seem to be actively trying to inconvenience the city authorities. For example, when Mayor Adams instituted his order that buses had to provide some notice, the buses started dropping people at train stations in NJ. 

I was also curious about the shelter system in NY. Not only has the migrant crisis forced the city to alter its obligations to provide shelter to all, but the city is also tearing down migrant encampments that are springing up around the place. This reminds me very much of what is happening in northern France. There seems to be an implicit desire in this policy that the migrants will simply vanish. Where are the migrants supposed to go then? In reality, I think such policies are just making life more miserable for them. I read the comments on the NYT article about homeless migrants, and I was struck by the lack of sympathy for the migrants and the general view of them as a nuisance. I imagine that some people in NYC who condemn Abbott’s treatment of the migrants at the border are not thrilled about the migrants in NYC. 

I found the report on the “illegal hunters” streaming their content on Youtube very distrubing. I think there is a generalised dehumanisation of migrants happening in lots of Western countries. When people are consistently talked about as “illegals” or “aliens” and otherwise dehumanised, it follows that they should not enjoy the same basic rights or decent treatment that we would expect for ourselves. 

Finally, I have been thinking a lot about why migrants from Ukraine got such good treatment in the US and, indeed, in the UK while migrants from other countries do not. On a fundamental level, there is very little that distinguishes many Ukrainian refugees from many Middle Eastern, African, and South American migrants to Europe and the US in the past few years. I think racism and assumptions about Ukrainians’ potential to integrate are at the root of much of the lack of protest against Ukrainian refugees.

I found this week’s readings interesting in the context of our discussion with Matthew Longo last week and his reference to the idea that people will go where the money is if the money does not go where the people are. The statement from economist Jean-Baptiste Say has an air of inevitability about it, as though it was a law of nature. The idea of migration being a force of nature is echoed in Taladrid’s pieces that we read for this week. In the Taladrid, former Mexican Ambassador to the US Arturo Sarukhán says that you ‘can’t enforce your way out of a migration crisis’” because the people and smugglers will simply find alternative routes. Indeed, as Lopez Obrador says, “people don’t willingly leave their own homes… they do it out of necessity.” The US has committed funding to development in Central and South America, but US politicians are under pressure to solve the problem now, which means enforcement. As a result, the US government spends much more money on the federal agencies that enforce immigration laws and guard the border. They treat the symptoms, not the cause.

Although I don’t think the question was asked explicitly in Taladrid’s piece, as I was reading, I asked myself whether the situation was sustainable. Moreover, if the situation were unsustainable, what would give out? Matthew Longo alluded to this last week, and I am inclined to agree: liberal democracy would give out. If the whac-a-mole of enforcement does not work, then many will see the immediate solution (the solution for the next election cycle) as a bigger hammer or a hammer wielded with less restraint. This is how we arrived at the “museum of deterrence”, that is, the wire, barriers, and blades on the Rio Grande, S.B.4, and Trump’s plan to deport millions of migrants when he enters office. 

I am also interested in performative action in migration policy. Specifically, I am interested in performative cruelty. Operation Wetback, as Burgess outlines, was largely performative in its outcome, even if its intention was substantive. The government claimed to have deported more than a million illegal immigrants, but the figures didn’t add up. Moreover, many of these deportations were coercions to leave the country rather than legal deportations. Burgess also points to this evidence that US citizens were caught up in the operation. The purported success of Operation Wetback lay in the Bracero program, which provided an alternative route for migrants to migrate legally to work nine months a year on farms. But politically, Operation Wetback allowed Eisenhower to say that he was getting tough on illegal migration. We might note, however, that the performative action came at the cost of a chip on the rule of law in the US.

It seems that creating safe routes for migration, does dissuade people from coming dangerously. In addition to the Bracero program, the parole program in certain South American countries that resulted in a 90% drop in irregular migration from those countries. Someone who supported Operation Wetback might say that there is a crucial difference between people coming legally and illegally, even if it results in the same de facto outcome. However, speaking from the UK, temporary migrant workers are just as much an “other” to be blamed in times of economic depression as irregular migrants. For example, after Brexit, a political event inspired in part by legal rather than illegal migration, farmers’ crops rotted in fields because the seasonal workers from Romania and Poland could not come any more. If migration policy is purely motivated by racism, then that policy is a threat to liberal democracy and the economy of that country.

I really enjoyed the chapters we read about the Pan-European Picnic in Matthew Longo’s book. I thought the book did a really good job of blending the broader macro-political events and even the personalities of the politicians with the reality of Hungarians, Austrians, and East German refugees on the ground. I would be curious to ask Matthew about his research process. I think something that is interesting about accounts of refugees that Matthew’s book highlights very well is that the experiences of refugees highlight the human duality of being insignificant and the center of one’s own universe. From one view, individual refugees are each an insignificance in the scheme of the world and history—a statistic— but at the same time from another perspective they experience epic struggles and stories with twists, turns, and angels which are beyond the imagination of most people who have not themselves been refugees. 

I found John McPhee’s reflections on writing leads very interesting and he has some great one-liners of advice. I was particularly taken with the idea that the lead is the first thing you should write. I was also taken with the idea that “A thousand details add up to one impression”, which I thought was very true of Longo’s description of the actual day of the picnic. 

I found it fascinating to learn more about the public discourse around migration in the US in the build-up to WW2 and see how many parallels there were between what was being said then and what is being said now in the US and Europe. There were several themes that I noticed in this discourse that particularly stuck out to me. 

The first is that there was a racialised hierarchy of immigrants. For example, the Immigration Act of 1924 made it easier for people to immigrate from England and Austria than from Italy and Greece. Another example would be the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was one of the few early successes of the “restrictionists”. This was in part because Chinese immigrants were perceived as a cultural threat as well as an economic threat. I think this is reflected today when we consider the discourse around immigrants to the US and Europe from the Middle East. Many people decry Islam as a threat to “Western life and values.” Ukrainian refugees, by contrast, were welcomed with open arms by people in the UK, as were dissidents fleeing Hong Kong, a former British colony. 

The next thing that struck me was how immigrants were blamed for economic downturns. The restrictionists were much more successful once the great depression started. I also noticed that Goudeau highlighted how many Chinese immigrants were based on the West Coast, which was economically depressed when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed. My understanding of the economics is not great, but as I understand it, immigration is often economically vital. The Reform Party in the UK has been making a particularly big deal of blaming immigrants on the UK’s economic difficulties which began with the 2008 financial crisis and then got worse with Brexit. 

Finally, I really liked Goudeau’s description of one part of the political discourse as “better safe than sorryism”. I feel like I have heard this type of argument made hundreds of times in contemporary discourse around immigration. I am curious to know if there was any what I would call “I-told-you-so-ism” which we see so much of now. What I mean by this is when an immigrant commits a violent or sexual crime, their status as an immigrant is held up as a sign that this was foreseeable and could have been prevented simply by not allowing them to enter the country.