One month later, Trump’s threats remain unfulfilled as Mexican shelters sit empty along border
The scenes in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico and in other border cities — from Tijuana to Reynosa —underscore the setbacks thus far of the president’s promise to launch the largest deportation operation in U.S. history
'It’s a place where they try to destroy you': why concentration camps are still with us
Mass internment camps did not begin or end with the Nazis – today they are everywhere from China to Europe to the US. How can we stop their spread?
by Daniel Trilling Thursday 2 April 2020
At the start of the 21st century, the following things did not exist. In the US, a large network of purpose-built immigration prisons, some of which are run for profit. In western China, “political education” camps designed to hold hundreds of thousands of people, supported by a high-tech surveillance system. In Syria, a prison complex dedicated to the torture and mass execution of civilians. In north-east India, a detention centre capable of holding 3,000 people who may have lived in the country for decades but are unable to prove they are citizens. In Myanmar, rural encampments where thousands of people are being forced to live on the basis of their ethnicity. On small islands and in deserts at the edges of wealthy regions – Greece’s Aegean islands, the Negev Desert in Israel, the Pacific Ocean near Australia, the southern Mediterranean coastline – various types of large holding centres for would-be migrants.
The scale and purpose of these places vary considerably, as do the political regimes that have created them, but they share certain things in common. Most were established as temporary or “emergency” measures, but have outgrown their original stated purpose and become seemingly permanent. Most exist thanks to a mix of legal ambiguity – detention centres operating outside the regular prison system, for instance – and physical isolation. And most, if not all, have at times been described by their critics as concentration camps.
We tend to associate the idea of concentration camps with their most extreme instances – the Nazi Holocaust, and the Soviet Gulag system; genocide in Cambodia and Bosnia. But the disturbing truth is that concentration camps have been widespread throughout recent history, used to intern civilians that a state considers hostile, to control the movement of people in transit and to extract forced labour. The author Andrea Pitzer, in One Long Night, her recent history of concentration camps, estimates that at least one such camp has existed somewhere on Earth throughout the past 100 years.
Police cordon off the city centre around West George Street in Glasgow after the fatal stabbing incident at the Park Inn Hotel on 26 June 2020. Photograph: Robert Perry
From Sudan to the Park Inn: the tragic story of a migrant’s killing
A mass stabbing in Glasgow in June revealed the plight of asylum seekers crammed into hotels during lockdown
Daniel Trilling Sun 18 Oct 2020 08.00 BST
On the last Friday of June, at about midday, Badreddin Abadlla Adam left his room at the Park Inn hotel in Glasgow, walked down to reception, and stabbed six people. The 28-year-old, an asylum seeker from Sudan who had been placed in the hotel as part of the UK government’s emergency response to the coronavirus pandemic, stabbed and seriously injured three other residents, two staff members and a policeman who arrived on the scene. Adam was shot dead by armed officers shortly afterwards.
The Iuventa ran hundreds of missions to save migrants from drowning off the coast of Libya. But after Europe cracked down on migration, its crew found themselves facing prosecution
by Daniel Trilling Tuesday 22 September 2020
As patrol boats with flashing blue lights surrounded the Iuventa, just outside the port of Lampedusa on the evening of 1 August 2017, its crew were more annoyed than alarmed. For three days, the old fishing trawler, crewed by volunteers from the German NGO Jugend Rettet (Youth Rescue), had answered a string of requests from the Italian coastguard that to them made no sense. “This madness hopefully will soon be over,” read a message sent from the ship’s bridge to Jugend Rettet base camp shortly after 10pm.
In the summer of 2017, two years on from the peak of Europe’s refugee crisis, smugglers in Libya were still sending hundreds of people a day to sea in unsafe rubber boats, and the Iuventa’s crew wanted to be where the action was. In a patch of sea just off the coast of north Africa, about a dozen NGO ships were searching for boats in distress – a direct challenge, as many of them saw it, to European governments that had scaled back state-run rescue efforts.
Yet the Iuventa had been following instructions that drew it further away from the rescue zone and closer to Italian territorial waters. According to the ship’s records, the Italian coastguard first told the crew to rendezvous with an Italian navy ship to collect two men found adrift at sea, and deliver them to another. The second ship never turned up. Then they were told to look for a blue and white fishing boat with 50 people on board, apparently foundering in the sea close to Lampedusa. As night fell on 1 August, after a day spent searching the waves in vain, a message came through: call off your search and proceed into port.
It was the third time in a few months that the ship had been ordered into the harbour at Lampedusa. In just over a year, the Iuventa – crewed by a group of young, motivated people “who could not stand to see the situation in the Mediterranean any longer”, as one put it to me – rescued more than 14,000 people. Most of these rescues were coordinated by the Italian coastguard, but the relationship was increasingly strained. The Iuventa’s revolving crew of volunteers were outspoken critics of Europe’s border policies, and the small, agile ship took more risks than some of the larger NGO vessels, sailing as close as possible to Libyan waters in order to be able to rescue people from unsafe boats sooner. As one Italian media outlet put it, the ship was “like a sort of Berliner squat out in the middle of the sea – very well organised, radical and antagonistic”.
