The Uninvited
Jeremy Harding
In the early 1990s, about 80 million people – roughly 1.5 per cent of the world’s population – were living outside the country of their birth. The figure now is closer to 120 million. Migration across international borders is not a simple phenomenon and migrants themselves are as diverse as people who stay put. The banker from Seattle who signs a five-year contract for a post in Berlin is a migrant; so is the lay-out editor in Paris who moves to Moscow to work on a Russian edition of her magazine; so is the labourer from Indonesia or Thailand who becomes a building worker in Brunei; so is the teenage boy from Shanghai indentured to a Chinese crime ring in New York. Refugees, too, are migrants. Often they share their route to safety with others who are not seeking asylum: the smuggling syndicates known as snakeheads, which induct Chinese women into a life of semi-slavery in Europe and the US, also ran dissidents to freedom in the retreat from Tiananmen Square. These things are largely a question of money. Refugees are not necessarily poor, but by the time they have reached safety, the human trafficking organisations on which they depend have eaten up much of their capital. In the course of excruciating journeys, mental and physiological resources are also expended – some of them non-renewable.
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[*] Refugees in an Age of Genocide (Cass, 505 pp., £47.50 and £22.50, 9 June 1999, 0 7146 4783 7).
Letters
Vol. 22 No. 6 · 16 March 2000
From Edward Luttwak
Without ever quite declaring it, Jeremy Harding (LRB, 3 February) persuasively differentiates sub-Saharan African refugees from all others. Kurds, Iraqis, Albanians, Sri Lankans, Romanians, Russians etc are fleeing the disruptions of war or the upheavals of post-Communism. Sub-Saharan Africans, on the other hand, are fleeing sub-Saharan Africa as such, or at least its governance. Sometimes there is war or bloody dictatorship as well, but even without either the normal operation of almost all sub-Saharan states impoverishes the already poor, because – legally or illegally – politicians, bureaucrats and soldiers extract relatively large resources for themselves from the population, without providing useful public services. The problem, moreover, cannot be solved by democratic forms, for it derives from the very existence of Western-type state structures in societies that lack a Western-type culture of public service, even rather bad and rather corrupt public service. In their case, non-feasance rather than misfeasance is the problem. Only the hollow pretence of their correctibility justifies the African policies of the US, UK, EU and so on, all of which legitimise extortionate state structures. I realise that re-colonisation, the only efficient remedy in theory, is not an option, but I am curious to learn what Harding's solution might be.
As for the fast patrol boats of the Italian Guardia di Finanza and their futile chases of even faster Albanian people-smuggling rubber boats, I am sure that Harding realises that it is not at all a matter of relative speeds. Coastal interdiction cannot, in any case, be performed by outracing intruders. If done in earnest, surveillance, detection and interception must be followed by warning shots and then sinking shots, if the intruders do not stop on command to surrender. The GdF has the weapons, of course, but is strictly prohibited from using them. Only a fraction of the Italian political élite really opposes illegal immigration, and a yet smaller fraction would sanction the use of force to stop the people-smuggling trade by shooting up the rubber boats after they had unloaded their human cargo. The Roman Catholic Church favours any and all immigration to replace the vanishing Italians, whose fertility is the lowest in the world, or near enough. As for the governing coalition, it wants to do no more to limit illegal immigration than is absolutely mandated by Italy's obligations under EU accords. Even in the opposition, Berlusconi's Forza Italia opposes effective controls, leaving only the ex-Neofascist Alleanza Nazionale and Bossi's Northern Leagues to oppose illegal immigration. Because Italian public opinion is increasingly antagonised by Albanian and Roma petty and not so petty crime, the insouciance of their betters is provoking a populist reaction. Haider is already a hero to many in north-east Italy, which has been particularly exposed to the new immigrant crime wave for obvious geographic reasons – that is where the Roma and many Bosnians and even Albanians first arrive. Public attitudes are not predictably or conventionally racist, however. The belief that the Roma have an exceptionally high criminal propensity is hardly a hostile fantasy. At the same time, there is more tolerance for black Africans than for brown North Africans, while the lily-white Albanians are perhaps the most widely disliked at present. The ineffectual games played by the GdF and Italy's other frontier police forces reflect élite preferences, not those of the public. Nobody should be surprised if Italy's stand-ins for Haider do rather well in the next elections.
Edward Luttwak
Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Washington DC
From Theresa Wells-King
I had hoped that Jeremy Harding's article would do what so many similar articles written in the wake of Bosnia and Kosovo have failed to do: namely, state clearly that the greatest mass expulsion in European history occurred between 1945 and 1950, and that those affected were ethnic Germans. To refer to the expulsion of 13.8 million Germans, 2.1 million of whom died in the process, as the 'return' from Poland and Sudetenland makes me wonder why he bothered to mention the subject at all.
Theresa Wells-King
East Wittering, West Sussex
From Donald John Lachowicz
Jeremy Harding claims that 'enormous numbers of Jews' were 'driven west by tsarist and Polish pogroms' and speaks of 'hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from the Pale of Settlement and Poland'. There was no Poland at that time. The country had been divided by her three ungrateful neighbours and had suffered with her many Jewish citizens from the actions of the Russians, Austrians and Prussians. Jews, having suffered in Western Europe, had found a home in Poland for over 600 years.
Donald John Lachowicz
Shelby Township, Michigan
Vol. 22 No. 8 · 13 April 2000
From Lena Barrett
Does Edward Luttwak (Letters, 16 March) regret that the Guardia di Finanza generally refrain from sinking Albanian boats filled with men, women and children? Given that Italy has an alarmingly low birthrate, as he himself points out, creating the possibility of lawful immigration would seem to be a sensible response – and one sure to reduce demand for the services of illegal traffickers.
As for attributing 'an exceptionally high criminal propensity' to the Roma, this is the kind of remark that breeds hatred of, and violence towards the Roma in many parts of Eastern Europe, ultimately forcing them to look for protection elsewhere.
Lena Barrett
Brussels
