Tag Archives: Refugees/migrants

Politics

Segregation is in the Air

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[Warning: In places I find it hard to understand what I am trying to say! Help appreciated.]

My previous blog makes the (simplistic) argument that the label “refugee” does scant justice to the reality of millions of people forced from their homelands by violence and destruction in which Western governments has played a significant role. The term “refugee” builds too weak a case. It underplays their actual history.

A weak case, however, is not the primary harm to the refugee.  The primary harm lies in the attendant displacement, not the displacement of people but the displacement of disciplines, approaches and paradigms that might have more ably defended these people/refugees.  And it is we in the humanitarian community, or the more specialized community that fights for refugee rights, who have elbowed out these other communities. Would ambulance chasing plaintiff attorneys be able to construct a successful claim for residency as compensation for an Iraqi fleeing war and ISIL?  Or maybe not an attorney at all, but a wheeler-dealer businessman, or a military negotiator, professionals unopposed to horse trading, able to traffic in compromise and the crude use power? Or maybe disruption and violence – a refugee exercise of power to replace their submission to a stacked deck of a legal regime?

It is not so much communities that are displaced by our elbowing, but the paradigms in which they operate. The “refugee” label belongs to a particular set of discourses (professional, personal, political) and to a specific world view. It lives within a particular framework. It offers a home to me and people like me in terms of its thinking and values – progressive, do-gooder, legal, humanist, justice-fighter, not-a-banker-thank-goodness, etc. There is hence a lovely power in that label, allowing me to cultivate a self-image full of virtues.  For that reason alone I am, like many others, well-wired to hold onto it with clenched fists, unconsciously perceiving my world through its lens. Put differently, I work within a structural aversion to recognizing what might have been.  By way of illustration, David Kennedy’s analysis of human rights reaches a parallel conclusion, that it “encourages people to seek emancipation in the vocabularies of reason, rather than faith, in public rather than private life, in law rather than politics, in politics rather than economics.” (David Kennedy, The Dark Sides of Virtue).

It is no coincidence that this displacement ensures my privileged position within the sphere of the refugee. There is no finer feeling than to stand erect in the fight for the downtrodden! We act as their champions, complete with a loud admiration for their drive, resilience and strength. Within this world (and not that one) displacement leaves people like me as the high priests and anointed speakers. That in itself is not a problem. Not knowing, feeling or seeing it is a problem. Certainty of its Truth is another. A less fundamental example of the power of the paradigm, one that has finally been exposed, is the process by which the aid response to migrants, refugees and IDPs became compartmentalized within humanitarian action, rendering invisible needs and aspirations of a long-term or developmental nature, even as camps morphed over decades into lifelong settlements.

One way to look at it is that we rule by the blessing of segregation, in this instance taking the form of compartmentalization. As we bear witness to the transfer of power in the US it strikes me as a good time to think more about this segregation. More dangerous than ever-sharpening global inequality is the degree to which the haves will maintain this inequality through a web of segregations. Segregation of neighborhoods, healthcare, education, cross-border mobility and perhaps soon human genetics; segregation within communities and across nations. A simple litmus test: Does the status quo work in your favor or not? It does pretty damned well by me.

The world of the haves will protect its interests by building Trumpian walls, and has been doing so for generations if not longer. In part, it will drive further inequality via a sanitized segregation, avoiding the horrors of Jim Crow and Apartheid, replacing such racist ugliness with the institutionalized compassion of aid, peacekeeping and 5-pronged fixes after technocratic fixes.  Is it clear to humanitarians that we form part of the haves? Issue by issue we side with them, perhaps as their less wealthy (but living quite comfortably — thank you for your donations) brethren, perhaps as an agent of their business. As in the fight for refugee rights, we will thump our fists and push for change, but will do so while posing no threat to the paradigm, in fact thumping our fists just as urgently to protect it.

[Note:  Twelve hours after the original posting I made several changes in wording. For better or worse, substance remains the same.]

