Pity the Poor Immigrant

The universal scapegoat of a world gone bad

Last Wednesday, among the blizzard of savage, vengeful and reactionary executive orders emanating from the White Supremacist White House, the criminal-rapist president of the United States instructed the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to detain 30,000 ‘criminal illegal aliens’ at the US Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay.

This executive order was issued on the same day that Congress passed the Laken Riley Act - named after a Georgia nursing student murdered by an undocumented Venezuelan immigrant in February, 2024 - which authorized the detention of any migrant arrested or charged with an array of crimes, ranging from theft to assault and murder.

Trump’s depiction of undocumented migrants as murderers, terrorists and rapists was a central theme in his electoral campaign. So on one level both the Laken Riley Act and the Guantánamo executive order were another sinister demonstration of his determination to halt the immigrant ‘invasion’ at America’s southern border - a commitment supported by twelve Democrats who also voted for the act.

Most Americans - and indeed, much of the wider world - associate Guantánamo with the lawless or grey legal practices initiated by the Bush administration in 2002, which enabled the detention of some 780 Muslims without trial and even without charge. 15 detainees remain at the ‘foreign’ military facility where the US government was able to evade international and even national legal norms for more than two decades.

In effect, Guantánamo became a twenty-first century variant on the ‘state of exception’ identified by philosophers and political theorists from Hannah Arendt to Georgio Agamben, whereby states strip certain categories of human beings of their human, national or civil rights and transform them into stateless people to whom anything can be done with impunity.

Historically, this phenomenon tends to occur under the pretext of national security ‘emergencies’, from the Reichstag fire and the ‘Mau-Mau’ insurrection in Kenya, to 9/11 and the ‘war on terror.’ This is why the criminal-rapist who currently occupies the White House has described illegal immigration at the US-Mexico border as an ‘emergency’ in order to justify a range of exceptional measures that include the proposed deportation of 12 million men, women and children.

Trump’s depiction of Guantánamo as a holding centre for migrant detainees who ‘are so bad, we don’t even trust their countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back’ is a both a response to this ‘emergency’ and a symbolic message intended to confirm its seriousness to the MAGA citizenry.

The Worst of the Worst

In 2002, Donald Rumsfeld described Guantánamo as a detention centre for terrorists he called the ‘worst of the worst.’ Now, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem says that the Migrant Operation Center will house ‘the worst of the worst’ migrants.

Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth - a former guard at Guantánamo during the ‘war on terror’ - has similarly described Guantánamo as ‘the perfect transit point to temporarily house the worst of the worst until we move them back to their home countries, who, as President Trump has made it very clear, better be prepared to take them robustly and soon.’

Words like ‘until’ and ‘soon’ are clues to the dire consequences of the criminal-rapist’s executive order. According to Hegseth, the Migrant Operations Center at Guantánamo will act as a holding centre for migrant detainees, while their deportation paperwork is processed and arrangements are made for their repatriation.

Neither Hegseth or anyone else knows how long this process may take, or by what legal norms it will be conducted, and it is difficult not to conclude that no one in Trump’s monstrous administration particularly cares.

The tragedy is that few of Trump’s supporters are likely to care either. Because if migrants are murderers, thieves and rapists, or criminals simply by virtue of having crossed the US border without documentation, then why should anyone in this brave new white supremacist world be bothered by what happens to them?

So given the low moral and intellectual calibre of the officials overseeing this operation, the Guantánamo Migrant Operations Center is likely to resume its place in history as an offshore detention centre, where certain categories of unwanted and undesirable people are held indefinitely, at the mercy of state agencies operating outside legal parameters.

It’s tempting, at first sight, to see this development as another indication of the criminal-rapist’s fascistic drift. But this is not the first time Guantánamo has been used for similar purposes. In the early 1990s, both the Bush and Clinton administrations used Guantánamo as a processing centre for undocumented Haitian and Cuban migrants intercepted at sea - reaching a peak of 45,000 detainees in 1994.

As the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) noted last year, the Migrant Operations Center at Guantánamo Bay has long served as an ‘offshoring’ centre, where refugees are ‘detained indefinitely in prison-like conditions without access to the outside world and trapped in a punitive system operated by the Department of Homeland Security.’

It is the tragedy of our times that such practices have become normalised by democratic governments across the world, particularly amongst western democracies.

Though not many people saw its anomalousness at the time, the Clinton administration’s use of Guantánamo as a migrant holding centre coincided with a period of history in which the United States, along with most western governments, celebrated the advent of a ‘borderless’ world as one of the great political gains from the collapse of Soviet power.

In those euphoric days, it was easy to be seduced by these utopian visions of the free movement of money, goods and people. Since then, a two-fold and seemingly contradictory process has unfolded. On the one hand, the world has become more ‘borderless’ in economic, financial and human terms. 24-hour supply chains connect raw materials and production centres, to markets from one end of the world to the other. Governments are made and sometimes brought down by political forces using de-territorialized digital technologies. These same technologies enable migrants to cross national borders in search of work, higher salaries or protection.

Where the rise of the nation-state - with its customs and tax regimes, its state education and welfare systems based on ‘imagined’ national communities - once coincided with ‘national’ capital accumulation, post-Cold War networks of production and capital flows tend to connect cities rather than nations, and corporations and individuals rather than governments.

These developments have inevitably made national borders more porous.

