What If Cities Issued Visas? Introducing the City Visa Program!

In 2017, the mayors of 130 cities around the world, including 18 in the United States, petitioned the United Nations to join the forthcoming Global Compact on Migration. A group of mayors also asked UNHCR to give input on the drafting of the Global Compact on Refugees. Neither compact is exactly innovative or earth-shattering, but at least the process has gotten the nations of the world to sit down and talk to each other about migration and displacement.

But why did the world's mayors have to petition the UN to be included? The compacts are being negotiated at the nation-state level in a time of increasing nation-state hostility to migration and refugees. Yet this hostility is not always reflected by the governments of the worlds' largest cities. As a spokesperson for the New York City Mayor's office put it; “(c)ities are pushing for a seat at the table at a time when many national leaders are increasingly isolationist – and even xenophobic – and disconnected from cities’ values of inclusivity and growth.”

Immigration has become the lifeblood of cities. In New York, for example, immigration is outpacing domestic migration. As the Rockefeller Foundation puts it in their report Global Migration: Resilient Cities at the Forefront; “(r)egardless of their reasons for arrival, the overwhelming majority of migrants (from abroad) now remain in cities, and are helping shape their future.” Today, cities house, transport and employ most of the world's migrants and refugees.

Yet it is exclusively national governments, not cities, who issue visas, police borders and airports, accept refugees and sign migration agreements. In this way, immigration policy is very different from environmental policy, which is an area where cities control many aspects of environmental law, such as limits on pollution or incentives for green technology. On immigration, by contrast, cities control almost nothing and states control almost everything. This skewed power dynamic has led to a global conflict within many states over immigration policy which threatens to tear the entire nation-state system apart.

This raises an interesting question: if immigration so deeply affects cities, should the Mayors of cities like New York be able to issue their own visas? If cities want to take the lead on migration policy, why don't we help them do so?

A System for States, Not Cities

Immigration controls and global migration policy are recent inventions. In 1861, the popularity of rail travel led France to abolish its recent passport system. Many other European countries did the same. Countries reintroduced a revamped and strengthened system of passports, visas and movement restrictions during World War One, which saw the introduction of the booklet passport. The League of Nations hoped that the new passport system would be “temporary,” a product of wartime necessity. They could not have been more wrong.

Today, passport checks, retinal scanners, customs forms, border checkpoints and immigration detention centers have grown up like weeds around the edges of the nation-state system. National governments enforce borders through a global system of laws backed by violence and fear. Much immigration policy is rooted in the end of the colonial period, when mass European migration, facilitated by Empire, shifted to what Leopold Sedar Senghor called the “balkanization” of the former colonies. Immigration restrictions prevented reverse migration back to Europe and, increasingly, migration between different parts of former colonial empires. Perhaps no group of people better symbolizes this shift than the UK's Windrush Generation, recently labeled as “illegal immigrants” by their own government.

The Rise of Global Capitals

Yet post-colonial borders have not halted migration. Far from it. Cities like Legos and New York are booming in large part thanks to international migration. In particular, rural-urban migration within and between countries has skyrocketed, creating global mega-cities. These global capitals contain populations of over twenty million people, a sizable percentage of which is foreign-born. They benefit economically, socially and culturally from immigration, even as rapid growth strains housing and infrastructure. Instead of halting this process, the global system of borders has simply served to push much of this mobility underground, fueling fraud and criminal gangs.

Yet highly restrictive policies on immigration continue to be set by nation-states around the world, while cities are often held hostage by the priorities of non-urban areas. The French immigration system ignores the fact that the immigration needs of Paris, France are totally different from those of Limousin, France. The conflict between states and cities can be seen around the world in countries from Malaysia to South Africa, where the need for workers has often clashed with concerns over changing demographics, economies and cultures to produce a contradictory hodge-podge of policies.

Of course there are a few exceptions: Singapore is both a city and a nation-state and, arguably as a result, has a relatively liberal immigration policy and an extremely high foreign-born population. As Migration Policy Institute put it in 2012, Singapore is a “transit point of the world” and its immigration policy reflects this fact. Like many cities, Singapore struggles with immigrant integration, but a liberal immigration system has allowed Singapore to manage its aging population and fuel its economic growth. Other cities do not enjoy such control over their own destinies.

