What Do We Owe to Refugees? E-Book

David Owen

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Political Theory Today
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 139

Beschreibung

Who are refugees? Who, if anyone, is responsible for protecting them? What forms should this protection take? In a world of people fleeing from civil wars, state failure, and environmental disasters, these are ethically and politically pressing questions. In this book, David Owen reveals how the contemporary politics of refuge is structured by two rival historical pictures of refugees. In reconstructing this history, he advocates an understanding of refugeehood that moves us beyond our current impasse by distinguishing between what is owed to refugees in general and what is owed to different types of refugee. He provides an account of refugee protection and the forms of international cooperation required to implement it that is responsive to the claims of both refugees and states. At a time when refugee protection is once again prominent on the international agenda, this book offers a guide to understanding the challenges this topic raises and shows why addressing it matters for all of us.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Front Matter

Prologue: A Tale of Two Ship

Notes

Introduction

Two Pictures of Refugees

Structure of the Book

Notes

1 Picturing Refugees

Forced Displacement and the Making of the Modern Refugee Regime

Lines of Descent: Persecution, Humanitarianism and Multilateralism

Constructing the Modern Regime

Conclusion

Notes

2 Who Are Refugees?

Who Is a Refugee?

Reconstructing the Institution of Refugeehood

Notes

3 Responsibility for Refugees

Shared Responsibilities and Durable Solutions

The Responsibility to Protect and the Norm of Non-Refoulement

Refugee Statuses and Durable Solutions

Sharing Responsibility

Towards a Fair Regime of Refugee Protection

Notes

4 Predicaments of Protection

Failures of Responsibility Sharing and Obligations of Solidarity

Logics of Failure

State Responsibilities in Contexts of Non-Cooperation

Citizen and Refugee Responsibilities in Contexts of Unfair Shares

Notes

References

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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David Owen, What Do We Owe to Refugees?

What Do We Owe to Refugees?

David Owen

polity

Copyright © David Owen 2020

The right of David Owen to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2020 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978–1-5095–3975-8

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Owen, David, 1964- author.Title: What do we owe to refugees? / David Owen.Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2020. | Series: Political theory today | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Who are refugees? Who, if anyone, is responsible for protecting them? What forms should this protection take? In this engaging and concise book, David Owen provides a clear account of the responsibilities of refugee protection and the forms of international co-operation that will be required to discharge them”-- Provided by publisher.Identifiers: LCCN 2019025264 | ISBN 9781509539734 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509539741 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509539758 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Refugees. | Emigration and immigration--International cooperation. | Emigration and immigration--Government policy.Classification: LCC HV640 .O89 2020 | DDC 325/.21--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025264

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Dedication

To Miranda

With the hope that your generation will do better

Acknowledgements

I have accumulated many debts over the years; the main ones are to Liza Schuster, who introduced me to the issue, to Matt Gibney, from whom I have learnt most (perhaps not enough), and to Joseph Carens and Rainer Bauböck, who have each critically supported my thinking about this topic. Others whose thinking and comments have helped me along the way include Alex Aleinikoff, Sarah Fine, David Miller, Kelly Oliver, Clara Sandelind, James Souter, Christine Straehle, Kerri Woods and Leah Zamore. Particular thanks are due to Chris Armstrong, Chris Bertram, Peter Niesen, Anne Phillips and Tracy Strong, for responses to the whole manuscript.

I was fortunate to have the political philosophy group at the University of Milan devote a workshop to the draft manuscript, and I am grateful to Corrado Fumagalli for organising it and to his colleagues for their critical insights. Special thanks are due to Gloria Zuccarelli and Laura Santi Amantini for detailed and helpful comments on the manuscript and to Valeria Ottonelli for raising an important point I had not adequately considered. I am also grateful to George Owers and Julia Davies at Polity, who have been exemplary throughout the process, and to two anonymous reviewers.

