Bradley Hillier-Smith asks in Aeon magazine if there 'can be an agreement on what an ethical response to refugees would be'.
The answer is no. There can be agreement as to a political response or a psychological response or an economic response or a military response to a particular refugee problem- because such responses are useful and require at least a degree of agreement amongst the powers that be. There can be no agreement about the ethical response to problems other people, in the abstract, have. It is obvious that I will feel differently about a problem faced by a person I feel kinship to. I care more about Sri Lankan Tamil refugees because I am a Tamil than I do about refugees, like Jason Stanley, fleeing Trump's Fascist regime. There is an 'uncorrelated symmetry' here. I am Tamil, not a left-wing American.
to achieve this agreement, we must reach across divides in current debates to find common ground and base our approach on widely shared commitments.
There are no 'widely shared commitments'. There are narrow commitments based on uncorrelated asymmetries. Mummy is committed to feeding baby and wiping its bum. Baby is committed to cooing and cuddling mummy. Neither is committed to doing such things to anybody else. There is an uncorrelated asymmetry to do with who came out of which womb, or who legally adopted who, which grounds such narrow commitments. Similarly, a citizen of a particular nation is committed to paying taxes to it or serving in its armed forces. That citizen is not committed to paying taxes to every nation or serving in the army of any foreign power.
In this spirit, we can grant that states have a right to control their borders and immigration.
They may do. They may not. This is a justiciable matter in International law.
The problem with rights is that enforcing them uses up resources. Some countries will make the effort to police their borders. Others won't bother more particularly if migrants simply want to pass through their territory to get to somewhere nicer.
The question of obligations to refugees is often tangled up with questions of whether states have a right to control border
If the people of a country are good at killing foreigners, then the State is irrelevant.
But these are distinct questions. You can believe that states have a right to control borders and immigration, yet still agree that states have obligations to protect refugees.
You agree to things if you get paid or if your agreement doesn't cost you anything. The thing does not matter in the slightest. On the other hand, if there is 'Aumann agreement' featuring Bayesian agents, then we may speak with confidence of 'commitments' as being meaningful rather than 'preference falsification' or mere hypocrisy. The problem is, for this to obtain 'intensions' must have well defined 'extensions'. Sadly ethical matters are 'epistemic' and, for that reason, lack any such thing. You just get cascading intensional fallacies if you pretend otherwise.
So, we can move past the broader distracting and volatile debate on immigration, and focus on obligations to refugees specifically.
This is a matter of law. Sadly, the existence of an obligation holder does not mean that a remedy will necessarily be provided. What matters is if it is 'incentive compatible' to do so. If it isn't the remedy will be rationed or might abruptly disappear. Pretending obligation holders have infinite resources is silly. Entitlement collapse occurs all the time. The State can run out of money and force a haircut on all sorts of innocent or vulnerable people.
Refugees are migrants,
They may be. They may not. People who take refuge in a camp set up for displaced people within the territory of the State of which they are subjects are still refugees. They may be waiting to get admitted to some other country which wishes to take them.
but only insofar as they have fled their own countries.
This is not the case. Internally displaced people are still refugees.
The majority migrate no further. Refugees are distinct, as recognised in international law, because they have been forced to flee their own states due to severe threats.
International law recognises that internally displaced people may be refugees. Bihari origin people in Bangladesh are an example.
Their own state is unwilling or unable to adequately protect them, so they are forced to seek safety elsewhere. This distinguishes refugees from migrants who may not be forcibly displaced and unable to return, but who migrate for other reasons.
The problem is that it is difficult to establish if a migrant who claims to be a refugee is actually any such thing.
Refugees therefore have particularly urgent claims to protection and potential admission.
So do starving people whose wives beats them. Sadly, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees refused to come and cook something nice for me.
To reach agreement on obligations to such refugees, these obligations must themselves be based on widely shared core moral commitments (that is, basic commitments fundamental to common morality, as well as endorsed by all plausible normative ethical theories and the Abrahamic religions, to which the majority of the world adheres).
