SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
asylum seekers
'It's a Disgrace': Biden Weighs Making Temporary Asylum Limits Harder to Lift
"We already know how devastating the Biden asylum shutdown is and it should be ended immediately rather than expanded," said one campaigner.
Sep 04, 2024
Two months after U.S. President Joe Biden signed an executive order barring migrants who cross the southern border without authorization from receiving asylum, senior administration officials are reportedly considering making the policy—which was meant to be temporary—much harder to lift.
Biden's June directive invoked Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act—previously used by the administration of former Republican President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, to deny migrants asylum—"when the southern border is overwhelmed."
The policy shuts down asylum requests when the average number of daily migrant encounters between ports of entry hits 2,500. Border entry points may allow migrants to seek asylum when the seven-day average dips below 1,500.
"The move to make the asylum restrictions semi-permanent would effectively rewrite U.S. asylum law."
The changes under consideration would reopen entry only after the seven-day average for migrant encounters remains under 1,500 for 28 days.
"The asylum ban itself is arbitrary and duplicative. It has no relation at all to a person's asylum claims, meaning even a person with an extraordinarily strong claim would be denied for crossing at a time when many others, potentially thousands of miles away, are doing the same," Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, an advocacy group, said Wednesday.
"There is no doubt that we need to rethink the current asylum system, which would include giving it an infusion of resources so that people don't have to wait five years for a decision," he continued. "But cutting it off to whole swathes of people for reasons unrelated to their claims isn't a fix."
"The move to make the asylum restrictions semi-permanent would effectively rewrite U.S. asylum law, which since it was created in 1980 has mandated that all people on U.S. soil be permitted to request humanitarian protections, regardless of how they got here," Reichlin-Melnick added.
U.S. officials say Biden's order has resulted in a dramatic decrease in asylum claims.
According toThe New York Times:
Since Mr. Biden's executive order went into effect, the number of arrests at the southern border has dropped precipitously. In June, more than 83,000 arrests were made, then in July the number went down further to just over 56,000 arrests. Arrests in August ticked up to 58,000, according to a homeland security official, but those figures still pale in comparison to the record figures in December when around 250,000 migrants crossed.
Migrant rights advocates condemned the new rules. Less than two weeks after Biden issued the order, a coalition of rights groups led by the American Civil Liberties Union sued the administration, arguing the policy was illegal and endangered migrant lives.
"We already know how devastating the Biden asylum shutdown is and it should be ended immediately rather than expanded," Amy Fischer, Amnesty International USA's director of refugee and migrants rights, said Wednesday on social media. "High numbers of people being denied their human rights is not a sign of success, it's a disgrace."
Keep ReadingShow Less
The UK’s Racist Violence Is Driven by a Dangerous Right-Wing Ideology
A coalition of hard-right politicians, commentators, and influencers have empowered this hateful movement to inflict widespread violence against families fleeing fear.
Aug 08, 2024
Every Saturday night throughout summer, young people gather in Bristol’s historic Castle Park to sit on blankets under the cherry blossom trees, eating ice cream and drinking from cans as reggae, dub, and drum n bass rattle through tinny speakers. The music competes with the squawks of the city’s seagulls, the roar of traffic leaving the Galleries mall, and the strumming of a guitar. Teenagers try out circus skills, while bikes whizz along the river toward the bars and clubs of Old Market.
This weekend, the scene was very different.
Gangs of far-right race rioters stormed the park, passing its commemorative plaque to the city’s anti-fascists who fought in Spain in the 1930s. They were joined by those pulled into the far right via a toxic mix of anti-vax, anti-LGBTQ, QAnon conspiracy theories. Punches were thrown at a Black passerby. Counterprotesters insisted that fascists and racists were not welcome here, before moving south to the river to form a human barrier around a hotel housing migrant people, which the mob attempted to attack.
In many ways, the far right is grooming the general public to believe the violence and disorder of the past week—and any future violence—is an inevitable consequence of political failings around immigration. Worse, it is a result of the failure of democracy.
