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In an Era of Hardening Borders, Wildlife Corridors Bridge Peoples and Species
From Costa Rica to Colorado, wildlife corridors have been about the connections people make when they care about animal mobility.
Jun 14, 2026
Driving on the Interamerican Highway from Monteverde Biological Reserve to Rincón de la Vieja National Park, I couldn’t help but notice a series of rope bridges that crossed the six lanes of traffic. Each crossing structure featured traffic warning signs with silhouette images of monkeys or sloths as nonstop flows of diesel semitrucks and electric cars zoomed by.
Costa Rica is known for its protected areas, which cover one-third of the country and function as core zones for conservation, but the “green republic” should also be recognized for its corridors. What started as an NGO effort in the 2000s when organizations like Kids Saving The Rainforest started installing aerial bridges to improve habitat connectivity later became national policy with a 2024 presidential decree requiring electrical companies to build crossing structures so that animals like howler monkeys and kinkajous avoided electrocution from using power lines. These monkey bridges also keep tropical rainforest more intact for mobile creatures.
Beyond Central America, wildlife corridors are popular in the western United States. According to recent surveys from the Environment America Research and Policy Center and the Pew Charitable Trust, respondents approve creating more wildlife crossings at rates of 85-90%. And that support spans the political spectrum. In March 2026, the Idaho State Legislature passed Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 124, officially supporting the development of wildlife crossing infrastructure, such as highway overpasses and underpasses, to reduce animal-vehicle collisions. In December 2026, California’s Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing is set to be completed across 10 lanes of Los Angeles freeway, making it the largest structure in the world.
Wildlife corridors could receive a financial boost by the bipartisan BUILD America 250 bill, considered by US House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee this week. If passed, it would increase funding for the Federal Highway Administration’s very popular Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program (WCPP) to $80 million annually ($400 million total). The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act allocated $350 million to 35 projects across 30 states, but demand far exceeded with $500 million in requests.
Today, the benefits of conserving wildlife corridors might be just as much about the social as the biological.
If we’re living in a worldwide golden age for wildlife corridors, where did this idea come from? I trace the origins of this dominant conservation strategy in my new book, Borders of Biodiversity: How Gray Wolves, Monarch Butterflies, and Giant Sequoia Transformed Large Landscape Conservation, published by University of North Carolina Press.
In the 1970s and 1980s, new technologies provided windows into animal mobility. For wolves, radio- and satellite- telemetry allowed US biologist Diane Boyd and Canadian biologist Paul Paquet to track the interchange of dispersing juveniles along the Rockies. For example, Boyd collared wolf #8551, named Kay, west of Glacier National Park; the wolf turned up six months later dead after it was legally shot near Pouce Coupe, British Columbia. The 600-mile movement northward was interesting scientifically because it was two-thirds of the way to the Yukon Territory, but Kay’s movement also had major conservation implications. Wildlife corridors facilitated wolf dispersals; transborder dispersals could facilitate wolf recovery under the Endangered Species Act.
In the 1990s, wildlife corridors were thought of as proactive tools against habitat fragmentation. Responding to Boyd and Paquet’s work, conservationists in Alberta, British Columbia, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming created the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative in 1993 to keep core areas—like Yellowstone National Park or Banff National Park—connected. Projects included lobbying the Canadian government to build wildlife overpasses and underpasses along the Trans-Canada Highway, which Y2Y founder Harvey Locke called the “Berlin Wall of Biodiversity” for its high rate of wolf and elk fatalities. Or investing in predator-deterrence tools like range riding and electrified fladry fencing for ranching communities so wolves and grizzlies could use rural spaces as biological passageways.
By the 2000s, however, wildlife corridors were also understood to help with climate adaptation in a warming world. A scientific meta-analysis documented that of 4,000 animals recently tracked, almost three-quarters of them shifted their ranges to cooler lands or waters. Terrestrial species, on average, were moving 12 miles (or 20 kilometers) every decade toward the poles. Animals relocate to adapt.
Today, the benefits of conserving wildlife corridors might be just as much about the social as the biological. In 2012, Ben Bobowski of Rocky Mountain National Park and Yaxine María Arias Núñez of Santa Elena Biological Reserve created a series of personnel exchanges between the two protected areas called the Naturalmente Juntos-Naturally Together Project. Their connection was based on bird banding studies that revealed 150 bird species, like yellow warblers, migrated along the Continental Divide between Colorado and Costa Rica. In 2015, Rocky and Santa Elena entered a formal sistering agreement.
From Costa Rica to Colorado, wildlife corridors have been about the connections people make when they care about animal mobility. In an era of border-hardening nationalism, corridors can help people of different nationalities facilitate solidarities among shared species.
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Waging a Nonviolent Civil War Against Borders
What we choose to love fully and unconditionally is Planet Earth itself—a planet without borders—and all who live within it.
Feb 01, 2026
And here I am, an American, staring at the border again... and slowly coming to realize the paradox of it. Borders don’t actually exist. They’re invisible lies. They’re also virtually everywhere.
Consider the border Alex Pretti crossed on January 24, on a street in Minneapolis, as he stepped between some US Border Patrol agents and the woman they had just pushed down. He crossed the border that separates ordinary people from the federal Proud Boys (or whoever they are), the masked invaders who were occupying the city to enforce The Law. Pretti interfered with them! He dared to try to protect the fallen woman, who herself had just crossed the same border. In so doing, they both went from being ordinary citizens to “domestic terrorists.”
“Yet our greatest threat isn’t the outsiders among us, but those among us who never look within.”
The words are those of poet Amanda Gorman, who wrote a poem honoring Alex Pretti after the agents shot him, almost 10 times. Another killing! Oh my God! Another cut to the American soul—a cut, by the way, that comes with complete immunity, according to Team Trump. They’re waging civil war against those who cross the border that separates right from wrong. “Fear not those without papers,” Borman’s poem continues, “but those without conscience.”
Oh, let us evolve toward a trans-border world! This is the core of the American civil war that is now, seemingly, getting underway.
You know what? As terrifying as the idea of a new civil war sounds, I prefer it to something worse: a great national shrug and acquiescence to the Trump agenda. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as so many people have pointed out, is acting like the Trump Gestapo, as his administration rids sacred (white) America of the brown-skinned other, who may or may not be immigrants. What matters is that they’re different from “real” Americans. Right?