Politics

Refugee? We need a new label.

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Certain labels bother me. Labels like “smuggler” that replace “mass murderer”.  Or “paradox”, when designed to hide consistency beneath a superficial contradiction.  What got me started on all this, though, was label “refugee”.

The crisis in the Mediterranean has sparked a healthy debate on terminology. A migrant, we are reminded, is not the same thing as a refugee.  Some worry about placing too much emphasis on the legal distinction, in the process creating a class of humans who are worthy of our sympathy, assistance and open arms. For others, “choices about words do matter.” The official UNHCR viewpoint: Blurring the two terms takes attention away from the specific legal protections refugees require.  The debate misses a crucial point.

The discussion of refugees tends to ask whether or not the people live up to the term. Do the circumstances of the flight from home measure up to the legal definition (i.e., a well-founded fear of persecution…)? It places the label of refugee on a pedestal. But what happens when the label does not measure up to the circumstances of the flight? When it masks a different set of relationships? In terms of the Mediterranean crisis, what happens when seeking refugee status weakens the claim to enter Fortress Europe? What we need, certainly, is for the governments in Europe to honor the ideals and protections they authored. What we also need is a new claim, one that better fits the contemporary circumstances of flight.

Stripped down, here are refugees: people living in Country being persecuted, bombed, tortured or disappeared then flee to Safer Country, where they are not persecuted, bombed, tortured or disappeared.  Note the formula: Country destroys citizens (or, wantonly fails to protect them from destruction), so citizens flee to Safer Country.

Note also the flaw in the formula: Safer Country acts out of discretion. Refugees have the right to flee Country and the right to seek asylum, but there is no corresponding obligation on Safer Country to grant entry/asylum. Rather, Safer Country is permitted and deemed to act out of generosity, human compassion and a host of self-congratulatory reasons (but certainly not political interests).  As so many have opined, nowadays such discretion comes with steep political costs, hence the shame of Fortress Europe.  That delineates the battleground and the political game in which we have engaged: advocacy and action aimed at getting our states to treat refugees as refugees should be treated. But what if they should be treated better than refugees?

Note the difference between the above formula and the current crisis. Waves of Iraqis, Afghans and Syrians comprise a big chunk of the refugee population crossing the Mediterranean. They clearly meet the refugee formula. But don’t they meet more than the old refugee formula? Doesn’t the modern formula also look like this: Safer Country bombs, wages war and/or fuels conflict in Country, so people flee Country, sometimes to Safer Country.

Why should the citizens of Iraq or Afghanistan have to gain entry to the US or to the UK based on the codification of magnanimity into international law? Why shouldn’t they be able to claim a right to enter based on their homes and lives having been, in part, violently destroyed by Western military intervention or the conflict and nasty forces unleashed by said interventions?

The justifications of such interventions are irrelevant. Iraqi, Afghan and even Syrian refugees aren’t Jewish dissidents being persecuted by a brutal Soviet regime. They are the victims of wars that we must, in part, own. What about, for instance, a creative invocation of the tort law concept of joint and severable liability? What about seeing them as creditors, collecting on a debt? In other words, what about moving beyond a claim to asylum and an exercise of national discretion to an obligation based on compensation for our national actions? We should be calling, hence, not just for the Refugee Convention to be fulfilled, but for it to be supplemented by a different notion, one in which people whose homes and lives have been destroyed get to live in the homes and lives of those who contributed to that destruction.

*                           *                           *                           *

Addendum: I will leave it for somebody else to make the parallel argument about economic migrants.  The formula used to look like this: Poor Country is hopelessly incompetent and corrupt so people go to Richer Country to look for a better life rather than starve to death at home. Now it looks too much like this: Richer Country enacts global economic policies and houses global economic actors that render people in Poor Country…

Critique of Aid, Politics

The trouble with labels

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The realization that humanitarian action masks political (in)action is an old story, as is our collective lament that blankets, pills and food will not fix an Afghanistan, even if they may prove quite useful to the cold, sick and hungry.  This is the problem of the humanitarian fig-leaf.  The humanitarian sector at times recognizes this effect, and has long echoed former UNHCR High Commissioner Sadako Ogata’s well-quoted wisdom that “there are no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems.” That is certainly true, but tends to be deployed as an alibi for our failures.  We forget to invoke Ogata as a critique of our successes.

