Refugees, as defined by a nearly half a century old United Nations treaty, are given certain rights when officially recognized as such by nations where they go to for asylum, and those countries have certain responsibilities when it comes to dealing with those people. That specific convention in question, the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees defines a refugee as "A person who owing to a 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.."
I think that it may be time to amend the criteria that we use to define refugees, or at least officially create a new international legal category for some people. People flee their own countries for a number of reasons, and political, religious, or ethnic persecution is probably as a whole a relatively small proportion of that. People who flee for other reasons, ones that make it so they don’t legally qualify as refugees, still face the same problems that “official” refugees do; they make it to another country, where they might not know the language, or have any idea of the laws and how they relate to their legal rights and responsibilities, they can find it hard to get access to healthcare and jobs, and their kids often start out without even having a basic chance at getting anywhere else in the world. The biggest bloc among these unofficial yet nonetheless very real refugees is economic ones. These heretofore unrecognized econo-refugees leave their homelands not because they face repression and persecution meted out by their governments, but because capitalism as a global economic system cannot help but to be exploitive in a way, and it’s left them economically impoverished, repressed, with no hope for advancement if they choose to stay, just an unrelenting life of long, brutal hours in unregulated, miserable conditions for very little pay that leaves them struggling to find a way to provide basic necessities, like food and shelter, let alone any type of healthcare if they should happen to get sick while living in squalid conditions. They have lived hard lives devoid of very much hope, and they know if they choose to stay, the lives of their children promise to be just the same.
So, as people have throughout history, they up and move to places that hold the promise of more opportunity, a better life, if not necessarily for them, at least it will be for their kids. They often do so at very great expense, especially for people who have so little, and it is far from unusual for them to put their lives at great risk. It is this phenomenon that we’re experiencing in this country right now, though to a confusion of terms, instead of refugees, we’ve been labeling these people “illegal aliens.” Language is a very powerful thing, it’s probably the one thing that has the most influence when it comes to shaping how we see the world, and that way that you frame an issue can really affect how exactly people view something, and the way that they feel about. (Parenthetical aside: I was thinking of the illegal immigration controversy when the term “economic refugee.” I’m pretty sure that I hadn’t heard it anywhere before, but I do a lot of reading so I guess that I may have come across it somewhere before. I googled it and came up with a page from the Rockridge Institute using it in the exact way I was thinking of it. I saw it after the idea first popped up, but credit where credit might possibly be due.)
Compare the two terms: refugee, a refugee is somebody that deserves compassion, respect, charity. They’re people who, through no fault of their own, have been placed in a situation where they feel it’s more worth it to leave their homes for another country, one that may be absolutely foreign to them, because even that is so much better than staying in the situation that they’ve been placed. Then take a gander at Illegal Alien. The first word, illegal, brings up all sorts of nasty, underworld connotations, they’re criminal lawbreakers with no respect for the institutions of this country, they’re abusing and exploiting our natural generosity as Americans. Alien, what a wonderful way of dehumanizing, being able to look down at them, they aren’t people deserving of dignity and respect, they’re foreign others, it must be perfectly alright to do our best to round them up to where they came form, Mexico maybe, Colombia, Guatemala, or perhaps Venus.
When it comes to this immigration crisis, or as how many people have referred to it, an “alien invasion,” it should be remembered that this isn’t just a matter of Mexicans laving Mexico and coming to the United States. Though they do form a vast majority of the people coming over, a good deal also hail from other Latin American countries, and a small number come from countries all over the world, particularly a quite a few Asian ones. Wherever they come from, the forces that are forcing them to make the decision to leave their homes are generally similar. It should also be kept in mind that, particularly when it comes to Mexico, it isn’t just economic forces pushing people out. The recent violence in Mexico relating to the narco trade, with carnage on a scale not dissimilar to Iraq, which has left thousands dead and dozens headless, would most likely qualify some people as refugees as we now see them, though since they do come from Mexico, and most often come via the unofficial route, they’ll be treated just the same as other Mexican immigrants.
This violence has been concentrated around the border with the United States, where the drug pipelines run through. In a city a mere thirty five miles from where I’ve lived all my life, Ciudad Juarez, there’ve been more than fourteen hundred murders there so far this year. The cartels have made it a habit of assassinating ranking police officers and officials, and Federal Attorneys. They’ve dumped heads and headless corpses in every section of the city, hanging a decapitated man from an overpass, dumping bodies in a soccer field right next a school, walking into a seafood restaurant and murdering eight people eating dinner with a barrage of hundreds of AK47 bullets. We worry about terrorism in India more than we do it on our doorstep. A number of towns have had their entire police force abandon their posts due to death threats, more than a few police chiefs have showed up at border crossings demanding asylum. There is a very real war going on, and it’s being fueled by profits from Americans’ insatiable appetites for drugs, and our insanely easy access to guns.
Particularly in Southern Mexico, in the mainly indigenous areas, such as Chiapas, people face governmental repression, as well as repression by groups given the tacit support of the government. The most notable aspect of this involves the EZLN, the Zapatista National Liberation Army. The EZLN, a group that I admire more than most other armed revolutionary groups, has been engaged in a “war” against the Mexican government since 1994, though apart from a few armed clashes following the start of their campaign, which purposefully coincided with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, they’ve been fairly ardent in their embrace of non-violent tactics. They aim not to have complete independence, but merely autonomy. Many members of the group and their supporters have faced repression and persecution that would qualify them as refugees in the sense that it’s now used. But all of this is a whole other topic from what my main point started out being.
