News from Britain:
Sir Keir Starmer has killed off the Rwanda deportation plan on the first day of his premiership
Labour insiders confirmed to The Telegraph that the scheme to deport migrants who arrived in the UK illegally to Rwanda was effectively “dead”
Read more ????https://t.co/B3JyXMNLKB pic.twitter.com/cl7nsgRcSl
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) July 5, 2024
Perhaps you don't know what this is all about. It's been a big deal in Britain for the past couple of years but I first heard of it only about a month ago. I was so gobsmacked that I had to read two or three articles before I convinced myself it wasn't some sort of late April Fool's joke.
It wasn't. Rishi Sunak seriously had a plan to cut down on illegal immigration by shipping migrants off to Rwanda. He had hundreds of millions of pounds budgeted for this, partly to bribe the Rwandan government and partly to pay for airfare and housing in Kigali.
In the end, something like two migrants were flown to Rwanda and the housing there mostly sits empty. Now it always will.
This whole scheme sounded like one of those Donald Trump fever dreams that he'd blather about but never actually follow through on. That's the danger of a future Trump who's more competent. He might really try to put Trump's dumbest ideas into practice.
This post is way off base. There's no way Donny would have given them housing or kept the Rwandan government in the loop.
Right? If you give them stuff it just reduces their incentive to work like the rest of us.
Sigh. I just don't see any evidence of this tactic working so far. People with ambition to better their lives will find a ladder, even if it isn't obvious. People without ambition (and that's most of them) will just get more and more unhappy until they eventually revolt and burn their government down (see history).
the ron de santis trafficking humans to martha's vineyard piece.
Respectfully, the Rwanda scheme was a lot more legally defensible and morally sound that either Trump's or Biden's actions at the southern US border.
Broadly, the reasoning is that if you arrive in a safe country that country has a legal and moral obligation to process your asylum claim (this is where both Trump and Biden's 'freeze' fall down). Assuming the claim is valid asylum must be granted in a safe country - but not necessarily the one the claim was made in. in some categories, particularly those fleeing, say, Afghanistan, there's potentially nothing unsafe about Rwanda.
Now the scheme fell apart in court wrangling over whether Rwanda was safe or not (for a particular set of people claiming asylum) and that's the right and proper function of the courts. But there's nothing inherently wrong with the legal or moral thinking behind the scheme.
The key point is that asylum seekers should be pulled into the system immediately to protect them and thereafter they must be kept safe.
The Republican/Trump plan is to mass deport 20 million people from this country. The plan is to use the National Guard in red states to go to blue states and round them up and place them into detention camps for “processing”, then deported. Please don’t act like Biden and Trump are equally bad.
Again, respectfully, deportations are either legal and moral, or they are not. The scale is irrelevant.
They also aren't necessarily a violation of a major international treaty - simply refusing to process asylum claims is.
I'm not familar enough with the US version of the ECHR (retained in domestic UK law post brexit), but clearly in some cases 'right to family life' would prevent the deportation of some individuals with close US citizen relatives - which is, again, a matter for the courts on a case-by-case basis.
Bluntly, if you do not like these things, win arguments and win elections. The backstop against many bad ideas is not law or Constitution but unpopularity and the electoral defeat that implies.
Trying to win an election. Not being helped by people who see some sort of moral equivalency between the policies of Trump and Biden.
Also, scale is relevant. It will include millions who have been here for 20 years or more.
Read this to bring yourself up to speed on what Trump is proposing:
https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/trumps-deportation-army?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=1ss7ww&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Republicans will have no trouble using your arguments regarding scale. The idea that anyone would even want to come to America to seek asylum with the kind of environment being proposed is laughable. And I suppose that’s a “feature” of the proposal.
Jacumba was an open air detention center where migrants were not provided food, water, or shelter despite being held in the desert 80 miles from the nearest town. That was under Biden's admin. Biden also defended and tried to reinstate the Title 42 policies. Biden has continued a number of the remain in Mexico policies and has continued the use of the private detention centers. The major substantive difference between Biden and Trump has been in terms of rhetoric rather than actual humanity. It's because they both seem to think that minimizing the number of asylum claims heard is more important than treating people like people.
No, the major substantive difference is that the Biden administration hasn’t routinely separated thousands of children from their parents, which Trump did. Biden has set up procedures to try to reunite families. KD is whistling past the graveyard thinking that TFG is too incompetent to do damage on the former scale, and more, should he regain the office.
