By Bradley DEVLIN

America’s current immigration regime, created and willed into being by our elites, simply manned at the moment by the Biden administration, finds itself morally responsible for yet another tragedy.

A thought that might jump into someone’s mind is the conditions in migrant detention facilities have led to an untold number of deaths. Substitute “Biden” for “Trump” in that first sentence, and it sounds exactly like allegations you heard hurled at the Trump administration from 2018 on. (Remember “kids in cages”?) But, while conditions are rather poor in migrant detention facilities around the Southern border, as they are at nearly every refugee camp in the world, this post isn’t about anything like that.

More than 50 Central American migrants, likely heading for the U.S.-Mexico border, were killed and nearly 100 more injured after a truck rolled in Chiapas, Mexico on Friday. The trailer truck was reportedly stuffed with upwards of 150 people when it turned too sharply at high speeds, causing the vehicle to flip, then crash into a pedestrian bridge. The carnage left bodies strewn about in the street, as the trailer reportedly ripped the container in half and tore off its roof.

This single, human tragedy is responsible for nearly twice as many lives than people who have died in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities since 2018—most of them likely due to illnesses or circumstances suffered prior to ICE custody. What’s more, this crash is far from an isolated event. Multiple crashes taking the lives of double-digit numbers of suspected migrants in transit to, or within, America’s borders have reportedly occurred in the past year.

Chiapas, the most southern state of Mexico, borders Guatemala. The other Northern Triangle countries lie only a short ways away. As migration to the U.S. has become more popular from Northern Triangle countries via land routes over the past few years, Chiapas has become a hotbed of migrant activities. Large caravans that seek to make their way from Guatemala to Mexico, and then to the United States, often seek passage through Chiapas. While the state may not be as violent as some other hotbeds of criminal activity in Mexico, Chiapas sees its share of criminality, such as human trafficking, stemming from the flow of migrants. That flow has been stable since Biden’s inauguration and has remained relatively stable since, despite initial efforts by the Biden administration to convince the public that the record-breaking numbers of migrants flooding across our southern border was just part of another seasonal surge. The Biden administration and its allies in the corporate media, abandoned that effort long ago. Now they think it best to ignore it.

Last time I brought up the topic of immigration, also on TAC’s State of the Union Blog, I brought up an anecdote about an interaction I had with a water taxi driver I had in Cabo San Lucas named Miguel. Miguel laughed as he told me he had been deported from the U.S. when he got caught illegally working in Las Vegas. In reflecting on my experience with Miguel, I wrote:

Maybe, if more Americans had his understanding of the motivating factors of immigration, our country would be more clear-eyed about the steps necessary to protect American workers by stemming the tide of low wage labor surging across our southern border.

I still believe clarity on the immigration issue is sorely needed. However, seeing reality for what it is does not mean that we should simply eschew all human emotion. If we do, that only serves to hand the immigration debate over to people I disparagingly call the “chart people”—the economists, consultants, and market-makers—which I’ve written about before. The chart people have already controlled the right’s perspective on immigration for the past 40 years, if not longer. Look where it’s gotten us.

Our approach, like most things, should lie somewhere in the middle.

For the past few years, it has been fashionable in young conservative circles to talk about objectivity, objective truth, and how facts should always come before feelings. However, conservatives shouldn’t be afraid of the youth’s claims that conservative moral outrage is passé when it comes to any issue—especially that of immigration. Indeed, something worthy of our moral outrage is happening right now regarding our Southern border. We must not let it blind us, but channel it. If we fail, then we should expect more of the same: The left will keep its monopoly on appeals to emotion and justice in our immigration debate. They will get away with making illegal immigrants working in violation of the law the victims of a cruel, fascistic immigration regime, rather than the true story that the 50 plus migrants killed in Chiapas, and thousands more like them, are the victims of lawlessness ushered in by liberals at hemispheric proportions.

theamericanconservative.com

Time after time, in recent weeks, we have seen the threats and rhetoric ramped up by “weasel” French President against Boris Johnson and his government. Whether it is the rights of British fisherman to be in their own waters or more recently the migrant crisis which captured the headlines when 27 asylum seekers attempting to cross the Channel perished when their boat was unable to sustain what is believed to be a wake left by an oil tanker.

But how much longer can Boris Johnson stay at the helm when faced with the outright threatening manner of Macron? The French president doesn’t seem to stop with the machine gun narrative which is always aimed at harming the British economy, its post-Brexit freedoms and its inevitable future as a vibrant independent economy. The latest insult by Macron calling Johnson a “clown” surely went over a line. Isn’t it time that Boris put on the gloves and faced this cowardly French president head to head? In the words of John Major, surely now is the time for Boris to deliver the ultimatum to France and its two-faced President to “put up or shut up”

Two-faced because, in reality, Macron is no friend of the British, but sees them as an adversary both to France and his own Presidency. A thriving UK is a threat to the status quo of Macron and France’s role within the EU itself. But Macron can’t help himself with the threats, games and skulduggery which comes with a hefty price for the British.

We should not be taken in by the theatre of what is being put on for our benefit to fool us into thinking that Macron really cares about the Calais Jungle and the record numbers of migrants now arriving on our shores. The recent calls by him that he needs more cooperation from Boris Johnson’s government is folly. In reality, he simply wants more money. Blackmail is always a game which never ends. It only has a beginning and the victim never stops paying. And this is precisely what Macron wants from the UK.

If Macron genuinely wanted to help resolve the crisis he could easily propose new, tougher laws aimed at the smugglers themselves, break up the camps completely and properly use France’s navy to stop them boarding boats in the first place. He could also initiate a new policy whereby French police would no longer watch migrants get into their boats, while they merely watch and gloat and even take photos on their phone. And perhaps more importantly, he would allow British police officers to act as watchers, to work hand in hand with the French, to stop the smugglers. How is it that the UK accepts armed French police in their London Terminal of the Eurostar – to help the French intercept criminals before they even leave the UK – but are not allowed to have their own police simply work as spotters on French soil?

Macron’s concerns are entirely disingenuous and it’s high time that Boris manned up and accepted the French president’s stunts for that they are: fake and politically motivated aimed at creating a political hullabaloo to bring down a Brexit government and to make an “example” of the UK for the rest of the EU.

But Macron is not the only one who is faking it.

It’s a similar story with the EU’s announcement that it will send a plane to monitor the boats crossing from France to the UK. Don’t believe a word of it. The plane will no doubt seem to do its job but it’s all part of a ruse which in reality punishes the UK for Brexit. If the EU was serious about helping with the migrant crisis, it would create a multimedia PR campaign and pay for advertising space on TV, radio and mainstream media in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and other countries like Somalia showing the darker side of the route to the UK – and use the tragic deaths of those who recently perished. Most people in the UK never even knew that most of what they saw on their TVs when Britain was in the EU, from mainstream media was financially subsidised by the EU itself to the tune of hundreds of millions of euros each year. If the EU has that kind of cash for fake news, why can’t it use some of it to inform people on the edge of Europe that the path to the UK is fraught with danger? Given that the migrant crisis is a direct result of the EU’s own failed immigration/asylum policies, one would have thought this would be a natural path for Brussels to follow.

But Brussels doesn’t do ‘Mea Culpa’.

Boris needs to stop allowing Macron to continue with these games and show him that Britain can get tough on the migrants and the French. He needs to work much more closely with the Royal Navy and give it the greenlight to tow the boats back to France and do the job of the French navy. If the legal boffins argue that the British are not allowed to “dump” refugees in French waters, surely the counter argument is that this is precisely what the French are doing.