Nonsense! Agreements have been reached on this and other matters without any agreement about 'core moral commitments'. The plain fact is, Refugees were seen as cheap labour. There was an economic argument for admitting them. There was also a political factor. Particular communities provide vote banks. In return they want unrestricted immigration, under the guise of Refugee Asylum, for people from their country or community or religion.
The first commitment is the moral prohibition on harming or violating the rights of innocent people without substantial justification.
Who is to say what 'substantial justification' is? The indigenous people may object to 'demographic replacement'. Equally, if smart people can easily gain asylum then they have less incentive to stay at home and fix its underlying problems.
For example, it is widely accepted that it would be wrong to physically abuse and then imprison an innocent person without trial for no adequate reason.
So what? Has that 'wide acceptance' prevented anybody being beaten and kept as a sex-slave? No. What is needed is an effective police force. But that costs money. Where agreement comes into its own is in Parliament where a budget is passed. But that is a political, not an ethical, matter.
This commitment grounds our negative moral obligations: obligations to not perform acts that would harm or violate the rights of innocent people.
Cretins who study and teach this shite might believe so. The fact is we require payment to do things we find repugnant or boring.
Such negative obligations are widely agreed to be particularly strong.
Wide agreements amongst morons are still moronic. It is sad that a few such morons have to teach this shite to would be morons.
The second commitment is the principle (sometimes called the humanitarian or Samaritan principle) that if an innocent person is in desperate need of help and you can easily help them at little cost to yourself, it would be wrong to refuse to help and let them needlessly suffer.
It would be foolish. You would gain a reputation for virtue at a trifling expense. On the other hand, if you are a Professor of worthless shite, you may well explain at length that it would be wrong to eat up all your own shit. Send some to Peter Singer. He will be awfully grateful.
To take Singer’s famous example, if you saw a small child drowning in a shallow pond, and you could save them simply by pulling them to safety, it would be wrong to do nothing, stand by and let them drown.
These cunts are so fucking stupid they think Singer is hella smart. Did you know you should not beat babies to death? You should give them milk.
This commitment grounds our positive moral obligations: obligations to perform acts that would help or otherwise benefit others. These positive obligations are also widely accepted.
By imbeciles. Still, if you want to get a sheepskin in stupid shit, you have to play along with this nonsense.
So what are the obligations specifically owed to refugees?
Individuals have no obligations to them. A State may say it has such obligations but it may be lying through its teeth.
To answer this question, it is essential to focus our attention on the situation and experiences of refugees themselves.
No. What matters is what we can afford. If you don't have a pot to piss in, you can't discharge any obligations. If you have plenty of money you can spend a bit by way of charity because there is a reputational benefit. Better yet, gain fame by being generous with other people's money. Also, if you are a professor of worthless shite, you may as well pretend you are the Mother Theresa of Economics or the Jesus Christ of Philosophy.
This will reveal morally significant features that ought to be recognised and taken into account, thereby helping us understand our obligations towards them. Once understood, these obligations will form the components of what an ethical response towards refugees would be.
Ethical people don't talk bollocks. They do useful things.
The first morally significant feature of refugees’ situation is that states in the Global North
want cheap labour. Because their own working class opposes economic migration, they pretend that their heart bleeds for obviously bogus asylum seekers. Also, voters become less keen on raising spending on public housing, schools etc. if they thing furriners will disproportionately benefit.
are by no means mere innocent bystanders simply overlooking the harms that refugees face.
Global North is beating and sodomizing the Global South. Fuck you Neo-Liberalism! Fuck you very much!
Rather, many states actively respond to refugees seeking safety with the following practices:
Border violence: violence against refugees is pervasive at European and US borders. In the most extreme cases, refugees are beaten to death or shot by border guards.
Also their bellies are torn open and foetuses are extracted. Those foetuses have their own bellies ripped open so that smaller foetuses can be extracted. It is notable that these foetuses are reading Gramsci and underling passages and writing 'how true!' in the margin.