Outside academic life I owe a debt to two friends – Jon Courtenay Grimwood and Simon Nicholson – who read the manuscript of this book as fellow writers, with an ear to its accessibility to the lay reader. My wife, Caroline Wintersgill, has offered her always steadfast love and support (even while trying to finish her PhD); and our children, Miranda and Arthur, sustain me in more ways than they know. Because I admire her passionate concern for justice, I dedicate this book to Miranda.

PrologueA Tale of Two Ships

Let me begin with two stories.

The first is the tale of the German ocean liner MS St Louis, which departed from Hamburg on 13 May 1939 carrying 937 passengers; nearly all of them were Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. The passengers had, for the most part, already applied for US visas and had landing permits or transit visas for Cuba, where they intended to disembark and wait for visas to enter the United States. It was a two-week transatlantic voyage and the trip was pleasant, offering music, dance and Friday night prayers (during which the portrait of Adolf Hitler was removed from the dining room). Unknown to the passengers, their voyage had already attracted considerable media attention in Cuba: ‘Even before the ship sailed from Hamburg, right-wing Cuban newspapers deplored its impending arrival and demanded that the Cuban government cease admitting Jewish refugees.’1 The director general of the Cuban Immigration Office was forced to resign over the illegal sale of landing permits, and in the week before the ship sailed the Cuban president issued a decree ‘that invalidated all recently issued landing certificates’.2 Refugees from Europe were portrayed by right-wing populist movements as threatening Cubans’ economic security by taking scarce jobs away from natives.3 When the St Louis arrived at Havana on 27 May, only 28 passengers (22 of whom were Jewish) were held to have valid papers and allowed to disembark – alongside one other, who tried to commit suicide and was hospitalised in Havana.

The fate of the passengers on the St Louis was now a major story in newspapers across Europe and the Americas. Appeals to the US government were made to no avail. The United States operated a quota system for immigration that was based on the size of existing US population groups; and the combined German Austrian quota of 27,370 for 1939 not only was filled, but left a long waiting list. Moreover, there was no political will to admit higher numbers:

A Fortune Magazine poll at the time indicated that 83 percent of Americans opposed relaxing restrictions on immigration. President Roosevelt could have issued an executive order to admit the St Louis refugees, but this general hostility to immigrants, the gains of isolationist Republicans in the Congressional elections of 1938, and Roosevelt’s consideration of running for an unprecedented third term as president were among the political considerations that militated against taking this extraordinary step in an unpopular cause.4

With no other choice available, on 6 June the St Louis set sail to return to Europe. The worst fear of the passengers was a return to Germany, but the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (alongside other Jewish organisations) was able to use its funds to arrange visas to four other European states: Great Britain (288), France (224), Belgium (214) and the Netherlands (181). The passengers admitted to Great Britain were the lucky ones, as only one was killed during the war in an air raid; of those trapped on the continent, 87 manged to leave Europe again before the German invasion in 1940, but 532 did not – and 254 were killed in the Holocaust: ‘84 who had been in Belgium; 84 who had found refuge in Holland, and 86 who had been admitted to France’.5

The second story is that of the MV Aquarius, run by SOS Méditerranée and Médecins Sans Frontières. Since 2016, this ship operated as a search-and-rescue vessel for asylum seekers and migrants in danger of drowning in the crossing from Libya to Europe, working in cooperation with the Italian Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre. On 10 June 2018, Matteo Salvini, the interior minister of Italy’s newly formed right-wing populist government, refused permission for Aquarius to dock with 629 rescued persons (including 123 unaccompanied minors, 11 younger children and seven pregnant women). Salvini claimed, contrary to the international law of rescue at sea, that Malta rather than Italy should accept those rescued – a demand that Malta vehemently rejected. Buoyed by popular support in Italy for a tough anti-immigrant policy, Salvini maintained his refusal, proclaiming that ‘Italy was saying “no to human trafficking, no to the business of illegal immigration”’.6 The stand-off was resolved only when Spain gave permission for Aquarius to dock in Valencia and agreed to accept those rescued persons on board. Italy’s actions took place against the background of economic austerity that followed the effects of the 2008 financial crash and the emergence or consolidation of right-wing national populist movements in the EU, as well as the failure of the Common European Asylum System to secure fair refugee responsibility sharing across its member states, a failure that had seen frontline states such as Italy under particular pressure.