Boris should also play hardball on defence and security cooperation and threaten France that it will remove British troops from Mali where they are risking their lives specifically so that French nationals can work there and French companies can make money, under the hilarious auspices of a UN peacekeeping mandate of fighting terrorism. Macron wants a bigger defence and security cooperation deal with Boris as France’s defence budget is smaller than the UK’s but if Boris can’t get any cooperation on immigrants in the Channel whose numbers alone are posing a threat to the UK’s own stability, why should Boris keep British soldiers in Mali? The last time in history the French navy posed a threat to Britain by doing nothing was in the early months of WWII where Churchill could see that with the Germans advancing rapidly towards Paris, they would inevitably take full control of the French navy and use it to attack the British. The French refused then to cede to Churchill’s demands that the ships were destroyed, rather than fall into the enemy’s hands. In the event, it was the British who destroyed them. Will Boris have to reinvent this historical moment and similarly take bold decisions which once again affect France’s battleships which are unable to stop literally thousands of immigrants from crossing the channel?

The world has many crises, and probably the most heart-rending is that of desperately miserable refugees who have been forced to flee from their homes. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, UNHCR, is a saintly body and does its best to care for those it can access. Its latest report indicates that there are now over 84 million people displaced by conflict, barbaric persecution and climate change disasters.

On November 11 Filippo Grandi, the head of UNHCR, issued a plea for greater assistance from rich countries, saying that “the international community must redouble its efforts to make peace, and at the same time must ensure resources are available to displaced communities and their hosts.” Unfortunately most of the international community couldn’t care less about refugees, as evidenced by reaction to recent agonising events such as Poland’s inhumane treatment of the thousands attempting to enter from Belarus, whose President is quite as cruel and pitiless as the Polish authorities who have repelled so many of them.

The BBC noted that as refugees “are summarily expelled from Poland and Belarus refuses to allow them back in, people are finding themselves stranded and freezing in Poland’s forests. Several have died of hypothermia.” But who cares? Certainly not such officials as the head of Poland’s National Security Council, Pawel Soloch, who said on November 8 that he expected “attacks on our border to be renewed by groups of several hundred people” overnight. “Attacks”? By unarmed, frozen, desperate, pathetic exiles who wish only for decency, understanding and support?

And in the waters of the freezing, stormy English Channel, there are similar hideous dramas of which the latest involved the capsize of a boat trying to travel from France to England, causing the death of 17 men, seven women and three adolescents – two boys and a girl. One of the women was pregnant.

The figures strike a chord of bleakness, but not in the hearts of such as the poisonous Priti Patel, the United Kingdom’s minister for home affairs, responsible for refugee matters, who is a proven liar (for which she was dismissed by then Prime Minister Theresa May) and bully of her subordinates (“Standards chief Sir Alex Allan found that Ms Patel had broken the code governing ministers’ behaviour but Prime Minister Boris Johnson rejected his findings, saying he did not think Ms Patel was a bully and had ‘full confidence’ in her”.)

Patel’s lack of compassion was demonstrated by her statement about “illegal immigration” in early November, when she declared that refugees seeking to start a new life were mainly cheats. She claimed that in the previous year “70% of individuals on small boats are single men who are effectively economic migrants. They are not genuine asylum seekers.” What is strikingly ironic, of course, is that “in the 1960s, her parents emigrated to the UK” from Uganda. And in an October 2012 media interview Patel affirmed that “coming from a country where you’re persecuted means that you want to work hard and to contribute to the society where you end up. You become patriotic because you make your new country your home, and, as a result, you live and play by its values.” Quite right. But it seems that the flint-hearted Patel is no longer prepared to give anyone a chance to do that.

As reported on November 21 Patel’s latest trick to punish refugees is to detain them on England’s beaches and then have them “soaked, shivering and traumatised… bundled on to buses and driven almost 500 miles – a journey of eight to nine hours – to an immigration detention centre called Dungavel” in Scotland.

The British government’s combination of intolerance, malice and incompetence concerning refugees is appalling, but it’s nothing new. A recently published book by an Afghan refugee, Abbas Nazari, called After the Tampa, tells us a great deal about the Australian government’s even worse treatment of the stricken and helpless. As the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported on November 26, “When the Taliban were at the height of their power in 2001, Abbas Nazari’s parents were faced with a choice: stay and face persecution in their homeland, or seek security for their young children elsewhere. The family embarked on a harrowing journey from the mountains of Afghanistan to a small fishing boat in the Indian Ocean, crammed with more than 400 other asylum seekers. When the boat started to sink, they were saved by a cargo ship, the Tampa. However, one of the largest maritime rescues in modern history quickly turned into an international stand-off, as Australia closed its doors to these asylum seekers.”

The Australian government’s actions were not only contrary to international law and the Charter of the United Nations, they were sickeningly amoral and had the aim of winning the impending national election for the Liberal Party whose leader at the time, John Howard, and his servile slimy acolytes merit the deepest contempt for their conduct. If there is indeed a Hell, they deserve its flames for eternity. As recounted in the Sydney Morning Herald the Captain of the Norwegian freighter Tampa, Arne Rinnan (a man with more moral and physical courage in his little fingers than these politicos have in their entire anatomies), “defied orders from Canberra to stay away from Australian waters with his cargo of 433 rescued asylum seekers, many of them in urgent need of medical attention, and proceeded towards Christmas Island, the tiny Australian territory below Java. It ended, after heavily armed SAS troops seized control of the ship, with John Howard introducing retrospective legislation giving his government the power to remove the Tampa, and any similarly unwelcome vessels in the future, irrespective of the circumstances or the consequences.”

Nazari’s description of the assault on the ship by armed special forces troops, covered in black from head to toe, is spine-chilling. There was absolutely no need for these people to carry weapons, because the wretched refugees certainly had none. These swaggering military louts put the fear of death into children who had been terrified by Taliban savages. We have no way of assessing to what extent the mental health of the refugees was damaged by Prime Minister Howard’s cynical re-election antics, but one person not affected was Abbas Nazari, who was fortunate enough to be taken, aged seven, with his family to New Zealand, rather than consigned to the Australian-run refugee concentration camp on Nauru island, 4,500 kilometres north east of Australia, where detention conditions were appalling. (An Amnesty International representative observed that “having worked in most of the world’s conflict zones over the last 15 years, I thought I had learned enough about suffering, injustice and despair. But what I saw and heard on Nauru will haunt me forever.”)

It is amazing and most gratifying that Nazari’s personal success, achieved through his innate intelligence and sheer hard work, includes selection as a Fulbright Scholar which is an achievement that should be brought to the attention of Priti Patel, who is so determined to deny asylum to refugees who she alleges are “economic migrants”.

In yet another Patel irony, it was noted on November 23 that the British government’s scheme to attract Nobel and other laureates to settle in Britain and contribute to its economy had failed completely, with not a single applicant having come forward, in spite of Patel’s declaration that her “point-based” immigration rules are intended to “attract the best and brightest based on the skills and talent they have, not where they’ve come from.”

Patel and her best and brightest colleagues in countries such as Australia, Belarus and Poland (and many, many others) have not a scrap of compassion for the tens of millions of destitute despairing refugees displaced from their homelands. The world is facing a terrible humanitarian crisis — but is also at risk of having future generations suffering from routine endorsement of governments devoid of decency, morality and simple humanity.

In the depths of eastern Europe’s bitter winter, Polish troops fired tear gas and thousands of litres of icy water from vehicle-mounted cannon brought up to the border with Belarus where hundreds of refugees from the Middle East were trying to get into civilised Europe via Poland. The refugees, already trembling with cold in freezing temperatures, were soaked to the skin. Their plight was indescribable. And the U.S.-Nato military alliance reacted to the humanitarian crisis by increasing the level of its confrontation with Russia.