New York: The Global Capital of a Nationalist State

New York City is a great example of the tensions between immigration policy in the United States, which is set by the US federal government, and the needs of its largest city. Unlike Singapore, New York is both a global capital and the largest city of a vast nation-state. Like most cities, New York has little control over the flow of immigrants attracted to its booming economy and rich culture.

Though New York is a so-called “sanctuary city,” it cannot unilaterally regularize the status of its undocumented immigrant population. Nor can it offer more H1-B visas to attract skilled migrants or ease the procedures for foreign students to attend its universities. It cannot create an exchange program with other cities with which it may have a particularly close relationship, nor offer dual citizenship to New Yorkers with significant ties abroad.

In fact, the New York City government has almost no role to play in immigration policy at all. Each year, American businesses, including those located in New York, go hat in hand to the Federal Government to request much needed H1-B (skilled labor) visas. In 2015, for example, all of the visas went to fourteen of America's biggest cities, including New York. From 2010 to 2016, New York City received by far the most H1-B visas of any location in the country. Yet the government of New York has no control over the H1-B program.

At the same time, the US government has recently sought to force so-called “sanctuary cities” like New York to comply with federal immigration policy, despite the fact that the local government of New York City does not see the deportation of its undocumented population as a priority. As of 2017, New York City had a 37% foreign born population, including over 700,000 undocumented immigrants. The lack of local control of immigration has led to a disconnect between the US federal government and the United States' biggest city.

New York City has done much to try to provide services to immigrants and ease their integration, including by creating the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs. The city also issues a city identification card available to all. Yet New York cannot solve the underlying legal problems faced by the city's undocumented population or offer visas to families and businesses who wish to bring immigrants to New York. On most matters related to immigration, the Mayor's hands are tied.

The City Visa Program

But what if New York could issue its own visas?

Enter the City Visa Program. City Visas would give their holders all of the rights of national visas with one important exception: the holders of City Visas could only reside and work within qualifying cities. A City Visa holder would have to establish his/her principal place of residence and employment, if s/he is working, in a participating city. Employers of City Visa holders would have to certify that all City Visa employees are employed within a participating city. City Visas would automatically allow the holder to transit, visit and even stay temporarily in the rest of the United States, but residence and employment would be available only in a participating city.

City visas would be available in both immigrant and non-immigrant categories, including City Green Cards (Lawful Permanent Residence Status). City Visa holders who wished to become US citizens could apply for expedited Lawful Permanent Residence status under federal law.

But would such a program be constitutional? There is no doubt that the creation of a new class of visas can only be accomplished by the US Congress. The power of the US federal government to control most aspects of immigration law has been upheld repeatedly by the US Supreme Court, most recently in Arizona v. United States. US immigration is currently regulated by the US Immigration and Nationality Act, a federal law.

Yet, as the late Supreme Court Justice Scalia once argued, while the Constitution mandates that the Federal government control naturalization and foreign affairs, there is no clear Constitutional basis for the federal government assuming complete control of immigration. In fact, until the 19^th Century, individual states used to employ immigration controls. Many conservatives in the US might welcome a program that would give cities more power over immigration to cities in exchange for more cooperation with federal immigration laws.

Under the proposed City Visa Program, Congress would grant the authority to issue City Visas to a panel of participating mayors. Participating mayors would meet once a year to set City Visa quotas in cooperation with the US Department of Homeland Security. The City Visa Program could be passed as a stand-alone law, or as part of Comprehensive Immigration Reform. One day, the US City Visa program might be linked to City Visa programs around the world.

Why City Visas?

If there is one thing that both pro-immigration and anti-immigration advocates can agree on, it's that the current global migration system is not working. A lack of consensus on migration policy is arguably tearing the nation-state system apart. But unlike past decades of burned fossil fuel emissions, migration law is something that can be changed.