After these events Aquarius encountered further problems. First Gibraltar and, next, Panama, perhaps under pressure from the Italian government, revoked the registration it required to operate under their flag. In November 2018 Italian prosecutors, somewhat arbitrarily, ordered the seizure of the Aquarius to investigate charges that it had illegally dumped potentially hazardous waste at Italian ports (a charge rejected by SOS Méditerranée and Médecins Sans Frontières); the effect of this order was to deny Aquarius access to Italian waters. Such measures increased the pressure on the inadequately resourced Libyan coastguard at a time when the death toll from attempted crossings was, not coincidentally, at its highest in history. On 7 December, having been stranded in Marseille since early October, the Aquarius officially ceased operations with Médecins Sans Frontières, blaming this on ‘sustained attacks on search and rescue by European states’.7 During this period of stasis, an estimated 389 persons seeking to cross the Mediterranean have drowned, although the figure may well be higher.8 (It is likely that, by the time this book is published, things will have got worse, given the deteriorating situation in Libya.)

While the contexts in which these two sets of events took place are different, there are significant parallels, notably that, under conditions of economic austerity, potentials for national hostility towards people seeking refuge were mobilised by right-wing populist actors, cultivated for domestic political advantage and made to support restrictive policies against those in flight. However, whereas the story of the St Louis may be seen as one of far too many that contributed to motivating the establishment of the international refugee regime in the aftermath of the genocidal murders and mass displacements of the Second World War, the story of the Aquarius speaks to the contemporary limitations of this regime, in particular in securing international cooperation between states and safe passage for refugees. It is against the background of such stories that the question of what is owed to refugees and how their protection can be secured acquires its ethical urgency and its political salience.

Notes

1.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, ‘Voyage of the St Louis’.

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/voyage-of-the-st-louis

.

2.

Ibid.

3.

Ibid.

4.

Ibid.

5.

Ibid.

6.

‘Italy’s Matteo Salvini Shuts Ports to Migrant Rescue Ship’.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-44432056

.

7.

‘MSF Ship

Aquarius

Ends Migrant Rescues in Mediterranean’.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-46477158

.

8.

Visit

https://missingmigrants.iom.int/region/mediterranean

.

Introduction

We commit to a more equitable sharing of the burden and responsibility for hosting and supporting the world’s refugees.

New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants (2016)

Today, as people flee civil wars, authoritarian states, persecution by state and non-state actors, famine and environmental disaster, the international refugee regime that was forged in the aftermath of global war and extended in the context of the independence struggles and post-independence conflicts of the second half of the twentieth century is creaking, perhaps cracking, under the strain. The images that we see, of overcrowded boats crossing the Mediterranean and drowned bodies washed up on Europe’s holidays beaches, or of caravans of displaced people trekking to the Mexican border with the United States – and the images that we generally don’t see, of people dying in desert crossings in Libya and Mexico, or of families warehoused in refugee camps across Africa and Asia1 – have led the UN secretary general to speak of a global crisis of solidarity. Many in need of protection do not receive it, and even those who reach camps (or urban spaces) often fail to find security.2

Acknowledgement of the failings of our current political framework for responding to refugee crises and the need for a renewed approach to refugee protection found expression in the United Nations’ 2016 New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, which highlighted the need for greater international cooperation and responsibility sharing.3 But what exactly is the nature of the responsibility that states owe to refugees? And what kinds of international cooperation are required? To raise these questions is to ask how we should approach refugee protection today. Who should count as a refugee and what is owed to persons with that status? Is it sufficient for the international community to provide funds to meet the basic humanitarian needs of refugees in the (typically neighbouring) states of immediate refuge? What weight should be given to the refugees’ own choices – exhibited, for example, in embarking on dangerous journeys to Europe or the United States? Under what conditions can refugees be repatriated to their own states? These are among the most pressing ethical questions in contemporary politics and it is the task of this book to provide a framework for addressing them.