We Have More Than a Moral Obligation to the People of Afghanistan

[Photo credit: Haroon Sabawoon | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images]

By Daniel Melo

Since the US exit and the subsequent collapse of its propped-up government in Afghanistan, the left has rightly decried the US’s failure to protect the lives of the Afghan people. There was seemingly little to no exit strategy for the many people who wished to depart the country and who might face future brutality by the Taliban. And while many on the left have been right to point out that the US has a moral obligation to take in any and all Afghan refugees, this does not end the inquiry. It is not enough to say that it is simply a question of right and wrong, or that we should feel sorry for the many left behind in the wake of bad US imperialist acts. Moral questions of this sort ultimately leave out the agency and necessity of those it is trying to help. And they are ripe for the kind of conservative-reactionary rhetoric that would morally place “American” lives above those of Afghan refugees. 

Limiting the question of whether the nation should assist Afghans who wish to depart as one of “right” or “wrong” removes the people of Afghanistan from their rightful political place as equals in discussions of their futures. It is not just a moral obligation to admit Afghan refugees (whether in the thousands or millions). It is also, fundamentally, a political one. And to help understand this political obligation, we can turn to a refugee from another war.

Political scientist, refugee, and scholar Hannah Arendt covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem at the end of WWII. Eichmann, an administrator and organizer of the Nazi Holocaust, was responsible for the death of millions of people. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt watched the court grapple with the realities of the magnitude of the crime before them. This led to questions about the nature of culpability and justice for acts that had no precedent within the legal order. Eichmann, for one, did not believe that he had committed any wrong whatsoever. A commandant of Auschwitz noted that Eichmann thought he was spearheading a noble mission, one that would “save the German people.” What’s more, there were no laws on the books at the time that could readily be applied to the situation. Eichmann believed that he a rather strict adherent to “the law” in his carrying out of Jewish extermination.

Thus, the Israeli court was put in the position of attempting to judge a man for whom there was no applicable law, particularly since he did not carry out the individual killing himself but facilitated the bureaucracy of death. Both then and now, many rightly conclude that regardless of the exact contours of the law, the condemnation of Eichmann was necessary because it deeply violates our sense of moral right and wrong, albeit on an unprecedented scale. But Arendt takes it beyond this sense of injustice and recognizes that his offenses and the subsequent judgment had to be more than legal affirmation of moral wrongs. The judgment had to be political— “The wrongdoer is brought to justice because his act has disturbed and gravely endangered the community as a whole . . . it is the body politic itself that stands in need of being ‘repaired[.]”

Mass death and violence, argues Arendt, move beyond remedying moral questions of individuals and instead are an affront to the very collective existence of humanity. In this sense, Arendt challenged the Israeli court to look beyond the strict legalities and to judge Eichmann politically.

In politics obedience and support are the same. And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations . . . we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you.

Thus, in the face of such things that move beyond the bounds of understanding within the law and even basic morality, we must turn to political judgment, the pursuit of reconciliation between the actor and the populace. Political justice demands an equal accounting for affronts to our collective humanity.

I am not attempting to compare or qualify the Holocaust and Nazi Germany with the US capitalist imperialism either in kind or substance. Rather, there is a more essential point that emerges from Arendt’s account--to fully reconcile these disparities, we must move beyond only making moral claims to making political ones. In this respect, it is high time we politically judged the capitalist-imperialist adventures into Afghanistan (and the world over). The human cost alone exceeds 240,000 lives, nearly a third of which were civilians. This is in addition to the 2.5 million Afghan refugees already registered elsewhere in the world (the second-largest refugee population).  Who knows what additional harm to the working people of Afghanistan is to come in the days ahead. The US incursion into Afghanistan and everything that has flowed from it requires political demands for agency in what is done to them.

In many senses, the US has already brought the Afghan people into the body politic. 20 years of occupation will necessarily have political ramifications for both those inside the territorial bounds of the US, as well as those within Afghanistan. And yet, this is threadbare at best; the US has also failed at its claimed guiding principle in the first place--any vague notion of democracy. The philosopher Rainer Forst notes that a foundational right of all people, and upon which all other rights are constructed, is the right to justification. While the theoretical discussion of this is both dense and long, it essentially boils down to a maxim within most political engagements between peoples--is what I am asking or demanding of you something you can ask and demand of me?