Regarding the whole concept of the border: It seems so real and viable until you start questioning it, which includes looking into its history.
As Elisa Wong and Raymond Wei write:
The way we think of borders today, as firm boundaries that are violently enforced, is a relatively new thing, and we would argue it doesn’t serve humanity’s best interests. While ‘strong borders’ are often argued as a necessity for our security, we think they limit humanity’s potential as a global community.
In ancient times, rivers, oceans, and mountains marked the boundaries of territory... As humans began building kingdoms and empires, more walls began to form, thus more firmly delineating borders.
And in Medieval times, from around 1000 to 1700 AD, European kingdoms started engaging with each other in a state of unending warfare, violently squabbling over the limits of their territory. And plunk! Global borders were created, and whole contents started getting divided almost randomly into European territorial possessions.
“At the Berlin Conference in 1884,” Wong and Wei write, “European leaders met to carve up Africa for themselves, which split local tribes across arbitrary lines and laid the groundwork for ethnic conflicts that still rage today’”
Oh, let us evolve toward a trans-border world! This is the core of the American civil war that is now, seemingly, getting underway. This is why protesters are flooding the streets in Minneapolis and across the country. This is why they’re enduring pepper spray and tear gas and flash bang grenades. This is why some people are being killed. But the rational—effective—response to violent aggression is not counterviolence.
“Anger and hatred are natural in response to such atrocities,” David Cortright writes, “but it is essential to avoid causing physical harm, to maintain a nonviolent intention and commitment despite increasing government provocation. A major outburst of protester violence would be disastrous, diverting attention from the message of support for victimized communities. That’s exactly what the White House is hoping for—to cover up ICE abuses, reinforce their lies about violent protesters, and justify additional domestic militarization.”
And he quotes—who else?—Martin Luther King: “Hatred multiples hate. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Violence multiplies violence.”
Yeah, that’s the world as we know it: endless war. But America’s new civil war must not—will not—go that way. “Loving ICE” doesn’t mean accepting their actions or their purpose, but rather, challenging it head on, courageously and nonviolently. What we choose to love fully and unconditionally is Planet Earth itself—a planet without borders—and all who live within it. Yes, that includes ICE agents. It includes Donald Trump. But loving them also means standing up to them—and handing them their conscience.
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How Immigrant Fiction Can Reshape American Realities
As the politicos do their darndest to render the Statue of Liberty little more than a New York City tourist trinket, what can American immigrant literary fiction offer our nation in terms of imagining a more welcoming, inclusive, and promising future?
Aug 20, 2025
Immigrants have been reshaping America since the pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. Or perhaps earlier than that fateful day in 1620, if you count Viking excursions dating back to 1021 and Spaniards landing in Florida in 1513. After the subjugation and genocide of the continent’s Indigenous people, and the establishment of the United States, wave after wave of newcomers from all over the globe, forced and unforced, have helped build what so many call “a nation of immigrants.”
Despite those facts, immigration has always been a topic of debate and a lightning rod for racism, xenophobia, and nationalism, a tool of political manipulation that appeals to people’s worst instincts and fears. Since the political rise of Donald Trump and his descent down that golden escalator in 2015, the debate on immigration and the US-Mexico border has shifted considerably to the right, after decades of centering on moderate concepts calling for comprehensive immigration reform and enhanced border security.
In the 2024 election cycle, both parties have skewed further in the same direction, narrowing the debate and placing immigrants and their advocates in an ever-tightening corner, with Republicans calling for mass deportations and Democrats supporting limits to asylum for refugees and backing away from providing public services (such as health and education) to undocumented immigrants and their children.
As the politicos do their darndest to render the Statue of Liberty little more than a New York City tourist trinket, what can American immigrant literary fiction offer our nation in terms of imagining a more welcoming, inclusive, and promising future?
Humanity, New Visions, and Hope
We are all human beings. To me, that’s what any good book reminds us of at its core. Authentic immigrant stories chronicle the desperation, urgency, and desire for safety and progress that drive immigrants to America’s shores in the first place. Immigrant and multicultural literature explore the process of becoming American, the rifts between immigrant generations and those born and raised here, and the sacrifices and rewards experienced by families and communities through acculturation, assimilation, and simply the act of living in a country full of promise yet also torn apart by a legacy of racism and discrimination. But, no matter where the readers and the writers come from, when one walks in the shoes of another, one gains empathy. In this way, immigrant literature builds bridges that foster unity in our shared humanity and multigenerational American experience.
Before embarking on my own journey as a writer of literary fiction steeped in the immigrant experience, some of the books that most deeply touched me were likewise immigrant or multicultural narratives. Even though they may not have been specifically about the Latino perspective, I saw myself and my family reflected in their characters’ struggles and dreams. At an early age, that experience as a reader opened my mind to cultures other than my own.
I did not get to New York City until I was a college student in New England, but I felt like I’d been there as a child making Jewish friends in the tenements of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep. I never spent a night in Harlem, but I could feel the dust on the floorboards and the tension between father and son in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. I’d never seen a ghost, but I saw myself and began to recognize my own voice as a writer in Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
When we recognize our genuine shared God-given humanity, the man-made machinations of maps fall into the shadows and the hope of who we could be and what we could do if we embrace each other lights the way in a blaze of glory.
When we see each other as more the same than “other” and “different,” we see that artificial constructs—such as borders and citizenship and legal documents providing permission for human beings to live in peace on various patches of the Earth’s soil drawn on maps by men who waged and won wars decades or centuries past—are just that: artificial, man-made, and by their very nature should be malleable. To connect and lift each other up, we must work toward more togetherness and less division.
Immigrant fiction is a laboratory for the creation of new visions for where we could go as a nation, as a continent, as a people united rather than divided. Just like science fiction has laid out blueprints for many of the high-tech devices and inventions that are now either fixtures in our daily lives or soon to revolutionize the way we live, immigrant fiction can help us imagine, envision, and thus create a new reality.
In my novel, The Resurrection of Fulgencio Ramirez, I imagine a world where a multigenerational utopia is built on a city that straddles both sides of the Rio Grande, a place where not just the borders between nations fade away but also those between life and death. In a manuscript I’m currently working on, I envision an America where someday there will be no borders at all. The walls and fences will be pulled down. The coils of razor wire will be retired. The militarized forces will be deployed elsewhere, far from the fertile farmlands of the Rio Grande Valley, far from the vast and perilous Chihuahuan Desert. The river will gleam with promise and flow in tranquility as it snakes its way like a shimmering serpent toward the Gulf of Mexico. Bridges will be built. And people will move safely back and forth, north and south, along with trade and commerce. When this happens, cultural harmony will rise, economies will boom, and illegal narcotics, weapons, and human trafficking will become ancient history.
