The 21st Century Strategy

By Ruth A. Sheets

I sign a lot of petitions hoping some of them will get through to the various receivers on issues I think are important.  I find doing this interesting even though I suspect most of the petitions go nowhere and are only an excuse to send a beg email.

I received a petition yesterday I did not quite believe.  It was a petition to the UK about their project to send people seeking asylum to Rwanda.  What!!!  The petition explained that Prime Minister Boris Johnson (a poor leader in my opinion) is giving the government of Rwanda hundreds of millions of pounds to take asylum-seekers from the UK.  I set it aside for a while to find out if this were true since I try to sign only petitions I actually know something about.

Later that day, Tuesday, June 7^th I was listening to my NPR station, WHYY, when a program came on with the topic of   UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson sending asylum-seekers to Rwanda.  The petition was from a reputable refugee organization, but I had hoped it was fantasy.  It wasn’t!

An apartment complex has been constructed outside the Rwandan capital with 50 rooms, a common area, and a pool.  The journalist who reported from Rwanda didn’t know how many people the building was supposed to hold because each room had several bunk beds.  She also didn’t  know what the goal was since none of the money sent by the UK to Rwanda would go to the asylum-seekers.  There was some hint of possible training and maybe jobs, but that was also unclear.

So, to recap, the UK is sending asylum-seekers from Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Syria, and other countries who risked their lives to get to Britain, to Rwanda, a poor nation with a history of one group massacring people who are not of their group. 

I have no idea whose plan this was, but I have no doubt Prime Minister Johnson was on board and has surrounded himself with a whole cadre of folks who, like him, have no moral compass.  Is the Parliament going along with it?  Probably. 

Asylum-seeking has been nearly sacred since the end of WWII but it seems it is losing its special place in society in the 21^st century.  The United States, under Barack Obama deported millions of asylum-seekers and refugees, often back into danger, even death.  Under Trump, asylum-seekers who were not deported were put into cages and children were torn from parents and for months were treated like animals.  Some still have not been reunited with their parents.  Currently, in addition to deporting folks, even people who have been living, working, and raising families in this country for decades, the immigration apparatus has been crippled so asylum-seekers are incarcerated in private for-profit prisons here or forced to wait in Mexico for years.  Trump’s CDC  accused those asylum-seekers of being a health threat for bringing COVID into the US.  Title 42 remains in place even though the CDC has dismissed the threat. 

Australia is keeping asylum-seekers and other possible immigrants on a very poor island off the coast of Australia.  Other countries in Europe have asylum-seekers quarantined on islands or in huge “refugee camps.”

There is a common feature here.  The asylum-seekers are people of color and the nations trying to keep or kick them out are predominantly white.

White people have been raised to see themselves as superior to everyone else, far superior.  They have been unhappy with people of color entering white society for centuries, permitting only a few who were not actually enslaved to stay.  They even tried to send the descendants of their enslaved people, not wanting free people of color to have rights, to some other part of the world (Liberia). 

Supposedly, in all those white nations, people of color have rights.  Ask people of color in any of those nations (OK most, because there might be one nation somewhere and a person of color somewhere who would not agree) and you would learn of the intense discrimination they experience every day.

Perhaps, as long as the white majority keeps electing racists to leadership roles, they will continue to find ways of ridding the society of asylum-seekers of color or forcing them to take the lowest-wage jobs, the dirtiest,  least appreciated work, if they let them in at all.  Of course that work is too menial for the families of white leaders, the true legacy citizens of that nation. 

Here in the US, Republican members of Congress and TV pundits have said the words “legacy citizens” out loud (it means white).  They have also told white folks to be very afraid because the reason people are coming here is to “replace” white people.  They imply this nation is white people, the “real” citizens, then there’s everyone else.  That is true in the other white nations too.  Each handles it slightly differently, but the message is the same.  White is good everything else is bad, unless you are winning a sports event or music competition “in our name,” then the “legacy citizens” will tolerate your celebrity until they don’t have to. 

It becomes more and more clear every day that white men (and some white women who have bought into the woman as walking incubator nonsense) are really scared.  How do we know?  There are many clues.  One is that they work hard to keep out asylum-seekers of color. (Ukrainians are OK because they are white, you know.)  People of color make up a greater percentage of incarcerated persons in white nations, being charged with crimes legacies commit at around the same rate.  White men in the US love their guns and can brag about it.  Police shoot Black men even if licensed to carry a gun. 

So, the 21^st century plan is to dump asylum-seekers wherever rich countries can find a poor enough place that can be forced or bribed to take them:  Mexico, islands that don’t touch the white nation’s mainland, impoverished countries in Africa.  I wonder which country is going to follow Rwanda.  South Africa is already trying to get rid of their immigrants and asylum-seekers too.  Their strategy is to just drive them out of the country or kill them, whichever works best for the ones doing the driving.

Those of us who are white and are not OK with the current system need to get the word out about the strategy and demand our leaders stop their racist behavior.  If they want to be racist themselves, that’s on them, but they should be unable to put into place racist policies anywhere.  We need to regularly call those scared white men (and women) out on their practices, report from the places asylum-seekers and refugees are being kept, often like animals in places run by private prison corporations, make documentaries on their plight, and more.  It is hard for a political party, a president, or prime minister to claim any kind of high ground when they see themselves as “guardians” whose duty it is to keep out all who can never be “legacy citizens,” except the useful ones, of course.