Imagine a future where the world’s global capitals, from New York to Lagos, are connected together by a single visa system. Does this sound impossible? Now imagine traveling back in time and telling a British man he would one day need a visa to visit India. He would probably have been incredulous. The system of visas and borders we inherited from the end of the colonial period is neither set in stone nor necessary. And if the conflict over immigration to cities is pulling countries apart, who better than cities to fix it? Migration challenges will require innovative solutions. Who better than cities to lead the way?

A Creepy Tour Through the New State Department Website

Today I had reason to peruse the State Department website for the Bureau of Population, Migration and Refugees (PRM.) Most Americans have never heard of PRM. If you have ever been the recipient of US foreign aid, then PRM is where the money comes from. It’s the State Department bureau, along with USAID, that allots money for overseas refugee and humanitarian assistance. Much of its budget goes to UNHCR, but money is allotted to a smorgasbord of other UN agencies and NGOs, from the Red Cross to UNICEF. PRM also runs the overseas part of the refugee resettlement program. Each year, PRM and USAID are responsible for the majority of humanitarian assistance.

I couldn’t find what I was looking for (an initiative on gender equality in nationality law begun by former Sec. of State Clinton), so I went to the archive from the Obama administration to see if the info I needed had been erased. There, I was greeted by a posting devoted to John Kerry’s farewell, his face looking out at me like that of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh, so long ago does it now seem since his day and time. The CIA is Secretary of State now.

The archived PRM website from Kerry’s time contains a long list of things the Trump administration hates: Syrian refugees, LGBTQ refugees, gender-based violence prevention.

In the brave new world of the Trump administration, the first page of the PRM website is just a blank. The long list of Kerry initiatives and projects has been deleted. There is no mention of Syrian refugees. The Syrian refugee crisis is inconvenient to several of the world’s leaders, so it has been erased. The section on International Migration is also gone, similarly inconvenient.

All the Fact Sheets, Remarks and Press Releases of the previous administrations are also gone as though they never existed. While in 2016, PRM released over 20 Fact Sheets on topics ranging from the resettlement process to education funding in Somalia, today’s PRM has released only one, on what is left of the resettlement program.

In George Orwell’s classic book 1984, the main character, Winston, has a job at the “Ministry of Truth.” Winston’s job is to erase history by rewriting or destroying old newspaper articles. In Orwell’s book, the government makes its own truth by erasing anything that is inconvenient. Both inconvenient truths and inconvenient people are erased.

As I read the new PRM website, I can’t help but wonder whose job it was to erase the page on Syrian refugees from the PRM website and to wonder what his or her day to day life has been like in these past two years. Was it horrible for them to do that? Did they protest? Did they resign? I also wonder what Syrian refugees think about being erased from history by the world’s only super-power, wealthiest country and the location of the drafting of the 1951 Refugee Convention.

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.

Trump Is About to Purposefully Create the World’s Largest Migration Crisis Ever

The well is about to run dry.

Most people don’t know anything about the shadow UN government providing food, housing, education and documents to almost 100 million people around the world. The “citizens” of this de-territorialized state are refugees, displaced persons, stateless people and others who are warehoused like criminals in giant, open air camps, usually without the right to leave.

These camps are run by a network of humanitarian organizations: UNHCR (refugees and stateless people except Palestinians), UNRWA (Palestinian refugees), WFP (victims of conflict and natural disasters), UNICEF (children in need) and others The collective mandate of these organizations is to keep people alive while they are waiting for their lives to resume. The lie of the system is that some day, in the distant future, things will return to “normal” and all the displaced people in the world will be able to go home.

Most of these agencies are actually separate from the main UN system and get their money from a separate fundraising process. This gives member states more control over their budgets than for the UN as a whole. According to OCHA, the UN agency that coordinates aid, the cost of these programs is just over 25 billion dollars. (In case you were wondering, that’s the same amount the US plans to spend on 100 new bomber jets.) This target is never met and there is never enough money, but over the last few years, the UN has managed to scrounge together enough to limp through the year.

In refugee camps, IDP camps and other places reliant on humanitarian aid, these UN agencies serve as a de-facto government for millions, providing food, housing and education. Keeping a minimum standard of living traps millions in long-term camps without hope or future. But it does keep people alive.

2018 is going to be different for the citizens of camp-states. It’s going to be worse.