By limiting the inquiry of the US taking in Afghan refugees as a right/wrong question, we miss the opportunity to recognize that the Afghan people should have an essential participatory voice in how the US treats them. This is foundational to democracy. Thus, it becomes more than a question of what we think should happen to the Afghan people and broadens to what they and we think. It is not that morality is absent from this political claim, but rather that it is placed in a political context. As Forst says, it “expresses the demand that no political or social relations should exist that cannot be adequately justified towards those involved.”

And the political exclusion of the now-millions of Afghan people who seek to enter the empire that once encircled them lacks even the most basic justification. They are excluded from the US body politic because of arbitrary legal lines that denote them not being “us.” As Forst argues, “Justification does not end at borders.” In all real political senses, the US empire stepped across that gap 20 years ago, and now the time has come to assert political justice for those that remain in its bloody departure. To borrow from Forst once more— “democracy . . . is not ‘instrumental’ to justice; it is what justice demands.” (emphasis mine) Placing the US and Afghan people in this relationship of political justice compels their inclusion within the political framework of the US.

I recognize these demands border on the impossible within the mainstream conception of politics. But that is precisely why we must push for a radical vision. This is the lesson that Arendt offers up in the trial of Eichmann--when the present framework is insufficient to comprehend or achieve the required level of justice, we must seek alternatives. In the instant case, we must pursue a political project that comprehends the Afghan people, along with the millions of other displaced peoples, as deserving of more than pity or even moral obligation. We must advocate for them and the collective working class of the world as ends in themselves and reconcile that with the failures of capitalism. Justice, the working out of justifications, is ultimately a political project of reconciliation. And in this case, we must dare to judge—and condemn—imperialism and capitalism politically.

Daniel Melo is a public sector immigration lawyer in the American Southeast who primarily works with refugees and is the son of a migrant himself. His book, Borderlines, is out now from  Zer0 Books.

Asylum As A Tool Of Exclusion

[Photo credit: Alejandro Tamayo / San Diego Union-Tribune]

By Daniel Melo

Asylum, on its face, would seem to be a word of welcome to those fleeing violence. In the US, its connotation within immigration law is tied to the acquisition of legal status, of the ability to remain, sheltered from the harm one is fleeing from. The oft-quoted lines of Emma Lazarus’s The New Colossus on the Statute of Liberty — “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” —has been held out as an ode to this very idea of refuge, and of America’s greatness in the provision of it. But while both the word and its ideal may paint warm walls and windows where so many broken people can come to find safety, the US asylum system is far more like the rusted metal walls that protrude from the desert floor. The asylum system, far from being a means of protection for the many thousands displaced by capitalism’s global consequences, is but another tool of exclusion.

As is true in many other areas of immigration relief, the quantum of harm is often the starting point for any chance at success. In other words, the system creates a rather horrendous form of “incentive” if one dare call it that, where the more brutality and violence has suffered, the more compelling the case is. Asylum requires a particular brand of suffering to compel state actors to allow people some small reprieve from harm. To put it bluntly, the system considers some worthy of protection so long as it serves a particular political purpose, while others (even those that end in death) are not so fortunate. While the Trump era saw even this slim protection erode away, the asylum system has never been a boon to migrants. In fact, despite the appearance of an “impartial” judiciary that often decides asylum claims, from its very beginnings, US asylum and refugee protections were not open doors with humanitarian aims but political, exclusionary tools.

Authors Banks Miller et al. note in their work that asylum law is also rooted in material reality; i.e., capitalism shaped the contours of the law. In the US case, it was a tool to undermine the communist countries by focusing grants of asylum and refugee status on people from those nations. Far from being oriented around even vague humanitarian interests, it was instead fashioned as a political weapon. For example, during the Cold War, the US framed the vast majority of incoming Cubans as refugees but denied the same status to most Haitians who were oppressed by a series of brutal—but anti-communist—dictators. Even after the text of asylum law changed to reflect a more “egalitarian” framework, it simply painted over this reality. Reagan’s administration painted migrants from Central and South America, fleeing decades of US imperialist policy, as “economic” migrants, unworthy of asylum, while as noted above, those departing Cold War nations were far more likely to have their asylum cases approved. This is no less true today, with asylum seekers from China granted at a rate orders of magnitude greater than those from Mexico.

