REUTERS/Brian Snyder
On Oct. 1, 1977, my parents, my two sisters, and I boarded a Lufthansa plane in the dead of night in Bombay.
We were dressed in new, heavy, uncomfortable clothes and had been seen off by our entire extended family, who had come to the airport with garlands and lamps; our foreheads were anointed with vermilion. We were going to America.
To get the cheapest tickets, our travel agent had arranged a circuitous journey in which we disembarked in Frankfurt, then were to take an internal flight to Cologne, and onward to New York. In Frankfurt, the German border officer scrutinized the Indian passports for my father, my sisters, and me and stamped them. Then he held up my mother’s passport with distaste. “You are not allowed to enter Germany,” he said.
It was a British passport, given to citizens of Indian origin who had been born in Kenya before independence from the British, like my mother. But in 1968 the Conservative Party parliamentarian Enoch Powell made his “Rivers of Blood” speech, warning against taking in brown- and black-skinned people, and Parliament passed an act summarily depriving hundreds of thousands of British passport holders in East Africa of their right to live in the country that conferred their nationality. The passport was literally not worth the paper it was printed on; it had become, in fact, a mark of Cain. The German officer decided that because of her uncertain status, my mother might somehow desert her husband and three small children to make a break for it and live in Germany by herself.
So we had to leave directly from Frankfurt. Seven hours and many airsickness bags later, we stepped out into the international arrivals lounge at John F. Kennedy Airport. A graceful orange-and-black-and-yellow Alexander Calder mobile twirled above us against the backdrop of a huge American flag, and multicolored helium balloons dotted the ceiling, souvenirs of past greetings. As each arrival was welcomed to the new land, the balloons rose to the ceiling to make way for the newer ones. They provided hope to the newcomers: Look, in a few years, with luck and hard work, you, too, can rise here. All the way to the ceiling.
For most of our history as a species, since we evolved from being hunter-gatherers to pastoralists, humans have not been attuned to the radical, continuous movement made possible by modernity. We have mostly stayed in one place, in our villages. Between 1960 and 2015, the overall number of migrants tripled, to 3.3 percent of the world’s population. Today, a quarter of a billion people live in a country different from the one they were born in — one out of every 30 humans. If all the migrants were a nation by themselves, we would constitute the fifth-largest country in the world.
The signal challenge for the world’s richest countries in the 21st century is accommodation of a tremendously variegated influx of migrants. As climate change and political conflict drive ever greater numbers of people from the villages and war zones of the world, the displaced seek sanctuary anywhere they can find it. You think 5 million Syrian refugees are a problem now? What happens when Bangladesh gets flooded and 18 million Bangladeshis have to seek dry land?
John Moore/Getty ImagesAt the same time, there has been a dramatic rise in income inequality. Today, the eight richest individuals, all men, own more than does half of the planet, or 3.6 billion people, combined. The concentration of wealth also leads to a concentration of political power and the redirection of outrage against inequality away from the elites and toward the migrants. When the peasants come for the rich with pitchforks, the safest thing for the rich to do is to say, “Don’t blame us, blame them” — pointing to the newest, the weakest.
What is the difference between the refugee and the migrant? It is a strategic choice of words, to be made at the border when you’re asked what you are; etymology is destiny. You could be sent back if you’re just an “economic” migrant, but you could also be shunned and feared if you’re identified as a refugee. Whether you’re running from something or running toward something, you’re on the run.
The refugee, as the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman said in a 2016 interview with the New York Times, brings with him the specter of chaos and lawlessness that has forced him to leave his homeland. The economic and political disorder that was caused by the orderly rich countries when they sloughed off their redundant populations into colonies and then retreated, leaving behind ill-defined “nation-states.” The refugee, though, suffers from statelessness. He cannot “go home” because his home has been wrecked by banditry or desertification.
So, bearing the burden of his failed state, he comes knocking on the West’s doors, and if he finds one of them ajar, he slips in, not welcomed but barely tolerated. He may have been a surgeon in his alleged nation, but here he is ready to perform any task — clean the bedpans in a hospital where he is more qualified than most of the doctors — but can never hope to be one of them because of the laws protecting their guild from people like him. He must be abject, renouncing claims to an equitable share of the wealth of his new habitation or to any kind of political franchise. All he can hope for is a measure of personal security and the opportunity to remit enough money back to his family so that they can send the eldest boy to a private school near the refugee camp in which they await their chance to be reunited with their father, brother, husband in his marginal existence.
We reject the refugee in the orderly nations because he is the sum of our worst fears, the looming future of the 21st century brought in human form to our borders. Because he wasn’t necessarily impoverished in the country he came from — he might have been a businessman or an engineer just a year ago, before everything changed — he is a reminder that the same thing could happen to us, too. Everything could change radically, irrevocably, suddenly.
The West is being destroyed, not by migrants but by the fear of migrants.
Reuters/Muhammad HamedAnd yet the world’s richest countries can’t figure out what they want to do about migration; they want some migrants and not others. In 2006, the Dutch government tried to make itself unattractive to potential Muslim and African migrants by creating a film, “To the Netherlands,” that included scenes of gay couples kissing and topless women sunbathing. The film was a study aid for a $ 433 compulsory entrance exam for people immigrating for family reunification. Except those making more than $ 54,000 a year, or citizens of rich countries like the United States, for whom the requirement was waived. The film also showed the run-down neighborhoods where immigrants might end up living. There were interviews with immigrants who called the Dutch “cold” and “distant.” The film warned of traffic jams, problems finding a job, and flooding in the low-lying country.