Secretary General Stoltenberg held a meeting of European defence ministers and declared “We stand in solidarity with Poland and other affected allies” while the U.S. official outlet, Radio Free Europe (annual government allocation $124 million) reported in justification of Poland’s water-cannon barrage that “The impact of a stone thrown by a migrant was so forceful that one officer’s helmet was damaged, police said following similar clashes in recent days.”

Make no mistake, the ruler of Belarus, President Alexander Lukashenko, is a malevolent lamebrain whose approach to human rights and society is entirely negative. But at least he didn’t order his troops to spray freezing water over unarmed civilians whose suffering should have attracted sympathy and energetic assistance rather than lip-smacking publicity statements from such as Lithuania’s foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, who declared on November 15 that “it is very likely that Ukraine could be attacked while we are dealing with the situation on the Polish, Lithuanian and Belarusian border.” But they are not “dealing” with any situation as it effects the iced-over refugees, because this would be much less attractive than trying to persuade the outside world to believe that the whole thing has been contrived by Russia in order to invade Ukraine.

U.S. News and World Report weighed in to the fantasy of Russian involvement by headlining that “Russia Deploys Commandos to Belarus as Migrant Crisis, Ukraine Tensions Spark Western Fears” and went on to assert that “Russia has orchestrated the deployment of special operations troops to the northern border of Belarus to see how sudden surges of migrants to the area are straining neighbouring NATO countries’ ability to respond, a source familiar with local governments’ assessments tells U.S. News — the latest development in Moscow’s troubling campaign of destabilization against Europe. It was not immediately clear whether the commandos came from Russia or from Belarus, says former U.S. Army Europe Commander Ben Hodges, who says senior officials in Latvia believe the deployments are at least for reconnaissance, if not some other form of nefarious distraction.” The story is so absurd it was not carried by the western mainstream media, and even the likes of the New York Times confined themselves to reporting such snippets as “As the Polish government pressed ahead with legislation that would extend the country’s most sweeping state of emergency in modern history, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told the German publication Bild that ‘by defending the Polish border, we defend the whole of Europe’.”

Presumably Poland’s prime minister meant that he and his water-cannon troops are defending Western Europe against an invasion by what Reuters stated on November 16 are “Up to 4,000 migrants, mostly from Iraq and Afghanistan” [emphasis added] who “are now waiting in freezing forests on what is not only Poland’s frontier but is also the external border of the EU and NATO, the Western military alliance.”

It is far from surprising that Poland is trying to get as much as it can out of this dreadful humanitarian crisis because Warsaw is trying to deflect Europe’s attention from its ongoing swing to ultra-right wing policies, including government control of the judiciary. As the BBC told us on October 27, before the refugee emergency, Poland rejected the primacy of EU law, which action was described by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen as “a direct challenge to the unity of the European legal order.”

While Poland’s rebuff of the EU is a serious matter, the other thing that Warsaw wants to keep quiet is the coalmining crisis on Poland’s border with the Czech Republic. As with the Polish refusal to stand by legal rules it had undertaken to follow by joining the EU, it is now refusing to phase out coal power as agreed at the COP26 climate conference. On November 4 it was reported that “Poland has joined a coalition of 190 countries and organisations in a new commitment to phase out coal power in line with the science of the Paris Climate Agreement” — but the following day there was “clarification” that “The Polish government has confirmed it still intends to produce energy from coal until 2049 despite signing a declaration at COP26 that some hoped meant Warsaw would part with the fossil fuel earlier.”

This is in line with the account in the Guardian in September that despite an EU Court of Justice directive to cease operations at the opencast coalmine at Turów, adjacent to the Czech Republic, the Polish government announced it would continue mining “arguing that its suspension would put the country’s energy security at risk. The mine fuels a power station providing about 7% of the country’s electricity supply. It employs about 3,600 people.”

President Lukashenko is no humanitarian, and has been using the refugees cynically as a political tool in his domestic and international antics, but the fact remains that this tool was promptly seized by people such as Nato’s Stoltenberg and his acolytes in order to hype a non-existent Russian threat to Ukraine. The chief of Britain’s armed forces, General Carter, actually declared that Russia is in a “hybrid playbook where you link disinformation to destabilisation and the idea of pushing migrants on to the European Union’s borders is a classic example of that sort of thing”. He followed this gibberish by saying it was “most likely” that the Belarus and Ukraine border situations were “classic distraction” by the Russian government of the type that had been going on “for years and years and years”.

What Carter and Stoltenberg and their directors in the Pentagon refuse to acknowledge is that the Poland-Belarus “border distraction” was caused by pitiable, wretched refugees who had fled countries that had been invaded (Afghanistan and Iraq) or bombed and rocketed to devastation (Libya) by U.S./Nato forces. Further, the situation along the Russia-Ukraine border has nothing whatever to do with the U.S.-Nato military grouping which continues to search for some sort of justification for its existence.

The “Strategic Partnership” between the U.S. and Ukraine is an uncompromising agreement that signals western preparedness to ramp up confrontation with Russia, and in one of its signals of aggression it claims there are “humanitarian and security costs of Russia’s occupation of Crimea” which is a risible allegation. In spite of energetic efforts on the part of agencies of the U.S.-Nato military alliance, there has been no uprising in Crimea, the majority of whose residents are entirely supportive of Russia (as indicated in a referendum) and know only too well that they would suffer enormously under a Kyev regime. As to humanitarian and security “costs”, it must be disappointing for the West’s anti-Moscow clique that Russian troops aren’t drenching unarmed Crimean citizens with tear gas and ice-cold water or that its government isn’t extending operation of health-hazarding open-cast coalmines contrary to international agreements.

Coal production and refugees are only two of the many economic and social problems in Europe, and the EU is trying its best to solve them, with moderate success. But it would achieve much more if it could persuade the Pentagon to cease its confrontational policies and encourage the Washington administration to come to the conference table. Refugees must be treated with compassion and coal-mining phased out. And conflict must be avoided.

We have all seen the rather strange cinematic clashes at the Polish border in which migrants, supposedly appearing due to blowback in Afghanistan, are trying to storm the eastern front of the European Union. Both the Western and Russian news media have been mostly focussing on the details that make up the facade of this issue rather than on the greater context of what this event means to today’s Poland.

The current narrative that Lukashenko is petty and wants revenge against the EU for trying to organize a “Maidan” in his backyard is very naive. This isn’t to say that he or any powerful leader are above allowing their pride to affect their actions. Vengeance could be at play, but sending a few hundred migrants into the West from the woods is a very pathetic form of revenge indeed, that wouldn’t satisfy the ego of even the most narcissistic bean-counter president.

Image: Protestors in Minsk unaware that they are doing a fantastic job of ensuring permanent integration with Russia.

The attempted Color Revolution against Lukashenko ended his longtime balancing act, forcing Belarus to look east and finally get about 20 years of bureaucratic stagnation over with in terms of creating the “Union State” with Russia. The final plan for this project was signed on “People’s Unity Day” 2021. No matter what the Mainstream Media may tell you there are no true dictators. Just because orders are issued, that doesn’t mean they will be followed, especially in countries with large Russian-speaking populations. Lukashenko probably wants to make sure that with actions like downing of an airplane to arrest one “dissident” or allowing this new border strife to happen (if they indeed are allowing it to happen) will only serve to cut off any last strands binding Belarus to the EU.

Just because Lukashenko and Putin made some paperwork does not mean the Union State concept cannot be aborted or reversed. Long story short, whether the Belarussian government had anything to do with the migrants getting to the border, this situation is driving the East/West rift further apart quickly and that certainly works in the interests of a rising Russian civilization.