The scenes in Bristol were repeated across the country. In Rotherham and Tamworth, people who had fled violence and persecution in their own countries hid in hotel rooms as the buildings were set on fire. Asian men were dragged from their cabs to shouts of “kill him,” while Syrian shopkeepers, determined to build a new life away from dictatorship and civil war, watched in despair as their businesses were trashed. By Sunday night, more than 90 people had been arrested, but the violence did not stop, spreading to city after city, to Liverpool and Belfast and Plymouth and London and beyond.
The inciting incident was ostensibly the tragic killings of three girls, and the stabbing of other women and girls, at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport. British-born teenager Axel Rudakubana has been charged with murder and attempted murder.
The horrific deaths of the three children had nothing to do with the terrorising of asylum-seeking people and children in hotels, the destruction of Black and Brown people’s businesses, or the attacks on mosques. The street violence that has gripped much of England and Northern Ireland since 30 July instead tells a story of who the modern far right are, how they organise, what they believe, and the coalition of hard-right politicians, commentators, and influencers who have empowered this hateful movement to inflict widespread violence against families fleeing fear.
Who Is the Modern Far Right?
The early days of the violence were met with suggestions from the new Labour government that the English Defence League (EDL) could be designated as a “proscribed group”—one that is forbidden under U.K. law due to terrorist connections.
But the suggestion fails to understand two crucial issues. The first, is that the EDL does not really exist. Its co-founder and most famous member, far-right activist and convicted criminal Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) left in 2013, claiming he had concerns over the "dangers of far-right extremism," after which the group’s membership dwindled until it ultimately became defunct a few years later.
The second is that the modern far right is no longer made up of organisations with clear hierarchical structures. Instead, it is an international and online-networked movement. It organises around a shared ideology spread by a core of theorists, leaders, and influencers who use their power to put out statements designed to trigger others to commit violence. In this, the influencers commit what is known as “stochastic” or “random violence,” while of course making sure they are not the ones throwing the punches and smashing the glass themselves, and can claim plausible deniability when it comes to incitement.
The networked nature of the modern far right means that rather than coalescing around a physical leader, they instead organise around a shared ideology and aim: the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which can be defeated via a race war.
The movement breaks out into the real world with violent, racist outbursts and attacks. That violence is filmed and live streamed across its network, with each action used to tell a story that will inspire new followers and, crucially, influence nonmembers by creating an atmosphere of insecurity and fear.
Following the killings in Southport, an online conspiracy claimed the killer was a Muslim man who had arrived into the U.K. illegally on a small boat last year. The lie brought together the two tropes driving the modern far right: Islamophobic claims that Muslim men pose a threat to women and girls and manufactured outrage over “fighting age men” arriving in the U.K. on small boats to live off the taxpayer.
While the false claims about the Southport killings were specific to that incident, the disinformation being shared was built on years of far-right influencers engaged in rhetorical violence against primarily Muslim migrant people. Numerous posts from Robinson’s Telegram channel, for example, discuss how migrant men who “inevitably go on to rape and murder” are “invading” the U.K. and “taken in and housed in hotels at taxpayer expense.” Governments and NGOs are even accused by him of “using little girls to encourage fighting age men to come to the U.K. who see nothing wrong in diddling kids.”
These messages have gathered pace over the past four years as the former Conservative government ramped up messaging to “stop the boats” and accused migrant people of abusing the system while being “child rapists" and "threats to national security.” In the same time period, growing anti-immigrant rhetoric and a failing policy to house asylum-seeking people in hotels has repeatedly triggered real-life violence and intimidation, mainly outside the hotels housing families.
“Citizen journalists” who made their names as “migrant hunters” such as Amanda Smith (who uses the social media avatar Yorkshire Rose) and Alan Leggett (Active Patriot), as well as groups including Britain First and Patriotic Alternative, have increasingly targeted hotels, live streaming their “visits” in footage that shows activists intimidating residents. Smith wrote how “women and girls are frightened to walk around the area of the [Rotherham] hotel at night,” pushing the message that migrant men are a threat to white women. Even children are positioned as a threat: One Britain First post said that a child in a hotel waving at their cameras was mocking them.