At the same time, global imbalances in power, wealth and lifestyle have increased the numbers of ‘surplus people’ who cannot be accommodated by the economic systems within their national borders, and who are also more closely connected through technology, information and transportation routes to countries beyond these borders than ever before.

War and conflict has increased the numbers of people living outside their countries of origin - a tendency that is likely to increase in the coming decades. As the geopolitical strategist Parag Khanna argues:

We have wealthy countries across North America and Europe with nearly 300 million aging people and decaying infrastructure — and roughly 2 billion young people in Latin America, the Middle East and Asia who are capable of caring for the elderly and maintaining public services. We have countless hectares of arable farmland across depopulated Canada and Russia, while millions of African farmers are driven from their lands by drought. There are countries with sterling political systems yet few citizens, such as Finland and New Zealand, but also hundreds of millions of people suffering under despotic regimes or living in refugee camps. Is it any surprise that record numbers of people have been on the move?

No surprise at all. And yet, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, governments across the world have sought to ‘manage’ or prevent these migratory movements through punitive border enforcement policies generally targeted at poorer immigrants from the global south.

In the same period, the nature of the border has changed. Border enforcement is no longer limited to ‘walls’ and fences equipped with militarised surveillance technologies that transform the lack of a visa into a justification for violence and even death.

Today, borders include both ‘internal’ borders that prevent refugees and economic migrants from obtaining any foothold in the countries where they end up, and ‘externalised’ border controls that attempt to prevent migrants from even leaving their own countries by enlisting foreign governments in policing migration routes.

Twenty-first century border control also includes Guantánamo-style ‘offshoring’ policies. And as cruel and vicious as the Trump administration’s enforcement policies are undoubtedly are, there is not that much difference between what he and his minions are preparing to do, and what previous American administrations have already done. The European Union has its own migration Guantánamos in Libya and Niger. Australia did the same at Nauru and Manus Islands, and the UK attempted to do it in Rwanda.

Again and again, right and even left-of-centre governments have introduced hard border enforcement policies either because they actually believe in them, or because they think that pretending to believe in them will fend off the political threat of the far-right.

Rarely has there been any serious attempt at an international level to reassess this approach to immigration, and consider whether there are more humane and mutually-beneficial ways in which migrant-receiving and migrant-producing countries might work together to construct a world in which undocumented migrants are not punished or ‘left to die’ simply because they wish to live and work outside their own national borders.

In 2018, the United Nations adopted a ‘Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration’ (GCM) which it described as ‘the first intergovernmental agreement, prepared under the auspices of the United Nations, to cover all dimensions of international migration in a holistic and comprehensive manner.’

This non-binding agreement was intended to pave the way for a new form of migration governance ‘that puts migrants and their human rights at the centre and that provides a significant opportunity to strengthen human rights protection for all migrants, regardless of status.’

The following year, these commitments were adopted by all 193 UN member states in the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants. This declaration was widely condemned in right and far-right political circles, which variously claimed that it was intended to ‘enforce multiculturalism’, and overrule both national immigration policies and the principle of national sovereignty.

Not much else is to be expected from these quarters. Since then, the GCM has been largely left to wither on the vine. As the Mixed Migration Centre (MMC) noted last year, objective 7 of the Compact committed signatories to saving migrant lives. Yet 2023 was the deadliest year on record - with nearly 8,600 deaths worldwide. The MMC also observed that:

the most volatile and vulnerable spaces seem to be at the highest levels of government. In this year of elections, when nearly half the world’s population head to the ballot booth, migration is widely being used as one of, if not THE, primary wedge issue, purposefully utilized by political parties across the spectrum as a very effective divisive tool.

This ‘wedge issue’ was crucial to getting Trump elected. It has been the key issue in the horrifying rise of the AfD in Germany, of the French National Rally, of Vox in Spain, and Reform in the UK. Again and again, mainstream governments have responded to reactionary nationalism with demonstrations of performative toughness that are not that different to what Trump is proposing.

And these developments also point to another possibility - that resistance and opposition to Trumpism and its associated movements cannot be based around punitive exclusionary policies that treat immigrants as criminals. To oppose Trumpism - and ultimately to defend democracy - must mean defending and siding with the victims of the immigration policies that define undocumented migrants as the universal scapegoats of a revitalised white supremacism that is leading America to moral collapse.

What is needed is an entirely different approach, based on solidarity and a recognition of immigration as a global reality that cannot be walled-off or shunted away into ‘offshore’ detention centres where the law no longer applies.

Some may base their pro-migrant politics on universalist notions of human rights and freedom. Others may prefer what Parag Khanna has called ‘cosmopolitan utilitarianism’ in which ‘We should realign our geographies to bring maximum welfare to current and future generations… States make their own decisions, but more migration is very much in the national interest.’

Whether this transformation is based on the national interest or on wider philosophical and and political premises, it needs to happen.

If it doesn’t, we will never escape a world in which the richest men on earth persecute some of the poorest, while simultaneously asset-stripping governments that get in their way. It’s a world in which post-World War 2 attempts to establish an international community of values are effectively dead, while fascism and the far-right return to the mainstream, using migrant emergencies and ‘invasions’ to justify permanent national security regimes.

If national sovereignty means nothing more than the ability to deport anyone, anywhere, for as long as any state sees fit, then the ‘new’ Guantánamo facility will merely become one more of so many already-existing dystopias that begin at the border and ultimately engulf the countries that created them.

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