Trump has already cut the budget for UNRWA in half is getting ready to slash the US contribution for many other agencies. Cuts to Syrian aid will affect not only Syrian refugees, but neighboring host countries like Lebanon. These cuts will bite deep: the US provides the majority of humanitarian aid in the world, though this accounts for less than 0.1% of our budget (not including military aid.)

As Reuters puts it, “(w)hile the United Nations said more money may still come in, Washington is reviewing its Syria policy, including humanitarian support, and Trump has questioned the value of such aid.” Meanwhile, the cuts to UNRWA will start to kick in beginning in June, when emergency food in Gaza begins to run out.

What will happen around the world when aid agencies can no longer provide a minimum standard of living in refugee camps?

What’s missing from many conversations about foreign aid is the fact of globalization and global migration. Foreign aid is still spoken of in terms of the Marshall Plan, where the goal of US aid is to spread our way of life and political system to other countries. Little thought is given to the intersection between humanitarian emergencies and migration, despite the clear example of the Syrian war.

Under the current system, rich countries like the United States give the UN money to keep refugees and displaced people in camps, far from US borders, and to cut down on the need for migration. Is this fair or just? No. But it is part of our government’s decades’ long strategy to cut down on people smuggling and keep migrants away. While this strategy may be morally reprehensible and racist, if you could distill it down to one word, that word would probably be “practical.” If the Trump administration's approach could be described in one word, that word would probably be “punitive.”

Cutting foreign aid will likely cause a massive humanitarian crisis in multiple points around the world, prompting an enormous surge out of camps and into the global migration system, a network increasingly earning billions for organized crime. No longer to refugees and migrants flee to neighboring countries, now they enter a global migration system that is linked together and may encompass thousands of miles. A person from Afghanistan may enter the US via Mexico. A Guatemalan woman may end up trafficked to Japan. Overwhelmed UN agencies will be unable to stop this from happening. Asylum systems in receiving countries may be shut down, causing receiving states to shut their borders.

Voters in the US and other rich countries will likely demand increasingly harsh “solutions.” At what point does even a wall seem like it’s not enough? At what point does migration into the US become a “state of emergency” in the eyes of many voters, perhaps necessitating a response from the military? How would a showman like Donald Trump spin such a scenario? We may be about to find out.

Dear Tax Evaders and Criminals: Making Yourself Stateless Is Never a Good Idea

This morning, my Google Alert on statelessness led me to an article published by Oliver Lewis of NZ Stuff magazine. Intrigued, I read the story of Harmon Wilfred and his wife, Caroline, who is the heiress to a Canadian cookie fortune. How did the husband of a Canadian heiress become stateless, you may ask? According to Harmon, he is being persecuted by the US and Canada due to his somewhat mysterious and unclear political activities.

It seems that Harmon used to work for the CIA, or for a Savings and Loan, or something. And he is being persecuted for his political work, either against the Savings and Loan industry or Hillary Clinton, it's unclear and depends on whether or not you trust Wikipedia or Kiwi reporter Oliver Lewis. Anyway, the point is, Harmon is being persecuted, so he and Caroline fled to New Zealand to escape. In 2005, to avoid deportation, Harmon renounced his US citizenship and is now "stateless." New Zealand won't grant him refugee status for some crazy reason, but they can't deport him because the US government won't accept him back. Harmon is appealing to President Trump to help him.

According to the Financial Post, Harmon has served some time in jail in both the US and Canada, though for what isn't clear. And it seems that he and Caroline have gotten themselves into some financial trouble in New Zealand as well, including something to do with an insolvent charity project. Caroline's family, for some reason, has been entirely unhelpful to the poor couple, who are now separated because Caroline lacks a visa to re-enter New Zealand after visiting Canada in 2015.

Oliver Lewis, the reporter, has presented this story as a tale of woe and persecution. He compares the situation of Harmon Wilfred to that of the Rohingya in Burma. I can't quite tell if Mr. Lewis believes that Harmon is being persecuted for his campaign to expose the "Clinton cartel," or the Savings and Loan industry, or whatever, but he certainly takes seriously the claim that Harmon is "stateless."