Imagine that. Instead of masses huddled along fences and politicians saber rattling and fearmongering, countries will work together to solve the hemispheric problems that they cannot solve alone. Stronger than ever, fueled by access to opportunity and more affordable labor, the combined Americas will be able to compete with the surging global powerhouses of China and India.
For that to happen, we must stop seeing the border as a problem and seize it as an opportunity. We need stories that inspire hope in us, faith that we can see past each other’s differences and find the common ground that binds us together: a love of family and freedom; a desire for each generation to do better than the one that came before; a respect for our fellow human beings regardless of where they were born, the color of their skin, or the language their mother whispered into their ears as newborn babies cradled in their arms.
We all have hearts that ache for love, minds that crave understanding, souls that yearn to be seen. This human connection—cognizant of the pain we all bear as living, bleeding beings but fiercely determined to cling to an optimistic view of the future we can share—drives the narrative arc of my new novel, The Border Between Us. It is the story of an immigrant family, of a young American raised on the border and kept afloat by the love of family and irrepressible buoyancy of the American dream. And many people who have read it have told me how they were touched by it in varied ways.
People didn’t focus so much on the border or the immigrant aspects when they shared their reactions. They mention seeing their own lives reflected in the novel: the strains of complex parent-child relationships, the balancing act between pursuing one’s own aspirations while living up to family responsibilities and obligations, the grief and hardship of losing loved ones before their time. When we recognize our genuine shared God-given humanity, the man-made machinations of maps fall into the shadows and the hope of who we could be and what we could do if we embrace each other lights the way in a blaze of glory.
Listen to me, America. I’m from the border, born and raised. I love the border. And, I believe the borders should be erased. Anyone supporting the proposed mass deportations (as well as the racial and ethnic profiling and vast detentions these would entail) should read Farewell to Manzanar, chronicling the mistreatment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. They should also do some research on the inhumane Operation Wetback, through which over 1 million Mexican migrant workers were deported in the 1950s. These are cautionary tales from our not-so-distant past.
We can be more than we are today as a nation and as a people. For that to happen, we must avoid the errors of the past, stop limiting ourselves, and expand our horizons. Until then, pick up some immigrant or multicultural fiction, learn from history, and imagine the possibilities. Someday, we can turn honest memories and empathetic visions into a new and more welcoming reality.
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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.
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How Can We Transcend the Borders We’ve Created?
There are natural borders and natural differences between people, but to arm those differences and make them absolute, utterly, utterly ignores the connectedness that is also present and crucial.
Mar 30, 2024
I call it “naked insanity,” as in: The emperor has no clothes.
He has no sane and transcendent values, no wisdom—not when it comes to survival. Global governance is consumed by power. Those who have it insist on keeping it, no matter the cost. Hence: nuclear weapons... and the threat to use them! Hence: climate change, a.k.a., ecocide.
I stroke the unknown,
the dark silence, the
soul of a mother. I
pray, if that’s what
prayer is: to stir the certainties of
pride and flag and brittle
God, to stir
the hollow lost.
I pray open
the big craters
and trenches of
obedience and manhood.
This is the beginning of a poem I wrote a few years ago. I called it “The Gods Get in Touch with Their Feminine Side,” by which I meant, “Mom! The world’s all messed up. Can you fix it?”
Now is the time
to cherish the apple,
to touch the wound and love even
the turned cheeks and bullet tips,
to swaddle anew
the helpless future
and know
and not know
what happens next.
Sometimes, when I’m bleeding political confusion, I try to patch the wound with poetry, that is to say, I try to define and understand the present moment, with all its chaos, suffering and cruelty, from the perspective of the future... the helpless future, the great unknown, which is at our mercy.
What I cradle continually these days is the transcendence of a divided world: us vs. them. Indeed, this is an ironically understandable concept. “Us” is a linked portion of humanity; “them” is a dark force out there, apparently also linked but hating us and, therefore, linking us ever more tightly as we go to war with them, as we try to eliminate them. How can we escape this paradox? How can we avoid committing ecocide and suicide, which seem to be the inescapable outcomes of our high-tech global separation from one another and from the living planet as a whole?
How can we transform and reorganize ourselves around a belief in connectedness? How can we make it our guiding political principle, even when we’re surrounded by doubt, uncertainty, and fear? Let’s take this question out of the realm of abstraction: How can we transcend the borders we’ve created?
Can we birth an awareness bigger than militarized sovereignty and the paradigm of us vs. them?
Addressing this question, Todd Miller, in his book Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders, writes about a town called Ambos Nogales, which is actually—against the will of its own population—two towns, or rather, a town divided in two, with a national border running through it. Ambos Nogales, which means “both Nogales,” is a split community on the Arizona-Mexican border. It was whole until the so-called Gadsden Purchase in 1853. Even so, for most of the time since then, Nogales residents were able to ignore the invented “boundary” and cross it with impunity—when, for instance, they wanted to visit family members.
But by the early ’90s, U.S. border police got increasingly serious, pointlessly dividing family members from one another in the name of... what? “...communities on both sides of the border share deep familial, community, social, economic, and political ties,” Miller writes.
“The border cannot stop the roots of trees and the vast mycelium networks symbiotically entangled with them from reaching across to the other side.”
Yes, there are natural borders and natural differences between people—culture, language, whatever else—but to arm those differences and make them absolute, utterly, utterly ignores the connectedness that is also present and crucial. And to militarize national sovereignty, in the process dehumanizing the designated enemy so that “they” can be killed when necessary, so that their existence can be obliterated, creates a state of permanent hell.
Humanity’s worst instincts, you might say, have seized control not only of the present but of the future. After the end of the Cold War, for instance, back in those same early ’90s, when peace could have bloomed across the whole planet (right?)... those still in power had a different agenda. They created a new enemy! The new “them” were terrorists, not communists. War was—and is—still the emperor.
The emperor has no clothes.
And the wars we wage get messier and messier, cutting ever more deeply into the organic connections across the whole planet. As Tom Engelhardt writes: “We’re on a planet that can’t take it anymore.”