When it was revealed that the individual charged with the Southport murders was a British-born teenager, the far-right narrative shifted to maintain its Islamophobic focus. Robinson and others shared disinformation about Muslim men stabbing people in Stoke-on-Trent, giving a new inciting reason for the riots, despite Staffordshire Police confirming there have been no such stabbings. Footage of the so-called “Muslim Defence League” portrayed British towns as under attack.
The claim that white Britain is under attack by Muslim men is then used to incite the far-right’s ultimate goal: a genocidal civil war, otherwise known as Day X.
The Ideology
The networked nature of the modern far right means that rather than coalescing around a physical leader, they instead organise around a shared ideology and aim: the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which can be defeated via a race war.
The theory baselessly claims that white people in the Global North are being “replaced” by migrant people from the Global South, aided by feminists repressing the birth rate via abortion and contraception. All of this is supposedly being orchestrated by “cultural Marxists,” a catch-all term that includes liberal elites, feminists, Black Lives Matter activists, LGBTQ+ people, and Jewish people.
This so-called replacement is commonly referred to as a “white genocide.” To defeat this so-called genocide, the far right wants to incite a civil war—sometimes referred to as Day X or boogaloo—that would result in pure ethno-states. It’s for this reason that the owner of X (formerly Twitter), Elon Musk, warned that “civil war is inevitable” in the U.K., in the wake of the riots. While it is far from inevitable, it is the desired outcome of the global far right, who are looking for an inciting incident to trigger Day X.
To prevent white genocide, men are told that it is their duty to defend their family—and to defend whiteness—through violence.
When white men in England are dragging Asian men out of cars with shouts of “kill them,” and when white gangs are setting fire to hotels housing families from various countries across the Global South, they are rehearsing the actions they would take during the thing they fantasise about: genocide. When white men attack mosques, they are rehearsing a cultural genocide.
The central replacement/white genocide theory is supplemented by secondary conspiracies designed to provoke anxieties that children are in danger, and that parental authority is being usurped by outside, hostile “others.”
Those attending the riots had signs written with “save the children” and “save our children.” The same slogans also appear at anti-vax protests and anti-drag queen protests. While seemingly a benign slogan—who doesn’t want to save children?—the message now evokes the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory claiming liberal elites are trafficking and torturing children in Satanic rituals in order to harvest “adrenochrome.”
The demand to “save the children” feeds directly into the overarching Great Replacement conspiracy theory. A hostile “other,” the message reads, is coming to take your children away. Children are the frontline against replacement. To prevent white genocide, men are told that it is their duty to defend their family—and to defend whiteness—through violence.
Strategy
The desired outcome of this violence is to create insecurity, fear, and anxiety in the general population, which in turn leads to a collapse in faith in democracy and society.
That this is happening now, less than a month into a Labour government, is important to note. Labour has already cancelled the Rwanda scheme and implemented a statutory instrument to start processing asylum claims that were in a backlog as a result of rule changes in the Illegal Migration Act. Though the party, which has a long history of courting anti-immigrant support, is also acting “tough” on immigration, with raids on businesses and deportation flights to Vietnam and Timor-Leste, Labour is the traditional enemy of the far right. It is associated with progressive values, multiculturalism, and “woke.” For the far right to achieve its aims, it has to destroy the electorate’s trust in the Labour Party, in government—and in democracy.
In many ways, the far right is grooming the general public to believe the violence and disorder of the past week—and any future violence—is an inevitable consequence of political failings around immigration. Worse, it is a result of the failure of democracy.
Sowing fear, anxiety, and distrust in societal norms allows for the far right to achieve its ultimate aim: to replace democracy with a strong-man, authoritarian leader who can rule on a war footing.
That’s why, following U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s intervention on Sunday night, where he condemned “far-right thuggery,” social media filled up with messages that he was a “traitor to his country,” a “Soros puppet” (an antisemitic trope) running a “radical government.”
Former actor and failed politician Laurence Fox called Starmer a “traitor,” writing that he is on the “side” of “immigrant barbarians” who rape “British girls.” He finished the tweet with the threat of violence: “Fine. Then it’s war.” His tweet echoes Musk’s “civil war is inevitable.”
