Across the globe, compassion for migrants has given way to cruel, performative politics | Kenan Malik
www.theguardian.com
From Britain and Italy to Tunisia and Pakistan, our leaders crave being seen to be tough as a distraction from their failures at home

Wednesday, the UK supreme court will give its verdict on the Rwanda deportation scheme. The decision will clearly have a major impact on those who face deportation. It will have an impact, too, on the political debate about immigration, with government supporters either hailing a victory or bemoaning the treachery of the liberal elite. But, whatever the decision, it will have little bearing on the “immigration crisis”. The government itself has acknowledged that, even were the court to deem the scheme legal, and deportation flights to Kigali take off, Rwanda could take only “small numbers” of deportees, possibly 300 a year across the four years of the trial period. Given that there were almost 46,000 people crossing the Channel on small boats last year, and that by August this year the asylum backlog stood at 175,000, the deportation scheme amounts to little more than performative policy – the desire to be seen doing something and doing something cruel – rather than a serious attempt to tackle a problem.

Performative policymaking has become commonplace in immigration management, and not just in Britain. Last week, Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, announced an arrangement under which undocumented migrants and asylum seekers will be kept in specially built detention centres in Albania.

Pakistan has said it will deport all undocumented Afghan refugees – up to 1.7 million people – potentially provoking one of the largest forced deportations since the 1950s, though, in the shadow of the war in Gaza, the world seems barely to have noticed.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    2·
    8 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Last week, Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, announced an arrangement under which undocumented migrants and asylum seekers will be kept in specially built detention centres in Albania.

    The details remain sketchy, but the scheme appears to be a form of offshore processing – rather than straightforward deportation, as Britain envisages in its Rwanda plan – whereby those heading for Italy but intercepted in international waters are to be detained in Albania and their cases heard there.

    Hungary, whose prime minister, Viktor Orbán, is among the most vociferous European opponents of immigration, is also quietly turning to non-EU countries to address its labour needs, with plans to accept up to 500,000 “guest workers”.

    What the obsession with immigration does, de Haas observes, is make it easier to turn questions about social policy at home – from stagnating wages to a lack of affordable housing – into a debate about an external threat to the nation.

    The unfolding catastrophe shows how, for all the western panic about facing “floods” of asylum seekers, it is the poorest countries in Africa and Asia that already host the vast majority of the world’s refugees.

    Facing a cascade of crises – economic disaster, political instability and a wave of terror attacks – Pakistani leaders are, in the words of one analyst, following a well-establaished strategy of “deflecting blame”.

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