by Suketu Mehta
Warren housed 15,000 souls in 1940 and is now down to 9,478. For $45,000, you can buy a three-bedroom home in decent condition. There are very few immigrants in Warren; 99 percent of the population is made up of U.S. citizens, almost all of them white. Still, they fear immigrants. A few months after my visit, Warren County went for Trump en masse: 69 percent, against the 27 percent that voted for Clinton. The city of Warren voted for Trump by 2,219 votes over Clinton’s 1,334 votes. In 2012, Obama had carried this same city over Romney by a thin margin.
I could understand the anger and confusion of the people in Warren. The twentieth century belonged to them; they worked in the town’s factories and felt glad to be Americans. Now they were truly desolate in a way that they had seen only American blacks desolated: their young people were cannon fodder or junkies. What happened? Whose fault was it?
* * *
Today, the eight richest individuals on earth, all men, own more than does half the planet, or 3.7 billion people, combined. The top 1 percent have more wealth than the bottom 99 percent combined. There are 1,542 billionaires today, whose fortunes rose by a fifth in 2017, to $6 trillion—equivalent to the GDP of the U.K. and Germany combined. Such figures cause outrage in the rich countries; many of the Obama Democrats in the Rust Belt who voted for Trump did so because Steve Bannon convinced them that he shared their anger against Wall Street.
Income inequality in the United States rises, in part, from radically different systems of education for the rich and the poor. Only 20 to 30 percent of the children of the poorest 10 percent go to college; but 90 percent of the kids of the top 10 percent do.
Deregulation of the financial sector also gave an outsize share of society’s most glittering prizes to the top 1 percent. This was facilitated by a tax system that grows ever more regressive. At the end of 2017, the U.S. Congress gave the biggest Christmas gift in history to the richest in the country: dramatically lowering their taxes while doubling the estate tax exemption. According to estimates from Union Bank of Switzerland and PricewaterhouseCoopers, 460 people will bequeath $2.1 trillion to their heirs over the next twenty years, which is larger than the GDP of India, a country of 1.3 billion people. It will be the greatest transfer of wealth in history.
So the way to wealth now isn’t to work for a paycheck, but to inherit daddy’s millions and then put your money in a hedge fund, where the structure of investment and tax laws allows for crazy returns—at least until it all goes crashing down, at which point, as with the financial bailout of 2008, the little people who pay taxes can be sent the bill.
As the people in Warren are slowly realizing, there’s a tax on being poor. You pay more for everything, particularly to the moneychangers: the banks charge the poor higher interest rates on credit cards, mortgages, and student loans—simply because they’re poor and ill-equipped to stay ahead of the schemes that are designed to fleece them. The rich get richer because they can hire the smartest people to grow their wealth.
The United States, at this point, cannot properly be called a capitalist society. It is a plutocratic society, a society of rent seekers. The “moral hazard” that is supposed to be part and parcel of free enterprise—you can make as much money as you want, but if you fail, you’re on your own—has been rendered moot by the government’s willingness to catch you if you fail, as long as you’re wealthy. The giant upward transfer of wealth, already unprecedented since the age of the robber barons, is set to accelerate. So the farmers and steelworkers who voted for Trump will find their taxes going up, their benefits slashed, their health insurance nonexistent, and they will be angrier still. But the news that they listen to—financed by the plutocrats—will divert them ever more energetically on to immigrants, the invisible enemy.
With the passage of the tax bill, America will look even more like an airliner: divided into first, business, premium economy, and basic economy. It’s not just the poor against the rich anymore; it’s the poor against the middle class, the upper-middle class against the rich. The country is angry, and going to be angrier still once the economy starts going south again and the people in cattle class realize they’ve been sold a bill of goods.
Who benefits from populists railing against immigrants and greedy elites? The greedy elites. Who has benefited the most from Trump’s election? Wall Street, the corporations that got the gargantuan tax cut, as well as free rein to let their industries pollute unchecked. Many of these same corporations were, earlier, publicly arguing against restrictions on immigration, because it would drive up wages when the supply of cheap foreign labor went down; but they stopped making a fuss once Trump took office and delivered the goods. The same is true of a number of other “populists” around the world: the greatest beneficiaries of their assuming power have been the rich and the corporations in their countries. Environmental regulations have been eviscerated, banks have been freed to gamble with their customers’ money, corporate taxes have been slashed beyond the CEOs’ wildest dreams.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt called it the “alliance between mob and capital.” When the rich see that anger is building in their countries about economic deprivation, they inflame or create anger and resentment against scapegoats—like foreigners, during Arendt’s time, and immigrants or Muslims or African Americans today—which makes the mob change direction, turn their attention from demanding redistribution of wealth, and focus on the politically weak, the newcomers, the minorities. The new robber barons have come to power, and intend to hold on to it, on the wings of xenophobia.