In Calais, France, UK-funded riot police reportedly use extreme violence including severe beatings.
The refugees don't mind the beatings. It is their bellies being torn open that they object to.
And along Greece’s newly-built 40 km border wall with Turkey, border officials reportedly assault refugees, causing grave injuries (including broken spines), and subject them to degrading treatment – in particular, stripping them naked – before forcing them back into Turkey.
These reports are all bogus. The truth is that all White peeps spend their every waking moment sodomizing darkies. Then they rip our bellies open. Sad.
Detention: in a 2017 arrangement between Libya and Italy, and other EU states, refugees attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea to find safety in Europe are intercepted and returned, to be confined in detention centres on the Libyan coast. In these centres, refugees are deprived of their liberty indefinitely, and face overcrowding, disease, starvation and death, as well as torture, rape and even being traded as slaves.
What happened in Libya might happen in Italy. Indeed, there were some reports of the Mafia using refugees as slave labour. My point is that if we do stupid shit then our country won't be safe for us- let alone foreign refugees.
Encampment: as part of the 2016 EU-Turkey deal, refugees who cross the Aegean Sea from Turkey and arrive on the Greek islands are forcibly enclosed in camps and ‘controlled access centres’, denying their free movement. Here, thousands of refugees, including women and children, have faced squalid and unsanitary conditions, and extensive human rights violations, including pervasive sexual violence.
This is not sustainable. Perhaps some lightly populated country will host the refugees who may, by their thrift and enterprise, enable their new country of domicile to prosper.
Containment: containment policies forcibly contain refugees in regions in the Global South, away from Northern territories, by shutting down migratory routes to safety.
It is perfectly proper to shut down an illegal route. That illegality may arise because it is not safe to use or else because it could be used for criminal purposes.
In areas of containment, refugees endure severe harms.
People endure severe harm everywhere. This does not mean any body or any state has an obligation to help all such people.
For instance, the arrangement with Libya blocks the main migratory route from North Africa to Europe,
it is a highly dangerous and wholly illegal route. Did you know that here in Britain, my main migratory rote from North London to Edmonton runs through Buckingham Palace? Yet King Charles is blocking my use of this route causing me severe harm.
and so contains refugees in those regions where they face extensive human rights violations. And the EU-Turkey refugee deal blocks that main migratory route to safety in Europe and so contains refugees in regions in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, where they face extreme poverty and human rights violations in urban areas or camps.
This is all very well but the other side of the picture is that rights are meaningless save if linked, under a bond of law, to incentive compatible remedies. A country which throws open its doors in a spirit of Christian Charity- as 'Saint' Angela Merkel appeared to do- may soon have to slam shut those doors or else go off a fiscal cliff. History has taught Germany that following a stupid economic policy can lead to very nasty people gaining power.
With unlimited space and time, we could consider many, many other practices used against refugees. The point, however, is already clear.
What is clear is that no country is rich enough to shelter all refugees. Worse yet, many countries have failed to abolish death which disproportionately affects poor people. Did you know that 99 percent of everybody who dies is not of the 'one percent'? How is that fair?
Many states in the Global North adopt policies and practices that result in extensive mental and physical suffering and severe human rights violations for refugees.
Also by refusing to implement compulsory gender reassignment surgery for heterosexual males, the Global North is totes pissing off the Feminist Global South.
These states are thus not merely failing to help those refugees asking for safety but are in fact actively harming them.
Also, they are failing to abolish death. However, in this instance, some blame also attaches to my neighbour's cat. I asked it to abolish death last week. It said miaow and ran away. Fuck you cat! Fuck you very much!
Border violence, detention and encampment straightforwardly harm refugees:
So does death.
they cause them to be far worse off than they would have been otherwise.
Dead people suffer a catastrophic fall in living. There is evidence that they are discriminated against in the job market.
