An interesting detail the euronews article reported on is that the German government had to give 1,000 euros to the 81 Afghans it deported. The reason is that the courts could block the deportation if it was deemed that the people faced financial destitution upon their return. This is a laudable humanitarian measure, and it’s a surprise to me that they afforded it to criminals. Note, I’m not saying that they shouldn’t afford it; in fact, I agree, but given the political climate, one would think that the country would’ve just deported them with nothing.
A key element this story reveals, and something we overlook, is the increasing importance of the judiciary in immigration discourse. There is an interesting cause-and-effect chain to observe. In Germany and much of the West, the public is turning against benevolent and humanitarian immigration policies, giving more votes to the anti-immigration right, and there’s an increasing strain on certain countries due to the immigrant influx. This drives executives to overreach to implement stricter policies that may very well return people to places where they face human rights violations.
The courts, then, being immune to politics and pressure (ideally), can preserve certain principles. This has been the case in Germany and even in America, despite the glaring partisanship and green-lighting of the Supreme Court. The parallels to the American case are worth studying.
On multiple accounts of presidential action, the courts have stifled the agenda, allowing the Supreme Court to use its shadow docket to simply allow the president to do as he wills. From stopping the end of temporary protected status and the alien enemies act fiasco.
Social media’s role and citizen journalism were also a critical theme in the readings. And in contemporary times, we’ve seen the internet allow for grassroots everything. In Gaza, regular people were using social media to report and document everything that was happening, aiding this overseas journalism or journalism in exile that Wafa was referring to. In Ukraine, we saw this in the war crimes investigations report by Yale that was referenced in last week’s class. Grassroots activism, information sharing, and community alerts are trends that we see from Algeria (Arab Spring) to Kenya(crowdsourced crisis mapping).
The role of Pakistan and Iran in Germany’s asylum program reveals a similar trend everywhere in how neighboring countries bear the brunt of a refugee crisis, even as countries farther away make promises of aid. Germany has had 10s and 100s of thousands of people in Pakistan. Why did Pakistan agree to take on this burden? Why must it now deal with a population that it definitely has less capacity than Germany to integrate in the face of these cancellations?
In Sudan, we saw this too. The international community funds neighbors like Chad, Egypt, and Ethiopia to bear the brunt of supporting and integrating refugees. These countries suffer strain with insufficient resources on top of their already struggling populations.