I do truly believe that it isn’t inappropriate to call most, if not all of the people in this country that are considered illegal immigrants, refugees. If you look at it from this viewpoint, the United States comes off as a completely appalling, sick, racist, xenophobic country. If you think of immigrants refugees as victims, people deserving of compassion, respect, and dignity, and compare it to the way we treat them, we come off as almost Nazoid.
Take a look at the politically, and most likely racially, fuelled anti-immigrant hysteria that has swept across this country in the past few years. There are people in the media like Lou Dobbs that devote hours of airtime every single week railing against immigrants. Dobbs himself has hyped sensationalistic stories claiming that immigrants are bringing new epidemics of leprosy and scabies into this country. People have been manipulated into believing that these people are intentionally coming over to steal their jobs, and force their children to learn Spanish. (Until I see one of you guys out in a field picking chilis and onion, please shut the fuck up.) There’s a particularly insidious belief among some extremist strains in the right that there is a concerted Latin American conspiracy to take back the Southwest United States by sneaking over, out breeding the Gringos already living there, and reclaiming it as Aztlan. They call this particular lunacy “Reconquista.” People go on and on about how much they cost the system, they don’t pay income taxes, but their “anchor babies” are overcrowding our schools, and them trying to get medical treatment is bankrupting our healthcare system. They’ve become scapegoats, demonized and dehumanized in ways that to me don’t seem unlike the caricatures of Blacks that you can see in cartoons from the thirties and forties, and German propaganda from the thirties.
This politico media campaign against immigrants has gotten people so worked up, that there is now an organization devoted to sending volunteers down to the southern border, armed with binoculars, and some are also strapped, so that if they spot any brown person out there in the desert, they can call it in to the Border Patrol so that they can swoop in and take them off to disappear into the bowels of America’s immigration detention system. Leave it to them to purloin the name of revered American Heroes, revolutionaries themselves, who’d most likely be appalled that they were being used as a label for an extremist conservative vigilante group. Back in the revolution, those people sitting at the border would be the people saying, “Awww, come on guys, the Brits aren’t so bad.”
All of those examples are just things that have been happening in the zeitgeist, they aren’t officially government sanctioned or promoted. The actual governmental policy is much worse. We have the Border Patrol patrolling our border, who in the past has been assisted by members of the National Guard, which is all well and good, as any sovereign country has the right to protect its borders. The immigrants/refugees who make it across the border, evading the Border Patrol, and the Minutemen vigilantes, and surviving the heat (about 500 people die trying to make it across the border every year, thousands over the past twenty years)(a Clinton-era immigration enforcement measure called Operation Gatekeeper intentionally upped security in safe areas to cross the border, forcing people to try to make it through far harsher, more dangerous and desolate areas, leading to a huge upsurge in border crossing deaths), face a life of living in the shadows. Due to a fear of being rounded up by “La Migra,” they’re vulnerable to exploitation by employers and criminals, who know that they’re too worried about their immigration status to report crimes committed against them.
If they do get picked up by the authorities, they get tossed into the Kafkaesque system of immigration detention facilities. Over thirty thousand people find themselves in such a situation every day, including entire families with young children. They may spend months in jail, until they can get around to having a deportation order issued, if they don’t agree to get sent back willingly. One of the most infamous of these facilities is the privately operated (gotta love that privatization) prison called the T. Don Hutton Residential Center of Taylor, Texas. Recently opened, it has the capacity to hold slightly over five hundred individuals, but currently holds around three hundred. Half of those three hundred detainees are children.
While living in this country, the refugees are often forced to live together in what’s considered the “ghetto” part of town. They’re looked down upon by the broadest part of society, maligned in the press, and used by conniving politicians pandering to the basest part of their base in the search from votes appealing to some of the uglier parts of the human psyche. Since they live in fear of apprehension, and often are fairly uneducated, they don’t know about, and or are to afraid to exercise the rights that they have as human beings within the confines of our borders, and don’t take refuge in the protections that they may be able to find, even in such a climate as there is. Another refugee crisis that has American fingerprints over it, one that’s considered by many metrics to be among the worst, if not the worst, in the world is that of Iraq. There are about two million Iraqis who have sought refuge outside of their own country, mainly in neighboring states like Jordan and Syria, as well as another two million who have been displaced in country. There are about twelve million refugees who have come to the United States, most of them belonging to the as of yet unrecognized category of econo-refugees, but also many who are fleeing violence and political repression. They come to this country not knowing much about the way our government functions, the rights that they may have, the language that we speak, and they still come here, to this place that degrades them, demonizes them, treats them like shit, because in spite of all that, it’s still better, with more chances of hope, than staying where they are, and even if their lives don’t become very much better, they still have to toil away in the shadows doing brutal work for long hours and minimal pay, they know that it’ll at least give their kids a fighting chance to have something they never did. That is why I admire many of the people we call illegal aliens, and one of the reasons I find it hard to say things like the pledge of allegiance.