And containment also harms refugees by forcibly denying their only escape from severe harms, ensuring they instead suffer those otherwise avoidable harms.
Nonsense! No force is applied to a person who can't get a visa.
Containment is the ethical equivalent of blocking the fire escape of a burning building,
No. It is the equivalent of not inviting people you don't like to your home.
ensuring that those who could have otherwise escaped are trapped, or holding an innocent child at arm’s length in a pond where they may drown, preventing them swimming to safety onto your dry land.
Consider the case of a British felon who can't get a visa to the USA. Is this a case of containment? What if the British felon has been jailed for supporting Terrorism? Is it not a grave violation of human rights that he is not given a visa to Israel where he wishes to kill Jewish people?
States and their citizens may have a right to control their borders, based on legitimate political, economic and cultural interests, but can this justify such harms to refugees?
Yes. We are justified in refusing to sleep with people we don't like even though they may consider it a terrible calamity.
Evidence shows that refugees can and do provide significant contributions to states in the Global North, especially advanced capitalist economies with ageing populations.
Evidence shows that some immigrants do so. Others don't.
Even if protecting refugees would require some costs, are these costs morally important enough to outweigh refugees’ urgent needs for protection,
Yes. It is perfectly moral to spend money you earned on yourself. If you were required to support others, you may stop working.
let alone morally important enough to justify harming them?
failing to abolish death is harming billions of people. How can it be morally justifiable to gas on about refugees when our nearest and dearest kinfolk are at risk of death?
We already accept it would be wrong for states to aggress against other states and harm and violate the rights of foreign populations, even if that would greatly serve their political, economic and cultural interests.
No we don't till we find out that 'wars on terror' cost a lot and yield no benefit to us.
Current practices also cause unnecessary suffering. They are hugely expensive (the EU-Turkey deal alone cost €6 billion), and largely ineffective in the long term: they do nothing to mitigate refugees’ needs to seek safety, but often serve only to fuel smuggling operations, and make refugees’ journeys even more lethal (more people died crossing borders in 2023 and 2024 than in any previous years on record).
The better alternative is just to scrap the Geneva convention on Refugees.
By contrast, safe routes would provide an alternative to irregular border crossings, and funding infrastructure to protect refugees’ wellbeing and human rights in regions near their states of origin demonstrably disincentivises onward journeys.
But death would still not have been abolished.
If states have the resources to fund practices that harm refugees,
tax payers should rebel.
they can instead fund practices that help refugees that would also, and more effectively, discourage dangerous migratory journeys. The suffering refugees endure today because of current practices is therefore needless and avoidable.
At least some of the suffering of the taxpayer is needless and avoidable.
Refugees also experience what Hannah Arendt, in her analysis of refugee situations in the 20th century, identified as ‘rightlessness’.
No they don't. They have rights but those rights may not be linked to effective remedies. Arendt was as stupid as shit.
This meant that refugees, who fled their own state and were not granted protection by another, existed in a situation where their human rights seemed to vanish: they were subjected to extensive abuses with impunity and without any way to claim their rights or have those violations redressed.
Stateless people have always existed. They have rights though they may not be enforced. Citizens may have more of that commodity. But if a State goes off a fiscal cliff, its own citizens' rights will cease to be linked to effective remedies.
To grasp this idea of rightlessness, imagine you are a UK citizen. Now consider your human right against cruel and degrading treatment. As a UK citizen, there is a huge infrastructure of state protection in place including criminal laws, a complex legal system with legal penalties and disincentives, law enforcement, and a vast political and economic system to facilitate this, which functions to protect your right.
This is very costly. The sad truth is, at the margin, no remedy is provided for rights' violations. It is said that nowhere in London are you less than 15 minutes walk from a brothel staffed by trafficked women. The Police may lack the resources to tackle the underlying problem.
As a result, you will typically fully enjoy your human right against cruel and degrading treatment throughout your whole life (you likely barely even notice or worry about this right).