In 2011, the city of Gatineau, Quebec, published a “statement of values” for new immigrants that cautioned against “strong odors emanating from cooking,” which might offend Canadians. It also informed migrants that, in Canada, it was not OK to bribe city officials. Also, that it was best to show up punctually for appointments. It followed a guide published by another Quebec town, Hérouxville, which warned immigrants that stoning someone to death in public was expressly forbidden. The warning was duly noted by the town’s sole immigrant family, which refrained from stoning its women in public.
In Germany, the country’s “welcome culture” changed in one season, from that guilt-expiating September in 2015 to “rapist refugees go home” after the Cologne attacks that same New Year’s Eve. Of all refugees, the most frightening is the womanless male migrant, his eyes hungrily scanning the exposed flesh of the white woman. The words the tabloids and right-wing politicians use to describe these Afghan or Moroccan men are similar to terminology used to describe black men in the United States in the early 20th century: as sex-hungry deviants. In 1900, South Carolina Sen. Benjamin Tillman spoke from the U.S. Senate floor: “We have never believed him [the black man] to be the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.”
Fast-forward to 2017: “Pro-rata, Sweden has taken more young male migrants than any other country in Europe,” said Nigel Farage, a British member of the European Parliament, in February. “And there has been a dramatic rise in sexual crime in Sweden — so much so that Malmo is now the rape capital of Europe.” This claim was quickly debunked: By 2015, the year Sweden took in a record number of asylum-seekers, sex crimes decreased 11 percent compared with the year before.
While it is true that there are horrific stories of organized rings of rapists with immigrant backgrounds — such as a group of Pakistanis in Rotherham, in the U.K., who groomed teenage girls for sex — there’s no evidence that immigrants overall rape or steal at rates higher than the general population. Mug shots of dark-skinned criminals, whether Moroccan or Mexican, somehow strike more terror in the Western imagination than those of homegrown white rapists. The fear is primal, tribal: They’re coming for our women.
Driven by this fear, voters are electing, in country after country, leaders who are doing incalculable long-term damage: Donald Trump in the United States, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Andrzej Duda and his Law and Justice party in Poland. It was fear of migrants that led British voters to vote for Brexit, the biggest own goal in the country’s history.
The phobia of migrants can be the greatest threat to democracy. Look at Germany under Chancellor Angela Merkel, with its flourishing economy and democratic institutions, and then take a look at its neighbor Poland, whose ruling party just attempted to take over its judiciary, or Hungary, where Orban has destroyed the country’s free press. It shows that when countries safeguard the rights of their minorities, they also safeguard, as a happy side effect, the rights of their majorities. The obverse is also true: When they don’t safeguard the rights of their minorities, every other citizen’s rights are in peril.
Associated Press/Craig RuttleLast summer, I drove out to the Hungarian-Serbian border with a volunteer for a church-based organization providing supplies to refugees. I had been in Hungary for a week studying its attempt to win the crown of Europe’s most hostile country for refugees. All over the country, there were blue posters bearing questions like, “Did you know? Since the beginning of the immigration crisis, more than 300 have died in terrorist attacks in Europe,” and “Did you know? Brussels wants to settle a whole city’s worth of illegal immigrants in Hungary,” and “Did you know? Since the beginning of the immigration crisis, the harassment of women has risen sharply in Europe.” The government was urging its citizens to vote in a referendum against accepting an EU quota of refugees: 1,294 refugees in 2016, for a country with almost 10 million people.
We crossed the Serbian border at Roszke and spent four hours looking for a road to get to the cluster of tents we’d seen right by the side of the highway near the border. We drove on dirt roads in the depopulated countryside, past orchards of apple, peach, and plum trees. From the car window, I picked a purple plum off a branch. It wasn’t quite ripe yet.
A woman told us which road to take to the “Pakistani camp.” We rattled down a rutted road by the superhighway and came up to the camp. It was an instant South Asian slum, but with backpacking tents instead of plastic sheets, just like the Sziget music festival I’d just come from. The festival had been filled with golden children, the flowers of white Europe, who, on payment of the $ 363-per-person entry fee, could luxuriate in their own tent city for a week.
There were children in the refugee camp, too, but younger and brown: preteens and toddlers on the run with their families. They played cricket amid the garbage. It cost 1 euro to use the toilet at the border. So people from the long lines of cars waiting to cross used the bushes instead, which served as the migrants’ temporary home, where they slept and ate, waiting for the doors of Europe to open.
We opened the trunk of our car and handed out water bottles, chocolates, socks, and underwear. A group of men came over; when they identified me as Indian, they shook my hand and spoke to me in Urdu about their travels. One of them was from the Pakistani city of Lahore, where there were bombings and killings. He’d been here for just a few days. The Hungarians wouldn’t let him in even though he had no desire to stay in that country; he wanted to go on to Germany, Sweden. The Serbians wouldn’t let him go back to Macedonia. “It’s closed in the front. It’s closed from the back,” he said.
A large black vehicle pulled up, and two big Serbian policemen dressed in black stepped out. “Please go,” they told us; we didn’t have official permission to visit the camp. They reminded us that the Hungarians were worse than the Serbians: “They have drones and cameras” monitoring the camp from the other side of the border fence.
For the few refugees who make it over the fence, it’s no promised land. At the time, any migrant caught within roughly five miles of the border would be arrested and deported. The Hungarian provision has since been expanded to include migrants detained in any part of the country. In November 2015, Orban told Politico, “All the terrorists are basically migrants.” Like much else coming out of his mouth, this statement was factually wrong: Many of the perpetrators of terrorism, in Europe and elsewhere, are native-born, like Timothy McVeigh and Anders Behring Breivik.
Eight months later, he turned the statement on its head, broadening it: All migrants are terrorists. “Every single migrant poses a public security and terror risk.”
NOW WATCH: Here’s what happens when two hurricanes collide
