THE QUIET BEFORE THE STORM AT THE BORDER & ELSEWHERE, TOO
- Gonzalo Santos
- Jul 31, 2024
- 3 min read
The dastardly deed - the inhumane Trumpist asylum ban by a Democratic, panicky president on the electoral ropes - has been done.
A surreal quiet reins along the southern border. But soon, the tragic drama of hundreds, if not thousands, of families dying crossing undetected the border deserts and rivers - instead of turning themselves to border officers to request asylum - will roar into our daily news cycles, become the new, appalling normal.
Also in the news will be reports on the dangerous and hopelessly desperate bottling-up of migrants on the Mexican side, the saturation of costly and insufficient long-distance deportation flights, the overwhelming of inadequate detention centers, and predictably, new and most dangerous surge of unaccompanied children migrants, provoking the ensuing chaos Biden's closing of the border to asylum-seekers will cause.
All of this will only show, once again and beyond the extreme cruelty, the utter futility of banning asylum and insisting on containing migration flows with purely punitive "enforcement" measures.
Is there another way to deal with this. Of course there is!
These are the direct consequences of adopting and applying the wrong conceptual, political, and ideological frameworks to deal with the migration flows within today's rapidly integrating - but asymmetrical - world order, mostly between the Global North and the Global South. Europe has adopted similar restrictionist policies, with similar inhumane, cruel and chaotic results (close to 30,000 drowned migrants in the Mediterranean since 2015).
There is no future in erecting fortresses.
We - humanity - are all in this together, whether we like it and acknowledge it or not. There's no "them" anymore. There never was, really as all world religions have insisted, but we were seduced by the "particular universalims" of modern nationalism, first in monoracial terms, then in multilcultural, but border-limited terms.
Today's human migration flows of hundreds of millions of displaced populations and how the international system deals with it from the anachronistic perspective of "state sovereignty" - what I now call "the problem of the border line" - has clearly become the problem of the first half of the 21 century, and if we as a world community do not address it will become the problem of the whole century.
The lack of global, comprehensive solutions to this global problem reflect the growing inability of the current international institutions to procure basic world governance.
What we see, instead, is the growing polarization of geopolitical tensions by regions and between borders, the retrenchment of many governments - especially democratically-elected ones - to embracing exclusionary, ethnonationalist "solutions" that only aggravate the problem, and the increasing incapacity of the world-system to address the economic environmental, and social causes of growing forced human migration.
Americans, in particular, both at the level of political elites and civil society, have now embraced a full-spectrum restrictionist mindset -- whipped up, on the one side, by the white nationalist Maga movement now in control of the Republican Party, conservative multimedia and the white evangelical churches; and on the other, appeased and adopted willy-nilly by what passes as the liberal establishment (formerly hegemonic and a champion of human rights and the multicultural society, today a shadow of its former glory).
The Biden administration's cynical retrenchment to raw Trumpian asylum bans and calls for greater militarized border & interior enforcement policies, far from gaining voters over from the Republicans' electoral advantages, will accelerate their defeat in November.
The same can be said, BTW, on Biden's continued support for Israeli genocide in Gaza, and his blind pursuit of a military solution to the war in Ukraine. Why vote for Maga "light" when you can vote for the real thing?
The Dems, ultimately as corrupt and sponsored by a hawkish, predatory, oligarchic power elite as the Reps, have learned nothing and and have forgotten nothing.
As for the people, forget the duopoly and prepare to fight like hell for your rights - united, resolute, and uncompromising - now and in the coming period, whoever wins in November.
That is, if you care to keep them. This include all the ethnic communities with large immigrant cohorts, the labor movement, the women's movement, the environmental movement, etc.
The world - the planet and all living things on it - needs you to act up and, in fact, expects no less of you!
But will you, Americans, measure up?
So far, you are abysmally failing the test! ¡Ya desapendéjense!
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