So long as the country does not go off a fiscal cliff. That's why it is important to change the law regarding Asylum.
Now imagine the UK descends into civil war.
Or, as in Ukraine, foreigners invade.
The government begins to violently repress citizens’ rights before eventually collapsing, resulting in widespread violence across the country. You and your family, fearful for your lives, make the agonising decision to leave the UK in the hope of finding safety elsewhere. There are no safe routes to leave. Yet, you manage to survive a dangerous small-boat journey across the channel to France. You end up in a refugee camp in Calais alongside thousands of other UK refugees.
You will be miffed if there are millions of non-Europeans ahead of you in the queue for Social housing and so forth. It makes sense to offer refuge to a neighbour who is in trouble. It makes no sense to treat your neighbour in the same way as you would treat someone from the other side of the world.
Now imagine someone (a trafficker, a criminal, or a border or camp official) threatens you. There is no protective infrastructure in place. Your own state has collapsed and offers no protection, and there is no UK state official or embassy you can appeal to. You have not been granted formal protection by the French government,
this is irrelevant. A threat of a criminal nature is a crime even if the victim is an 'illegal immigrant'. This Professor of Ethics thinks there is nothing wrong in telling a stupid lie.
and the local authorities and police force are absent, overstretched, not interested or even hostile. There is no one to turn to.
This is the plight of many a young person on a 'sink' Estate who is being bullied and threatened to become a courier for the 'County Lines' drug network in the UK.
In this situation, your rights can (and, likely, will) be violated by others with ease, and you will have no protection or assistance. As such, your human right against cruel and degrading treatment effectively means nothing: you are unable to enjoy this right, and you are, in this sense, rightless. This is the phenomenon of rightlessness that Arendt identified and which the majority of refugees currently face.
There is no phenomenon of rightlessness. Arendt had shit for brains. She didn't know the law. What is being referred to is the problem of scarcity or opportunity cost. If the police are too busy tackling bloody battles between immigrant drug gangs, they may do nothing for you when you report you are being stalked. This is because the police may decide the risk is less or that providing you adequate protection would be too costly in terms of man-power.
We have now arrived at an understanding of the negative and positive obligations, based on our core commitments, that together form the basic components of what an ethical response to refugees would be.
Briefly, they are the same as our response to any class of humans. The negative obligation is not to harm them. The positive obligation is to help them. But most of us have neither the means to harm nor the means to help. If our Government helps non citizens, there will be less to go around for citizens. Citizens may rebel if their Government chooses to display its virtue using money taken from tax-payers.
What would implementing this ethical response look like? The negative obligations would rule out harmful practices.
No. It would mean more resources would be devoted to monitoring such practices. In practice this means 'sensitivity training' or some other such complete waste of time.
State policies and oversight would prohibit tactics of violence and abuse at the border, and ensure respect for refugees’ rights.
By the same magic that death could be abolished and would be abolished but for the sinister influence of the Undertakers' lobby.
The interception, return and detention of refugees, as in Libya, would end as a practice, with currently incarcerated refugees evacuated to safety.
In Germany. That way AfD can come to power.
Forced encampment would also cease. And containment would be prohibited as a practice: refugees would not be forcibly prevented from escaping severe threats; instead, their human rights to seek asylum would be respected.
This man is clearly delusional. He thinks a Dictator will let his people flee on jets provided by democratic countries. He forgets there was such a thing as the Berlin Wall.
The above proposals might be dismissed as a naive wishlist that ignores the political realities of the contemporary world. The 44 million refugees worldwide are roughly 0.5 per cent of the global population.
The figure would be two billion if this 'wish-list' became a reality. Currently, Gujaratis deported by Trump say they spent 100,000 dollars to get a chance to cross the border and claim asylum. It must be said, if the US had kept them, they would soon have been paying plenty in tax.
This is often framed as an unprecedented ‘crisis’, but this invites alarmism, fatalism or harmful, knee-jerk responses. Larger displacements have been addressed in our history (there were around 200 million refugees after the Second World War,
60 million is the highest estimate.
or 10 per cent of global population),
3 percent.
and we have a wide variety of policy tools available.