On the other hand, Poland finds itself in the strange position of being the guardians of a European civilization that despises itself. Even if Lukashenko is the mastermind behind this crisis, it is the “Liberalness” and nanny states of Germany, France and Scandinavia that are the real reason these foreign people want to jump over barbed wire fences to live in countries they passionately despise. Poland is actually being put in a tough spot, not by Belarus but by Brussels as we cannot forget that if it were not for EU bureaucracy and a bizarre interpretation of the concept of “Human Rights” the Poles could have settled this problem in a more blunt message-sending manner. Using cutesy poo water cannons to annoy foreigners from storming the border, some of them armed with melee weapons, shows just how straightjacketed Warsaw really is.

We also cannot forget that officially this angry mob came thousands of miles to escape a post American Afghanistan. America did save Poland from the numerous culturally destructive downsides of Communism (state enforced atheism being one of them) but the gift of American Liberalism is proving to be just as destructive, but in a different way. Perhaps Poland’s greatest weakness is having the terrible geography of being right on the open highway between Russian and Western Civilizations. Poland is always forced to be part of some alliance in order to survive. This fact of life may be unchangeable, i.e. this nation will always be stuck being part of an alliance, but whom Poland is going to be allied with could be the real question that is now up for debate as serving Moscow during the Cold War and Washington till present have both been losing options for Warsaw.

Image: The quiet before the storm.

This madness in the woods around the borderlands is yet another call for the Visegrad nations (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia with the potential for others to join) to become their own entity outside of the EU. Within the Brussels framework they are not only losers destined to send their young people to London and Paris to clean toilets, but are also bound to tolerate supposedly “European Values” that they consider to be completely illogical, foreign and Anti-European. If there was an East and West EU perhaps everyone could be ideologically happy, but as it stands today most of what is considered Central Europe is held ideologically captive by the degenerated intellectual offspring of the Anglo-French Enlightenment.

The nations considered traditionally “Western” have dropped the “European” ball and it is time for the Poles, Hungarians and whoever else is floating around Central Europe with an old school attitude, to pick it up. Perhaps now is the time for Poland to stop seeing itself as the protectors of a Europe that does not want to save itself. Poland’s idea that it is saving the greatest society on Earth from being tainted by Mongol-Russian hordes is obsolete at best. Perhaps Warsaw should just declare themselves the new epicenter of Europe. Why not? The West has begun to hate its Europeanness anyways.

Within the framework of a Visegrad Supernation Poland would neither be the victim of EU ideological madness or a potential Russian threat that they are sure is coming. Poland is always going to be stuck as part of some alliance but at least it should finally become an equal partner along with other weaker nations that could make up a mighty block. This madness at the border should be a wake up call or at least a mirror for Poland to look into to see that it is again part of a destructive alliance and things need to change.

The Belarus border is just the most recent in a long list of examples how Brussels cannot fight back countries who use refugees as a weapon against the EU’s failed hegemony

For many erudite commentators who know the EU well, the scenes on the Poland-Belarus border felt a bit ‘déjà vu’. Once again, the EU’s failed policies when tackling immigration flows — which in many cases are as a direct result of propping up dictators or for dabbling in geopolitics — comes right back and smacks Brussels in the face. Perhaps Belarus is using Syrian refugees as a tool to hit back at Brussels and its bellicose sanctions-based so-called foreign policy. For journalists and analysts who lead with this argument, we can assume that many will be supporters of the EU project itself and are unable to see a bigger picture.

Such a panorama can be summed up in the old English saying “you reap what you sow”. For decades, or certainly since the EU metamorphosised into a geopolitical player since the adoption of the Lisbon Treaty — which signed off on Brussels having over 120 “ambassadors” around the world and a more beefed up foreign policy narrative — we have seen such a doctrine be a rod for its own back. In Libya, in recent years, journalists have seen some of the most barbaric acts of human cruelty known to man with modern day slavery and sexploitation carried out on African migrants fleeing their own countries, run by tyrants whose human rights atrocities frighten them so much, they make the trip for a better life. The irony of this is that those same despots are supported by the EU, sometimes to the tune of hundreds of millions of euros, just as long as they show respect to the EU, its flag and its delusional hegemony. Syria is another example. In 2007, the EU was ready to accept Assad as a new partner in the region but then felt obliged to follow the U.S. in ostracising him later on after he was linked to the assassination of Rafiq Hariri in 2005 and he had the cheek to hit back at what was essentially a western-backed Muslim Brotherhood attempted coup d’etat in 2011. In Libya itself, EU countries were happy to bomb the country in the name of a so-called peace initiative signed off by the UN Security Council — which in the end, secured not a peaceful transition to a more western-style democratic apparatus but the ugly assassination of Ghaddafi himself and a decade of civil war leaving the country divided. Even in Morocco, where old allies like France and Germany are giving up on Rabat, we see the Moroccans respond to EU bullying by opening the gates to thousands of illegal African immigrants who entered Spain — a stunt, not unlike the one from Belarus to send a signal that there is a limit to how much poorer countries on the periphery of the EU country will take from threats from the EU executive in Brussels which of late is in a panic mode.

The refugee flows are nothing new. And the games that poorer, weaker countries play by using them, have also been around for a while. But the EU only has itself to blame when it allowed itself to be blackmailed by Turkey’s maverick president who took money off the EU to not allow them to leave and enter the EU at the Greek border. This was an error and it showed how weak and ineffective the EU project is as what we’re seeing today on Poland’s border finds its roots in the Turkey deal of just a couple of years ago.

Sanctions threats are really all the EU has. But with diminutive growth and a political crisis which sees countries like Poland regularly mulling the idea that the project is not worth the hassle, some might argue that this is a threat from a toothless tiger anyway. U.S. sanctions against Iran, in the end, didn’t amount to the leverage that was hoped. Tehran is moving ahead with a new economic model which involves China and Russia on a grand scale and is almost reaching its pre-2015 oil revenues with black market sales which the Biden administration refuses to tackle head on.

And so these threats are met head on by immigration stunts, which harms the EU project’s credibility as once journalists start writing about immigration, we are reminded that the Schengen Treaty is something that EU member states switch on and off at will without the EU executive even issuing so much as a vexing press release. The Belarus immigration story is really about a country standing up to EU sanctions on the regime and a bigger disingenuous show to supposedly get tough with Russia. Today, it’s Poland on the front line and facing the numbers, which is ironic given that Poland has its own “push back” laws which EU chiefs deem illegal and have been the basis of talks about Warsaw leaving the EU altogether. Before it was Greece on its Turkish border when the policy of Brussels failed spectacularly and we saw right-wing militias “hunting” for Syrian refugees who managed to get across. Slowly, the whole world is waking up to this new retaliation against Brussels as the EU has let its weakest pressure become clearly visible. Even the EU’s own policies on how it controls its own citizens leaves a lot to be desired. But on immigration, there is only dithering, confusion and chaos. If Brussels continues to peddle this fatuous idea that it’s a super power and can make threats to countries that it once called friends in euro-jargon called the ‘network neighbourhood’, then we can only expect more countries to hit it where it hurts.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has made a stark accusation against Belarus and Russia, claiming they are weaponizing the migration problem on the border with Poland. This is a cowardly move to divert blame. It is also recklessly escalating confrontation.

Speaking to media after a White House meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden, the top European Union official said the task at hand was about “protecting our democracies” from “cynical hybrid warfare”. She explicitly accused Belarus of weaponizing migration and destabilizing the EU.

Von der Leyen did not mention Russia by name but her comments implied Moscow was colluding with its neighbor and ally to create geopolitical tensions by facilitating an influx of migrants into Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. She also cited unproven previous allegations of election interference and cyberattacks attributed to Russia as precedents for the current “hybrid warfare” with migration.

