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Asylum principles under threat since Sept 11
23 Aug 2002
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Matthew Gibney: lamentable consequences.
Photo: Refugee Studies Centre.
Since the attacks in the United States last September, there has been an unprecedented consensus that refugees are more of a threat than an asset, writes Matthew J. Gibney of the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. He argues that these events remind us why the institution of asylum is so important and should not be bartered for a marginal increase in security."Security", the philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote in 1861, "is the most vital of all interests. On it", he argued, "we depend for all our immunity from evil, and for the whole value of all and every good, beyond the passing moment".On September 11, 2001, the citizens of Western countries had the truth of Mill’s words brought spectacularly home to them. This lesson unleashed some lamentable consequences. The attacks of that fateful day led to war; war created refugees; refugees fled in search of asylum.The first two months of the war against the Taliban resulted in the movement of some 130,000 refugees, most of whom found a kind of rough asylum in neighbouring Pakistan.Pakistan’s borders had remained, in practice if not official declaration, relatively open to refugees because of pressure applied by international organisations for the country to serve as a humanitarian refuge for the course of the crisis. Yet, while Pakistan was expected to offer more asylum during the course of the "war on terror", Western states implemented a number of policy and legislative changes that were likely to have a profound effect on the provision of protection for refugees. In the United States, the government temporarily suspended the resettlement of some 20,000 refugees told that they would be able to enter. Under the new USA Patriot Act, aliens suspected of terrorism can be detained without charge for seven days.In addition, members of terrorist organisations prescribed by the Justice Department can now be deported or barred from entering the United States without judicial review. In the United Kingdom, a new Emergency Anti-Terrorism Act was quickly proposed. The act allows the Home Secretary to reject asylum claims for persons deemed a threat to national security. It also broadens the state’s authority to detain individuals considered a terrorist threat, while curtailing appeals for some asylum seekers.MORE MONEY FOR DEPORTATIONIn Canada, the government’s new Anti-Terrorism Plan creates new detention places for foreigners suspected of terrorist activities, provides for a tightening of screening systems to ensure that those involved with terrorist groups do not enter asylum systems and allocates more money for deportation.Legitimate asylum seekers, state officials have been quick to say, have little to fear from well-targeted security measures.But the question is whether such measures are indeed well-targeted. Asylum is increasingly viewed as a vehicle through which terrorists and other undesirables might enter Western states. In the aftermath of September 11, these concerns are not hard to understand.The latest incarnation of asylum as a security threat is rooted in the mid-1980s and can be traced to four major developments.The first was the ratification of the Single European Act in 1987, which began the move towards the abolition of border controls between European Community member states.Negotiations about the implications of a frontier-free Europe prompted new concerns about the security implications of mutual interdependence.From the start, discussions welded matters of asylum and immigration with more nefarious issues of organised crime, illegal migration and terrorism. Linkages between these concerns became, moreover, institutionalised in the Amsterdam Treaty.Fittingly, asylum was placed under the category of matters leading to a community-wide area of "Freedom, Security and Justice".The end of the Cold War also played a key role in joining refugee and security concerns.A third important factor has been the Security Council’s increasing prominence since the early 1990s as a vehicle for sanctioning military intervention by states. Interventions in Iraq, Somalia, Haiti and former Yugoslavia were in part legitimised by the desires of the dominant powers to stem refugee movement. MULTIPARTY DEMOCRACY IN AFRICAFinally, the increasing association of refugee issues with security reflects the spread of democratisation since 1989. The rise of multiparty democracy in Africa, in particular, has arguably diminished the autonomy of state elites in determining the security agenda.Widespread social concerns about the economic, cultural and social threats posed by refugees and other immigrants have, accordingly, tended to make their way into the defence considerations of states, such as South Africa and Tanzania.Even in the more established democracies, the end of Cold War hostility and uncertainties created by economic globalisation have created the space and the appetite for a new range of public fears.These developments are significant in their own right. However, the movement towards a new security perspective on forced migration really picked up pace in the wake of actual terrorist activity.The bombing in 1993 of the World Trade Center in New York by Islamic extremists, one of whom had an asylum decision pending, and, of course, the September 11 attacks carried out by foreigners on visitor and student visas, demonstrated that talk of security actually corresponded to an empirically verifiable threat.These attacks spawned a range of new restrictive laws and policies in Western states, particularly the United States. There is now an unprecedented consensus among states that refugees generally constitute more of a threat than an asset.Widespread public indifference to discretionary treatment of asylum seekers is closely linked to the view of the foreigner as a threat.How can we be sure that those claiming asylum come in search of help rather than to harm us? Might they not be hostile to our values and institutions? Do not their true loyalties lie with the state they have left?This lack of trust is deepened when a history of racist assumptions has been left to fill the void between what we do and do not know about particular groups of people.NO ORDINARY FOREIGNERYet the refugee is no ordinary foreigner. Refugees, by definition, are victims of insecurity. Their very search for protection vindicates the importance of security. By virtue of being escapees from violent conflict and human rights violations, refugees are also (albeit unwilling) representatives of these phenomena.As representatives of these undesirable features of social life, it is not surprising that refugees are often construed as carriers of the instability and insecurity that led to their initial departure. As in the case of those fleeing a plague, reactions to them typically involve a mixture of sympathy for their plight and concern that they might be the carriers of the disease.What, then, might an ethically defensible response to security concerns about asylum raised by September 11 look like? We need to begin by ensuring that this general feeling of discomfort is disentangled from more legitimate concerns over security that states might have. This process of disentangling requires that states subject their own security concerns to the same kind of scrutiny that they apply to the claims of asylum seekers.The trade-offs associated with increased security are not only shared out amongst citizens. At times of high national drama, the consequences for foreigners are rarely a matter of great public debate. Yet, from an ethical perspective, the interests of outsiders must count for something.The unspoken truth is that, as shocking as the attacks in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington were, the number of people killed by them is dwarfed by the number of people whose lives are saved from death and torture annually as a result of the asylum policies of the United States, Canada and other Western countries.Even if, as some ethical theories argue, there are good moral reasons for prioritising the needs of one’s compatriots, the value of these lives saved cannot be completely written off. A shiver ran down the spine of many people in the West on September 11. The world they looked out on now seemed a much less secure and more uncertain place. This changed world provided the rationale for new measures of exclusion and control on refugees, asylum seekers, and, in some cases, foreign residents generally. No one with a modicum of historical memory could be surprised that these measures have flourished. At times of high anxiety, political communities tend to become less tolerant, more insular places. Yet, if this was the exclusionary moment spawned by September 11, another moment is still possible.The insecurity and uncertainty generated by the terrorist attacks brought many people in stable, rights-respecting countries closer to the insecurity that blights the lives of many of the world’s refugees.In so doing, they showed why the institution of asylum -- with its promise to swap vulnerability for protection -- is so supremely important, and why it should not be bartered away for a marginal increase in security.For most of us, this moment of connection lasted only for a few short minutes. But it is a moment we could do well to replay in our minds. For, if we let this feeling of connection with refugees inform current measures to protect our societies, the events of September 11 might well cement, rather than erode, the values that security promises to preserve.An extended version of this article can be found at: http://www.fmreview.org/MAG1_PDFS/FMR13-pdfs/fmr13.14.pdf
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