There is a shadowy world of eccentric millionaires and others who are wanted by the long arm of US tax law or criminal law and who have attempted to renounce their US citizenship as a way out. There are a million websites set up to help you evade taxes by opting out of US citizenship.

Many of these people are happy to break the laws of other countries by overstaying visas and then renouncing their citizenship to avoid deportation, counting on their money and their white-male-ness to protect them from any adverse effects. Many with money purchase citizenship in another country, but for obvious reasons, this is not always possible. Unlike many countries, the US does not require that you have another citizenship before you renounce your US citizenship.

According to Investopedia, there were almost 5,000 Americans who renounce their citizenship in 2016, likely due to tougher laws on collecting taxes from Americans abroad. Unfortunately, it is not clear that many rich, white, American men understand what their citizenship is for. There is nothing in this Investopedia article, nor on most of the websites I checked, about the importance of gaining another citizenship before you renounce.

If statelessness is mentioned, the fact that one might be imprisoned in a foreign country for overstaying your visa, or that you might not be able to leave the country to which you have moved ever again, is not mentioned. It is not clear if most rich, white, American men understand that one cannot simply move to another country with a temporary visa and stay there forever without consequence. Most importantly, many seem to have not considered that they may wish to have children some day and that these children may wish to have a citizenship.

There seems to be an never-ending stream of reporters eager to write a never-ending stream of articles about the "brave" white-guy-anarchists who renounce their US citizenship so they can mooch off the foreign governments of eastern European or Asian countries and operate Bitcoin laundries to launder dirty money without fear of prosecution. Why laundering money for criminals is considered to be a political act is not clear to me, but it apparently makes sense to a lot of journalists like Atossa Araxia Abrahamian at Vice. What all this has to do with the Rohingya, I'm not quite sure.

Sadly, the idea that US citizenship is all about politics, feelings, identity and taxes is very common amongst the techno-anarchists-tax-avoider community. Coddled and protected their whole lives, these men (and they are almost always men) seem not to realize that the world of people without papers is a cold, hard one, full of bureaucracies who simply do not care about you and do not see you as a person. A permanent residency card can be taken away at any time. But US citizenship is a right that can only be willingly given up.

Is Your Country a Prison?

As my government sends armed troops to the border with Mexico to prevent a caravan of Central American migrants from entering the country, I was struck by a story in the New York Times written by Algerian author Kamel Daoud entitled “Can It Be Illegal to Leave Your Country?” As an international lawyer, this seemingly simple question intrigued me, because the answer is both a resounding “no,” but also a quiet, muted “yes.”

Daoud’s op-ed is about the trans-Mediterranean migration route, one of the most ancient migrant routes in the world, both through, and out of, Algeria. It seems that the Algerian government is disturbed by number of Algerians leaving their native land for the dream of a brighter future in Europe. So many decades fighting a bloody war for liberation from France and now scores of young Algerians are displacing themselves to Europe, singing as they go.

According to Daoud, the government of Algeria has criminalized non-authorized emigration. And, of course, the European Union essentially been criminalizing non-authorized immigration for a long time. In fact, while it is unusual for states to criminalize emigration, the widespread criminalization of immigration is so common, it’s easy to forget that the international system of passports only came into being a hundred years ago. Today, it is common as dirt to find immigrants locked up in jails all over the world.

Under international law, the right to leave one’s country is well established. It is upheld in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and many others. That’s nice. It’s nice that we have the right to leave our countries. Otherwise, our countries risk becoming giant, open-air prisons. Unfortunately, the right to leave your country is of little good if you can’t enter any other country. Perhaps it might be good for people who wish to float on an artificial island in the middle of the ocean.

For the rest of us, the right to leave one’s country carries with it few benefits if it doesn’t bring with it the right to enter another country. And the means by which one can freely travel from one country to another are disappearing. Borders are becoming more secure. The paperwork used to authorize movement has become more invasive. Biometrics are now the norm, promoted even by the UN. Global instruments that ensure the right to cross borders without prior authorization, like the 1951 Refugee Convention, have become ever more circumcised.