Other EU leaders have been more openly provocative. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki this week claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “masterminding” a plot in cahoots with Belarus to flood the EU with migrants. This is a rehash of an old claim dating back to 2015 when more than one million refugees entered the EU. That mass movement was claimed then to be “hybrid warfare” orchestrated by Putin to wreak havoc in the bloc.

Such a claim is based on irrational Russophobia that does not stand up with facts, then or now.

Most of the refugees stranded at the Belarus borders with Poland and the Baltic states are from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. This was the same as in 2015. The common denominator is that these three source countries have been subjected to war and aggression by the United States and its European NATO allies over two decades. That is the root of the phenomenal migration to Europe. One can also factor in the NATO destruction of Libya in 2011 as another gateway for mass migration.

The EU is weaponizing the issue by distorting the cause: alleging that it is Russia and Belarus creating the human tide when in fact it has been illegal imperialist wars and regime-change operations conducted by the United States and the Europeans.

It is Poland and EU members that are deploying thousands of troops, tanks and barbed wire along the border with Belarus. This is an abomination of supposed “European values” and respect for international laws of asylum. The fiasco of Brussels financially supporting the construction of barbed wire fences is an international disgrace. Pointedly, this rush to ring-fence Europe comes exactly 32 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Filippo Grandi, the United Nations Commissioner for Refugees, this week condemned the EU’s xenophobic, militarized response to people seeking asylum.

The heavy-handed EU response is way out of proportion to the actual numbers involved. It is estimated that some 8,000 people have crossed over the Belarusian border into the European Union this year.

In 2015, the influx of an estimated one million refugees into Europe from U.S.-led wars in North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia provoked an existential political crisis for the European Union. Eastern European member states like Poland and Hungary refused to share quotas for resettling asylum seekers. Germany took on a disproportionate share under Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “open door” policy. That policy had huge negative repercussions for the entire bloc.

It led to bitter tensions between member states and within states. The rise of populist anti-EU political parties was largely driven by a perception of foreign migrants inundating societies.

The EU desperately wants to avoid a repetition of that internal political crisis. Thus it is moving swiftly to make Poland and the Baltic states the “line of defense”. This explains the sudden militarization of border controls with Belarus.

The EU is drawing up another round of economic sanctions against Belarus next week, accusing its President Alexander Lukashenko of “gangsterism” and “human trafficking”. The possible imposition of sanctions on Russian airlines is also being mulled on the back of allegations that Moscow is colluding with Minsk in pushing migrants towards the EU. This is a reckless escalation of tensions.

Russia has flatly rejected any such allegations. Moscow says the EU needs to talk directly with Minsk to resolve the problem. One idea proposed by the Kremlin is for Brussels to provide financial aid to Belarus to implement a rational system of asylum application and resettlement. But the suspicion is that that is the last thing the EU wants to do. It simply wants to block any migration to avoid internal political strife. To do that, it needs to blockade Belarus. That blockade is having a deleterious impact on the economy of Belarus from normal border crossings for trade and haulage being stymied.

The underlying problem also goes back partly to the EU’s hostile policy towards Belarus. Brussels has controversially interfered in Belarus, along with the United States, in claiming that its presidential election last year was a sham. The EU refuses to recognize the re-election of Lukashenko and has slapped several rounds of sanctions on the country while claiming that an exiled opposition candidate is the real winner.

The Belarus government says it can’t afford to accommodate refugees coming through its territory en route to their desired destination of the European Union. Given the background hostility of the EU towards Belarus, it is understandable if Minsk is not exactly overseeing border controls. It’s a kind of “screw you” gesture to the European bloc for its interference in Belarus’ political affairs. Von der Leyen and other officials are going further by claiming that Minsk is deliberately organizing flights of refugees from various Middle Eastern countries, including Egypt, Jordan, United Arab Emirates.

Under international law, the EU is obliged to receive asylum seekers. The European governments have created millions of displaced people from their criminal wars and machinations along with the United States. But Brussels is shirking its legal obligations in order to avoid internal tensions with member states over immigration and populist opposition to capitalist corporate-controlled Europe. But by weaponizing the matter, the EU is recklessly winding up tensions with Belarus and Russia. The culprit is Europe’s moral and political cowardice to live up to its responsibilities by seeking to shift the blame on to others.

A year ago, Chileans voted to rewrite the dictatorship era constitution – the first step in building a more inclusive society since the democratic transition in the country which was plagued by vestiges of Augusto Pinochet’s legacy. In April this year, Chilean President Sebastian Pinera’s right-wing government suffered another loss as independent and opposition candidates gained the majority of seats to rewrite the constitution. This secured another victory away from the right-wing and the possibility that reforms would be blocked by the government’s candidates.

With a broad representation across the political spectrum, including 17 seats reserved for indigenous representation, the Chilean people’s aspirations for social rights and protection of natural resources became more plausible. However, as the Chilean presidential elections draw closer, it is clear that right-wing sentiment in Chile is still gaining traction.

The Republican Party’s leader Jose Antonio Kast – the right-wing presidential candidate and Pinochet admirer – is gaining traction in the electoral polls. A poll places him leading ahead of Apruebo Dignidad’s candidate Gabriel Boric, by one point. Kast who once declared in 2017, “If Pinochet was alive, he would vote for me,” has Chile’s far-right rooting for him, as the possible shift in Chilean politics since the 2019 protests hangs in the balance.

After violence erupted in Iqique over migration, where a group of people burnt migrants’ belongings on a road, the right-wing in Chile recognised its opportunity. In a similar manner to electoral propaganda in many countries, Kast and other right-wing candidates exploited anti-migrant sentiment to introduce security rhetoric.

Chile’s National Institute of Human Rights has called upon the government to alter the state’s policy on migrants, which is mostly defined by expulsions and evictions, thus giving rise to racism and xenophobia.

The right-wing, however, exploited the recent violence as an opportunity to insist upon stricter border controls and surveillance. Kast declared, “the migratory disaster began with Bachelet and escalated out of control with Sebastian Pinera.”

Boric called upon the government “to ensure that the people’s mobility is secure and balanced.” Meanwhile, social movements in Chile demanded that Pinera offer protection for asylum seekers.

“Fundamentally, Kast defends free markets and traditional values, and favours the image of a monocultural Chile of European descent,” academic Gilberto Aranda was recently quoted as stating.

Aranda’s analysis invites a deeper reflection of Chile’s society. Kast’s politics are based upon divisions, in a similar manner to which the Pinochet dictatorship operated, particularly with regard to the left wing and the Mapuche. The latter were not recognised as indigenous, as part of the neoliberal experiment that exploited Chile’s natural resources for the benefit of industrialisation.

Chilean governments across the political spectrum since the transition to democracy have also exploited such societal divisions. The low electoral turnout in the 2017 elections reflected the possibility that a majority of the population was disillusioned with Chile’s politics, given the centre left failed to follow through on social issues and human rights.

The 2019 protests marked a change in Chile. A right-wing government acquiescing to the people’s will for a referendum was a major victory. As Chileans mobilised, the government took a downturn in the polls. Yet Kast’s current political prominence casts a shadow over Chile’s gains. On one hand, the rewriting of Chile’s constitution provides the opportunity for change. The slight lead which Kast enjoys in the polls, however, is indicative of how entrenched right-wing sentiment is in Chile, even if Pinochet no longer takes centre stage in terms of adulation. Will the rewriting of Chile’s constitution be enough to veer the country’s trajectory away from the neoliberal experiment ushered in decades ago by the U.S.?