In other words, we humanitarians bear responsibility for maintaining the lustre and exclusivity of the humanitarian label, a mode of action that emplaces one set of responses by displacing others. Have we not safeguarded our turf by averting any critique of the its sufficiency; of the effect of humanitarianizing a crisis? Beyond a label that obscures the political and military, it also occupies turf within the aid sector. To label a crisis as “humanitarian” makes us the Big Kahuna, and its calcification into policy and practice – for example, the humanitarian-development divide – has usefully meant that only humanitarian projects could be funded in some contexts.

The price of the label hence falls upon people. To wit, using blankets and pills to fix war, rescue at sea to fix killer migration, or the incongruity of responding to decades of crisis in places like DRC or South Sudan through projects aimed at addressing people’s immediate needs.  As I write in a forthcoming report, the “urgency of [humanitarian] needs eclipses but in no way lessens a greater spectrum of human aspirations – to secure livelihoods, education for their children or to live in peace.”  The degree to which such short-term approaches to long-term problems have been particularly damaging in refugee settings, addressing neither the causes of flight nor the protracted nature of being in flight.

So let us begin. Let us begin by tossing out Ogata, as a necessary but insufficient realization.  As Tom Scott-Smith cleverly concludes, the problem is not with the humanitarian solutions being inadequate, but ‘humanitarian problems’.  In his words: Framing an issue as a distinctly humanitarian one necessarily limits the responses available. Seeing inescapably political issues as humanitarian ones, in other words, can seriously curtail the possibilities for reducing suffering, and nowhere is this more evident than in the recent migration crisis. 

So let us begin in earnest by a moratorium on humanitarian tagging. The situation in DRC is not a humanitarian crisis. The situation in Haiti is not a humanitarian crisis. And the situation in the Mediterranean is not a humanitarian crisis.  The world should not sleep better knowing that humanitarians have responded to a humanitarian crisis.

And if it does not seem to be in our institutional interest to remove our label? Take heed! What goes around comes around. Look no further than the ‘crisis’ of refugees and migrants in Europe or the Ebola response. It will not be long before the security label more completely paints over the humanitarian one, replacing victims with problems, aid with self-protection and compassion with fear; replacing one Big Kahuna with another.

Politics

The Three Ds of Search and Rescue

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A hand stretches from water and another from the side of a boat. A rare moment of purity in humanitarian work.  The hands clasp, and a life is saved. It is far from coincidence that this purity flourishes on the open sea, in a space beyond the borders of states, a no-man’s non-land where, unaided, human survival can be counted in minutes.

rescue-at-sea-pic
Source: AFP

We can be proud that there in the Mediterranean the humanitarian imperative to save lives defeats the savagery and oppression that force millions into a desperate displacement, defeats the policies of democratic nations that eliminate safe and legal alternatives for people to reach Europe and defeats the evil greed of the smugglers (misnomer alert!**). Those victories are, however, short-lived.

Last week search and rescue (SAR) operations pulled over 11,000 people from the sea, from boats so densely packed they recall the slave ships of centuries past. That is a spectacular number of hands. But the purity of search and rescue is a deceptive purity, one that masks costs borne by the humanitarian organizations engaged in SAR, by the fundamental principles and ideals of human rights and by the people pulled from the sea themselves.  Because once that moment of purity has passed we leave the sea for land, where the humanitarian ethos collides with political reality, fear and gutless self-interest.