And Trump reduced refugee resettlement* to an all time low of a maximum of 15K per year, while Biden increased it to the statutory maximum of 125k per year. Say what you will about Biden, equating his policies with Trumps is simply inaccurate, and Trump’s return to office will mean hundreds of thousands fewer refugee admissions over the next four years.
*refugee resettlement, NOT asylum. https://www.unhcr.org/us/what-we-do/resettlement-united-states/information-unhcr-resettlement
Immigration is not a winning topic for anyone, which is the point being made. Nobody wins elections promising to open the doors and we'll all share nicely, unless you have a booming economy and increasing living standards.
All of the first world countries have declining living standards and blaming the immigrants is stage one of where ever it is we are going. Stage two is where people start looking for enemies closer to home, frequently those of different ethnicity or religion. When you get to stage two, it's time to get out because they're coming for you at some point.
Hmm... to try to cut to the heart of it, you think that it's morally wrong to remove someone who's built a life in the US over a long period even though they had no right of residency to do so (?)
I just... don't agree with that. In particular if you build a life without regularising your status, you're accepting some risk.
Goddamn, something about Kevin Drum’s blog seems to draw all the assholes out into the sunshine, doesn’t it?
So according to you, there's no such thing as, say, genocide, amirite? After all, "scale doesn't matter". I give your further statements the consideration they deserve.
No, sorry, that was a bit unclear. Murder is wrong, therefore, mass murder is worse. Racially or otherwise genotyped murder is wrong, therefore, genocide is worse.
But if the act at the microscale is not morally wrong it's hard to see how it's repetition can make it morally wrong.
has anyone considered the economic costs of removing 20 million people (in a country of 330 million)? dumping 6% of our consumers out of the economy won't lead to more jobs, or even more jobs for the right kind of people (white, nativeborn, cishetero men). it will mean fewer jobs, at lower pay. big corporations will be able to pare down staff with lower patronage, & small business, like restaurants & lawn service, et. al., will crater as their offbook staff are back in guatemala, the philippines, myanmar, & cameroon.
"as anyone considered the economic costs of removing 20 million people..."
It is not a real plan anyway. It is just an excuse to build a Trump-loyal militia, so he can use it to suppress any opposition.
the presumptive portland mayor elect "mexican tulsi gabbard" rene gonzalez deputizing the patriots pride to forcibly remove &/or summarily execute the homeless piece.
Of course its cruel, unworkable, and will result in a humanitarian (and economic) catastrophe of historic proportions. But the thought of heavily-armed soldiers stuffing thousands of crying families into train cars headed back to Mexico or wherever gives bigots and assholes (aka MAGA voters) a chubby, so Trump's turning the xenophobia and immigrant-bashing up to 11.
Wrong. The UK supreme court ruled flatly that Rwanda was not a safe country. The government had overruled warnings from its own civil servants that it wasn't. Rwanda has never settled anyone from the Middle East, and there are consistent reports of abuse to refugees from Burundi and DR Congo.
Sunak's government actually threatened to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (originally written by British diplomats, to prevent Nazi Germany from happening again) just so he could go ahead with the scheme. He was dissuaded by, I kid you not, the Rwandan government itself, worried about the effect on ITS reputation if the UK was seen as withdrawing from a major international treaty on its behalf.
I mean, you're not wrong, but that was a case about a specific group of asylum seekers to be granted asylum in Rwanda, and, as you say, the court ruled that it would not be safe for them.
I'll say clearly that I'm horrified that the government tried to pass legislation to overrule the court. that was completely inappropriate.
But it's not necessarily the case that the ruling would've been the same for a different group of asylum seekers.
Weak tea. If Burundi and DRC refugees aren’t safe …
Well... its plausible that local conflicts spill over the borders into Rwanda because of the ethenicities and relative porosity of the borders involved.
I'll note that the Starmer scheme, to negotiate an arrangement where asylum seekers are sent to European third countries, is not legally distinct (in the abstract) from the Rwanda scheme.
It doesn't taken them thousands of miles away removed from the economic zone they're in and leave them without communication.
Britain isn't in the European economic zone, and Rwanda has phones and Internet.
are you a streetteamer for ratemyskyperoom-dot-kigali-dot-com?)
Asylum is a Cold War concept:
World War II displaced at least 7 million people in Europe. In response, U.S. lawmakers created the nation's first formal refugee and asylum policies. The Displaced Persons Act of 1948 resettled some 400,000 European refugees over four years. Meanwhile, the newly formed United Nations recognized the right of refugees to seek asylum in other countries. In 1951, the U.N. defined a refugee as anyone who cannot return to his or her home country "owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion." The U.S. signed on to the U.N.'s refugee protocol in 1967, finally creating a comprehensive system for granting asylum with the Refugee Act of 1980.