Following the Southport riot, Reform U.K. Member of Parliament Nigel Farage put out a video where he claimed the violence was a reaction to “fear, discomfort, to unease… I am worried, not just about the events in Southport, but about societal decline that is happening in our country… this prime minister does not have a clue… we need to start getting tough… Because what you’ve seen on the streets of Hartlepool, of London, of Southport, is nothing to what could happen over the next few weeks.”
In his video, Farage hints to the far-right trope of Western decline—an offshoot of the Great Replacement theory. He argues that the government is failing to protect its people. More importantly, he suggests that if the government fails to get "a clue," it will get worse. The violence, fear, and disorder will increase. And then what happens? What happens when violence leads to people no longer trusting the state?
This is part of the modern far right’s strategy: If the state cannot protect us from inevitable violence, it says, the far-right strongman can. Sowing fear, anxiety, and distrust in societal norms allows for the far right to achieve its ultimate aim: to replace democracy with a strong-man, authoritarian leader who can rule on a war footing.
This is the lesson of the 1930s. It’s one we cannot afford to forget in the 2020s.
Keep ReadingShow Less
When Walls Are the Only Answer, We’re Asking the Wrong Question
Border barriers respond to only one question: How do we stop them? Our starting point should be: Why are so many people on the run?
Aug 08, 2024
The U.S. Border Patrol turns 100 this year, marking a century of hunting people; stoking vigilante violence; and erecting physical, technological, and bureaucratic barriers—many lethal—against human beings in need. But walls have never been the solution. Indeed, they are the reason cruelty, chaos, and corruption prevail at our crossroads, especially along the U.S. frontier with Mexico. Patrols and checkpoints, gateways and guns, militarization—in lieu of humanitarian mobilization—these represent the real crisis at our borders today: the hardening of the human heart, a world in which empathy has seemingly expired.
Border barriers respond to only one question: How do we stop them?
Our starting point should be: Why are so many people on the run?
Over the last 40 years, a deterrence-to-detention-to-deportation pipeline that daily flouts legal due process has grown up all around us, hiding in plain sight just outside our privileged view.
History matters, and this history is no exception because much of what we’re dealing with today was Made in the USA. It is the legacy of climate breakdown, driven largely by our stubborn dependence on fossil fuels. It is the consequence of U.S. economic imperatives that incentivize corporations to migrate south in search of low wages, little taxation, and no environmental controls. It is the heritage of a foreign policy perspective wherein Latin America and the Caribbean exist for U.S. enrichment.
From the Banana Wars to the Dirty Wars, through the so-called Wars on Drugs and Terror, the U.S. role in rendering whole regions unlivable, thus forcing human displacement, is little discussed. While there is significant and excellent academic scholarship documenting this reality, it is kept swept under the rug, out of sight and out of mind, as if the powers that be don’t want us to know.
So here’s what you should know.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the power and wealth accumulated by the Cold War iron triangle at the intersection of bureaucracy, industry, and self-interest was threatened. So the military-industrial complex pivoted to managing and maintaining borders worldwide. A border-industrial complex was born, and the betrayal of the international refugee protection regime began.
There were about a dozen walls around the world when Berlin’s came down. There are now close to 90 built or in the works. And while erected much as their medieval counterparts had been—to divide and exclude—modern walls are no longer exclusively physical. They extend to the outer limits of linked surveillance systems and troop movements. As a result, the U.S. southern border of 2024 stretches as far as Colombia; Fortress Europe can be felt throughout North Africa, deep into the Sahara Desert.
Though the militarization of the U.S. southern border began well before the shattering events of September 11, 2001, that event propelled the border-industrial complex into overdrive, with the wealthiest and most privileged nations already primed to turn their backs on post-WWII human rights commitments. Favoring a security-first paradigm, 21st-century profiteers and demagogues are now making bank—or political hay—in thwarting the movement of humans fleeing hunger, horror, and harm.
The foot soldiers in this cruel war against the world’s most vulnerable people—those who’ve been forced to leave home because home has become too dangerous to stay—include the U.S. Border Patrol.
