"Western societies are not very well disposed towards accepting refugees and this limits the action of any government that wants to be re-elected"

 

Víctor M. Sánchez, received his doctoral degree in Law from the University of Barcelona (UB) in 2003, and is director of the UOC University Master's Degree in Human Rights, Democracy and Globalization. He has just published Migraciones, refugiados y amnistía en el derecho internacional del Antiguo Oriente Medio, II milenio a.C. (Migration, refugees and amnesty in the international law of the ancient Middle East, 2nd millennium BC) (TECNOS). According to Dr Sánchez, an expert in international law, “we have not changed that much in human terms, and historical experience, the only social laboratory we have, has not taught us enough. The same social situations repeatedly lead to identical disasters". Today, the faces of the people of Syria, Sudan or Afghanistan are a reminder that there are over 23 million refugees in the world and around 300 million migrants. A full-scale drama.

 

 

Víctor M. Sánchez, received his doctoral degree in Law from the University of Barcelona (UB) in 2003, and is director of the UOC University Master's Degree in Human Rights, Democracy and Globalization. He has just published Migraciones, refugiados y amnistía en el derecho internacional del Antiguo Oriente Medio, II milenio a.C. (Migration, refugees and amnesty in the international law of the ancient Middle East, 2nd millennium BC) (TECNOS). According to Dr Sánchez, an expert in international law, “we have not changed that much in human terms, and historical experience, the only social laboratory we have, has not taught us enough. The same social situations repeatedly lead to identical disasters". Today, the faces of the people of Syria, Sudan or Afghanistan are a reminder that there are over 23 million refugees in the world and around 300 million migrants. A full-scale drama.

 

Human migration flows are very old: we have written records from 4,000 years ago, although they cover further back. But today the volumes are higher than in any other period of history. In 2000, 155 million people moved from their place of origin, 2.8% of the world's population. In 2015 there were around 244 million migrants, 3.3%.

There is no single cause. We can talk of relatively new technical factors: it is increasingly easier to move around and to do so efficiently. ICTs also help this movement: it is easier to decide where and how to go, creating family networks to receive new migrants, for example. Now, with a mobile phone or satellite TV, the psychological distance between the socio-cultural space in which you live and where you want to go has been reduced. But there are other factors that, since antiquity, have encouraged human beings to reactivate their nomadic instinct: economics, social inequalities, fleeing from worlds excessively tied to tradition, political minoritization in places of origin, wars, natural disasters, etc.

Wherever there is an unsatisfied basic necessity of life the instinct to flee emerges. We have moved around ever since the first Homo sapiens walked on the Earth and looked up to see beyond the tree tops. And these migratory movements have probably always been conflictive. When the territorial states began to emerge, around the second millennium BC in the ancient Middle East, treaties were written between states in which these flows were regulated to prevent them. Normally, they created an obligation to capture and return migrants or refugees to their country of origin. Perhaps the most important lesson is that the most relevant variable in the regulation of migration flows is the economic value given to each individual, rather than their moral value. In those times, having a large population, especially women, was a determining factor in the power of the state. Now normal migration, that is, of poorly-qualified people with limited wealth, has the opposite effect: they are seen as a cost for the source and host countries. Therefore, the former does nothing to retain them within its borders and the latter makes access to its territory as difficult as possible. Today in the developed world nothing impedes the entrance of people with special qualifications because they are seen as an economically productive asset.

First, they remind me that there are around 23 million refugees in the world, and that in recent years the main cause of these personal and collective dramas is the same: conflicts within countries, civil wars, separatist movements. Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Somalia, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Burundi... The international community and society at a national level should do everything they can to prevent and stop them... The same thing happened in the domestic wars between Greeks in the 6th to 4th centuries BC (the Holy Wars, the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian Civil War in 404 BC, etc). They generated thousands of exiles and refugees all over Hellas and its adjacent areas (Lydia, Persia). We have not changed that much in human terms, and historical experience, the only social laboratory we have, has not taught us enough. The same social situations repeatedly lead to the same disasters.

The media selects what is 'news', playing an essential role as guardian of the right to information, but obviously also being subject to market and political forces. The world is as human as me or the reader, and like anything human it has virtues and defects. Luckily, looking after refugees is not something that depends on journalists. If it was, the problem would have become yesterday's news by now and faded out of sight. However, they are still there. Fortunately, countries, with all their defects, have created international institutions such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and the International Organization for Migration. These, along with long-standing humanitarian bodies such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, carry out constant work that is not always sufficiently recognized and often poorly funded, to manage the worst effects of these situations.

By combining realism with a sense of humanity. But not one without the other. It is important to stress that no one is going to impose on a country how many immigrants it will take. Another issue concerns the refugees or people in need of international protection because their lives are in danger. This is where we must demand more of Western countries, above all because most refugees remain in the countries bordering the source countries (Turkey, Lebanon, etc). Neither must we underestimate the fact that Western societies these days are not very well disposed towards accepting refugees and this limits the action of any government that wants to be re-elected. Ask Angela Merkel in Germany. Therefore, while better conditions are being created for receiving refugees in our countries, we also have to be positive in our attitude towards increasing resources for the main countries that host refugees.

The only legal limits that can be demanded under international standards are to ensure that people are returned properly; that is, processing asylum requests when pertinent, ensuring legal assistance for those passing through before returning them, treating each case individually. We must ensure that the conditions of these fences do not unnecessarily endanger the integrity of people who want to cross them. We must guarantee humanitarian treatment of all those people in transit, whether they have the right to remain in the country of destination or not, and pay particular attention to how immigrant minors are received and treated, whether accompanied or not, and also to women, who are always in a more vulnerable situation. By the way, the wall between the USA and Mexico is not from Trump's mandate. Democrat President Bill Clinton started to build it in 1994. And Obama has the merit of being the US president that has expelled the largest number of illegal immigrants: almost 3 million.

Anyone who portrays the problems of the mass flows of people across borders as a question of Right or Left, or modernity versus conservatism, is making judgements motivated by mere political opportunism. The savage razor wire covering the top of one of the border fences of Ceuta and Melilla was installed by Zapatero in 2005...

At this stage it is very difficult to know with any certainty what we mean when we talk about “civil society". Trade unions, NGOs, foundations? Reality shows that these institutionalized forms of social action have been co-opted by political parties or administrations. So, in general, with honourable exceptions, their point of view is highly conditioned by the parties or administrations on which they depend. They act or stay silent with excessive selectiveness. This affects their reputation and credibility. In reality, they have not managed to be authentic representatives of civil society as their funding is not based on the fees from members, citizens concerned with improving the society around them, but in one way or another on public subsidy. Of course, there are serious associations, not politically co-opted, to channel the financial and human aid of this genuine humanitarian conscience of citizens: UNICEF, UNHCR, Médecins Sans Frontières, Amnesty International, etc. Beyond this, we find parapolitical action mechanisms with little financial autonomy and, consequently, with little independence to establish their objectives. They behave like the churches when they carry out social action: they are not motivated by profit but certainly by capturing followers; in other words, future voters. This is not necessarily bad, except that in the case of churches or religions there is more transparency about their ends.