How the refugee crisis created two myths of Angela Merkel
Daniel Trilling Tuesday 21 September 2021
W
hen Angela Merkel steps down as chancellor once Germany’s elections later this month produce a new government, the tributes will centre on her role as the figurehead of western liberalism; an island of stability, caution and openness in an era marked by turbulence and far-right reaction. She will be remembered “for serious work, stable leadership and having a gift for political compromise”, wrote Ishaan Tharoor in the Washington Post last week. When she faced off against Donald Trump after his inauguration in 2017, some newspapers dubbed her the new “leader of the free world”.
As far-right politicians reach positions of power, their influence is coming to bear.’ Illustration: Eleanor Shakespeare
The irrational fear of migrants carries a deadly price for Europe
Daniel Trilling
Thursday 28 June 2018
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hen people rescued from the Mediterranean reach a European port, once they have been screened for security threats and communicable diseases, their own medical needs are at last attended to. For those who have fled Libya, a typical list of health problems might include: cuts and bruises from being beaten; skin burns from the sun or from engine oil in the smuggler’s boat they were crammed into; respiratory infections and stomach conditions from overcrowded and filthy living conditions; complications arising from pregnancy or sexual assault; leg and foot injuries consistent with being thrown from buildings; or severe psychological trauma. These have the same effects on the body and the mind regardless of whether the person experiencing them made their journey because of war, or because they were duped into it by traffickers, or because they were looking for work.
The Displaced; Migrant Brothers; Lights in the Distance – reviews
Three powerful, conscience-stirring books use personal testimony to help us see the refugee crisis through the eyes of its victims
Tim Adams Sunday 6 May 2018
This September it will be three years since the body of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy in red T-shirt and blue shorts, was washed ashore on a beach in Turkey. The picture that ran on the front pages of newspapers across Europe, and prompted calls for politicians to confront with all urgency what even the Sun called the “biggest crisis since the second world war”, was perhaps the only moment in recent memory in which popular empathy for refugees clearly outweighed disregard or antipathy.
Alan Kurdi
For a month or more, maybe, after the picture ran, and Alan lay face down in all of our consciences, there was a feeling in European capitals that a different approach was desperately needed; several cities saw rallies in which crowds carried banners reading “Refugees Welcome Here”. In November, however, the Paris attacks happened, and the popular mood once again hardened against “migrants”. That new year the lurid reports of mass sexual assaults from crowds of young men of “north African appearance” in German cities were used to justify a far more alarmist rhetoric, which culminated in the calculated and algorithmed scaremongering leading up to the EU referendum. Weaponised borders became a critical and mythologised issue; deliberately “hostile environments” for “aliens” a matter of political pride. In the 24 months after Alan’s body was discovered on the sand, 8,500 people drowned or disappeared trying to cross the Mediterranean to a place of greater safety; had it not been for the volte face in humanity of the Italian coast guard, the number would have been far higher. Comparable numbers will have perished this year, but not one of their pictures has made lasting front-page news.
Those lost people on Europe’s seas are just the tiniest fraction of those now permanently adrift. When Nigel Farage gurned in front of his “Breaking Point” poster, the aim was to suggest a faceless and ceaseless army of otherness, and in terms of numbers at least, the portrait – if not its pitiless intent – was correct. By the time of Alan’s death, there were more displaced people in the world than at the end of the second world war: 65 million, an uprooted nation almost exactly the size of Britain. These people raise many questions, but a central one remains this: how do you bring the story of their lives home? And how, without that connection, without a picture of Alan, can the relatively settled population of the world, living inside rather than beyond borders, be encouraged or inspired to find the collective will to offer these strangers some kind of life?
These three books, each one committed passionately to those questions, try to answer them in different ways. Viet Thanh Nguyen attempts it by way of recent historical example, to show how waves of migration and assimilation have been the natural order of things – not a historical anomaly – and to reveal how cultures, like individuals, depend for their life on novelty and openness. He argues that those who arrive last invariably work hardest, create most fervently, inject most imagination – because their lives depend on it.
Nguyen, like the other writers he has invited to tell their tales here, speaks from experience. He was a refugee himself before he became a writer. He arrived in America with his parents, aged four, after the fall of Saigon in 1975. By that age he had known what it was like – though he cannot remember – to walk 184km, to see paratroopers hanging dead in trees along the road, to see his mother and father fight their way on to a boat while others were being shot, to be labelled “other” in military camps in Guam and the Philippines and Pennsylvania, and to settle finally in San Jose, where his parents, who ran a grocery store, were threatened several times by men with guns, once shot, and eventually forced from the neighbourhood they had helped to revitalise by the construction of a brand-new city hall, paid for with taxes from Silicon Valley businesses almost exclusively begun by entrepreneurial migrants and their children.