The misunderstood context of Lazarus’s poem itself is revealing. As Professor Walt Hunter notes, it emerged in the midst of the profoundly xenophobic and racist Chinese Exclusion Act and as the European powers were divvying up the African continent to colonize it. In that particular moment of capitalist geopolitics the lines emerged (contrary to their parroting in the mouth of neoliberal elite) that stand for something more than American exceptionalism--it is a mirror casting back the reflection of precisely the misery that such exceptionalism has wrought on so many. Lazarus’s poem is not an ode to America’s open arms but a condemnation of how it has failed to live up to its professed ideals. During our moment, the rehashing of these lines is telling--America has yet to truly face the human consequences of its role in marching capitalism around the globe and maintains its innocence to the huddled, displaced masses the world over.

The notion of asylum, however pure conceptually, is ultimately shattered into sharp pieces when set down on the ground of actual application. The political weaponization of what was supposed to be a humanitarian aim evidences a profound need to rethink the question of not just how the law is written and applied, but more fundamentally, the body of people who get to shape it. It should be no more of a surprise that asylum law ultimately fell victim to ruling class interests than the retooling of Lazarus’s poem to reflect neoliberal values and American exceptionalism. As Marx noted, the law and forms of state power that enforce it “have their roots in the material conditions of life.” So long as a choice few have the right to decide who lives and dies (albeit through the sterile and supposedly equal “rule-of-law”), we cannot achieve the aims of the solidarity that should come for those seeking asylum. Indeed, it makes it nearly impossible to look beyond the present humanitarian crises the world over to their source—capitalism itself. Justice does not stop at expanding and welcoming those fleeing harm; it looks to that which chases them.

Daniel Melo is a public sector immigration lawyer in the American Southeast who primarily works with refugees and is the son of a migrant himself. His book, Borderlines, is due out from Zer0 Books in August 2021.

Kamala Harris and the New Imperialism

By Daniel Melo

In her recent trip to Guatemala, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke of seeking to end corruption, building trust in the region, and tackling the “root” causes of migration. But she also had a dire warning for would-be migrants—do not come to the US, you will be turned back. Never mind the fact that her remark flies in the face of international law protecting the right to seek asylum. This hard-line stance seems to be at odds with the present administration’s supposed compassionate view of migrants. In reality, it is the latest rendition of the long-standing hypocrisy within capitalism and its displacement of people, a tragically necessary result of US imperialism in Latin America.

US capitalist imperialism is central to the very conditions present in Central America today. In several texts on the issues of empire and migration, professor Greg Grandin details the US’s expansive exploitation, both in military and economic terms, throughout Latin America. This includes everything from direct military intervention, to strong-arming Latinx nations into destructive neo-liberal economic policies, to transplanting the very gangs that now hold criminal empires. This mode of imperialism actually supersedes the prior eras of colonialism. As Grandin argues in Empire’s Workshop, it replaced the old colonialism, as the latter could no longer handle the nationalistic tendencies of former colonies nor the nativist uproar they caused at home. Capitalism needed a new way of exploiting territory beyond itself, without the costly eventual repercussions of direct colonizing. Latin America became a “workshop” for the budding US empire, where it could flex both its military and economic might, a place for developing and honing the empire's machinery. Empire, says Grandin, became synonymous with the very idea of America. We are witnessing over a century’s worth of empire dire consequences--hundreds of thousands displaced, crumbling governments, and the rise of neo-facisim.

Of course, Harris has the benefit of time in masking the US’s own culpability in the displacement of people in Latin America. Time and short memory. Her comments received little contextualization in the greater arc of US relations with the Latinx world, which aids in veiling the empire’s direct role in lighting said world on fire. Recent comments by DHS secretary Majorkas echo this ignorance—“Poverty, high levels of violence, and corruption in Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries have propelled migration to our southwest border for years.  The adverse conditions have continued to deteriorate.  Two damaging hurricanes that hit Honduras and swept through the region made the living conditions there even worse, causing more children and families to flee.” Not only are these remarks devoid of any historical materialist context noted above, but significantly, drive home the reality that the US has fully absolved itself of any responsibility, moral or otherwise, from the human consequences of empire.