Meanwhile, the list of inanimate objects that can move freely between countries only grows: money, cars, toys, clothes, weapons, drugs. All of these things pass with fewer and fewer restrictions. News and information fly across the world in an instant. No one seems to know how to get Russian military intelligence out of my Facebook feed. Yet, I cannot go to Russia without a visa and many Russians couldn’t come here, ever. Each year, monarch butterflies migrate to Mexico and back to Canada. But that caravan of migrants will likely never reach the United States.

Governments tell us that borders, biometric ID cards and movement restrictions make us safer. Do you feel safer?

The Atlantic Monthly Likens the Opening of a Falafel shop in Bamberg, Germany to the Sack of Vienna…in Bizarre, Factually Inaccurate Article

I opened Graeme Wood’s article on so-called “fake” refugees in the Atlantic today with interest. Anyone who works in immigration and refugee law in any country will tell you that the asylum system is broken, based on an unwieldy set of laws mostly drafted after World War II that badly needs an update. Because the system is broken, desperate people must fit their lives into an arbitrary bureaucracy that was created for the world of the early 1950s and not for today’s challenges. Climate change, one of the biggest threats to the entire world, is barely mentioned in the refugee regime. But you go to war with the refugee system you have, not the one you need. In particular, if you are a migrant, you do what you can, as immigrants always have.

In Europe, perhaps unsurprisingly, the response to the inefficiency and contradictory nature of the international refugee system has been to create yet more bureaucracy, as though throwing voice recognition technology, office workers, paperclips and threats at desperate people could ever possibly resolve a system that demands each doctor and scientist and cab driver and farmer fleeing the rubble of Syria be given a separate interview to ask them why they can’t go back, then sends them back to Lebanon because they “weren’t persecuted,” a place where they are forbidden to work, either as a doctor, or scientist, or cab driver, or farmer, or anything else.

After labelling Syrians and other asylum-seekers criminals and terrorists because they used to have jobs and would like to have jobs again one day, Germans are then shocked when other Germans won’t give them jobs. The conversation between refugees and locals always goes like this:

“Why won’t you get a job?”

“But that’s why I came here. To get a job.”

Then, after the refugee finally gives up on finding a job in their field and opens a restaurant, the Germans go out and enjoy tasty Afghani food, or Syrian food, or Congolese food, and have a loud conversation about how their culture is being destroyed. Not, like, actually, physically destroyed like in Syria, but you know, sausage places are being pushed out by tasty Afghani food, a lot of which is too spicy.

Mmmmm…Afghani food. Hang on, I’ll be right back…

But back to Graeme. Graeme begins his article in America by trying to hire a refugee to clean his house. He gets a bunch of resumes from a refugee organization because he is one of the nice Americans, not one of the bad, mean ones, and he wants to do something nice for a refugee. Looking over the resumes, he realizes that one is from a doctor! He laughingly points out that doctors from other countries are now competing for the privilege of scrubbing his toilet! So funny! You can never say the Atlantic doesn’t have a great sense of humor.

Graeme then settles down to read the life stories of the refugees he is considering hiring. I picture him sitting at a dining table, perhaps with a mug of coffee, casually reading over the lives of others and judging their worth. In particular, Graeme is struck by what he calls irregularities in the stories. How could an African doctor not immediately get a job in the United States? Doesn’t that seem weird? This person must not really be a doctor because the United States of America would surely provide such a person with every opportunity in the world. An African doctor would never come here and have to work a cash register in Bridgeport.

There were also people claiming to be refugees from Zambia and Tanzania and Graeme is an expert on both countries, so he knows that there is no war in either place! Their claims must be fraudulent! Never mind that fleeing a war is not necessary for refugee status. Claims of persecution are made on a case by case basis and I can assure Graeme that neither Zambia nor Tanzania are any exception to the general rule that governments often persecute their citizens. But the words “Zambia” and “Tanzania” seem to trigger something in Graeme: maybe not all refugees are what they seem….

Armed with his sudden suspicions, Graeme travels to Germany to see how the nation who brought us the Nazis is dealing with the cultural and social challenges of mass non-white migration. As he discovers, the answer is: they’re managing, but it’s hard.