Sadly, this is not the case. The problem with human rights law is that it greatly reduces policy options or flexibility in in their implementation.
In fact, it is already a reality – at least for Ukrainian refugees. There are no Ukrainian refugees beaten up or killed at Northern state borders, nor drowning en route. There are no Ukrainians imprisoned indefinitely and abused in detention centres, or enclosed into camps, or forcibly contained in regions facing severe threats to their human rights. Instead, immediate protection has been provided to millions. The EU Council activated its Temporary Protection Directive (available since 2001, but triggered only in 2022), granting all Ukrainian refugees the right to travel freely to, and access employment, housing, healthcare, education and social welfare in, any and all EU states. The UK provided visa schemes allowing hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees to apply online for free, and then board commercial flights or other transport to the UK and stay for at least three years with immediate rights to work and access to public services. Eurostar even offered free rail travel for Ukrainian refugees to the UK.
This shows that genuine refugees are welcomed. There is no need for a Geneva Contention. However, there was a geopolitical aspect to this. Europe's aim is to defeat Russia and push it back or, at the very least, expand NATO while seeing what can be done to create an European Army. The presence of Ukrainian refugees in towns and cities across Europe might help build popular support for raising Defence spending to 5 percent of GDP. Europe, potentially, could have a bigger army than the US. Will it do so? That remains to be seen. The problem with immigration is that it may make the indigenous less willing to spend money on defence and other Public goods.
This response should be rightly celebrated as one where the negative and positive obligations towards refugees were recognised and acted upon.
No. It is celebrated as an assertion of Europe's desire to drive back the Russians. If Ukraine joins the EU and becomes a big player in the projected EU army (along with Poland which is rearming and introducing compulsory military service for its people) then it is possible that a United States of Europe will come into existence. The hope is that this will permit Europe to escape a low-growth trap by eliminating internal barriers to trade and greatly reducing the cost of doing business. Something similar was supposed to happen after the introduction of the Euro.
An ethical response was achieved with millions protected. This response also proved that the supposed costs of protecting refugees were agreed to be morally irrelevant in the face of urgent obligations towards them, and that expansive protection measures were not idealistic, infeasible or too demanding, but immediately implementable.
Ukrainians were considered hard working and skilled people just like the Poles. Also Ukraine has a lot of 'raw earth' as Trump likes to point out. Kuwaiti refugees and those who decided to flee Hong Kong met with warm welcomes. Why? They were expected to create wealth. I suppose if Israel is invaded, everybody will want to get their hands on as many as possible of those super-smart Sabras.
Since all human beings are moral equals, there can be no moral difference between Ukrainian refugees and non-Ukrainian refugees
nor can there be any moral difference between your wife and somebody else's wife. If you have sex with the one, you are morally obligated to have sex with the other. Also, if you wipe your own bum, you must wipe everybody else's bum. John Manynard Smith was wrong. 'Uncorrelated asymmetries' aint a nifty solution to game theoretic dilemmas. 'Bourgeois strategies' are totes bougie. Everybody should be incessantly wiping everybody else's bum while loudly demanding the immediate abolition of death with retrospective effect.
facing equal threats that could justify such divergent responses towards them. An ethical response, demonstrated to be possible towards Ukrainian refugees, can and ought to be expanded to all.
Arab countries accommodate Arab refugees unless there is a Terrorist or other political threat from them. India accommodates non-Muslims fleeing Islamic persecution. Europeans help fellow Europeans in Ukraine. Such help can't and must not be expanded to all. Commitments are 'intensions' which to be meaningful must have well-defined 'extensions'. In other words, obligations can't be open ended. They have to be restricted in scope. This is one of the first things you are taught in Law College. Sadly, it is the one thing you must forget in order to make a career as a Moral Philosopher or drooling imbecile.
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