Through his administration’s recent policies towards Haiti and Haitian migrants, President Joe Biden is carrying out a crime against humanity. Unfortunately, this represents continuity in a decades-long, bi-partisan policy toward Haiti.

Biden recently ordered the breakup of a camp of 15,000 mainly Black Haitian migrants under a border bridge in Del Rio, Texas. The migrants—many of whom had traveled thousands of miles—had fled to the U.S. in the hopes of being granted asylum from the horrific oppression and exploitation they face in Haiti, Chile, Brazil, and other states in the region.

In scenes that evoked the history of U.S. slave catchers, Border Patrol agents on horseback used their reins as whips to beat the refugees they chased down and captured. Eager to join the racist frenzy, Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the National Guard and Texas police to form a miles-long “steel wall” of patrol cars and military vehicles to block migrants from escaping Biden’s dragnet.

When these horrific scenes were caught on camera, Biden had the gall to condemn the Border Patrol for carrying out the orders he had given. But he did not rescind his policy to expel and deport the encamped Haitians based on Title 42, which Trump had previously invoked to close U.S. borders to all migrants during the pandemic. In fact, this was another in a series of actions that exposed the lies of Biden’s pre-election promises to establish a “humane migration system” and combat “systemic racism.”

From the Del Rio encampment, Biden expelled 8,000 migrants to Mexico, deported 7,000 to Haiti (many of whom had not been in the country for a decade), and admitted about 12,000 from the camp and Mexico into the U.S. Many migrants remain detained and others have been chained with tracking devices while they apply for asylum.

They will likely be denied for being so-called economic migrants, not political refugees, or for having residence in a third country, and then face deportation. Once the camp was cleared of human beings, the bridge was reopened for commerce.

Biden carried out this racist repression to send a signal to tens of thousands of Haitians, who are making their way north through the Darien Gap between Panama and Colombia, that the border is closed to migrants. The Mexican state collaborated every step of the way, clearing out the encampment on its side of the border in Ciudad Acuña, deporting many to Haiti, shipping others back to southern Mexico, and promising to stop Haitians from reaching the U.S.

The manifold crises driving Haitians from their country are not natural or some quirk of history; they were caused in large part by U.S. imperialism. Instead of helping Haitians overcome those crises, the Biden administration is compounding them, shoring up the morally repugnant elite that runs Haiti, and blocking migrants’ escape routes with Washington’s racist, regional border regime.

The Imperialist Origins of Haiti’s Crises

The mainstream media present the crises in Haiti that are driving migration—its poverty, so-called natural disasters, political corruption, and gangsterism—in sensationalized fashion with ritualistically repeated and neutered phrases like “poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.” They pathologize the country as if there is something inherently wrong with it.

In fact, blame for most of these crises lies with the U.S. and other imperialist powers’ intervention in the country. From the Haitian Revolution right down to today, these powers have waged an unrelenting attack on the Haitian people’s struggle for liberation, democracy, and equality.

When the enslaved Africans overthrew their French oppressors in 1791 and declared Haiti’s independence in 1804, the great slave-holding powers of the time—France, Spain, England, and the newly independent U.S.—did everything in their powers to destroy the new Black republic. France, Spain, and England all deployed armies in a vain attempt to prevent the revolution’s victory.

After their defeat, they moved to isolate Haiti and stop it from becoming a precedent and inspiration for revolutionary risings of the enslaved in the region. France only recognized the country’s independence in 1825 on the condition that Haiti repays their former masters in reparations for the loss of their “property,” that is, their land and enslaved human beings.

To pay this “debt,” Haiti had to take out loans at usurious interest rates from French and U.S. banks, stunting its economic development. In today’s money, they shelled out $21 billion for recognition by the great powers. Even then, the U.S. did not acknowledge Haiti’s independence until the middle of the Civil War in 1862.

The imperialist powers of the 19th century shackled Haiti with debt until its last payment in 1947, isolated it from the world system, and blocked its independent development. They made the country pay an enormous price for its liberation—poverty and structural adjustment from its birth.

Washington: Haiti’s Twentieth Century Overlord

After the U.S. rose as a new imperial power at the end of the nineteenth century, it viewed the Caribbean as an “American lake.” It aimed to prevent its European rivals from encroaching on its fiefdom and treated the region’s states as vassals to be commanded and, when insufficiently obedient, subjected to military intervention and occupation.

Haiti was one of its prime targets, with devastating consequences for that country’s politics and economy throughout the twentieth century and to this day. Woodrow Wilson sent in the Marines to occupy Haiti from 1915 to 1934, seizing control of the country’s financial and economic assets as compensation for the government’s failure to make loan payments. Wilson also wanted to ensure that U.S. corporations, and not those of Germany, would control the country’s economy.

The U.S. handpicked the country’s leaders, imposed forced labor on peasants, brutally repressed the Cacos rebellion, and, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ripped up the country’s revolutionary constitution and imposed a new one that allowed foreign ownership of the country’s land. To ensure “order” when it left, the U.S. created and backed the dreaded Haitian military, the Forces Armées d’Haïti,  whose only function was to repress the country’s people.

During the Cold War, the U.S. backed the brutal dictatorship of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier as an anti-communist counterweight to Fidel Castro’s Cuba. The Duvaliers ruled from 1957 to 1986 through state terror carried out by its murderous paramilitary, the Tonton Macoute. With Washington’s tolerance, if not encouragement, the father-son dictatorship killed as many as 60,000 people, especially socialists and advocates of democracy and social reform.

Washington used Baby Doc’s regime to impose one of the most predatory structural adjustment programs in the region. It promised to remake the country’s economy by privatizing state-owned industry, dismantling its welfare state, opening it up to international agribusiness, and employing displaced peasants in urban sweatshops run by multinationals. This neoliberal prescription was so life-threatening that Haitian activists called it “the plan of death.”

Damning the Flood of Social Reform

In one of the first rebellions against neoliberalism, Haitians rose up in a mass movement called Lavalas (“the flood” in Haitian creole) to topple Baby Doc from power in 1986. This led to the country’s first free and democratic presidential election in 1990 won by Jean Bertrand Aristide. A liberation theologist, Aristide promised to rip up the roots of the old order and implement a program of social democratic reforms.

Threatened by these reforms, the Haitian army, backed by the country’s ruling class and Washington, carried out a coup against Aristide in 1991. The administrations of George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton stood by while the military carried out mass repression and murder.

Infamously, then-Senator Joe Biden argued that intervening to stop the bloodshed in Haiti was not a priority and that the U.S. should ignore the humanitarian catastrophe. He stated that “if Haiti quietly sunk into the Caribbean or rose up 300 feet, it wouldn’t matter a whole lot in terms of our interest.”

Clinton only agreed to intervene and return Aristide to power in 1994 on the condition that Aristide abandon much of his social democratic agenda and implement “neoliberalism with a human face.” He did manage to abolish the army and resist the worst of the neoliberal program, but his hand-picked successor, Rene Preval, implemented much of it between 1996 and 2001.

Aristide again ran for and was elected president in 2001 on promises of social reform and securing reparations of $21 billion from France for the debt it imposed on Haiti to be paid on the 200th anniversary of its independence in 2004. The U.S. under George Bush Jr. imposed an aid embargo on Haiti, stopping Aristide from implementing even a modest version of his program.

The blockage of reform demoralized the Lavalas movement and gave space for right-wing paramilitaries to mount increasingly violent opposition, which Aristide confronted with his own paramilitaries. With the country on the brink of a conflagration, the U.S., France, and Canada organized a second coup against Aristide, kidnapping and exiling him to the Central African Republic until he secured asylum in South Africa.

