‘No one invited you here.’ –Milos Zeman, Czech President
The overall effect of the slanders and calumnies showered upon ‘them’ (rarely supported by facts) results in the dehumanization of the migrant, immigrant, and refugee. They are stripped of their humanity and of their religious significance (this second stripping is significant for it allows people who espouse a belief in and a commitment to a compassionate-loving God to guilt-free dehumanize them and then guilt-free punish them).
Dehumanization paves the way for their exclusion from being ‘part of humanity’ and thus from those who have a ‘right’ to ‘human-rights.’
Dehumanization leads, with dire intended and unintended consequences to shifting the ‘migration-immigrant-refugee’ issue from the realm of the moral-ethical to issues of threats to security, crime prevention and punishment, criminality and defense of ‘civil-order.’ The metaphor becomes a ‘war’ metaphor and thus we become ‘at-war’ with ‘them.’
In 2015, Texas’ Agriculture Commissioner, Sid Miller, compared Syrian refugees to rattlesnakes. He posted on Facebook images of snakes and refugees and asked: ‘Can you tell me which of these rattlers won’t bite you?’ About the same time, the Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, told reporters that ‘we cannot allow charity for some to compromise safety for all.’
Then there is Katie Hopkins, an English media personality. She faced charges that she incited racial hatred in a newspaper article calling migrants ‘cockroaches’ – a name given by the attackers to their victims during the Rwandan genocide – and ‘feral humans.’ She published an article with this title: ‘Rescue Boats? I’ll Use Gunboats to Stop Migrants.’
Our current President challenges us to ‘make America great again.’ Perhaps we might embrace ‘Make America Moral and Human Again.’
Our current President is chided by many because he is illiberal towards the people seeking ‘salvation from tyranny’ and persecution and inhuman poverty. Paradoxically, or is it ironically, he is also praised by a minority of us because he is illiberal towards these human beings.
In closing, I invite you, Gentle Reader to consider Michel Agier’s insights. In 2015 he was considered to be the most experienced researcher into the fate of 200 million (that’s correct, Gentle Reader, as of 2015, 200 million) persons displaced. He noted a ‘consolidating’ partition between two immense world-categories: on the one hand, ‘a clean, healthy and visible world; on the other, the world of residual remnants, dark, diseased and invisible.’
We (humanity) are on a path. If we continue on this path, Agier predicts that internment camps ‘will no longer be used to keep vulnerable refugees alive, but rather to park and guard all kinds of undesirable populations.’ We, Americans, have created such camps along our Southern Border. And ‘We the People,’ for the most part, remain silent rather than become nationally and morally incensed.
We all must be serving someone or something. Do you know, do you comprehend, in the moment, who or what you serve? –Maya Angelou
Searcher-Seeker 