Graeme begins his section on Germany with the bizarre claim that mass migration only began “seven years ago,” when Syrians began fleeing refugee camps in the Middle East, where they are not allowed to work, to Europe. As someone who has been working in the refugee space for decades, I can tell Graeme that there have been refugee flows and mass migration happening for my entire life. He may remember something called “the Vietnam War” and the “boat people crisis” in this country. He may also remember the Balkans war, the Darfur genocide, the conflict in South Sudan…I could go on, but I won’t.

What was different about the recent migration of Syrian refugees from the Middle East to Europe is that it represented the first time in recent years that Europe received a major flow of non-European refugees over a short period of time. As Graeme himself points out, refugees from the Balkans were white. (Many were also Muslim, but Graeme doesn’t mention this, so I won’t, either.) There were tons of them, but it simply didn’t cause the same sort of reflexive panic that the arrival of a large number of Syrians did.

The arrival of one million orderly, well-educated and relatively well-off Syrians, most of them coming from big cities in what had been a middle income country, seems to have triggered some sort of deep, cultural reaction in Europe, some ancient trauma perhaps dating from the Mongol invasion. No offence to the Europeans, but it’s been a little puzzling to watch their collective freak-out. Almost as puzzling as watching Trump voters from 100% white towns freak out because one million Syrians went to Germany.

Sounding like a Fox News segment, Graeme calls the arrival of Syrian refugees looking for work a “refugee tsunami” and, perhaps most bizarrely, a “bum-rush.” He likens the opening of a falafel shop in Bamberg to the sack of Vienna. I have to go back and read this part of the article several times. Yup. It still says that.

Graeme then spends the rest of the article outlining all of the various bureaucratic systems the Germans have invented to “sort” asylum-seekers into “real refugees” and “fakers” who will, in Graeme’s colorful language, slam the “limo door” on “the fingers of any faker trying to take a refugee’s place.” Why some people should be allowed to get into the limo that is Germany, while others have their fingers cut off is never explored. Why there needs to be a cap on migrants into Germany at all is never explained. Graeme assures us that cutting off a few fingers is simply necessary to stop the return of the Nazis and “the end of a liberal vision for Germany’s future.” Vladimir Putin’s opinion on all this is never discussed.

What disturbed me about this article was less the opinions expressed in it, which are common these days on both the right and the left. After all, white countries don’t want a huge influx of non-white people, much like non-white people probably didn’t enjoy white migration two hundred years ago. I doubt it was easy when all those British people arrived, either, but hey, that’s mass migration for you.

I’m not even bothered by the casual assumption that white people have a god given right to go where every they want, whenever they want, and be welcomed with open arms, but everyone else is expected to stay out of white countries. This is totally typical and is the reason why British people demand beer, hot chips and servile politeness when they drunkenly vomit on their shoes in Bali, but get flaming mad whenever an African person wants to live in the UK and work in a shop.

What bothers me is the glee Graeme takes in cataloging the veiled violence and petty humiliations of the refugee process. Asylum-seekers have their luggage examined, they are forced to tell their stories over and over again, they are interrogated about inconsistencies in their stories, every past indiscretion is questioned. They are poked and prodded and judged, their possessions are confiscated and searched, they are forced to take a battery of tests, treated like criminals and told their lives are worthless a thousand times a day, that they are taking the place of someone more deserving. Graeme makes the German asylum office sound like an episode of Survivor and the Bachelor rolled into one. But here, the prize is to cook kebabs for Germans and listen to them complain about how you are ruining their country with the very kebabs they are eating.

In the Stanford Prison experiment, professors and students at Stanford University chronicled how easy it is to divide humans into two groups and then dehumanize one side. The drafters of the 1951 Refugee Convention tried to create categories of migrants to make it easier for governments to determine who really needed protection and who could probably be safely returned to their home. I don’t think they ever meant to brand failed asylum-seekers as criminals worthy of scorn and mistreatment, but by creating two categories of people, they inadvertently set us down a path that leads strait to a cramped office, a stack of manila files, and an asylum officer being paid by the German government to yell “you lie!!!” at an Afghani woman and her six children. This is how we have chosen to spend our tax dollars in 2018.