CAN EMIGRATION BE ILLEGAL?
When people flee bombing by Russian or American (or French or British or Saudi) warplanes, are they “illegal emigrants”?
If it is not illegal to flee war, how can these victim be described as “illegal immigrants” when they seek asylum?
The Boat People of today are refugees desperate to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe.
Our policies create the migrants and our politicians declare them “illegal.” Instead of making them illegal, we should welcome the migrants and set them to work to rebuild their lives and to build our economies.
Would anyone not want their family to escape death by bombing? Did Iraqi families do something illegal when in 2003, they fled from Baghdad to escape the Donald Rumsfeld “Shock & Awe” to hide in Syria or in Jordan?
In 2001 a bunch of Saudi citizens (and one Egyptian) flew airplanes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. George W. Bush and the Pentagon – for reasons I have never been able to fathom - decided to bomb the Taliban in Afghanistan, in retaliation for what? Most Afghans assumed that the Russians had returned to bomb them. Very few Afghans had ever heard of New York, let alone the World Trade Center. Most Afghans cannot tell the difference between a Russian and an American. When millions of them fled into Pakistan, or Iran to escape the Russians or the Americans, did they do something illegal?
Historians judge the USA’s Marshall Plan the best foreign policy ever because it built lasting peace after war in Europe.
We need every rich nation to establish a Marshall Plan for refugees, giving them the chance to rebuild their lives – lives that our governments have often destroyed with our wars.
When Donald Trump and Joe Biden withdrew their troops the end of America’s longest war (and defeat by the Taliban), hundreds of Afghans fled Afghanistan because they had worked for US or British or other NATO allies. Was their flight from Afghanistan “illegal”? Had most of these Afghans not been promised asylum by the NATO soldiers they had been supporting?
The same question can – and should – be asked about the refugees who fled Saudi aggression in Syria and Yemen (where the USA supported Saudi military actions); and about citizens who are fleeing Russian bombs in Ukraine; and the Africans who are fleeing bullets and starvation from Al Qaida’s extreme violence across the Sahara and the Sahel (also funded by Saudi and Arab Gulf sources).
And how about Palestinians fleeing the deliberate and genocidal destruction of Gaza by the Israeli military? The mis-named “IDF” which failed as a ‘defense force” when Hamas attacked Israel on 7th October 2023 and killed more than 1000 Israelis), is now taking revenge on Gaza. The IDF have killed 40,000 Palestinians: not so much a “defense force”, it would seem, as an military agency for genocidal reprisal and the murder of 12,000 children. Who – apart from Netanyahu the War Criminal - would describe Palestinians leaving Gaza as “illegals”?
Israel destroys Gaza – a picture from nbc news
Few of us would describe emigration as “illegal” when families are fleeing death and destruction, yet when these refugees cross a national frontier, our hypocritical politicians classify them as “illegal immigrants.”
Hypocritical politicians? Of course: most of the migrants they describe as “illegal” are simply fleeing conflicts fed by NATO countries and their Arab allies.
So where should the refugees go? How can they become illegal if their need to save their lives was legal, especially in cases where the place refugees want to land are the countries that destroyed their own homes? Since NATO countries fighting the Taliban occupied Afghanistan and destroyed much of it, NATO countries should be accepting Afghan refugees fleeing the Taliban regime as valued friends and guests – not as “illegals”.
Migrants are dreamers. With their futures destroyed at home - and often their houses were destroyed so they have no place to call home - therefore they have to dream of a creating a new future elsewhere. Having destroyed their homes, Western nations are now destroying their dreams.
A refugee camp in Bamako, for families fleeing ethnic violence and banditry in Central Mali.