The image we have of rescue in the Mediterranean is a naïve one, for in fact the human quest for freedom and security and refuge often leads to the not-so-Hollywood ending of low-budget incarceration.  From the sea and into the realm of mankind we might better append three Ds to SAR: Search and Rescue and Delivery into Detention and Deportation.  Official containment policy propels this punitive approach, and research has shown the “highly detrimental impact of detention on the health of migrants and asylum-seekers”, not to mention the degradation (see this article in the excellent June 2016 issue of Refugee Survey Quarterly).  SAR teams deal with consequences; they struggle with their inescapable complicity in the matter (see this analysis of MSF’s difficult and lengthy internal debate). As humanitarians they choose the life of those at sea over DDD, but they do not have to like that choice.

Humanitarian organizations and other activists alike have lifted their voices in protest, against the conditions and policies of detention, against the failure of our ideals and legal obligations to protect people in danger and against the human cost of political leadership’s deliberate failure to establish anything close to a functioning safe and legal alternative to reaching Europe. Those protests have not fallen on deaf ears, but they have fallen on ears that place political survival above principled commitment.  From a different angle: their protest is drowned out by the protest of those more anti-immigration in persuasion. The Aylan Kurdi moments of overwhelming public compassion prove too brief to sustain policy.  And almost cruelly, humanitarians must ponder their role in that as well, for the power of humanitarian purity renders much else invisible.  In this case, the mediatique drama of the rescue at sea obscures both the prologue and the epilogue.

** What does sending thousands of people into the sea on unseaworthy boats have to do with smuggling? What are the smugglers concealing and conveying?  They aren’t even on the boats any longer. This is not smuggling. This is mass murder.

Critique of Aid, Politics

The trouble with refugee summits

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[Apologies for the long absence – I have been working on two large projects and distracted from my usual flow of sideways thinking.]

Is Tuesday a good time for a scattering of ideas?

1. The real problem with hype.

The UN Refugee Summit – all hype and no substance? A typically good read from IRIN. The question we have to ask as a sector, and I think within the framework of research rather than accusation, is whether the emptiness of hype constitutes the full extent of the damage. Do summits, conferences and other grand ‘change change change’ plus ‘build back better’ moments actually produce more negative than positive outcomes? Specifically – and I’ve blogged on this before, in the aftermath of Angelina Jolie and William Hague’s 2013 proclamation of a ‘historic moment’ in ending rape in conflict – do these well-hyped declarations actually function to diminish the likelihood of positive change? Did Bill Clinton’s ‘build back better’ speech help doom Haiti to the not-so-built-back future it would soon discover?

Mechanisms? The obvious question is whether the well-reported declarations of world leaders take the winds out of the sails of public pressure? Will people across the West now sleep better, knowing that the refugee problem is being dealt with by no less than Barack Obama and the entire United Nations?  More important than public urgency, what about pressure from within the sector? Do these global launches generate too much of an opportunity for the aid system to capture momentum, political will and (surprise surprise) funding, only to transform it into conferences, evaluations, policy discussions, guidelines, and the unproductive yet satisfying busy-ness of saving the world? One might ask, “Where’s the beef?”

2. Fight the fear, not the violence?

The Viet Nam war produced the incongruous situation whereby young black American males were removed from the civil rights struggle and shipped off to fight in Viet Nam. A journalist/historian named Wallace Terry interviewed these soldiers. As I listened to this fascinating BBC program on Terry’s work, one moment caught my ear. One of the soldiers interviewed talked excitedly about the Black Panthers, justifying their violence because blacks had to fear the police and fear the KKK, so it would be a positive and fair change if white people also had something to fear.  I couldn’t help wondering if that same logic hasn’t fused with jihadi anger against the US or Europe.  Which prompts the strategic question of how to get rid of their fear?

3. Respond to the fear (and to the suffering, loss, hopelessness, anxiety…), not just the violence

And while I am on the topic, the news from the US when it comes to inner city gun violence will be one of the great producers of phd theses a hundred years from now. It defies comprehension. Here’s a recent headline: In Chicago’s Deadliest Day Of 2016, 9 People Killed In Shootings On Monday. Get that? On a Monday.