“Think of climate change,” he goes on, “as a kind of slow-motion World War III. After all, it couldn’t be more global or, in the end, more destructive than a world war of the worst sort.”
We know this. We stroke the unknown and call out for peace, awareness, wisdom. Can we birth an awareness bigger than militarized sovereignty and the paradigm of us vs. them? Can we birth a sane and lasting—loving—future?
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If Trump Re-Elected: Flee for Canada or Stay and Fight?
While countless asylum-seekers and refugees will still certainly make their way to get enter the United States for a safer and more secure life, there's also the question of those wanting to get out.
Jan 08, 2024
Back in 1968, my father announced that, if Richard Nixon were elected president that November, he was going to move us all to Canada. I’m not sure who “us all” actually was, since my younger brother and I were then living with my mother and my parents had been divorced for years. Still, he was determined to protect us, should someone he considered a dangerous anti-Semite make it into the Oval Office — and leaving the country seemed to him like the best way to do it.
As it happened, Nixon did win in 1968 and none of us moved to Canada. Still, I suspect my father’s confidence that, if things got too bad here, we could always head somewhere else (Canada? Israel?) was a mental refuge for him that fit his own background very well. It was, after all, what his father had done in 1910, when his family was attacked by Cossacks in what’s Ukraine today. His parents had him smuggled out of town in a horse-drawn rig under bales of hay. He then walked across a significant part of Europe and took a boat from Antwerp, Belgium, to New York City. There, he was met by a cousin who brought him to Norfolk, Virginia. Eventually, my grandfather managed to bring his whole family to Norfolk, where he became, among other things, the president of his local Zionist club, fostering his dream of refuge. My father grew up in the haze of that dream.
In the Shadow of the World Wars
In fact, my father’s reliance on the guarantee that he could go “somewhere else” accorded well with the post-World War II international consensus that people in danger of persecution where they lived had a right to seek refuge in another country. Shortly after the formation of the United Nations, that view was codified in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.
The Convention consolidated various treaties created by European nations to address the desperate situation of millions of people displaced by the two World Wars. It defined a refugee as a person who:
“As a result of events occurring before 1 January 1951 and owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.”
More recent regional agreements have expanded that definition to include people subject to external aggression, internal violence, or the serious disturbance of public order, whose lives, in short, have become unsustainable thanks to various forms of systemic violence. The Convention also laid out the obligations of nations receiving refugees — including providing housing, work permits, and education — while recognizing that receiving countries might need assistance from the international community to meet those obligations. It also affirmed the importance of maintaining family unity (something blatantly violated by the Trump administration under its policy of family separation at the U.S.-Mexican border).
With the phrase “events occurring before 1 January 1951” the Convention’s framers alluded to the two world wars of the preceding decades. What they didn’t foresee was that millions more refugees would be churned up in the second half of the twentieth century, much less what humanity would prove capable of producing in this one.
The trajectory was clear enough, however, when, the year before Nixon was elected, the 1967 Protocol to the Convention removed limits on migration-producing events occurring after 1951 and geographical restrictions of any sort. No matter when or where people became refugees, they were now subject to protection in all 148 nations that signed on, including the United States, which signed and ratified both the original Convention and the 1967 Protocol.
Refugees Everywhere
Twenty-first-century conflicts have already created millions of refugees. In fact, by mid-year 2023, the U.N. High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) put the number at 36.4 million worldwide, a number that has doubled in just the last seven years. Three countries alone — Syria (6.5 million), Afghanistan (6.1 million), and Ukraine (5.9 million) —accounted for 52% of all external refugees in 2023.
And keep in mind that those 36.4 million refugees only include people officially registered with the UNHCR (30.5 million) or with UNWRA, the U.N. Works Relief Agency for Palestinians in the Near East (5.9 million). UNWRA was created in 1952, specifically to serve people displaced in the formation of Israel in 1948. Unlike the UNHCR, it provides direct service to registered Palestinian refugees and their descendants in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), and Gaza.
And that figure doesn’t even include the majority of people fleeing war and other systemic and climate violence, who are “internally displaced persons.” They are not counted as refugees in the legal sense because, while they’ve lost their homes, they still remain inside their own national borders. There were — take a breath — 62.2 million internally displaced persons when the UNHCR issued that mid-2023 report.
Where do we find the majority of internally displaced persons? More than 90% of them have been uprooted by events in seven key countries or regions: Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, various Latin America and Caribbean countries, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, and Ukraine.
Which countries are taking in refugees? According to the UNHCR, “Low- and middle-income countries host 75% of the world’s refugees and other people in need of international protection.” Furthermore, “the Least Developed Countries provide asylum to 20% of the total.” Despite Donald Trump’s histrionic claims about asylum-seekers pouring into the United States and “poisoning the blood” of this country, the United States is not, in fact, a major recipient of international refugees.
Nor is the United Kingdom, whose Tory government has come up with a perverse scheme to potentially ship any asylum seekers approaching Great Britain by boat to Rwanda for “processing” in return for financial support of various kinds. (In November 2023, that country’s supreme court nixed the plan, but in December the government signed a new agreement with Rwanda, which it claims will satisfy the court’s objections to the agreement.)
In fact, Americans may be surprised to learn that the two countries taking in the most refugees at the moment are Iran and Turkey, at 3.4 million each, followed by Germany and Colombia at 2.5 million each and Pakistan at 2.1 million.
Let me highlight just two areas where, at this very moment, refugees are being created in enormous numbers with no apparent end in sight. One of them people around the world just can’t take their eyes off right now (and for good reason!), while the other seems almost entirely forgotten.
Gaza: Since Hamas’s vicious and criminal October 7th attack on targets in Israel, the world has focused intently on events in Israel-Palestine. The UNHCR’s 2023 report was compiled before the attack and Israel’s subsequent and ongoing genocidal destruction of Gaza, which has seen the deaths of more than 21,000 Gazans (a majority of them women and children) and the loss of more than half of its housing stock and three-quarters of its 36 hospitals. In one sense, Gaza’s residents are not new refugees. More than 85% of its pre-war population of 2.3 million are now “merely” considered internally displaced. Yes, they have been starved, deprived of medical care and potable water, harried by bombs and missiles falling on homes and temporary shelters from one part of that 25-mile-long strip of land to the other, and forced into an ever-shrinking area near Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. Still, for now they remain in Gaza with nowhere else to go.
