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The migrant convoy: a heroic journey
(Republished from The Guardian)
The six or seven thousand people – men, women, and children – who have set out to walk 3,000 miles through Mexico to reach the US are brave, resourceful and determined to better themselves. They might become the kind of citizens that every country needs and whose support any politician should be proud of.
Naturally, they are objects of loathing for President Trump, a man whose entire life has been cushioned by privilege. He has done his best to exploit their misery in advance of the midterm elections, claiming that “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners” are mixed in with them.
There have been many such caravans before now, and there will be many afterwards. They are a natural reaction to the difficulties and dangers that lone travellers, especially women and children, face when they attempt to reach the prosperous world. The wise and sensible thing to do would be to treat them as an opportunity to manage migration – but the nativist reaction is to treat them as a giant jailbreak.
For Mr. Trump and, indeed, for some other western policymakers, the function of poor countries is to keep poor people locked up. Aid to the Central American countries from which the caravan has fled is conditional on their “doing the job of stopping people from leaving their country and coming to the US” to quote another of his presidential tweets.
This view of Central America as a prison colony is grimly reflected in the US justice system. Many experts point out that the chaos in Central America can in part be attributed to the mass deportation of gang members and suspected gang members from the US, whether or not they grew up there.
These gangs originated inside the Californian prison system and among its clientele on the outside. They are not native to the countries that they are now destroying. It is their victims who are fleeing on foot to the US. The murder rate in parts of Honduras is the highest anywhere in the world outside of war zones.
Much of this violence is fuelled by drugs, and the money from the drug trade, which also comes in the last analysis from the US. The idea that these countries and their inhabitants can be walled off from US politics, and the US economy, is a poisonous fantasy. But it has served Mr. Trump well and he will continue to exploit it.
In theory, there is a policy of enlightened self-interest that would help to mitigate the worst effects of this traffic. Sufficient aid to the countries from which they come would help to enable the development of both the economy and the kind of security and access to justice that they desperately need. This was the policy pursued under the Obama administration, which Mr. Trump is now demolishing.
Since 2015, “addressing the root causes of migration” has also been a key theme of official EU strategy. As a means of stemming the flow of refugees, this will be effective only in the long term. Civil societies grow over time. They can’t be prefabricated abroad and helicoptered into place like disaster housing. Nevertheless, increasing aid to help stabilise societies is a policy still worth pursuing, though care must be taken not to undermine poorer countries’ ownership of development policies.
In the meantime, these caravans should be treated as the humanitarian emergency they are, and their inhabitants welcomed for their courage and spirit.
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