Who received asylum?
Mostly people fleeing communist countries. Since 1975, the U.S. has accepted roughly 3.3 million refugees, the vast majority from Cuba, Vietnam, and the former Soviet Union. Asylum seekers from U.S.-backed right-wing regimes, however, were often rejected as "economic migrants." During the 1980s, the U.S. Coast Guard detained 23,000 Haitians fleeing Jean-Claude Duvalier's repressive regime. Of those, only eight were granted asylum. The same decade, nearly 1 million Central Americans crossed the border fleeing civil wars in the region. Only 3 percent of asylum applications were approved for Guatemalans and Salvadorans in 1984, compared with 40 percent for Afghans fleeing the Soviet invasion and 100 percent for Cuban asylum seekers. This glaring disparity sparked the Sanctuary Movement, which led to Congress creating the Temporary Protected Status program in 1990 for people affected by armed conflicts or national disasters. Subsequent legislation allowed many Haitian and Central American migrants to apply for permanent residence.
That was informative, thank you.
That's a super low bar you' e set, but it still wasn't legally defensible.
Kidnapping people and shipping them thousands of miles away seems pretty cruel.
Denmark also planned to do this. I think they came up with the idea first, but have also dropped it in favor of sending asylum seekers to a poorer EU country instead.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/un-committee-criticizes-denmark-third-country-plans-asylum-seekers-2023-11-28/
Given Rwanda's periodic stirring if the very violent divisions in Eastern Congo, it is hard to claim that Rwanda will remain a safe place over the long haul.
That thing you were worried about (the UK government's cruel plan to deport people to Rwanda)? It's not a big deal to Kevin Drum (because he hadn't even been aware of it until recently).
That is not what he said.
Not knowing about something doesn't mean someone approves of it.
Very dishonest.
it was a signature policy of the uk conservatives post-cameron & may. each pm from boris johnson on was looking to unload their wogs in deepest darkest africa.
Not to say I support the plan, but my understanding was to remove the incentives from people who want to get into Britain from paying trafficker's. If they knew they would instead wind up in Rwanda, they wouldn't pay to get to the UK. Like here asylum seekers stay in the country while their case goes through the courts. With this plan, they would be sent to Rwanda while their case went though the courts.
Compared to the U.S., Europe sees a higher proportion of immigrants from Africa. I would think, if they wanted to end up in Rwanda, they could go there directly.
They want to go to the UK. But the UK's obligation is to send bona fide refugees to a safe place, not to admit then to the UK.
Bona fide refugees should be happy to be safe. If they do not end up in UK, well tough luck.
My reaction to this was, "wow, that's something that differentiates Starmer from the typical Conservative politician" It was getting hard to find.
I doubt the fact that Sunak is not American would prevent trump from making him his VP.
bojo was born in nyc.
he has the jus soli citizenship (that trump & the bois at project 2025 want to take away).
Yeah, Kevin, I had exactly the same reaction as you did when I first heard about this: Was this some kind of sick joke?
I heard about this quite a while ago, but I read the Guardian. Mass migration from one place to another is fraught with challenges. The places they flee are shit shows with no hope of ever becoming a decent place to live. The places to which they flee risk becoming shit shows as a result. Oh well.
And if you don’t think the USA, UK, and EU are becoming shit shows then… have at it.
uk, yes; brevity is taking the britons back to the deprivation of the postwar period that produced the likes of ozzy osbourne.
the us, maybe; assuming donald trump, stephen miller, & proudboi wonder john mc entee get back to the white house.
the eu, nah; the only shithole countries are places like hungary & slovakia, & by some measures poland & italy, countries that have allowed their putin-aligned revanchists to install crony & klepto crapitalist regimes.
*brexit not brevity
The US Census Has Some projections for the population by 2100.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023/population-projections.html
Total Population
By 2100, the total population in the middle series is projected to reach 366 million compared to the projection for the high-immigration scenario, which puts the population at 435 million. The population for the middle series increases to a peak at 370 million in 2080 and then begins to decline, dropping to 366 million in 2100. The high-immigration scenario increases every year and is projected to reach 435 million by 2100.
The low-immigration scenario is projected to peak at around 346 million in 2043 and decline thereafter, dropping to 319 million in 2100.
Though largely illustrative, the zero-immigration scenario projects that population declines would start in 2024 in the complete absence of foreign-born immigration. The population in this scenario is projected to be 226 million in 2100, roughly 107 million lower than the 2022 estimate.
The architect of the plan, Suella Braverman, sadly retained her seat.