14
THE REFUGEE AS PARIAH
The first time many Americans became aware of the family-separation policy was in spring 2018. After an epic journey, a Congolese mother and her six-year-old daughter, fleeing mass rape and war in their country, had turned up at the U.S.-Mexican border in November 2017. They immediately presented themselves to border control officials and requested asylum. An officer interviewed the mother and determined that she had a credible case for asylum. They should have been released on parole. But the San Diego ICE field office has a policy of refusing to grant parole to asylum seekers, and so they were detained.
Four days later, the officers summoned the mother and child into a room. Then they dragged the little girl away, “screaming and crying, pleading with guards not to take her away from her mother,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The mother was handcuffed, jailed, and not allowed to speak to her daughter for the next four days. In those four days, she had no idea what happened to her daughter.
What happened was this: The Department of Homeland Security shipped the child two thousand miles north, to an immigration detention center in Chicago, which might as well be the moon for the little girl, who only spoke Lingala. From November till March, the mother was allowed to speak to her daughter a total of six times, by phone. No video. In December, the girl spent her seventh birthday far from her mother, far from any family, in an ICE jail for child migrants. Each time the little girl heard her mother’s voice on the phone, she started crying uncontrollably; she was fearful about what would happen to her and her mother. The mother was sick with worry, and couldn’t sleep or eat.
In an editorial, The Washington Post summarized the policy of separating parents from their children at the border: The mother and child “could have been placed together in a family detention center. There has been no explanation of why the determination was made to separate them; nor is there any allegation that [the mother] is an unfit parent. The only principle at work, if it can be called that, is the idea that future asylum seekers might be deterred if they are convinced that the United States is actually a crueler and more heartless place than their native country.” It’s a competition: you think rape and robbery on the freight train north was bad? You ain’t seen nothing yet. We’re going to take your children away from you when you get here.
* * *
The Congolese mother and child, of course, were only an augury of things to come. Over the
next few months, the Trump administration officially instituted the family-separation policy. Children, no matter how young, were to be separated from their parents who showed up at the border while their case was being adjudicated. There was a grim legal logic to this. The Trump administration had decided to put parents applying for asylum in detention centers automatically—unlike in the past, when they were granted parole pending their asylum hearing. But it would be a violation of earlier court orders, the government argued, to imprison their children with them. So tens of thousands of children were taken from their parents and shipped to “shelters,” which were often across the country, with little or no access to their parents. It was a policy specifically intended to deter families fleeing violence and instability in their home countries. Why was it so draconian? What primal fear could these ragged families evoke in the hearts of the mightiest government in world history?
The refugee, as the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman said, brings with him the specter of chaos and lawlessness that has forced him to leave his homeland. He embodies the economic and political disorder that was caused by the orderly rich countries when they sloughed off their redundant populations into colonies and then retreated, leaving behind ill-defined “nation-states.” The refugee, though, suffers from statelessness; today, 10 million people are officially stateless, people without a nation. Or he cannot “go home” because his home has been wrecked by banditry or desertification.
So, bearing the burden of his failed state, he comes knocking on the West’s doors, and if he finds one of them ajar, he slips in, not welcomed but barely tolerated. He may have been a surgeon in his alleged nation, but here he is ready to perform any task—such as clean the bedpans in a hospital where he is more qualified than most of the doctors—but can never hope to be one of them because of the laws protecting their guild. He must be abject, renouncing claims to an equitable share of the wealth of his new habitation or to any kind of political franchise. All he can hope for is a measure of personal security and the opportunity to remit enough money back to his family so that they can send the eldest boy to a private school near the refugee camp in which they await their chance to be reunited with their father, brother, husband in his marginal existence.
It was only in the early twentieth century that the modern, convoluted superstructure of passports and visas came about, on a planet where porous borders had been a fact of life for years beyond count. So the refugee arrives at the border of the country he seeks to live in, bearing papers, many papers, all kinds of papers that could make his case: school transcripts; certificates from notables and grandees such as teachers, politicians, Rotary Club presidents; identity cards; photos of the crater left by the bomb when it hit his house. Papers that establish identity, accomplishment, victimhood.
The political refugee has, by binding international covenants, the right to asylum. But in the orderly nations of northern Europe, he is rejected as much as, and in some cases (like Germany today) even more than, the economic migrant, because he is the sum of their worst fears, the looming future of the twenty-first century brought in human form to their borders. Because he wasn’t necessarily impoverished in the country he came from—he might have been a businessman or an engineer just a year ago, before everything changed—he is a reminder that the same thing could happen to them too. Everything could change—radically, irrevocably, suddenly.
* * *
What is the difference between a refugee and a migrant? It is a strategic choice of words, to be made at the border when you’re asked what you are; etymology is destiny. The “migrant” does not even enjoy the nominal rights that are the privilege of the refugee, because it is implied that his movement is voluntary. You could be sent back if you’re just an “economic” migrant, but you could also be shunned and feared if you’re identified as a political refugee. Whether you’re running from something or running toward something, you’re on the run.
