The perpetual motion of migrant dehumanisation

In Israel, news broke this week that the country’s security forces are actively recruiting asylum seekers primarily from Eritrea and Sudan for war operations in Gaza, promising permanent status in exchange for their lives, and, inevitably, the deaths of Palestinians. There are approximately 30,000 such asylum seekers in Israel seeking safety from civil war and violent repression. So far, no asylum seeker involved in the war on Gaza has received status from Israel. 

Among the many deeply disturbing dimensions of horizontal violence involved in this arrangement, one stands out: Israel exerts control over asylum seekers through the same legal mechanism by which it oppresses Palestinians. Over the course of the 2010s, Israel amended the 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law – a measure passed to prevent the return of Palestinians to their homes from neighbouring countries – to include asylum seekers and undocumented migrants within the law’s definition of an “infiltrator”, creating a legal basis for forced detention. This effort formed a key component of Israel’s intensifying vilification and normalisation of violence against migrants over the past decade and a half.

As Haaretz explains, Israel appears to have taken inspiration from similar asylum seeker-turned-mercenary schemes in Russia and Syria. The United States, too, has recently toyed with such an approach. In February, a bi-partisan bill called the Courage to Serve Act was introduced to Congress. It proposes to address the dual issues of the country’s “migrant crisis” and military recruiting shortfall by offering permanent residency to migrants in exchange for enlistment. The bill has not moved past the first stage and is unlikely to be passed, but reflects the country’s own disturbing relationship to migrants, which has also been on display this week.      

In the US, Haitian immigrants in the city of Springfield, Ohio continue to face bomb threats to schools and hospitals following the proliferation of the false claim that they are eating pets – a lie which picked up momentum after it was promoted by Donald Trump during last week’s presidential debate. The baseless statement was further spread by vice presidential candidate JD Vance, and he has continued to defend it despite admitting he fabricated the stories. 

After nearly a week of silence, vice president Kamala Harris finally addressed the situation in an interview, offering a generic condemnation of Trump and well wishes for the children besieged by neo-Nazis, but provided neither a plan to safeguard migrants’ safety and dignity on a national scale nor even a simple statement in support of migrants more broadly. To do so, as Jack Mirkinson argues, would break the nationalist consensus on immigration established by both parties, and is consistent with the Democratic party leadership’s refusal to object to ostensibly right-wing plans to deport over 10 million people.

Reform MP Nigel Farage has himself doubled down on Trump’s claim, stating on LBC that he expects there will be some evidence found within the next month, and that Trump is normally “proven to be right”. 

Meanwhile, the UK government has also continued to engage in its own overt demonisation of migrants, learning absolutely nothing from the summer. Prime minister Keir Starmer’s trip to Italy made headlines for his friendly discussion about immigration control with fascist Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni. Meloni’s comments to the media indicated that Starmer was particularly interested in Italy’s approach to offshoring asylum applications in Albania, an arrangement which is expected to threaten the rights of asylum seekers and expose them to rampant abuse. It is, also, merely a variant of the now-scrapped Rwanda scheme, revealing Labour’s commitment to the same logics of capital, nationalism, and racism. 

It is possible to go on. I could also cite Starmer’s interest in agreements with north African countries, such as Libya and Tunisia, which exchange EU and Italian funds for greater enforcement to prevent people from reaching the Mediterranean in the first place. This arrangement was yesterday exposed as a vehicle for funding beatings, rape, and human trafficking by EU-backed Tunisian security forces. 

There simply is, at present, no meaningful electoral opposition to the vilification and exploitation of migrants around the world. 12 years ago, then communities secretary Eric Pickles (who now serves as parliamentary chairman of Conservative Friends of Israel), warned that migrants risked becoming a “sub-class” if they could not learn English.

It’s clear that Pickles was, in part, right: migrants are a sub-class, though not at all due to their English, but because they are treated by every government nominally committed to human rights as an inexhaustible resource which can be created, extracted, and manipulated at will. Migrants are essential to every national project, be it as a labour force, fighting force, scapegoat, or proof of concept for the military-industrial complex’s operations abroad. It is an unending cycle, an apparent perpetual motion machine with energy sources so accepted and normalised as to be invisible. 

I don’t often seek out Gordon Brown for insight, but today he delivers. Writing earlier this week on the continued growth of the far right in Europe, Brown concludes: “as long as the so-called moderates continue to play with fire – believing that by keeping their opponent close, they can eventually tame the beast – they will continue to lose.”

This is plainly true, but perhaps doesn’t go far enough. At what point does the adoption of right-wing immigration policy go beyond a strategic concession and actually amount to an acceptance of that vision of the world? And at what point does that acceptance become, in reality, an endorsement? When the candidates we put in office prove to be the same people they were the whole time, it’s worth asking: what exactly were you supporting? ▼

Evan Robins is an editor at Vashti.