Human Cargo (49 page)

The idea that migration must, somehow, be “managed” is now beyond doubt. All Western democracies have modulated their recent language to reflect this view. The worry is how to do it, given that September 11 increased the perception of a world under threat, and that even demographers are not able to predict precise labor needs. Even as the speed of change has challenged people’s sense of identity across the Western World, necessary policy decisions to confront the new realities are judged as too unpopular, and public confidence has evaporated in the face of inefficient handling. The UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, who is personally very interested in this issue and aware that the UN needs to be seen to act on such a crucial dimension of twenty-first-century politics, has set up a Global Commission on International Migration, though its budget is small and its life span short.

Within the EU there already exists a cross-border labor market for several million workers, and EU policy has been moving toward opening more doors to both skilled and unskilled migrants. But while those with advanced skills are perceived as necessary, there remain doubts about the numbers of unskilled workers the West will be able to absorb, particularly as current migrants are finding it harder to prosper economically than those who came before them. No one disputes that increased migration brings economic gains at a global level: the migrant moves from a place where he is less productive to a place where he is more productive. But migration works best when workers have skills different from the existing workforce, so that the new arrivals complement rather than replace those who are already there. The fear of brain drain—attracting skilled people away from where they are needed—is only one element in a debate that, say economists, has many still largely unexplored repercussions. The links between diasporas and development, they say, may prove promising.

Migration can only provide one answer to the needs of a future labor force, for migrants age too. People may also need to work
longer and more productively, and to save more. In the UK there are plans to tap the 2.8 million men and women who are currently not working and who are older than fifty but not old enough to be eligible for government pensions. Across the EU, there are now new immigration programs, guest worker arrangements, and migrant quotas, drawn up both out of self-interest and in order to relieve pressure on overburdened asylum systems. There is also the suggestion, outlined not long ago by the economist Timothy Hatton of the University of Essex, that immigration and asylum could be integrated at EU level, by adopting a points system to include humanitarian points.

At the beginning of 1999, 500 people from different backgrounds, disciplines, and countries worked together in the Hague under the auspices of the Society for International Development to discuss the future of migration and refugee policy. Starting from a shared conviction that the present situation is no longer tolerable either for asylum seekers and migrants, or for the countries on which falls the burden of caring for them, and that the threats posed to stability and security are alarming, they produced a Declaration of the Hague in November 2002, a document with a more hopeful tone and outlook than many that have preceded it. A coherent and genuinely international migration policy, they argue, must go hand in hand with development policies and concerted programs to combat disease, poverty, and illiteracy; the root causes of forced displacement have to be tackled, such as the flow of arms, and the corporate sector, as well as government, must play its part in conflict resolution and postconflict reconstruction. The declaration comes at a good time: refugee numbers dropped by 10 percent to 9.7 million between 2003 and 2004, according to UNHCR, the lowest figure in a decade. In the past few years, more than 5 million people have gone home—to Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi, Iraq, and elsewhere.

Apart from the demographers’ calculations and their uncertain predictions, more intangible questions arise. Why should something as arbitrary as where one is born determine where one is allowed to
live?
*
Entrance restrictions, borders, and boundaries, often themselves accidents of history, stand as barriers to a more equal world, protecting the privileges of those who live in the least crowded, richest, and safest states. Against the moral claims of liberals, who argue that current restrictions on immigrants constitute a gross violation of human rights and who point out that it is ethically inconsistent to support the free movement of goods and services while restricting the free movement of people, come the counterclaims of the anti-immigration lobbies, arguing for the need to preserve by state boundaries the unique cultural communities of people who share common practices and understandings. To demand of a state that it show equal concern for those who live outside its boundaries is to ask it to pursue policies that may undermine the very institutions that provide social justice and cultural autonomy for those who live inside them. If to restrict entrance is to accept a world in which differences of citizenship correspond to differences in quality of life, then the arrival of large numbers of people can undermine the existing “provision of collective or public good” and profoundly alter the nature of a state. It is hard to halt entrance flows at just the right moment, before social disharmony breaks out. Once started, migration flows, with people following in one another’s footsteps, are extremely hard to stop. By the same token, as migratory chains develop, so young people leave villages, thereby causing vast change in community life. And migration can only increase, say demographers, as high levels of insecurity and increasing disparity between rich and poor in so many parts of the world make families keen to send their children to safer and more stable economies.