The U.S. deployed the UN to occupy the country from 2004 to 2017. While of course sold as a humanitarian mission, the UN forces proceeded to repress popular protest, rape women, and introduce cholera into Haiti, killing 10,000 people in an epidemic.

Meanwhile, the U.S. backed a succession of weak, quisling presidents from Rene Preval for a second time to Kompa band leader, Michel “Sweet Mickey” Martelly, to the widely despised and recently assassinated, Jovenel Moïse. Each won office in elections with collapsing voter turnout, had little to no popular support, and were widely viewed as illegitimate.

Each administration introduced increasingly draconian neoliberal programs that hollowed out the Haitian state, which was so incapacitated that it barely could be said to be in control of the society, let alone regulate it and provide any services to socially reproduce it. That void of service provision has been filled by privatized services for the rich and international NGOs for everyone else.

Those NGOs were in no way beholden to the Haitian people, but to the corporations and imperialist states that bankrolled them. Indeed as Mark Schuller, Haiti became a republic of NGOs, and one under an occupation entirely controlled by foreign capitalist powers.

Neoliberal Disasters and Creation of a Dependent Aid State

U.S. imperialism’s incapacitation of the Haitian state set the country up to be devastated by so-called natural disasters. Haiti had few to no regulations to ensure that buildings were capable of withstanding earthquakes, few remaining trees to absorb winds and rain from hurricanes, and no state services ready to provide relief and reconstruction.

So, when the 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Port au Prince in 2010, it laid waste to the capital, flattening the presidential palace, destroying homes, killing as many as 300,000 people, and impacting millions more. Over the next decade, a succession of hurricanes and tropical storms ravaged the country’s deforested land turning rivers into torrents that flooded lands and wiped out buildings. And, to top it all off, this August another magnitude 7.2 earthquake devastated the island’s south, killing 2,200 people, injuring another 12,000, and destroying 7,000 homes.

While people of the world responded with the utmost generosity, they sent money mostly to the corrupt NGOs like the Red Cross that had collaborated in the incapacitation of the Haitian state, and much of the funds never made it to the people in need but got diverted into other projects and the salaries of bureaucrats. Meanwhile, the U.S. state and its imperial accomplices  promised billions to “build Haiti back better.”

Predictably, they launched yet another neoliberal development plan overseen by Bill Clinton. The states funneled $13 billion into building more sweatshops, setting up walled-off tourist resorts, and funding more NGOs to provide services and aid. While billions were spent, conditions only got worse for the country’s majority; 60 percent of the country lives in poverty, 46 percent of the population lives in acute food insecurity, and 217,000 children face moderate-to-severe acute malnutrition.

Haiti became what Jake Johnston has called an “aid state,” a government entirely dependent on funds from imperial states and international donors. For the people to survive, they depend increasingly on remittances sent from their relatives working in low-paid jobs in other Caribbean countries, Latin America, and the U.S.

Corruption, COVID, and Political Chaos

When the UN occupation ended in 2017, this dependent aid state descended into ever-worsening corruption and infighting between factions of the political elite over who would steal a bigger slice of the aid pie for their own enrichment. Their theft stoked mass anger in a population desperate for reforms to alleviate their plight.

The Petrocaribe Scandal is the worst example of the venal elite’s corruption. Venezuela allowed Haiti to borrow oil from it to be paid back in 25 years. That freed up over $3.2 billion that was intended for reforms to improve people’s lives. Instead, the political elite, including President Moïse,  simply pocketed more than $2 billion for themselves and their cronies. With the money gone, Haiti still is on the hook to pay Venezuela back. Revelations of this corruption sparked mass protests, calling for Moïse’s resignation.

Despite the spiraling crisis, Trump and then Biden continued to support Moïse, even after he dissolved parliament and opted to rule by decree after his term expired. With Washington’s backing, he became for all intents and purposes a dictator, who deployed cops, paramilitaries, and gangs against his opponents.

At this moment of complete political chaos, COVID-19 struck a country without a functioning healthcare system and with only 64 ventilators in a country of 11 million people. Up until this summer, the government had no plans for mass vaccinations amidst relatively low rates of infection and death.

When the delta surge struck, the U.S. and the Haitian government finally started a program of vaccinations, but they still only have half a million doses for a population of 11 million. Even worse, the global economic crisis triggered by the pandemic threw Haiti into a sharp contraction cutting Haitian living standards, a fact only compounded by drops in remittances from Haitians abroad who had lost their jobs during the recessions in Latin America and the U.S.

With the society coming apart at the seams, gangs began to emerge, some with the backing of the government. Armed with guns, mainly imported from the U.S., they built mobster-like fiefdoms, ran extortion rings, stole aid, kidnapped people demanding ransom often from relatives abroad, and carried out revenge killings against their rivals.

With Haiti spiraling into social and political chaos, Moïse was assassinated in July by a group of foreign mercenaries made up mostly of former soldiers from the Columbian military, many of whom had been trained at the School of the Americas. While it remains unclear who ordered the murder, it has all the hallmarks of a hit ordered by Moïse ’s opponents in the ruling class. To maintain some semblance of government, the U.S. has appointed Ariel Henry as president, a man who aided and abetted Washington’s second coup against Aristide.

Washington’s Border Regime Deployed Against Haitian Migrants

U.S. imperialism’s interventions and support for reactionary Haitian governments are the cause of the waves of migrants that have fled the country. The Washington-backed Duvalier dictatorship drove out hundreds of thousands of people, the first coup against Aristide sent tens of thousands out of the country, the 2010 earthquake drove tens of thousands more abroad, and now the complete social crisis in Haiti, as well as deteriorating conditions in Latin America, is triggering a new wave of tens of thousands of people fleeing to the U.S.

While U.S. imperialism was causing mass migration, it was at the very same time building an immense border regime to buttress global capitalism’s state structures, block people from entering the U.S., and criminalize those that successfully evaded the border cops as racialized cheap labor in everything from agribusiness to meatpacking. Washington has used its border regime to block most Haitian refugees, only granting partial exceptions when faced with political pressure and protest.

It has subjected Haitians to xenophobic, racist, and politically discriminatory treatment. This has led to them having the lowest rate of asylum of any nationality with high rates of application.

During the 1970s, Jimmy Carter, despite his self-proclaimed support for human rights, applied a double standard to migrants from Haiti and Cuba. Because Washington supported the Duvalier dictatorship as a Cold War ally, Carter denied Haitian migrants refugee status, arrested them when they arrived in Florida, and deported them back to Haiti, while it admitted all mostly lighter-skinned Cubans fleeing the Castro regime which the U.S. opposed.

Ronald Reagan, who pushed for the neoliberal program in Haiti in the 1980s, deployed the Coast Guard to interdict undocumented migrants at sea and applied the new policy mostly to Haitians. The U.S. intercepted boats with Haitians before they reached U.S. shores, denied them the chance to apply for asylum, and returned them to Haiti. In 1987, Reagan introduced a ban on anyone with HIV from being allowed into the U.S., even if they qualified for asylum, and used it against Haitians in particular.

Jailing and Repatriating Refugees from Washington’s Coups

After Washington’s first coup against Aristide in 1991, George Bush Sr. blocked boats filled with Haitian refugees and jailed 34,000 in vast concentration camps set up in Guantanamo, Cuba. He repatriated most of them to Haiti, some to certain death at the hands of the coup regime.

He did grant a third of them asylum, but he used Reagan’s ban on HIV-positive migrants to keep 270 Haitians in a segregated camp even though they qualified for asylum. While Bill Clinton campaigned against Bush’s policy, once in office he broke his promise and kept the concentration camp open. A court case forced him to finally admit the 270 HIV-positive asylees into the U.S.