In summer 2016, I drove out to the Hungarian-Serbian border with a volunteer for a church-based organization providing supplies to refugees. I had been in Hungary for a week studying its attempt to win the crown of Europe’s most hostile country for refugees. All over the country, there were blue posters bearing questions like, “Did you know? Since the beginning of the immigration crisis, more than three hundred have died in terrorist attacks in Europe,” and “Did you know? Brussels wants to settle a whole city’s worth of illegal immigrants in Hungary,” and “Did you know? Since the beginning of the immigration crisis, the harassment of women has risen sharply in Europe.” The Orbán government was urging its citizens to vote in a referendum against accepting an EU quota of refugees: 1,294 refugees in 2016, for a country with almost 10 million people.
We crossed the Serbian border at Röszke and spent four hours looking for a road to get to the cluster of tents we’d seen right by the side of the highway near the border. We drove on dirt roads in the depopulated countryside, past orchards of apple, peach, and plum trees. From the car window, I picked a purple plum off a branch. It wasn’t quite ripe yet.
A woman told us which road to take to the “Pakistani camp.” We rattled down a rutted road by the superhighway and came up to the camp. It was an instant South Asian slum, but with backpacking tents instead of plastic sheets, just like the Sziget music festival I’d just come from on the Danube in Hungary. The festival had been filled with Instagram-ready teens, who, on payment of the $363-per-person entry fee, could luxuriate in their own tent city for a week.
There were children in the refugee tents, too, but younger and brown: preteens and toddlers on the run with their families. They played cricket amid the garbage. It cost a euro to use the toilet at the border. So people from the long lines of cars waiting to cross used the bushes instead, which served as the migrants’ temporary home, where they slept and ate, waiting for the doors of Europe to open.
We opened the trunk of our car and handed out water bottles, chocolates, socks, and underwear. A group of men came over; when they identified me as Indian, they shook my hand and spoke to me in Urdu about their travels. One of them was from the Pakistani city of Lahore, where there were bombings and killings. He’d been here for just a few days. The Hungarians wouldn’t let him in even though he had no desire to stay in that country; he wanted to go on to Germany, Sweden. The Serbians wouldn’t let him go back to Macedonia. “It’s closed in the front. It’s closed from the back,” he said.
A large black vehicle pulled up, and two big Serbian policemen dressed in black stepped out. “Please go,” they told us; we didn’t have official permission to visit the camp. They reminded us that the Hungarians were worse than the Serbians: “They have drones and cameras,” they said, monitoring the camp from the other side of the border fence.
For the few refugees who make it over the fence, it’s no promised land. At the time, any migrant caught within roughly five miles of the border would be arrested and deported. The Hungarian provision has since been expanded to include migrants detained in any part of the country. In November 2015, Orbán told a press conference, “All the terrorists are basically migrants.” Like much else coming out of his mouth, this statement was factually wrong: many of the perpetrators of terrorism, in Europe and elsewhere, are native-born, like Timothy McVeigh and Anders Behring Breivik. Eight months later, he turned the statement on its head, broadening it: “Every single migrant poses a public security and terror risk.”
* * *
If Hungary has elevated the anathematization of refugees to a new level, Denmark has gone one step further—rendering its own legal residents pariahs. In 2018, Denmark adopted an initiative called One Denmark Without Parallel Societies: No Ghettos in 2030. According to the initiative, one of the three criteria for designating an area a “ghetto” is if half or more of the inhabitants are from non-Western countries. The government classified thirty largely Muslim and immigrant neighborhoods containing a total of sixty thousand people as “ghettos,” in which parents will have to abide by an e
ntirely different set of laws from those in the rest of the country.
The initiative includes twenty-two separate measures, some of which have been passed, and others that are still pending in parliament as of fall 2018. Starting at the age of one, “ghetto children” will be separated from their “ghetto parents” for a mandatory twenty-five hours of instruction a week—not including nap time—in “Danish values,” which include celebrations of Christmas and Easter, even if the children are Muslim. If they don’t obey, their welfare payments stop. Non-ghetto children can stay home until they’re six. If ghetto parents compel their children to make extended trips to their homeland, which the government has dubbed “reeducation trips,” the government wants to jail them for two to four years, because the “schooling, language, and well-being” of the children would be harmed. They will also lose their residency rights. But if white Danish parents decide to send their kids to, say, America or Britain for boarding school, then no worries.
The government, with the broad support of most Danish parties, will also double the punishment for a crime committed in a ghetto—designated a “special punishment zone.” A proposal that was seriously entertained was to confine ghetto children to their homes after 8 p.m., and have them monitored by electronic bracelets affixed to their ankles.