There’s no liberty for the world’s hapless refugees

WEDNESDAY was World Refugee Day. It must mark the lowest point in the plight of these marginalised masses, since 2000, when the UN introduced the commemoration.

Until next year, that is. On present depressing trends, the plight of refugees and migrants on June

17, 2019, will almost certainly be worse.

In the US, Refugee Day coincided with a row over officials taking migrant children from their parents and holding them in separate detention facilities.

This was necessary, the reasoning went, to ensure that kids are not incarcerated alongside criminals, as the US pursued its “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting anyone who enters illegally.

Hungary, this week, passed legislation that criminalises lawyers and activists who help asylum seekers. Anyone who “facilitates illegal immigration” will face a year in jail – this in the country that has thwarted refugees with a barbed-wire border fence and a studied indifference to the EU’s “mandatory” asylum quotas.

Here at home, Lawyers for Human Rights penned an open letter to President Cyril Ramaphosa, charging Home Affairs with disregarding the constitution, as well as international treaties and law, with its “very many harmful, unlawful and cruel practices and policies”. The situation, it says, has worsened since Malusi Gigaba became minister earlier this year.

Gigaba begs to differ. SA does not have a refugee problem, he insists. Rather, “we have a problem of irregular migration, with large numbers of economic migrants abusing the process of asylum”.

If you are liberal, these are “refugees” and “asylum seekers”, with connotations of them being hapless victims of war, civil collapse and repression. If you are conservative, these are “economic migrants”. This has the less charitable connotation that they are exploiting heartstrings and loopholes, in equal measure, to escape dismal lives in what Trump dubbed “s ***hole” countries.

It does not matter what terms you prefer. The crux is that the apparently unstoppable flood of people across borders is changing fundamentally the political make-up of a significant number of democracies, including Scandinavian countries, with strong historical commitments to social justice.

Opposition to soft migration policies is the biggest political issue in Poland, Bulgaria, Czech Republic and Slovakia, to name a few. It is what recently led to the election of populist anti-migration governments in Italy and Austria. It is also the social cleavage that triggered the British vote to exit the EU.

Germany’s once-unassailable Angela Merkel has seen her political fortunes wane in direct proportion to the influx, since

2015, of 1.4 million migrants. Given Germany’s stature in Europe and since Merkel was the most powerful champion of open-door migration, the international ramifications are significant.

Parties on the left will have to come to terms with the fact that human compassion and international law simply no longer cuts it. Nor does the academic research that unambiguously shows that immigrants are an economic benefit to the societies they migrate to. If these political parties want to be elected, and of course they do, they are going to have to make radical policy changes.

It will be interesting to see how all this plays out in Spain.

Two decades ago the foreign-born component of Spain’s population was 1.6%. It is now 14%, one of the highest in Europe.

Last week it had what was a rare pleasure for a former fascist dictatorship, that of being the darling of the world’s human rights organisations, when the country’s new Socialist government accepted a boatload of 600 migrants who had been turned away by Italy and Malta. The new arrivals will be allowed to apply for asylum.

However laudable the intentions of the humanitarians, the more migrants they “rescue”, the more attractive they make it for others to pay unscrupulous people smugglers large amounts of money to take them to the promised land. Human exports from Africa are, once again, becoming a major trading activity.

The arrival of the boat is likely to be the beginning of unending convoy. Migrant arrivals to Spain this year, so far, are already 50% higher than last year.

But Spain is an anomaly.

Buoyed by its success, the Italian government will continue its hardline policy. Others, like Greece, might follow suit.

The EU is reaching the tipping point. Fortress Europe is pulling up the drawbridge. So, too, the US.

Almost everywhere, the world’s human flotsam and jetsam are having doors slammed in their faces. No longer party to that promise of succour engraved on the Statue of Liberty.

● Follow WSM on Twitter @ TheJaundicedEye