It’s no secret, however, that the Israeli government intends to change that. On Christmas Day 2023, Prime Minister Netanyahu told the Israeli newspaper Hayom Daily that he is seeking the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians from Gaza. A week earlier, Trump’s former U.N. ambassador and now rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Nikki Haley, had opined that “the Palestinians should have gone to the Rafah crossing and Egypt would have taken care of them.” Even if Egypt were willing to accept more than two million displaced Gazans — which it is not — it would be hard to see such a migration as anything but a forced population transfer, which international law considers a crime against humanity.
Sudan: While the world has watched Gaza’s decimation in horror, an even larger refugee crisis in the African nation of Sudan has gone almost unremarked upon. In 2019, a massive nonviolent movement of Sudanese civilians led to a military coup against longtime dictator Omar Bashir. While the military initially agreed to hand power over to civilian rule in two years, by October 2021, its leaders had declared their intention to remain in power, while the United States, despite rhetoric supporting civilian rule, stood idly by. Since then, war between the military government and a paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces, has displaced 4.5 million or more within Sudan, while another 1.2 million have fled to neighboring countries.
Good “Refugees” and Bad “Economic Migrants”
Human beings have always moved around the world, beginning with our first forays out of Africa 60,000 to 70,000 years ago. However, it is only within the last two centuries or so that countries have attempted to control human transit across their borders. International law concerning refugees is even newer, first forged, as noted, in the critical period immediately following World War II.
One perhaps unintentional consequence of those laws, created half a century ago to protect refugees, is the relatively new distinction between them and “economic migrants.” Refugees able to demonstrate a “well-founded fear of being persecuted” have the right to seek asylum in any country that’s signed the U.N. refugee convention. Anyone else, however economically desperate or deeply endangered from, say, increasingly fierce climate-change-induced weather extremes, has no actual right under international law to move to a safer country. That legal reality hardly makes the existential desperation of such migrants any less genuine, as evidenced by the fact that they risk — and lose — their lives daily in perilous sea crossings or thousand-mile treks like the one that passes through Central America’s deadly Darien Gap in a bid for survival. At present, however, international law offers them no special protection.
This will have to change, and quickly, as global warming makes ever more parts of the world increasingly uninhabitable, often in the very areas that are the least responsible for the actual burning of fossil fuels. We all live on one planet, and no country or individual, no matter how rich, can hope to remain insulated from the ever more devastating effects of the continued record burning of fossil fuels and the desperate overheating of our planet.
Bad News at the Border
My father was pretty sure that the Canadians would be glad to receive him and his kids in the event of Nixon’s election. I don’t know what the rules were back then, but today Canada allows “Express Entry for skilled immigrants,” presumably including people from the U.S. wishing to cross that country’s southern border.
It’s not so easy, however, for immigrants, skilled or otherwise, hoping to cross the southern border of the United States these days. Despite our signature on the Convention on refugees, people seeking refugee status in this country now face almost insurmountable barriers. And those designated mere “economic” migrants have little hope of ever gaining legal residence in the United States.
Despite his promise to take “immediate actions to reform our immigration system,” three years after his election and the defeat of the man who had promised to build that “big, fat, beautiful wall” on our southern border, President Biden has done little to alleviate the situation. While he did end the Trump family separation plan and allow Covid-era restrictions on migration to expire, he’s kept in place a version of another Trump policy: denying asylum in the United States to migrants who fail to first request it in another country they’re passing through on the way to this one. So, as many as 10,000 immigrants a day now cross illegally into the United States. Since May, almost half a million of them have been caught and deported. As of this writing, 11,000 are living in camps on the Mexican side of the border, having applied for asylum using the Biden administration’s cell phone app. No one knows how long they will be there while this country’s overburdened asylum system limps along and election 2024 fast approaches (along with Trump’s proposed plans to create vast border deportation camps).
To be fair to Biden, with the exception of President Obama’s creation of a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status for immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally as children, no administration or Congress has done much of significance over the past 40 years to address immigration issues in this country. What institutions do exist, including immigration courts, remain desperately underfunded, leading to staggeringly lengthy waiting times for asylum applicants.
The situation at the frontiers of wealthy countries like the U.S. will undoubtedly only get worse. Nations like ours can’t hope to keep the human urge for survival forever bottled up on our borders.
My father said he’d go to Canada if Nixon were elected. Recently, I’ve heard a few friends echo that intention should another dangerous authoritarian — Donald Trump — regain the White House in January 2025. If that were to happen, people around the world, citizens and migrants, the sheltered and unsheltered alike, can expect things to get so much worse. For us in the United States, emigration won’t be an option. Like it or not, we’ll have to stay and fight.
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The World Must Act as One to Solve the Climate Emergency
Before we can begin “doing everything we can,” we have to transcend our limited sense of who we are and what matters.
Jul 21, 2023
“We need to do everything we can to keep (global) warming as low as possible.”
When it comes to climate change, one two-letter word has me totally perplexed: “we.” There’s an implication of global unity—a transcendent “we,” marching as to war (so to speak)—facing humanity’s greatest crisis, undoing the exploitative, Earth-destroying aspects of our social structure and grabbing control over the planet’s rising temperature. We need to do everything we can!
Yeah, sure. And then it turns out “we” aren’t doing nearly enough. The blame gets passed around—to the rich countries of the Global North, to the world’s largest fossil fuel companies. And the ice keeps melting, the wildfires rage, average temperatures keep setting records. Scientists grow ever more distraught. The cry repeats itself: We need to do everything we can!
There is a “we” that most Americans embrace and feel a part of, but it has nothing to do with the warming planet and collapsing ecosystem.
I don’t disagree with this. I just don’t know who “we” are, and hardly feel like a participant in the process, except in small ways: when I recycle stuff or argue with a climate-change denier or walk rather than drive wherever (achy legs, balance issues—I mostly drive). This isn’t enough, of course. It’s change from the social margins. The global warming—the global “weirding”—continues unabated, as do the warnings from the science community. National promises to change remain minimal, and are ultimately bypassed and ignored.
What I’m trying to say is this: There is a “we” that most Americans embrace and feel a part of, but it has nothing to do with the warming planet and collapsing ecosystem. Before we can begin “doing everything we can,” we have to transcend our limited sense of who we are and what matters.
