Swarms, Floods, Invasions and Infestations
How the Language Used to Describe Refugees Triggers Fear, Indifference and Repulsion.
The television news is broadcasting heart-rending images of over a million people fleeing Ukraine in fear for their lives. Thankfully all over Europe people are welcoming them, an attitude that has been sadly lacking lately towards refugees.
Not long ago when thousands of people were crowding in and around the Kabul airport, trying, and literally dying, to get out of Afghanistan, right wing commentators started bad-mouthing refugees. “We will see many refugees from Afghanistan resettle in our country in the coming months, probably in your neighborhood,” a notorious Fox News commentator declared. “And over the next decade, that number may swell to the millions. So first we invade, and then we’re invaded.”
The use of terms like “invasion,” along with other manipulative terms, like “swarms” and “floods” to indicate groups is dehumanizing to those seeking safety, intended to “other” them and thereby remove them from our circle of care.
Watching from the safety of my home in Venice, California, the Afghani desperation felt palpable, and I worried would those that need to get away? Will other countries welcome them? Or will they spend their lives in camps deplorable conditions in camps set up by the United Nations on the borders of countries that don’t want them?
Over the past years the ratcheting up of racial and anti-immigrant, resentment in the US and other countries recalled my father’s investigation into Third Reich methodologies: Find scape-goats and blame them for everything that goes wrong. Keep inciting fear and resentment. But I found few media commentators naming this Third Reich strategy of dividing people by whipping up their biases and fears.
As an immigrant myself, I’ve noticed that many in the media do not distinguish between immigrants, migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. Refugees are defined as those from other countries who are entitled under the 1951 Refugee Convention to seek asylum and citizenship in a host country. That process is arduous and long and requires much vetting. If they are called migrants, however, they are not entitled to such protection. Often mainstream media use the term ‘migrant’ to refer to all people on the move who have yet to complete the legal process of claiming asylum.
According to the UN Refugee Agency, there are 82 million forcibly displaced people, as a result of persecution, violence, and human rights violations, among which 35 million are children. Half are internally displaced, a different category of refugee, as they are not stateless, but homeless, often living in camps. The fleeing Afghanis, those from failed states and getting away from drug cartels in Latin America, those risking drowning in the Mediterranean fleeing starvation and war in Africa, none of these people are leaving their families, communities and cultures behind as a lark, but because they experience their survival at risk. The countries that take in the most are Turkey, Columbia, Pakistan, and Germany, more than a million. The US took in 12 thousand last year, less than the 80 thousand in the years before Trump, and far less compared to 1980, when we took in 207 thousand.
These days we have another category, those living on the frontlines of the climate crisis, which has exacerbated their plight and displaced them within or outside of their own countries. Numbers of those coming across the border with Mexico looking for work, are defined as migrants as they try to survive the changes brought about by warming planet as well as the cartels that provide Americans their illegal drugs. Days before the 2018 midterm election, the president characterized these individuals crossing the border and seeking asylum as violent criminals terrorizing law enforcement and others on their way to wreak havoc in the United States. “It’s like an invasion. They have violently overrun the Mexican border. They’ve overrun the Mexican police, and they’ve hurt badly Mexican soldiers,” he added. “So this isn’t an innocent group of people.
I think we can all agree that children are innocent, but politicians use such inflammatory language and misinformation to push anti-refugee policies. By linking these desperate people to terrorism, drugs, trafficking and violent crime, they are driving a perception of refugees not as normal people fleeing war, persecution and starvation, and in dire need of sanctuary, but as a threat to our (white Christian) identity and our economic security, which is effective in a time when so many Americans feel insecure.
So it’s encouraging to see how many regular Americans are opening their hearts to these Afghan refugees. The poison of “othering” has not infected all of us. But some leaders seem to have forgotten the lessons from our own past. The US (and other countries in the Western Hemisphere) could have saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis. At one point, the US literally turned away a ship of 900 desperate German Jews; shortly after, it rejected a proposal to allow 20,000 Jewish children to come to the US for safety. At the same time our government imprisoned many of its own Japanese and German citizens in detention camps.
I relate viscerally to the fate of refugees because my own mother escaped from Europe in 1941 on the last boat out of Portugal. She was half Jewish, living with her new husband, my father, in Nazi occupied Holland. He was a resistance organizer and knew she was in danger, so found a way to get her to Lisbon. Unlike most, because she had an American parent, she obtained a visa and spent the war years in Princeton, New Jersey in relative safety.