After Washington’s second coup against Aristide in 2004, George W. Bush threatened to interdict and repatriate any migrants fleeing Haiti. He deputized the UN to lock people in place and impose “order” on the country.

The Obama administration, infamous for deporting more migrants than any in U.S. history, treated Haitians little better. While he granted 60,000 Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Haitians in the U.S. after the 2010 earthquake and stopped deportations, it was open to review every 18 months. While he renewed TPS, Obama re-started interdictions and deportations in 2016.

Trump’s Unleashes the Border Regime’s Racism and Xenophobia

Trump’s America First agenda made explicit and more radical all the xenophobic and racist features of Washington’s border regime. He placed all migrants, including Haitians, in Washington’s crosshairs.

In a flurry of executive orders, some upheld by the courts and others struck down, Trump imposed a Muslim ban, implemented Remain in Mexico that forces those applying for asylum at a U.S. port of entry to return to Mexico while they await their hearings, and then in the wake of COVID-19 imposed Title 42, shutting down the borders to all migrants. He unleashed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to go after migrants, restricted to 15,000 the number of refugees the U.S. would grant asylum in 2021, and gutted the asylum system to make it difficult to process even that tiny number of applicants.

Trump attacked TPS for Haitians, Salvadorans, and several African countries, raving “why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” After noting his preference for white migration from countries like Norway, Trump raved “Why do we need more Haitians. Take them out.” He ordered the termination of TPS for 400,000 people in the U.S., including 60,000 Haitians. Only court rulings blocked that attack.

Haitian migrants faced similar assaults in Latin America where they had fled after the earthquake to find jobs during the region’s China-fueled commodity boom. With that ended by the Chinese slowdown and global recession triggered by the pandemic, Haitians lost their jobs and became the objects of racist scapegoating in Brazil and Chile where they were concentrated in the largest numbers.

Facing desperate conditions, Haitians closely watched the U.S. presidential elections. When Biden won, they began the long trek by foot and bus to the U.S. in the hopes that they would now be welcomed.

Biden’s Betrayal of Migrant Justice

Tragically, they were soon betrayed. In reality, there was little basis in Biden’s record to expect him to treat Haitians or any other migrants differently than his predecessors. His fingerprints are all over the creation of Washington’s border regime and, when he was last in office under Obama, he was an accomplice to his boss as the Vice-Deporter-in-Chief.

But, under pressure from activists who had protested Trump’s unconscionable policies, and faced with liberal challengers in the Democratic primary, Biden verbally tacked left, mouthing promises to repeal the worst of his bigoted predecessor’s executive orders, replace them with a new “humane immigration policy,” pass so-called comprehensive immigration reform, and redress the causes of migration in Central America. At the same time, however, Biden made clear that he would pair such reform with border enforcement and expansion of the border regime into Central America.

Once in office, Biden did repeal some of Trump’s executive orders, but he has enforced the closure of the border under Title 42 and Remain in Mexico. He has used these to intercept 1.5 million at the border, expel 700,000, and place tens of thousands, including families with children, in what under Trump had been called concentration camps.

While Biden introduced a proposal for comprehensive immigration reform, it included onerous and punitive conditions for citizenship and was paired with even more border enforcement, including plans for a new virtual border wall. It was a far cry from the movement’s call for unconditional legalization for all and abolition of the border regime.

Without even a fight, Biden let this bill die in Congress where it never even came up for a vote. And when the parliamentarian blocked an attempt to include it in the reconciliation bill, the Democrats capitulated obeying an unelected bureaucrat’s non-binding judgment.

With reform dead in the water, Biden abandoned his promise to impose a moratorium on deportations when it was blocked in the courts and started to repatriate people. He deputized his Vice President, Kamala Harris, herself a child of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, the new “Immigration Czar” to carry out all this border enforcement.

On her junket to Washington’s vassals in the Northern Triangle and Mexico, Harris told migrants, “Do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our borders. If you come to our border, you will be turned back.” She also announced a new initiative for Central American countries that combines neoliberal development aid, support for so-called “democratization”, and assistance for them to build up their own border regimes.

Haitians Collide with Biden’s Border Regime

Haitian migrants collided directly into Biden’s border regime. Biden did extend TPS for another 18 months, but that only applied to 150,000 Haitians who had been in the U.S. before May 21st of this year, not new arrivals.

When Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas announced the administration’s decision, he declared “Haiti is currently experiencing serious security concerns, social unrest, an increase in human rights abuses, crippling poverty, and lack of basic resources, which are exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.” Despite these conditions, Biden has continued to deport Haitians, the first planeloads on the first day of Black History Month.

But Haitians in Latin America observed that some were getting through the border and so continued to head north. That led 30,000 mostly Haitians at the border to try and cross into Del Rio Texas with 15,000 getting through and setting up a camp under a bridge, hoping to apply for asylum. As the world witnessed, Biden treated them with callous brutality.

To stop the next wave of Haitian migrants, he has deputized Mexico to deport Haiti from the northern border region, relocate others to Tapachula, Chiapas, and deploy its National Guard there to block Haitian and other migrants’ passage up from Latin America. The Northern Triangle states have similarly started to crack down on migrant’s passage.

Biden has also ordered the Coast Guard to intercept migrants fleeing Haiti in boats, detaining hundreds in recent days. Ominously, he has also sought out a contractor to establish a camp for migrants in Guantanamo staffed with Haitian creole speakers. Joining the quarantining of people in Haiti, the Bahamas and even Cuba has started seizing and repatriating Haitians in the Caribbean.

Time to Rebuild Protest Against the Border Regime

With Biden breaking his promises of reform, deporting Haitians and other migrants, and enforcing a closed border policy, the migrant justice movement must rebuild independent mass struggle with a program of immediate reforms and long-term border abolitionist goals.

Without protests against Biden’s attack on Haitians and all migrants, he will only face pressure from xenophobic Democrats and racist Republicans. Already, Republican Governors led by Texas’ Abbott and his Operation Lone Star have started to encroach on federal authority and implement their own rogue border policy.

The GOP plans to make immigration a central issue in the midterm elections, portraying Biden as soft on border enforcement, even though the administration is overseeing a closed border. Without protest from the migrant justice movement, Biden will double down on racist, border enforcement to neutralize Republican attacks, selling out migrants in the process.

Already there are positive signs of protests emerging, demanding justice for Haitians and all migrants. There are demonstrations calling for Biden and Senate Democrats to override the parliamentarian and include legalization in the reconciliation bill. And the Haitian Bridge Alliance has called for a national day of action on October 14th for Haitians.

In these protests it is vital that we demand justice for Haitians and all migrants, and not allow our enemies to divide us, pitting different migrant groups against one another. For Haitians, we should demand that Biden extend TPS to all in the country and grant them unconditional, permanent legalization.

For Haitians arriving at the border, we must demand that they all be let in, granted asylum, and provided any assistance they need to rebuild their lives. We must also call on Biden to stop all deportations of Haitians back to their country amidst the full-scale political, social, and economic crisis the U.S. has caused. Instead, the U.S. should pay reparations to Haiti and its people and allow them to determine their own destiny without interference from Washington or any other imperial power.

We must force Biden to scrap Title 42 and open the border immediately. If the U.S. is concerned about COVID-19, then it should end its vaccine apartheid and provide the shots and the capacity to make them to governments in Mexico, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the rest of the Global South.

The border regime, capitalist patents on life-saving medicine, and hoarding of vaccines are the problem, not migrants. For all those migrants, we must demand unconditional legalization.

In the fight for these immediate reforms, we must raise the guiding goals for the whole movement—the defunding and abolition of ICE, the Border Patrol, and the entire border regime. Only when we win open borders can we establish a society where no human being is illegal.

The Tempest Magazine via counterpunch.org