In the mid-1970s the anthropologist Theodore Schwartz used the phrase “migrants of identity” to describe the search among young people in America for an identity they considered both “acceptable and authentic.” Since then, much has been thought, debated, and written about the relationship between space and time in
the construction of modern cultural identities. Wars, market forces, and environmental change all uproot people—not only refugees and migrants, but tourists, travelers, and businesspeople—and that movement can more and more be seen as the determining experience of the age. In the twenty-first century, “nonplaces,” like waiting rooms, refugee camps, stations, airports, and hotels, have become temporary abodes. The idea of “home” is no longer that of a fixed and safe place, there to leave and return to, and which gives form to memory and anticipation. Rather it has become a more fluid idea, something to carry in one’s head. Home, argues John Berger, is located in a set of routines, a repetition of habitual interactions, in styles of behavior and in dress, in memories and in myths, and in stories carried around in the head. “We dream in narrative,” as Barbara Hardy famously observed, “day-dream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticise, construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative.” For Mamadu in Tel Aviv, Abdularam in Maryland, and Mary in London, whose original homes have disappeared into memory and for whom no return to a fixed place of the past is possible, these narratives, testimonies to their own histories, become a form of safety. As cultural anthropologists describe it, the modern age is an age of exile; displacement between worlds, existence between a lost past and a fluid present, present the most fitting metaphors for modern consciousness. In his condition of perpetual transit between so many different worlds, the modern traveler is at home in none, a “homeless mind” constantly subject to nostalgia for a past, fixed time when identity was rooted, safe, and communal.

•   •   •

AFTER THE WANNSEE
Conference of January 20, 1942, and the launch of the Final Solution, Jewish refugees began to arrive in ever greater numbers to beg for asylum at Switzerland’s western borders. Nearly all were turned back. Heinrich Rothmund, the head of the Swiss police, warned of the “menace to our spiritual identity if too many foreigners live here.” Rothmund would later describe his twenty-year
battle against the
enjuivement
, the “Jewification” of Switzerland. Regarding the decision to keep the frontiers closed, in the summer of 1942, Rothmund repeated a phrase that was much used in Switzerland during the late 1930s and early 1940s. “The boat,” he said, “is fall.”

Even if the flows of migrants now trying to make their way to Western Europe, North America, and Australia were to be realistically addressed by an increase in working permits and a better understanding of labor needs, there are always going to be more people wanting to migrate than the developed states will be willing to take. Why they persist in such numbers given the increasingly restrictive policies is not altogether clear, beyond the fact that asylum seeker networks are growing and that smugglers are becoming ever more skilful. There will be migrants in search of better lives; there will be refugees, fleeing death and persecution; and there will be a huge gray area in the middle, growing all the time, where people move because of poverty, because they have been driven to the margins of life by ethnic tensions, or because a new dam has flooded their village. It is this gray area that makes UNHCR’s position so difficult; the agency is bound on the one hand to insist that refugees are different from other migrants and deserve different treatment, without which their entire house of cards will collapse, while on the other it has to acknowledge that people move for many different reasons and need respect and rights. Migrants need protections, too.

Migration, as Gervais Appave at the International Organization for Migration in Geneva sees it, is the unfinished business of globalization. It is threatening because it challenges the last national defining characteristic: the ability of a country to say who comes in and who goes out. And it is threatening because by its very nature it is disorderly and unpredictable. While Australia has gone farther than any other country in its efforts to make migration orderly, its draconian solutions are not possible on continents with many countries and many borders.