My father’s attempt to get away on the other hand, failed. A year later he and a few other resistance fighters sought by the Gestapo, tried to row a boat over the North Sea to England. He was imprisoned, condemned to be executed but sent to the camps to be worked to death instead. He survived to be liberated by the Russians. While I was born two years after the war ended, I grew up with the “never again” warning often repeated, as the Dutch were prompted to examine how both collaboration with and resistance to the Nazi programs of deportation and extermination had occurred. Taking part in that appraisal in his work as a journalist, my father reserved much contempt for the Nazis apologists and propagandists in the press. He could see how the manipulative use of language and lies contributed to the citizenry allowing and supporting the horrors that ensued.
America has spent 70 years atoning for those errors by becoming a most welcoming country for refugees, a legacy to be proud of. But Republican fear mongering is changing all that. White House advisor Steven Miller, himself the Jewish descendant of refugees escaping pogroms in Russia, created the family separation policy. Immigration agents forcibly removed children from their parents’ arms, removed parents while their children slept, or simply ‘disappeared’ the children while their parents were in different holding cells or receiving medical care, even removing newborns from their mother’s arms — a policy, prohibited under international law, but carried out in order to punish and coerce Central American asylum seekers to give up their asylum claims.
As these facts of child detention camps became known, the issue of whether it’s legitimate to make comparison with the Third Reich reemerged in public debate. On the progressive side, AOC and others named the detention centers “concentration camps” to considerable censure, but to call a prison-like facility where people are forcibly detained because of WHO THEY ARE “a concentration camp” is historically accurate. Many Americans don’t seem to know that for years before they were retrofitted into actual murder camps, places like Auschwitz and Terezienstad were used to make life intolerable tor Jews. In part by enforced family separation, their goal of compelling unwanted groups to leave Germany is the exact same motivation of the administration’s policy towards undocumented immigrants.
While the Biden administration is trying to reverse the most egregious policies of the former administration, the situation at the border is still dire, complicated in part by the Covid pandemic. While US agents no longer separate families, many thousands of refugees arriving from Central America are refused entry, and forced to stay on the Mexican side of the border in tent cities, with little food, amenities, or security provided. For the families that were torn apart, somewhere between 1000 and 1500 remain separated, but others have been reunited and offered financial and other help to deal with the trauma.
Germany at least has tried to atone for its horrifying history in offering reparations to their victims over time, and recently admitting a far greater quota of refugees from the war torn Middle East, taking in one million fleeing Syria and other countries, but they too have experienced backlash. Anti-immigrant and refugee sentiment is easily exploited by people who pushing isolationist, nationalistic and xenophobic agendas. Add to this an increasing number of climate refugees, which will no doubt worsen this situation. Recently it has become clear that many refugees from Africa seeking to find a safe haven in Europe are caught and returned to Libya where they experience starvation, torture, child-rape in prisons set up to receive them, all tacitly approved by the European Union.
So, how do we remind people that refugees and migrants are fellow human beings deserving of help? We can start by referring to them as ‘people’, ‘women’, ‘men’, ‘children’, ‘sons’, ‘daughters’, the terms we use to describe the folks we know on a daily basis. We can call them ‘the family who fled Syria,” “the children who walked from El Salvador,” or “the engineer who translated for the Americans in Afghanistan.” Social psychologists tell us that people are more inclined to recognize the humanity of someone who is described in a personal way, rather than in more bureaucratic terms. For years I’ve deplored the term “illegal immigrants,” because while actions may be against the law, people are not.
Aside from altering our language, we can point to all those refugees who have contributed hugely to American life. Albert Einstein, The Dalai Lama, Madeleine Albright, Elie Wiesel, Gloria Estefan, Mark Chagall, Sergei Brin, the co-founder of Google, to mention just a few. How much poorer would we and the world be without them. But it’s also important to remind people that non-celebrities contribute just as much. Without the farm workers our produce and food would be more expensive, our hospitals and nursing homes understaffed, our homes and gardens dirtier, our first responders smaller in numbers.
A week past the Afghan withdrawal, hurricane Ida deprived the city of New Orleans of electric power. People were told to leave the city and return when the power was restored. Yes, that is still possible, just as it’s still possible more Afghans will find a way out and a safer place to live. But how much longer before climate refugees looking for safety number in the hundreds of millions?
We stand before a stark choice. Do we want a future of closing ourselves off from large sections of our fellow humans? Do we want to harden our hearts and live in fear? If not, we will need to find ways to make space for them, and ways to share. If we want to live in a culture of civility and caring, we need to start by eschewing the language, memes and biases that depict others as less human and deserving than ourselves.
To support refugees, check out these two good organizations:
To support the people in Ukraine: Timothy Snyder, a prominent historian of Ukraine and Central Europe, has links to several organizations at:
https://snyder.substack.com/p/a-few-ways-to-help-ukrainians?utm_source=url
