Public Comment

The plight of Ukrainian refugees has brought new focus on other refuges attempting to escape mortal danger from their own countries. While Ukrainian refugees have been cursed to live close to “big bad wolf Putin” and his murderous Russian army, they have been blessed to have fair skins which gives them a passport to neighboring countries which have welcomed them with incredible kindness and warm hospitality. In sharp contrast, US ICE agents have abused non-white asylum seekers; many have been imprisoned and tortured. Ukrainians entering the US from the southern border have been blessed to receive ‘Polish” style hospitality.  

In a rare victory, Cameroonians won Temporary Protected Status after an outcry over “Double Standard” for Ukrainians. The move allows Cameroonians protection from immediate deportation to a politically unstable state and grants them permission to work in the U.S. for at least 18 months amid escalating violence in Cameroon. As the midterm elections are fast approaching, there is intense debate over Title 42, a racist legislation which was enacted by the Trump administration to severely limit migration from our southern border targeting predominantly people of color. 

While we look in horror at the savagery of Putin’s army, we should remember our own dark history – the genocide of native Indian tribes, enslavement of African Americans, and the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps following the attack on Pearl Harbor. In our earlier history, we annexed large swaths of Mexico land during the US Mexico war, -California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, the western half of New Mexico, the western quarter of Colorado, and the southwest corner of Wyoming. 

Western powers that once championed the welfare of refugees following World War 2 has been steadily eroding. Britain’s government announced a new plan for thousands of foreign citizens in the country who had applied for asylum. Rather than hear their claims, it announced it would now ship them to faraway quasi dictatorship of Rwanda mimicking the “stay in Mexico” US plan. What’s next? The Trump remedy separating parents from their screaming children? Britain did not invent the practice of shuttling refugees and asylum seekers in faraway facilities. European governments have been paying foreign despots and warlords, in countries like Sudan and Libya, to detain migrants on their behalf for years. Australia outsources this work to a string of island nations sometimes described as its gulag archipelago. The United States effectively pioneered the practice in 1991, when it diverted boats full of Haitians to Guantánamo Bay. A rise in right-wing populist politics, the backlash in Europe against a surge of migration in 2015 and then the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated this practice and others like it. Finally, as more land becomes uninhabitable with the impact of climate change, The refugee crisis will likely become much worse.