A sub-agency of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection since 2003, the U.S. Border Patrol became official 100 years ago, on May 28, 1924. The first appointed agent, Jefferson Davis Milton, was the son of a Confederate governor and enslaver. Offspring of an era when Slave Patrols carried out the dictates not of law, but of plantation “justice,” Milton became a Texas Ranger in the late 1870s, when still a teen. Tasked with the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous peoples, the recapture of formerly enslaved Black people, and the suppression of Mexican-origin property holders who took issue with white colonial settlers moving in and moving them off their land, the Texas Rangers of Milton’s day relied on the same raw, physical violence and brutality bequeathed to them by their Slave Patrol forebears.
Then came the 1875 Page Act, Congress’ second-ever legislation restricting immigration. It sought to check the numbers of Chinese laborers lured to the U.S., first by the discovery of California gold, then by the construction of the transcontinental railroad. The subsequent Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made it harder for expelled Chinese to get back into the U.S.; and impossible for new Chinese arrivals to gain entry at all.
Of course, Congress needed an armed guard to enforce this legislation as well as an office to maintain the force. So, in 1904, the first U.S. immigration police force was born: the Mounted Guard of Chinese Inspectors. It was made up of former Slave Patrollers, Klansmen, and Texas Rangers, like Milton. The human link between yesteryear’s slave and today’s border patrols, Milton brought to the Mounted Guard of Chinese Inspectors the same “shoot first and ask questions later” attitude he learned as a ranger. From 1924, he passed that culture of impunity to his new Border Patrol recruits just as U.S. lawyer, conservationist, and hardened eugenicist, Madison Grant, became a household name with his 1916 publication, The Passing of the Great Race. Claimed by Hitler as “my Bible,” the book is the bedrock of the Fox News/Breitbart/MAGA-party “Great Replacement Theory” today.
The fear-mongering Madison’s book kicked up in the 1920s might have been the country’s first Culture War. It certainly played an active role in Congress passing the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, with humans still referred to as “aliens,” even in the modern era. The follow-up Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the National Origins Act; authorized the creation of the Border Patrol; further tightened the quotas; and stiffened punishments for what was now called “illegal” entry," criminalizing the act of crossing the line “without inspection” by a border official. The National Origins Act would remain in place until the 1960s, as would the blatant exploitation of Mexican laborers.
Mexicans had moved throughout the borderlands without issue for centuries. They helped to expand and grow the U.S. economy; they turned California’s Imperial Valley into some of the most productive land on Earth. From 1924, when the U.S. southern border was closed and Mexican migration thwarted, treaties had to be negotiated when labor was needed to keep crops from dying in the furrows and factory assembly lines from failing to meet their projected yields. A political compromise was forged between Congress and the southwestern land barons: They could have their cheap labor as long as it was kept temporary and marginalized. This is when the Border Patrol went from merely hunting people to herding folks for the captains of U.S. corporate agriculture, too.
Fast-forward to the 2010s. When whole families as well as unaccompanied children began to arrive at the U.S. southern border—fleeing violence, starvation, climate breakdown, and other repercussions of U.S. political interference, military operations, and economic exploitation—that might have caused us to consider the human costs of our global adventurism; it should have triggered a humanitarian response at our southern border and a rethink of our outmoded immigration and asylum systems. But it didn’t.
Instead, the model of “prevention through deterrence”—unleashed 10 months after NAFTA became official in January 1994 and built on thwarting human migration through the cruelest of means—hardened. Over the last 40 years, a deterrence-to-detention-to-deportation pipeline that daily flouts legal due process has grown up all around us, hiding in plain sight just outside our privileged view. It is now the global behemoth that many decry as “broken” but which is working just fine for the demagogues and profiteers that benefit from it. In their world, where the outsider is to be feared and our so-called “security” reigns paramount, the 20th-century promise of the universality of human rights no longer applies.
But when home becomes too dangerous to stay, people move. We always have, and we always will—part of the human story since the dawn of time.
That is why deterring humans with walls has never worked, except to inflict misery and to kill. And why the 100-year birthday of a federal agency tasked with people-hunting and herding; prone to stoking vigilante violence; and intent on erecting physical, technological, and bureaucratic barriers—many lethal—against human beings in need is nothing to celebrate.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular