I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be “civilized.” It’s not caring for one’s own; animals do that. It’s not making music and art; cave men drew and sang. It is, I believe, to live with a moral standard that takes into account our fellow man, and to ask: What do we owe one another, and what do we owe strangers?
For me, to be civilized boils down to being willing to work against our own lesser interests in order to alleviate greater suffering, no matter the sufferer’s identity or relationship to us. It is a high standard, but it is not heroism, which is putting one’s own life in real danger for another.
After World War II, a large group of lawmakers decided to codify this principle of humanitarian duty into international law. Nonrefoulement (from the French “fouler,” meaning “to trample”) is the idea that vulnerable people, once arrived on safe shores, should never be sent back into danger. Put simply, it is the premise that the least we can do is not knowingly send someone out to die. It is this idea that was challenged by the first Trump administration, with its “Remain in Mexico” policy, which denied responsibility for asylum seekers. Now, in his second term, President Trump has not only reinstated that harmful policy but also suspended thousands of existing asylum cases, and canceled appointments and even flights for refugees already cleared to enter the United States. All of this goes against a contract this country signed 58 years ago.
One hundred and forty-five countries signed the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention (the United States signed on to the bulk of the convention’s requirements in 1967, including those on refoulement), which states: “No contracting state shall expel or return (‘refouler’) a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”
The language in the treaty was designed to be all-encompassing, and to acknowledge that there will always be refugees fleeing persecution. The vaguest protected category, “particular social group,” was added by a Swedish delegate who worried that some people who deserve shelter would not fit into the existing categories. How could anyone when this language was drafted, just six years after the horrors of the Holocaust, foretell whom the next atrocity would target? “Particular social group,” then, was written as a catchall, to make sure everyone who needed refuge would be covered by the legal language.
In 1988, my family fled Iran and landed in the United Arab Emirates. After nearly a year, we were recognized as refugees by the U.N.’s High Commissioner on Refugees and sent to a camp in Italy. There we sat for another six months or so, waiting and submitting to “credible fear” interviews, wherein asylum seekers must prove to an immigration office that the danger back home is real, not imagined. My mother explained to the officers that her Christian conversion was apostasy according to Islamic law, and that before we escaped, she had been imprisoned, interrogated and told she’d be executed. As we told our story, I sensed that our interlocutors’ aim was to save us, not to send us away. Later, too, I saw American neighbors and friends embracing this moral duty, a responsibility and an instinct to protect lives more vulnerable than their own.
But in the United States and in Europe of late, it seems as if government lawyers have treated the Refugee Convention like a checklist of obligations to reinterpret and wriggle out of rather than a sacred principle that bound together a shellshocked world after the savageries of the Holocaust. The spirit of a broad and inclusive refuge has slowly been replaced by a narrowing of those categories to allow as few as possible to qualify. During the first Trump administration, Jeff Sessions, who was then attorney general, argued that women fleeing domestic violence did not qualify for protections as a social group. As ugly as that is, Mr. Trump is once again engaging in mass refoulement, turning away refugees who meet the strict criteria.
The writers of the original treaty tried to articulate something like: We can’t know what evil will come next, but when it does, we peaceful nations will shelter its survivors. Twenty-first-century lawyers have reinterpreted that to mean, essentially: We will shelter survivors, but only from the kinds of evil that we are legally forced to care about.
After receiving asylum in 1989, my mother, brother and I were resettled in Oklahoma. Pastors often asked us to share our story in their churches, and my mother gratefully did the rounds. It felt humiliating, but I liked the language of their sermons: We were “chosen,” our journey a “miracle,” our lives a part of “God’s plan.” I loved these words because they meant we were special. One sweet, grumbly old church man, though, didn’t seem to think we were special at all. When we were at his house, he teased me about my accent, the books I hadn’t yet read, my love of stewed spinach and yogurt. And yet he absolutely believed that bringing us out of Iran was God’s work. Now I understand that this man had a higher-order morality than all those who praised our faith, or our value: He didn’t think we were extraordinary or anointed. He just thought that every life deserved saving.
This standard has eroded in America and across Europe. We’ve become baser, more self-serving, jealously guarding our spaces. These days, so much of our talk about migrants and refugees is about how much they do for our economies, for our communities and for our culture. But what about the sanctity of human life? America, this shining city on a hill, is now sending people back to face torture and death, en masse, despite our obscene resources. Just this month we began shipping the most vulnerable to Panama; including Iranian Christians, facing the same risks my family did 36 years ago. The firmer our door remains shut, the more our language has become about exceptional people, deserving people and merit.
I don’t think, for meritorious people, this is a very difficult promise to keep, for our gatekeepers and for all of us: We don’t send wretched people back into danger. Even if it costs us money. And certainly not for some hypothetical fear for ourselves. We do this because we’re civilized, and born lucky, and life is the minimum we owe to our fellow man.
The post America Loses Its Soul When It Rejects People Fleeing Danger appeared first on New York Times.