Syrian children smile from a pickup truck, as they come to safety after fleeing areas controlled by the jihadist group Islamic State. Photograph: Delil Souleiman/AFP/Getty Images
Nguyen’s parents, along the way, saved enough to send him to college. Forty years on from his epic odyssey from Saigon he is now chair of the comparative literature department at the University of Southern California. His debut novel, The Sympathiser, won a Pulitzer prize. Last year he was awarded a MacArthur genius grant. His collection of life stories from other refugees who have gone on to become celebrated writers – Marina Lewycka, born in a displaced persons camp in Ukraine before settling in the UK, Aleksandar Hemon, a Chicagoan from Bosnia, Dina Nayeri born in Iran, raised in America, now living in Britain, and many others – tells us something that I imagine we all intuitively know: that those who have journeyed furthest have invariably gained the most perspective.
The stories are beautifully, and often angrily, told, and felt, and add up collectively to documentary proof of the possibilities – of empathy and humanity – that even the most brutal of welcomes can bring. Unlike nearly all of the 65 million refugee stories currently on offer, however, these are defiantly survivors’ stories – they come with happy endings of settling and prospering, even if delayed by a generation. Nguyen reminds us that the instinct to close borders is a choice, not a historical rule, and that there have been moments in all national psychologies when “we have achieved the best of ourselves in our ability to welcome the other, to clothe the stranger, to feed the hungry”. Mostly, those times have been when we have collectively remembered that justice is not the same as law.
Changing the cycle, dealing with the “refugee issue” in that sense, requires a lasting shift in philosophy more than a temporary tweak of policy. Patrick Chamoiseau was born in Martinique and lived in France before returning to the island. He writes in a Creolised French all his own. His short, lyrical book, Migrant Brothers, was prompted by his growing personal knowledge of “hundreds of people – who had overcome deserts, oceans, walls, lines of barbed wire, checkpoints, who had survived nightmarish camps – only to crash against police violence in the very heart of Paris”. Chamoiseau looks for a framework of thinking that might give our consciousness a jolt to upend that narrative, to offer a manifesto “for a global humanity”. He argues for the “relational ecosystem”, for a “sentimography of globality” for “the open soul of borders”. His abstract task is heartfelt and sometimes profound, but ultimately doomed, you feel, to end in sentences like these, lost somewhat in translation: “The relational imaginary makes globality the domain of conscience. The latter can then without a shield take up the adventure of living in the fire of life…”
While the hoped-for expansion of consciousness takes place, more and more lives are lived in detention and degradation. The journalist Daniel Trilling, long a key British writer on these issues, takes a more direct approach to making “globality a domain of conscience”; he goes out and reports on the people who are held in awful protracted limbo on Europe’s margins.
Rohingya refugees gather behind a barbed-wire fence in a temporary settlement in a “no man’s land” border zone between Myanmar and Bangladesh, April 2018. Photograph: Ye Aung Thu/AFP/Getty Images
His brilliantly researched and written Lights in the Distance is, above all, a book of witness – to add to those by Patrick Kingsley (The New Odyssey) and Charlotte McDonald-Gibson (Cast Away). Trilling resists much editorialising, though he knows all the arguments inside out, in favour of bringing his reader as close as possible to the actual circumstances of those who have found their way to Calais, or to Catania in Sicily or to London or to Athens, only to find themselves condemned to occupy space, rather than live. He finds out among a hundred other details both how exactly you cling to the bottom of a lorry on a motorway at night, and how you develop the desperation to attempt it. How families survive and don’t survive when “quarantined” interminably, fighting for status as human beings, and unable to work. And how shreds of hope can survive almost any level of intractable despair.
Trilling grew up hearing stories from his own grandmother, Teresa, twice a refugee, first from Russia, then from Nazi Germany, who arrived in London in 1939 clutching her only book, Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists. She thrived and lived to be 94. Her sanctuary – her welcome – was made possible, he argues, not by governments but by pressure on governments. He makes the case not only to resist the militarisation of immigration policy but also the “hierarchy of suffering” that pervades the debate on human rights, or the rhetoric that sees only “economic units” rather than people with real experiences.
Like the others, Trilling’s is not at all a hopeful book; we are living in a moment in which walls are going up rather than coming down – in 1990, 15 countries had walls or fences at their borders, by 2016 that number had risen to 70. But it ends with a set of questions that we all would do well to ask: “Why should anyone have to put up with these conditions? What set of interests does it serve to regulate their movement? And how likely is it that states that treat migrants with such callousness will behave similarly toward their own citizens?”
The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives Edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen is published by Abrams (£18.99).