The New York Times’ Brad Plumer, for instance, writing about a report recently released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of experts convened by the United Nations, noted:
“Governments and companies would need to invest three to six times the roughly $600 billion they now spend annually on encouraging clean energy in order to hold global warming at 1.5 or 2°C, the report says. While there is currently enough global capital to do so, much of it is difficult for developing countries to acquire. The question of what wealthy, industrialized nations owe to poor, developing countries has been divisive at global climate negotiations.”
These words quietly scream for a fundamental shift in the planet’s political infrastructure. “Encouraging clean energy” isn’t really any nation’s first priority, especially if it’s rich and powerful. As I read that paragraph, what popped into my head is this: The planet’s annual military budget is about $2.2 trillion (with the United States accounting for nearly half of that). War is hell, but that’s OK. It’s the primary manifestation of nationalism, the primary expression of power. We have treaties and such—some nations are allies—but the essence of the situation is this: We live in an us-vs.-them world. We have to be continually cautions and, if necessary, aggressive. This is a divided world. Any questions?
The problem, of course, is that the divisions are mostly arbitrary, not to mention pragmatic. There’s nothing like a good enemy to help a country maintain its unity, to help a government assert control over the population. (Careful, he may be a commie.) But these arbitrary divisions are also distinct and specific; they’re called borders.
Borders have nothing to do with reality, but “we” pretend that they matter—often to the detriment of people who need to cross them. And as climate change continues to create chaos, it makes certain regions uninhabitable. More and more human beings will find themselves being pushed out of the “human climate niche,” which means they’ll have to go somewhere else.
As Anju Anna John and Stefano Balbi write at Common Dreams, regarding a study called Quantifying the Human Cost of Global Warming: “In the worst-case future scenario—where the world reverts to fossil-fueled development and has a population of 9.5 billion at the end of the century—the study found that 5.3 billion people would be left behind. We would be looking at a world where about half the world’s population would no longer be able to live in regions they once considered home.”
So they’d have to move. They’d have to become climate refugees, which probably means confronting a foreign bureaucracy at some border or other. Uh oh. That could be a problem, even though, according to The Guardian:
“The richest 1% of the world’s population is responsible for twice the amount of greenhouse gases as the world’s poorest 50%, who suffer the brunt of the harms.
“So far, the rich countries of the global north are regarded as having promised too little—and delivered even less—for climate adaptation efforts in poorer countries.”
We need to do everything we can—to minimize global warming, to deal with its inevitable effects on some. But this will only happen minimally in the context of the present moment, in which the wealthy and powerful are motivated primarily to protect and expand their wealth and power, and will casually dehumanize those who are in the way or who attempt to cross a sacred border.
This is not the “we” that’s going to do everything it can to save the planet, but it’s the “we” we’re stuck with, at least for now. Truly dealing with climate change—doing everything we can—means transforming who we are and reorganizing ourselves as one world.
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Americans Shouldn't Fear Asylum-Seekers, But the Consequences of Turning Them Away
"Offering protection to people escaping danger has long been among the most universal ethical obligations."
Jun 25, 2023
In May, yet another border crisis burst into public attention. This time the crisis centered on the feared consequences of the long-delayed termination of a draconian policy initiated by former President Donald Trump. Title 42 was the pandemic-justified policy that summarily expelled asylum seekers without a hearing on their asylum claims. The end of Title 42, it was claimed, would result in another “surge” or a “flood” of border crossers.
Republicans amplified the threat to discredit President Joe Biden. The administration responded by parading its border-security bonafides and announcing its own restrictions aimed at radically limiting asylum seekers.
The crisis narrative is a staple in this nation’s fixation with border security. The widely held supposition holds that the border is a danger zone, a site of infiltration of unwanted migrants who are positioned as a threat to our nation’s safety, prosperity and identity. Walled or unwalled, the border signifies the nation’s sovereignty and, for many, the line of defense against the outside world.
Media coverage of the crisis focused on the political drama. Minimal attention was devoted to the consequences for people who are turned away after undertaking long and dangerous journeys in the hope of finding refuge from violence and persecution. At best, news accounts referenced but did not elaborate upon the objections of human rights or refugee advocacy organizations, as if they were a sideshow to the main attraction.
Even less attention was given to why asylum is a value the nation should uphold and what policies are needed to protect that value.
The right of asylum belongs in our political debates about how we should respond to refugees. Offering protection to people escaping danger has long been among the most universal ethical obligations. All three Abrahamic religions assert the requirement to provide shelter to those in need; and indeed religious charities play a crucial role in the resettlement of refugees. Resettlement, however, assists only a small fraction of those caught in the hell of the world’s overflowing refugee camps.
Ever since the acknowledged failures to provide sanctuary before and during the Holocaust, asylum has been declared an essential value of the international order, important enough to be recognized as a core human right that nations cannot violate without falling outside the law.
The U.S. was instrumental in the adoption of the right of asylum, part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and then backed subsequent treaties and laws, starting with the 1951 Refugee Convention. The protection of human rights is a responsibility of nations to the international community. The right to asylum means a right to cross borders in order to seek asylum. People who arrive on U.S. territory, even without permission, and then request asylum must be provided due process in a fair hearing. It is their legal right to do so. They should not be treated as criminals or intruders to be repelled. They are not “illegal.”
For decades, the U.S. has joined other nations in the Global North in adopting tactics designed to evade its asylum obligations. It has implemented restrictive interpretations of what qualifies as asylum. It has created physical and militarized barriers to entry. It has interdicted migrants at sea, detaining them offshore. It persuades or pressures other nations to prevent migrants from reaching the U.S. border and adopts other tactics known to critics as “remote control.” People who have crossed the border without authorization have been subjected to lengthy incarceration, family separation or “expedited removal.”
Human rights groups have amply documented the brutality and frequent lethality of these methods. The prevailing crisis narrative, however, ignores these consequences or justifies them as deterrence. Compassionate policies are labeled as “pull factors.”
Anti-migrant prejudices are deeply embedded in American history and culture. Border security anxieties are far-reaching. Opportunist politicians are eager to exploit both. Yet fear of electoral consequences should not silence a moral politics. If our debates about border policy would not sweep aside the morally shocking consequences for people being summarily turned away or never given a chance to apply for asylum, might we turn instead toward a more humane response to the deeper crisis of forced migration?
The moral challenge may seem daunting; but the choice to help might be better served if, like the reckoning that followed World War II, Americans could acknowledge the inhumane consequences of failing to offer sanctuary.