In a timely BBC piece, the journalist attaches himself to a local rapper to penetrate one of the most violent Chicago neighborhoods. The report quickly transports. I slipped into voyeurism, appalled and yet enthralled by the combination of youth, energy, guns and lurid deaths. The entertainment ended at 12:53, when our tour guide broke through to my human side. Worth the watch.

Parts of Chicago must surely define a humanitarian crisis. I say that less because of the violence than because of the pain, the unfathomable grief, anxiety, powerlessness and waste that produce urban landscapes seemingly imagined by Cormac McCarthy. Trauma wounds may be dealt with at the hospital, but where is MSF with its psycho-social programming for the tens of thousands of victims? Because ‘this shit will fuck you up’ and because you know that the US healthcare system isn’t offering mental health care? Where is Save the Children with its ‘Child Friendly Spaces’? Or, more simply, how do we respond to these Americans who desperately need to ‘get out’ of a place that ‘ain’t normal’?

4. “Where’s the tofu?”

Tired of the gloom? Here is a rather devastating take on humanitarian action, cleverly disguised as a restaurant review. “It’s the good intentions that sink vegetative restaurants. They are selling the goodness of their intentions in the hope that you’re more interested in filling the karma bank than your stomach. The explanations of the ingredients are always longer than the recipes. Vegetarian places are to restaurants what the Big Issue is to journalism… It’s a commitment to niceness and oneness and caring and nurturing. The Big Issue is vegetarian journalism.”  That’s the brilliant AA Gill’s Table Talk review of Tiny Leaf restaurant (Sunday Times Magazine 21 February 2016). By the way, he gave the restaurant two out of five stars.

 

Politics

Brexit Now vs UK EU

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The Referendum on staying in the EU strikes me not as a “great festival of democracy” but more an invitation for tyranny of the majority. Issues this important and decisions this enduring should be decided on the basis of principles and analysis, not a direct measure of popular sentiment or, worse still, fear-stoked self-interest.  It also strikes me as full of lessons for humanitarians.

The process has almost boiled down UK membership in the EU to the single issue of refugees/migrants (Trumping for many potential economic ruin) – yet another historic chapter in the denigration of an entire category of human beings due to otherness, this time based on a fear of kebab houses, long-bearded men who aren’t hipsters and increased wait times in the Tory-gutted National Health Service.  The tenor of this debate, as that of the more general ‘migrant crisis’, signals well the moribund status of ideals such as humanitarianism.

If that were not enough, then consider the appeal to the EU as a protector of human rights, justice, working class dignity, and democracy itself against the (Tory party’s) British government. Here’s one poster:

eu poster pic

The argument, relatively common, strikes me as too common, too causally passed from podium to populous, its accuracy familiar and suffered like the crappy British summer rather than revolting. There is something fundamentally wrong with governance in Britain if it cannot, on its own, protect its citizens and residents from injustice, overzealous anti-terrorism legislation, and the tyranny of the corporate elite. We humanitarians berate governments in places like Sudan, Zimbabwe and Iraq for similar domestic shortcomings.  We do so with no small hint of frustration and condescension, an angry and smug appeal to the ‘enlightened’ external world – to the universality and binding commitments of international human rights – that has not yet overtaken the primitive internal state. Can it be that in Great Britain, such lustrous ideals and protections similarly depend upon a relatively full panoply of external laws and courts?

As I (and many others, no less than the UN Secretary General) have blogged elsewhere, the plug seems to have been pulled on the belief that governments should allow such ideals and commitments to constrain self-interest. This downward spiral lies not just in the behavior of states with long dark track records, but in the strengthening norm among the usual champions of international law, human rights, and multilateral civility. The EU’s decision on migrants seems perfectly emblematic in this regard. It should function as a wake-up buzzer, an indication that humanitarian protection needs a new strategy.

