This Wednesday, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom will announce its judgment on the deportation program in Rwanda. The decision will certainly have direct consequences for all those who are threatened with deportation. It will also influence the political debate on immigration, where supporters of the authorities will either celebrate victory or condemn the betrayal of liberal elites.
Whatever it is, this ruling will not particularly affect the "immigrant crisis". The government itself has admitted that, even if a court were to declare the program legal and allow takeoff to Kigali, Rwanda would only be able to receive a "small number" of deportees, possibly 300 a year during the four-year trial period. Considering that last year nearly 46.000 people crossed the English Channel in small boats and that by August of this year the number of pending asylum applications was 175.000, the deportation program represents nothing more than performative politics - the desire to show that the authorities are doing something and it relentlessly, instead of seriously trying to solve the problem.
Performative political decision-making is a constant in immigration management today, not only in Britain. Last week, Italian Prime Minister Giorgio Meloni announced an arrangement that would see undocumented migrants and asylum seekers held in specially built detention centers in Albania.
Details are not yet known, but the plan appears to be some sort of offshore processing of claims - not outright deportation, as Britain envisages in its program with Rwanda - whereby those heading for Italy who are intercepted in international waters would submit their claims from detention in Albania. The judges who will lead those cases will be Italians, and in order to have at least some legal cover for their decisions, they will sit in courtrooms that will be declared Italian jurisdiction. If found to be genuine, the asylum seekers would be free to enter Italy. Those who are rejected by the court are threatened with deportation. However, as in many cases Albania does not have an appropriate agreement with the migrants' countries of origin, there is a possibility that many people will be detained indefinitely - possibly in Italy.
Why should asylum claims simply not be considered on actual Italian soil? Because in that case, Meloni would not have the opportunity for the public to see her deal with immigration harshly. Italy, like Great Britain and many Western countries, turns its immigration policy into a public spectacle.
The irony is that the same countries that seek to portray themselves as uncompromising on immigration are also desperate for new workers from abroad. When the Italian government launched an online system for employers seeking visas for non-EU workers earlier this year, the entire quota was used up within an hour. That's why Italy will open the door to more workers coming from outside the EU and issue up to 425.000 work permits over the next two years.
Hungary, whose Prime Minister Viktor Orban is one of Europe's most vocal opponents of immigration, is also quietly turning to non-EU countries to meet its labor needs, with plans to take in up to 500.000 guest workers. Greece, too, is desperately trying to boost its workforce while simultaneously holding tens of thousands of undocumented migrants in its notorious camps. Such contradictions arise because, as Dutch sociologist Hein de Haas notes in his new book How Migration Really Moves, liberal democracies face the trilemma of how to reconcile three different goals: the economic need for migrant labor; the political desire to present themselves as keeping immigration under control; and the moral obligation to treat migrants and asylum seekers as people with rights and dignity. Seemingly unable to achieve all three goals, governments have moved to combine overt policies of immigration suppression with covert plans to increase net immigration flows, while being willing to sacrifice the rights of migrants and asylum seekers for economic and political expediency.
De Haas deftly dissects the countless myths in which our contradictory attitudes towards immigration are embedded. Immigration out of control? The number of people on the move around the world has certainly increased, but as a share of the global population it has been constant for decades at around 3 percent. Despite the almost universal perception that we live in a world of increasingly numerous conflicts that generate an unprecedented mass of refugees, de Haas shows that there has been no long-term increase in the number of refugees and that refugees make up only 0,3 percent of the global population. Nor, he shows, is immigration responsible for lower wages, higher unemployment, rising crime rates or a lack of affordable housing in host countries.
But the obsession with immigration, de Haas notes, facilitates a maneuver to turn social policy issues at home—from wage stagnation to unaffordable housing—into a debate about an external threat to the nation. Here, immigrants serve as scapegoats, which allows politicians to abdicate responsibility and present themselves as crusaders in the fight against a foreign enemy.
It is not only a European or Western phenomenon. From Tunisia to South Africa, from Kenya to India, politicians are happy to foment xenophobic backlash against immigrants to distract the public from domestic issues. Pakistan has announced the deportation of all undocumented Afghan refugees - up to 1,7 million people - in what could become one of the largest forced deportations since the 1950s. However, the world in the shadow of the war in Gaza seems to have barely paid attention.
The impending disaster shows how, despite all the panic in the West due to the "flood" of asylum seekers, the poorest countries in Africa and Asia have already hosted the vast majority of refugees in the world. It also shows how easy it is in the Global South to demonize refugees, just like in the West. Faced with a cascade of crises - economic disaster, political instability and a wave of terrorist attacks - Pakistan's leaders are, in the words of one analyst, pursuing a well-established strategy of "blame-shifting".
When it comes to Pakistan (or India or South Africa), it is clear to many that politicians are manipulating fears of foreign threats to divert attention from their responsibility for domestic failures. In Europe and America, however, claims of an immigration crisis are too often taken for granted, and policies such as the deportation program in Rwanda or the Italy-Albania deal are seen as serious attempts to solve the problem. Far from it. Those plans are a performative policy in which the merciless attitude towards migrants and asylum seekers becomes a means of covering up social problems at home. It's high time we named them.
(The Guardian; Peščanik.net; translation: M. Jovanović)
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