Thus, Harris' warning to the Guatemalan people is a continuation of the nature of the new imperialism and the hypocrisy at its heart—to do as it wishes without having to deal with the direct consequences. The contradiction is even clearer when paired with her other recent remarks about the border. When NBC’s Lester Holt questioned her choice not to visit the US-Mexico border as part of her trip, she responded that “my focus is dealing with the root causes of migration. There may be some who think that that is not important, but it is my firm belief that if we care about what’s happening at the border, we better care about the root causes and address them.” What she actually means by “caring” and “addressing”  is ensuring that the “problem” of thousands of displaced people simply be relocated to somewhere away from the US border. Of late, papering over the direct consequences of a century of US foreign policy in Latin America comes in two flavors--paying others to keep the problem at bay (“monetary aid”) or direct applications of force at the border (“you will be turned back”). In other words, the ravages of capitalist imperialism are best dealt with by ensuring that they never make their way to the US in the first place.

However, hostility toward the growing desperate multitudes will do little to deter people who are fleeing for their lives. As the Italian delegates at the Socialist Congress of 1907 long ago noted—“One cannot fight migrants, only the abuses which arise from emigration…we know that the whip of hunger that cracks behind migrants is stronger than any law made by governments.”  This administration, like the one before it (and so on for 100 years), assumes that brutality is a functional means of abating the ravages of capitalism. And while oppression may momentarily suppress the movement of people, it cannot fill stomachs, reverse climate change, or repair the decades of damage done by imperialism. As Grandin notes in The End of the Myth, the horrific and historic cycle of violence at the border is a product of the impossible task of policing the insurmountable gap between massive wealth accumulation and desperate poverty. Keeping people where they are will increasingly require escalations of violence and force to hold-off the human consequences of capitalist imperialism.

In this respect, Harris and the administration’s aim at tackling the “root causes” of migration will be forever out of their reach. To do so, they would first have to acknowledge the pivotal role that the US had and continues to have in creating such conditions, and in turn, the unsustainable nature of capitalism itself. This is ultimately no more likely than them suddenly conceding power to the workers of the world. Yet, Grandin also unveils a sliver of light in the darkness of imperialism--the lesson taught by the history of US involvement in Latin America is “[d]emocracy, social and economic justice, and political liberalization have never been achieved through an embrace of empire but rather through resistance to its command.”

Daniel Melo is a public sector immigration lawyer in the American Southeast who primarily works with refugees and the son of a migrant himself. His book, Borderlines, is due out from Zer0 Books in August 2021.

The Hidden Violence of Immigration Bureaucracy

By Daniel Melo

There are obvious forms of violence in the US migration system--the longstanding brutality of Border Patrol; migrant deaths in the desert; the conditions in detention centers. These are all recognizable facets of enforcing borders and immigration restrictions. But there is a subtler, less understood violence that is pervasive in its bureaucracy, one that impacts the many thousands of people who are funneled through it.

The late anthropologist/anarchist scholar David Graeber took a compelling look into the nature of bureaucracy in his book The Utopia of Rules. This went beyond our usual disdain towards the absurdity of bureaucracy to peer inside its heart. There, he found violence. In a series of essays, Graeber lays out how deeply bureaucratized modern life has become, from one’s ability to get a bank transaction performed overseas to obtaining the ability to handle an ill loved one’s affairs, to immigration, to opening a barbershop. For him, this “bureaucratization” of daily life is “the imposition of impersonal rules and regulations . . .” which “can only operate if they are backed up by the threat of force.” Throughout, Graeber hones key point—no matter how innocuous or well-intentioned both regulations and regulators are, they possess significance and weight precisely because they are backed by the real physical force of the state.

