How to Get Rid of Migrants
Texas and Tunisia Show the Way
The stable democracies are losing their bearings over migration. Unable or unwilling to develop sane immigration policies, the European Union and the United States have opted instead to declare open war on asylum-seekers. In the US, Texas has deployed increasingly deadly force against migrants, and the EU has decided to pay Tunisia to threaten them with extinction.
Governor Abbot of Texas and President Saied of Tunisia may not otherwise have much in common, but both have utilized geography as a weapon in this one-sided conflict. The natural features of the US state and the North African country require that asylum-seekers cross dangerous stretches of desert or water to reach safe haven. If the elements fail to kill them or turn them back, Saied and Abbot have no qualms about calling in militarized force to make their intentions clear.
With Libya now too chaotic, the city of Sfax in Tunisia has become the primary transit point for sub-Saharan Africans headed for the EU. In a speech last February, Saied claimed that “hordes” of asylum-seekers were bringing crime and violence to Tunisia. As a result Black African migrants were attacked and harassed. In July hundreds were swept up and dropped in the desert on the Libyan border without food, water or shelter; at least 27 bodies have been found.
The current asylum route is across the Mediterranean from Sfax to the Italian Island of Lampedusa. According to Agence France Presse, more than 1800 people have perished in 2023 on this treacherous 80 mile/130 kilometer journey. On September 13, a number of smugglers’ boats managed to reach the island intact. This relative success for migrants — the fact that there was no mass drowning– has led far-right Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni to call for a naval blockade of North Africa.
Meloni is not alone in declaring war. Even as Africans were being moved out of sight and out of mind into the Tunisian desert, the EU was cutting a devil’s bargain with Saied. The Union has reportedly offered Tunisia 105 million euros to control the border, plus another billion euros as needed for support. That’s roughly 112 million and 1.1 billion in US dollars, although Saied now appears to be angling for more money.
This is a president who, since being elected in 2019, has dissolved the legislature and the judiciary and jailed opposition figures. Since Saied has demonstrated how migrants will be dealt with in Tunisia, the EU representatives might need a reminder that their Charter of Fundamental Rights proclaims “the universal values of human dignity, freedom, equality and solidarity.” Article 18 guarantees the right to asylum, and Article 19 forbids expulsion when death or torture are a risk.
Governor Abbot could well be the role model for Saied. In 2015 Abbot attempted to block the settlement of Syrian refugees in Texas, and in 2020 said ‘no’ to all refugees. In March, 2021 Abbot militarized the border with ‘Operation Lone Star’, which authorized patrols by the Texas National Guard. In July troops began arresting migrants, and reports indicate that hundreds of asylum-seekers were imprisoned for weeks without charges.
Just getting to the border in Texas is a survival story. In fiscal year 2022 more than 800 migrants perished in the desert or by drowning, and that is considered an undercount. Border Patrol rescues have gone up more that 70% over 2021, so in a typical move the governor has made crossing more dangerous. In June of this year Texas began placing miles of razor wire on the shores of the river and chains of buoys in the river itself. According to a state trooper, border guards were ordered to “push back migrants, including small children, into the Rio Grande.”
Like the EU, the US guarantees the right to asylum, but the notion of rights has gotten little traction in some quarters against the fear and loathing of unknown others. It is true that the logistics of migration have become more daunting every day, as migrants flee poverty and hopelessness en masse. Courts and care agencies are overwhelmed by sheer numbers, and even sympathetic liberals are beginning to turn away from their professed values as majority opinion makes those values inconvenient.
But leaders like Abbot, Saied and Meloni have no interest in making a case for intelligent reform. They opt instead for political gain by invoking the language of war against ‘invaders’, who then drown or disappear in the desert with no consequences. As the US and the EU continue to normalize and institutionalize that rhetoric and the actions that follow from it, we should recall that this planet has no shortage of sites and events that attest to the ultimate results of campaigns to expel and eliminate those considered less than human.
>All images are Public Domain, courtesy of Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons; this is a link to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license for the map, which has been cropped and modified.
>No AI was used in the conception or execution of this article.