In places like South Sudan, Syria or Central African Republic, humanitarians confront their increasing impotence, an inability to appeal to international commitments and norms that were never fully upheld, but at least held some power. As Ban Ki-moon declared, “our global landscape is still blighted with the brazen and brutal erosion of respect for international human rights and humanitarian law.” As a practice, humanitarian protection – the duty of humanitarians to move beyond a sterile delivery of material assistance and work towards protection – seems depressingly lost. Experts convene and much more easily describe the abysmal state of affairs than potential ways forward. This report of such a meeting held last June (disclosure, I am one of the authors), for example, identified three potentially useful strategies, but without any delusion that they solve the problem:

[… a] strengthened capacity to leverage political and armed actors resulting from (1) better analysis, of the sort that reveals not only the violations/abuses but also potential tactics towards ending them […]; (2) a deliberate, broader engagement with a wide range of actors external to the humanitarian sector; and, (3) greater humanitarian independence from political power.

Perhaps, as I have come to understand on the eve of the UK’s EU Referendum, there really is something quite wrong with the necessity of appealing to external, supra-sovereign covenants in order to guarantee fundamental human rights.  Such agreements work well enough for technical issues, like patent law or aviation safety, but perhaps we should never have diverted so much effort into the internationalization of our humanity. Instead, we should have focused that energy and effort into its localization, into all the different locals, from the ground up. Perhaps therefore we need to accept the decline of universal norms and official disregard for international covenants, and begin the 25-year march not to their reaffirmation but their replacement at each and every national level.  Local civil society as the centerpiece, rather than us international do-gooders. Because in or out of a common union should affect commerce, travel and cross-border law enforcement, not justice, rights or democracy.

Critique of Aid, Politics

Three Songs (2)

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[This blog is the second in a 3-blog series . See directly below for the the first part].

Part 2: An Old Song

The starter’s gun has fired on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which will pretty much fix the entire world by 2030. Have a look. Like swansongs (see previous blog), these goals are not exactly small stuff. End poverty in all its forms everywhere is SDG goal #1. Like I said, not small stuff. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls is Goal #5. Unlike Moon’s swansong, though, the SDGs are just launching, a vision to be implemented. At least, that is their intention.

ODI recently held a panel discussion entitled ‘Leaving No One Behind’, a launch event for the march towards 2030 and the achievement of the SDGs. In keeping with my unscientific approach to blogging, I thought I might offer some criticism without having attended, listened to or even perused a summary report. My comment is a simple one, based on evidence as insubstantial as this sentence from the on-line description of the event: ‘In order to ensure no one is left behind, we firstly need to identify the most vulnerable and marginalised people’.

Leaving no one behind works fine as a slogan for much of the SDG work to come. Please forgive a statement of the obvious: delivering on the promise may prove more difficult. Take, for example, the UK government, who has itself proudly enshrined Leaving no one behind as an official promise. If it weren’t so tragic, it might seem almost a parody to the refugees and migrants stuck in the brutal mud of Calais. No one gets left behind because no one is allowed to leave? That jibe aside, the lesson is flawless. Achieving change against the tide of hard political realities requires more than a shiny new slogan and more even than a government’s promise.

Governments, though, should be excused if their actions aim to satisfy the conflicting demands of a broad electorate; and they should be predicted to serve the powerful more effectively than the powerless. Well more than one of the would-be refugees and migrants in Calais will be left behind. Faced with fierce opposition to any immigration, that is what governments are designed to do.

Less easy to excuse is the international community that, knowing this, has nonetheless designed a set of goals structurally dependent on states behaving, essentially, contrary to their nature or their political capacity. Note that this is the same international community who will be charged in large part with developing and implementing the policies and programs to ensure no one is left behind. There is a persistent gap here, between rhetoric and reality.

