Why, for all their bluster, countries will fail to stop migration

benfell

Migration is more or less continuously in the news and that desperate attempts to cross the English Channel from France to the United Kingdom continue even after an incident in which 27 passengers on a flimsy boat drowned[1] should illustrate that people are willing to risk their lives to get into places even when they cannot do so legally or safely.

This is why I have argued that border barriers function less to deter and more to kill. The xenophobes who advocate barriers generally do so, focusing on “pull” factors that attract migrants to certain countries, the U.S. and the U.K. included, and neglect the “push” factors that drive people away from their homes. The latter include violence, poverty, and even the climate crisis. Their false assumption is that people can reasonably remain where they are.[2]

Fixing those problems of course involves the countries that migrants are fleeing; one of the sources of migration is Afghanistan and we see how the attempt to “fix” that country went. In this particular case, an obvious “push” factor is war. War is violence. Another “push” factor is the Taliban takeover, which the war had been meant to prevent; that this failed, even for twenty years of trying, simply reinforces that war is not—and almost never is—the answer.[3]

It is certainly true that critics of the withdrawal from Afghanistan can point to specific things that were done wrong, but as a justification for continuing the effort, such an argument necessarily assumes a counterfactual. There are a great many such failings but the critics’ argument assumes that warriors and the politicians in their thrall could have done better when the facts on the ground are simply that they did not, that they failed, utterly, and once having taken the decision to withdraw, failed with astonishing and unexpected speed. That such an argument is taken seriously in any quarter can be dismissed right along with the hubris that got the warriors into Afghanistan in the first place.[4]

The situation is little better with the example I used in my dissertation, the U.S. southern border, where U.S. climate denial, U.S. neoliberal trade policy, U.S. support for coups, and the U.S. “war on drugs” all play a role in driving migrants from their homes.[5] It seems so very often the case that the countries which are so desperate to keep migrants out have somehow played a role in driving them from their homes in the first place: With Afghanistan, as well, certainly the U.S., but also its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies: the U.K. and Europe. With migration across the Mediterranean, I can’t help but suspect the lingering effects of European colonization.

Focusing on “pull” factors as attracting migrants is in fact a fallacy, diverting attention from the “push” factors that xenophobic powers are often at least partly responsible for. Because those powers fail to face their own failures, they fail to address the causes of migration, and therefore fail to stop it.

  1. [1]Dulcie Lee, “Channel deaths: More boats arrive after 27 people drown,” British Broadcasting Corporation, November 25, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-59412329↩
  2. [2]David Benfell, “Conservative Views on Undocumented Migration” (doctoral dissertation, Saybrook, 2016). ProQuest (1765416126); David Benfell, “Things I shouldn’t have to say about borders,” Not Housebroken, December 26, 2021, https://disunitedstates.org/2018/12/26/things-i-shouldnt-have-to-say-about-borders/↩
  3. 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  4. 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  5. [5]David Benfell, “Conservative Views on Undocumented Migration” (doctoral dissertation, Saybrook, 2016). ProQuest (1765416126).↩

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