The paradoxes of the West are what make migration so uncertain. Western states are driven by the democratic will of their people,
who are often hostile to refugees and migrants, but also by the rule of law, which makes excessive exclusion impossible. Since research for this book began, ever tighter restrictions on asylum are being debated throughout the EU, where recent elections reflect growing, but unfounded, fears that terrorists are using the asylum route to reach the West, while in the United States the many made homeless by the New Orleans hurricane have caused the very word “refugee” to take on new and confusing meanings. There is, as has been argued in many papers, speeches and articles, no panacea. There are things worth trying, from the speeding up and improving of the asylum process, to the spreading of more accurate and realistic information about true conditions in the West and the dangers and pitfalls that await immigrants, to the setting up of regular programs so that people can travel legitimately and not take the asylum route. But none can ever achieve enough, unless the root causes that send people abroad in the first place—poverty, violence, and instability—are addressed. Meanwhile, there is very little alternative but to follow the proposals of the Declaration of the Hague and to take steps to manage migration with clarity and imagination, while upholding the 1951 Convention, so that true refugees are treated humanely and with understanding. The whole refugee apparatus—rules, conventions, organizations—exists to offer substitute protection for people whose governments cannot or will not protect them. UNHCR’s mission remains that of preserving asylum for those who need it and ensuring that those who are driven from their homes need not resort to clandestine means; it should not depart from its original mandate of protection by taking on tasks that others do better.

No one denies that it would be best if the situations that create the world’s flow of refugees could be prevented. The diaspora Sudanese in Uganda, Ethiopia, Congo, Kenya, and Central Africa, and the diaspora Somalis in Yemen, the UK, the United States, and Djibouti, would rather not be there. But until that day comes, refugees will keep on moving, and governments have no alternative but to find policies that protect their borders but that are also humane and protect the rights of those who seek asylum. Some acts, like torture,
are not negotiable; the prolonged detention of refugees, and particularly refugee children, comes close to torture. Protecting people who flee persecution is a responsibility all nation states must share if collective sovereignty is to have some moral worth.

And there is something more at stake. No one, in the end, wants to be a refugee. Exile is an unhappy state. Refugees seldom want to leave home, and when forced to do so, they dream of the day they can return. The best “durable solution” for any refugee is to go home, but to a home and a country that are safe; if that is impossible, the next best option is resettlement. It has to be accepted that some asylum seekers will never contribute anything to the West’s economy: many will be too frail, too damaged, too inflexible to achieve a productive life. But to rail at that is to misunderstand the nature of asylum, because asylum in the end is not only about responsibility and interdependence but about morality; and because, in an age of globalization, it is simply not possible to ignore the world’s dispossessed. How a state deals with its refugees should be a measure of its social and political health.

•   •   •

BY E-MAIL, LETTER,
and the occasional phone call, I was able to keep in touch with some of the Liberians I had met on my travels, just as I was able to follow the progress of Mary, the Ugandan girl who had fled to England after her long abduction by both rebels and government forces. In June 2003, Mary gave birth to a baby girl, and decided not to put her up for adoption. On appeal, she was first given four years to remain in the UK, and slowly, cautiously, she began to re-create her life—then just as she was settling down with friends and a possible college place in South London, she was “dispersed” by NASS to the twenty-fourth floor of a block of flats in Glasgow, with “forty-eight hours” notice. In Glasgow she knew no one; while she was out one day, her flat was broken into. Soon after, she received a letter from NASS. They had made a mistake: the UK was not willing to accept her as a refugee after all, on the grounds that she would be in no danger if she returned to Kampala. In the current
ungenerous spirit that governs asylum decisions, Mary’s fear and horror of return to a country in which she was repeatedly raped apparently no longer counts. While a new application is being prepared, she is moved, randomly, from flat to bed-sitter to hostel, with her baby and her few possessions, sometimes two or even three times a month. Her old terrors have returned.