Our response to the growing crisis of forced displacement and migration would then be framed by commitments and obligations already undertaken in the name of human rights and human dignity.
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Why Democrats Should Embrace Immigration
Immigration is overwhelmingly beneficial and arguably part of the bedrock that the U.S. was founded on.
Jun 15, 2023
If you were a politician, and you wanted to persuade the American people to support a particular set of policies, wouldn’t you want to advocate for a set of policies that will benefit the economy, create jobs, enrich the U.S. culturally and linguistically, subsidize social programs, help improve the U.S. birth rate, improve U.S. soft power, enhance human rights by helping people in need, and reunite families?
You would think that any type of policy that could achieve this many benefits would be an easy sell, and any politician running on a policy platform with these benefits would be very successful. The set of policies that achieve these benefits is a more liberalized immigration regime, i.e., creating more pathways for people to legally immigrate to the U.S.
In spite of these numerous benefits, Democrats never seem to fully embrace immigration. Republicans consistently run on an anti-immigrant platform that demonizes immigrants and immigration as bad for America, even though this is demonstrably false. In the face of this rabid anti-immigrant xenophobia, the Democrats typically counter by saying the Republican policies are cruel, but they do not give a clear endorsement for immigration itself and often end up supporting anti-immigrant policies. Why don’t the Democrats embrace immigration, given that it is overwhelmingly beneficial and arguably part of the bedrock that the U.S. was founded on?
The Benefits of Immigration Are Clear
Republicans are extremely proficient at flooding the zone with false notions that immigration is somehow bad for the U.S. and that immigrants are somehow dangerous, when the exact opposite is true. For example, numerous studies have demonstrated repeatedly that immigrants help create jobs and improve the economy overall (sources: one, two, three, four, five, and six). The data is also clear that immigrants (both documented and undocumented) have a lower crime rate than the native-born U.S. population (sources: one and two); they pay taxes (source) unlike many conservatives who feel that taxation is a form of theft; they pay into programs like Social Security and often do not receive benefits for them, which increases the solvency of those programs (source); they increase U.S. soft power, which is defined as nonmilitary resources that help advance U.S. interests (source); they bring high levels of talent and innovation from around the world and increase U.S. competitiveness (source); they help keep the U.S. birth rate stable (source); and many other intangible benefits.
There really is no good faith debate that can be had about the benefits of immigration because the data consistently shows that immigration is beneficial.
Opponents of immigration tend to make arguments such as, “Immigrants are dangerous,” “Immigrants take jobs,” or “Immigrants are a drain on resources.” All of these arguments are countered by the data cited above. Indeed, the anti-immigration and anti-immigrant argument does not have a leg to stand on because there is no factual basis for it. There really is no good faith debate that can be had about the benefits of immigration because the data consistently shows that immigration is beneficial. Given the clear and well established positive effects that immigration has, why don’t the Democrats embrace immigration as an issue and use it against the Republicans?
Immigration Exposes the Flaws in Democratic Political Strategy
Democratic trepidation toward strongly and clearly advocating for immigration, as well as less demonization of undocumented immigrants, points to larger issues with their overall political strategy.
Democratic politicians tend to watch the polls and base their policies off of the polling instead of having a core set of policies and persuading the public to support them, thus propelling them to electoral victory. Public opinion polling on immigration matters in the U.S. is mixed and highly dependent on the exact question that is asked. On the one hand, polling typically shows that most Americans think we are a nation of immigrants, that legal immigration is generally good, and even that Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients should receive a “pathway to citizenship,” which is politician speak for allowing them to apply for green cards since green card recipients can generally apply for naturalization (U.S. citizenship) after five years.
Conversely, polls also show that more Americans are “concerned” about immigration recently. One poll even shows that a higher percentage of adults think the U.S. is “worse off” because of immigration, and one infamous poll from NPR/Ipsos found in 2022 that more than half of Americans either think that it is “completely true” or “somewhat true” that the U.S. is experiencing an invasion at the southern border (sources: one, two, three, four, and five). I think it’s also important to note that immigration tends to be a low priority voting issue, but, anecdotally, it appears to be a big motivator for the Republican base.
Biden could literally seal the entire border, and the right-wing media machine would continue to churn out propaganda saying that Joe Biden supports “open borders.”
Because the polling is so mixed, Democrats try to have it both ways. They try to at least pay lip service to the positive benefits of immigration, but they also repeat the conservative narratives about border security, asylum, “waiting your turn in line,” and other key GOP talking points. President Joe Biden is emblematic of this kind of thinking. In the 2020 campaign, he ran against Donald Trump’s extreme immigration policies, but when he got into office, he left many in place or even expanded them. For example, he has effectively ended the asylum process at the southern border, while simultaneously expanding the use of humanitarian parole. He ended Trump’s illegal border wall, but he advocates for more funding for “border security,” including fencing, walls, and other barriers.
Democrats think that if they behave this way, their base will support them, and that they will somehow be able to inoculate themselves from right-wing criticisms. Instead, the opposite is true. Mixed messaging and mixed policy moves only serve to lower the enthusiasm of the Democratic base, which polls show is pro-immigration. On the other hand, conservatives will never give any Democrat credit, even when the Democrat is enacting the very same policies that Republicans support. Biden could literally seal the entire border, and the right-wing media machine would continue to churn out propaganda saying that Joe Biden supports “open borders.”
Instead of trying to have it both ways, Democrats should embrace immigration and flip this issue into a clear winner for themselves. They should be clear that a functional legal immigration system is a priority for the U.S. and that it has all of the benefits that I outlined above. When Republicans say we need to tighten our immigration policies, Democrats need to push back and go on the offensive. For example, they should say things like, “Immigration creates jobs, so why do you want to hurt the economy by lowering immigration?” “Immigrants have a lower crime rate than U.S. citizens, so why are you trying to smear immigrants as invading criminals?” or “Immigration leads to family unification and helps people escape desperate situations, so why do you want to keep families apart and turn people away who need help?”
The conservatives would naturally counter with their tired, fact-free arguments, but that is where Democrats need to hammer them with the facts and counter their narrative. If Democrats don’t counter the Republican narratives, the American people begin to believe the Republican narratives. That is why so many Americans simultaneously believe that immigration is good while believing immigrants are dangerous or that there is an invasion at the southern border. People will believe the Republican propaganda, no matter how false it is, if there is no progressive narrative to counter it.