Returning now to that line from the event’s description, this is the aid community that appears, now at least six decades deep in the enterprise of organized, institutionalized development (A) to be proclaiming to have discovered only in 2016 the need to figure out who are the most vulnerable and marginalized, or (B) to be inspiring the coming generation of work by sloganing over the fact that this is exactly what they have reported to have been doing for the past six decades, or (C) to want to convince us that ‘finding the most vulnerable and marginalized people’ somehow defines an ‘all new’ or ‘improved’ product that really will work, without explaining to us what they are going to do differently from the decades of many approaches.

Now, I know this entire blog amounts to a cheap shot, a cavalier reduction of fairly complex thinking and experience to a line in an event description. The cheapness of my opinion, though, does not so easily dismiss the sense that with the same choir and the same melody, we will get the same song. There is a superficial accuracy in A, B and C above. However, they do not explain why such a dedicated, intelligent community repeats itself with such frequency. Why are the choir and melody so old? And how do we manage to produce a different song? Answers A few thoughts in my next post.

Critique of Aid, Politics

Refugees and Migrants: A New (old) Narrative

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Imagine the scene. A desperate mass of stricken, exhausted, frightened people find refuge. Perhaps for the first time in years, they sleep with two eyes shut. Bam! A powerful group wrenches the money, jewels and property from their hands. Highway pillagers? Blood-thirsty criminal gang? Friends of Joseph Kony? Nope, nope, nope. That’s the work of the Government of Denmark and the Government of Switzerland (see e.g., here). In other words, it is the cunning policy of governments obligated by law to protect these very people. Governments, I might add, one does not usually associate with regime thuggery. This doesn’t pass the smell test.

In a related example of erecting clever barriers because a wall seems too crude, Obama’s US government will set up screening centers in Latin America, to “head off migrants . . . before they start traveling to the United States.” And who will be implementing these barriers screening centers? No, not Donald Trump. It’s UNHCR, the UN agency dedicated to defending refugees and the right to seek asylum.

Denmark? Switzerland? Obama? UNHCR? With friends like these … And lest the humanitarian community feel superior, let us remember that the appeals for money to fund programs in Syria have been unmistakably louder than appeals for Western governments to open their doors. A logic reminiscent of George Bush has evolved: if you help us feed/clothe them over there, they won’t come over here.

As Sara Pantuliano and others have astutely argued, it is time to change the narrative. Rather than view migrants as risks (or, for that matter, leeches, criminals and terrorists), she elaborates, the debate needs to be reframed to recognize “the substantial social and economic contribution they can make to their host societies.” Certainly, a more balanced understanding of migrants and refugees is necessary. But will a more accurate, positive spin on the situation work?

I have my doubts. Once a public debate is permeated by fear, once politicians seize upon those fears to gain power, once a gaping us-them divide blocks humanizing discourses . . . Well, let’s just say it becomes extremely difficult to engage in the sort of discussion where facts possess the power of persuasion. Look at the gun control debate in the US, or the past decade of immigration debates that have cropped up in much of Europe.  People become fact-resistant, positions entrenched, opinions shouted at the other side. In the situation we have today, facts don’t matter as much as we would like to believe.

More importantly, arguing the facts, arguing the other side of the coin, does not reframe the debate, it reinforces it. By accepting those terms for the discussion – the pros and cons of refugees – one undercuts the idea that asylum and refugee decisions should be based on principles, on the law, on an ethic of compassion. To reframe the debate, we need to discuss what is right and what is human, regardless the consequences. We need to avoid the a policy discourse of self-interest: asylum cannot depend on whether or not the safe haven needs you. Is Germany’s open door a more moral approach than other nations? Or a more enlightened understanding of domestic needs and migrant potential? I hope the former, I fear the latter.

If we want to salvage the sinking ship formerly known as the right to seek asylum, if we want to defend the 21 million refugees in the world, facts may be useful, but principles must be foremost. Not because loudly proclaiming what is right will win the argument, but because it is the argument most worthy of losing.