Graeber goes on to argue that bureaucracy and its attendant violence have “become so omnipresent that we no longer realize we’re being threatened . . . .” This violence is so thoroughly present that it’s boring; it hardly ever enters our consciousness. He also points out that the creation and sustenance of systemic violence require very little work. In fact, incredible violence can be done to people with almost no affirmative action at all, such as the horrors of solitary confinement.

The violence Graeber identifies is present in our immigration system--preventing human movement, confining people to cages, or throwing them off “our” land. These all require force or the threat of it. The mere existence US immigration law perpetuates violence. Consider the simple example of the harm done to separated families because of visa quotas where the wait can range from years, up to decades. But statutory schemes aside, there is enough violence to go around in the pure administration of the law, independent of its unjust nature. To stretch Graeber’s analysis further--immigration bureaucracy possesses violence beyond the direct application of force on migrant bodies to more subtle, hidden forms of violence.

By way of example, consider the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the least outwardly hostile of the immigration agencies that exist under the Department of Homeland Security. USCIS is the agency charged with “adjudicating requests for immigration benefits.” In practice, this means that it reviews the common kinds of applications and processes for migrants transitioning from one form of immigration status to another, e.g., spousal green card applications, DACA applications, and citizenship, to name a few. Despite this rather innocuous, paper-pushing semblance, USCIS has real power over a migrant’s future. It is the bureaucratic equivalent of Border Patrol in its own right, a gatekeeper to forms of lawful status for many migrants both within and without the US. And in its own way, is just as violent as the officers with guns at the border.

The 18-24 months it takes to process a refugee resettlement case leaves already displaced people in life-threatening precarity. Bureaucratic mix-ups and slowness result in prolonged family separations and government detainment of children at the border. Even delays in the ability to get a work permit present a migrant with the choice of breaking the law and working without authorization or being unable to sustain herself. The same is true of denials. USCIS, under the auspices of the Attorney General, has broad discretion to deny applications, even those that otherwise meet the letter of the law. In many instances where migrants, especially the undocumented, are unable to adjust their status, a denial opens them up to the violence of removal from the country. This is of course separate and apart from how delays and denials perpetuate the precarious nature and violence of living somewhere without status. It recently reached an absurd height when USCIS began rejecting applications (including those for asylum) if every box on the application was not filled in with “N/A,” even when a question was clearly inapplicable or irrelevant to the benefit sought (e.g., a 2-year-old won’t have any children).

To argue that these are not forms of violence is precisely how the system gets away with it—it paints over the real harm inflicted by the system as purely administrative and lacking in either the significance or intensity to amount to real violence. To the contrary, much like solitary confinement or the neglect of a child, these are expressions of violence, just in their least obvious form. They impart real harm to real people and do so on a largely arbitrary basis. To Graeber’s point about the bureaucratization of life, this violence not only escapes our view but the view of almost everyone who interacts with the immigration system. It is both mundane and pervasive thus has lost significance, only jarring us every now and again when we see children in cages or a father and daughter face down in the Rio Grande having drowned in an attempt to cross.

Perhaps what is most troubling about this violence is that it is completely displaced from any one person or even one entity. There is no one to hold directly responsible for it, and in this way, all escape responsibility. Its casualness is both its alibi and its greatest weapon—-to be able to ignore the harm it wreaks on others, its lawful ability to do nothing. As Slavoj Zizek points out in his book on violence—the holocausts that stem from capitalism all seem “just to have happened as the result of an ‘objective’ process, which nobody planned and executed and for which there was no ‘Capitalist Manifesto.’” It is precisely because these systems appear as both “objective” institutions that produce similarly “objective” results that gives them moral and political ground to justify themselves, often as anything but violent.

Despite its perniciousness, there might be hope yet for bureaucracy. Or better said, for the creation of institutions that are accountable for how they affect people’s lives. Even Graeber, an anarchist, readily acknowledges that certain kinds of bureaucracies have done a great deal of good in the world—“European social welfare state, with its free education and universal health care, can just be considered . . . one of the greatest achievements of human civilization.” In addition to his scathing analysis, Graeber also offers up a profound critique of what is “realistic”. Drawing on Marx, Graeber notes that “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” If bureaucracy, particularly the one that lays claim over migrant bodies, is a human construct, it’s time to do it differently.