When Democrats adopt the Republican narrative, or allow it to flourish, they lose.
Instead of watching the polls and basing their policies off of what they think is popular now, Democrats should develop a core set of policy beliefs, then seek to move popular opinion in their favor through clear and consistent advocacy. When they do so, they change the narrative on immigration in their favor and create a winning issue out of an issue that may not have helped them much previously. The Democratic leadership always seems to forget that opinion is fluid and can change. Democrats need to ask themselves what policies are best for America, then try to advocate for them and move the needle of public opinion in their favor. When Democrats adopt the Republican narrative, or allow it to flourish, they lose. The result is low enthusiasm from their base and little to no increased support from the Republicans.
Democrats don’t see immigration as a winning issue, or rather, they are worried that if they go too far “left” then they will lose. I am not sure what it is going to take for the Democratic leadership to abandon this mindset. It is keeping them from making a winning issue out of a set of policies that will greatly benefit America and help people in need.
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Amidst Record Displacement, People Are Remaining Refugees for Longer
Host countries’ interests in protecting the rights and services of their own citizens keeps refugees from being fully integrated into society or obtaining citizenship.
Jun 14, 2023
The number of people forced from their homes, primarily because of conflict or climate change, is on the rise, topping 100 million people in 2022—more than double the number of displaced people in 2012.
About a third of those 100 million people are refugees. Refugees live in a legal limbo that can increasingly stretch for decades. And the number of people remaining refugees for five years or longer more than doubled over the past decade, topping 16 million in 2022. These are people who do not have a clear path to residency in any country but are unable to return to their homes because they are unsafe.
Typically, because of domestic political pressure and other issues, the countries hosting refugees do not want to offer them permanent residency.
“We escaped our home and belonging to save our lives from bullets. Now, we are hanging in uncertainties.”
I have spent years interviewing Rohingya people—members of an ethnic minority who have lived in Myanmar for centuries but without actual citizenship—in refugee camps in Bangladesh. These talks show the real-life effects of people remaining refugees for years.
“We escaped our home and belonging to save our lives from bullets. Now, we are hanging in uncertainties—no right to attain higher education, no permission to work, no claim over property. Yet no path to return,” Jafar, a 27-year-old Rohingya refugee, told me during my fieldwork in the Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh in July 2022.
I am a Bangladeshi scholar who researches refugees’ everyday lives. I have closely followed the trajectory of Kutupalong, which grew to become the largest refugee camp in the world in 2017.
My research shows that host countries’ interests in protecting the rights and services of their own citizens keeps refugees from being fully integrated into society or obtaining citizenship.
In the absence of legal protection outside their home countries, refugees’ livelihoods and well-being often remain in jeopardy, an effect that can span generations.
Why People Are Remaining Refugees for Longer
People can get refugee status when a government or international organization such as the U.N. finds that they have a legitimate fear of persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group in their home country.
Refugees are legally protected under international law from deportation but often do not have safe places to live or the opportunity to legally work in their host countries. Most refugees live outside of formal camps, in informal settlements in cities.
Only 204,500 of the world’s 32 million refugees were able to return home or get resettled permanently in 2022.
Some wealthier countries are developing restrictive policies that make it harder for refugees to cross their borders.
Generally, people are remaining refugees for longer periods for three reasons.
First, conflicts in places ranging from Ethiopia to Syria are lasting longer than conflicts have historically, dragging on for more than a decade in some cases.
Second, there generally aren’t cohesive international, regional, or national strategies to handle large numbers of refugees. Low- or middle-income countries like Turkey that do not guarantee a path to citizenship host more than two-thirds of the world’s refugees.
And third, some wealthier countries are developing restrictive policies that make it harder for refugees to cross their borders. They are also taking actions that make it harder for refugees to ever cross their borders—including building more border walls, detaining refugees in offshore islands, and intercepting refugee boats.
One general exception to this trend is the protection granted by European Union countries to 4 million Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war, including giving them the legal right to work, for several years.
Increasing Years in Exile
The Rohingya situation demonstrates the civic and physical dangers of long-term legal refugee limbo.
In 2017, Mynamar’s military launched widespread violent attacks against the Rohingya people that the United Nations considers genocide.
Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people fled across the border to Bangladesh. Now, about 930,292 Rohingya refugees live in a sprawling refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar in the southern part of Bangladesh.
Syrian refugees in Turkey, Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in India, Afghan refugees in Pakistan, and Somali refugees in Kenya are among the large groups of refugees who fled conflict and have lived for decades in another place without the protections of citizenship.
Negotiations over repatriating Rohingya people to Myanmar stalled in 2021 following a military coup in Myanmar.
But the Rohingya situation in Bangladesh is not unique.
Syrian refugees in Turkey, Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in India, Afghan refugees in Pakistan, and Somali refugees in Kenya are among the large groups of refugees who fled conflict and have lived for decades in another place without the protections of citizenship.
When Refugees Are Stuck
During my fieldwork in Cox’s Bazar in August 2022, I met with a 65-year-old refugee named Kolim who lost both his legs in a shooting by the Myanmar army. He said that the local nonprofit organization that had supported him with a disability allowance for five years just ended its project, because the organization could not secure funding for the next year.
This follows an overall trend of major international humanitarian organizations and smaller nonprofits alike tending to give the most money following an emergency response or crisis.
Similarly, long-term conflicts and continuing humanitarian crises that last years tend to see drops in funding and help over time.
Refugees in dire situations also often engage in work without permission and risk being arrested by the police.
Meanwhile, only about half of refugee children are in school.
Refugees—who are typically unable to legally work in their host countries—also tend to undertake informal kinds of employment, working as day laborers in construction, for example, or as street vendors.
Refugees in dire situations also often engage in work without permission and risk being arrested by the police. Some of my research shows that competition to find work also generates tension between the host and the refugee communities.
Initiatives That Help
There have been some recent efforts at the international level to address the challenges facing refugees and host countries alike.
In 2018, countries in the U.N. agreed to an informal plan to jointly share the responsibility to host refugees and migrants.
These countries committed to a framework for shared responsibilities in their response to refugee crises.
But nonprofit groups that work with refugees have said it is unclear whether the plan has resulted in any change, noting that few countries have implemented the strategy into their domestic planning.
Without any systematic solutions to deal with migration and refugees, refugees continue to forge ahead without a clear direction.
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