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LONDON – President Trump's promise to prevent a caravan of Central American migrants from reaching the US border, if necessary by military force, may seem like an additional effort by the president to unilaterally dismantle international laws and accepted practices.
But there is a significant difference between that and Mr. Trump's insane challenge to climate change agreements, trade agreements or arms control treaties. By tackling the long-accepted ways of protecting refugees and maintaining stability in times of mass displacement, he has company. A lot of company.
There is no shortage of countries that bypass, and thus weaken, the global refugee rules. The European Union and Australia are two of the biggest offenders. Peru and Ecuador restrict the number of Venezuelan refugees, while Tanzania employs them to hunt Burundians.
In 2015, when Rohingya refugees had fled Myanmar in overcrowded boats, the Indonesian, Malaysian and Thai governments – a move that could even make Mr. Trump blush – pushed the boats to the sea, failing them, to prevent them from reaching safe shores.
Nevertheless, countries tend to hide their violations by posing as respecting the letter of the law or disguising anti-refugee measures in humanitarian terms. But Mr Trump sells his harsh treatment of asylum seekers as deliberate. And even if he is not the first to break the rules, he contributes to their collapse so as to have global consequences.
"The more daring you are, like Trump, and the more frequent you are, you can easily imagine a completely abolished standard," said Stephanie Schwartz, a migration expert at the University of Pennsylvania, who added that Mr. Trump was "Take an ax" towards "one of the most stringent standards of international law" – the right of a refugee to apply for asylum.
To understand how this would happen and what it would mean, it is helpful to understand the basics of asylum and how Mr. Trump integrates it into its erosion.
How should the asylum work?
The basic principle is simple.
If you go to the border of a foreign country, you have the right to ask for asylum. This country is obliged to hear and evaluate your request. He can not evict you while your application is being processed – which can take months or years – or if you face a credible threat of persecution at home. If the country finds that you meet the definition of a refugee, he is obliged to accommodate you. If you do not do it, then only can he expel you.
These rights came from the Second World War, which created a considerable number of refugees in Europe. The victors of the war spent a good part of the next decade establishing what would become the international order, enshrined in laws that regulate things like war or establish universal rights.
Refugee protection was on the list because it was an urgent issue at the time and was seen as a way to preserve stability and human rights in future humanitarian crises.
And after the United States and others refused Jewish refugees during the Holocaust, the world felt compelled to promise "never again."
Refugee rights were enshrined in international law through global agreements signed in 1951 and again in 1967, when the end of colonialism led to new crises.
Not all countries have signed these covenants; the United States has ratified only the 1967 agreement and several countries in the Middle East and Asia have signed neither. But they are considered so widely accepted that they constrain everyone.
Nevertheless, what makes asylum one of the most stringent standards in the world is that it is enshrined in the national laws of many countries, including the United States. After all, asylum is managed by governments and national courts.
This means that a leader such as Mr. Trump can not simply evade his obligations by ignoring or abdicating the 1967 agreement, as that would amount to breaking American law.
But on the world stage, there is no enforcement mechanism. Nothing prevents a country from repealing its asylum law or, if the party leader can get away with it, to ignore it.
Countries have generally complied with this norm because they want to be seen as responsible actors or to avoid angering their neighbors or the United Nations. And even if the countries do not care about the refugees themselves, they know that they will benefit if all the others comply.
Why the asylum system is eroded
This system has held up relatively well until the 1990s.
In retrospect, it became clear that Western countries were complying with refugee rules and pushing other countries to do the same, less out of altruism than through the cold war.
In the first decades after the Second World War, many refugees came out of the communist bloc. For Western leaders and their allies, accepting refugees, as well as those from non-communist countries, was a way to position the West as morally and ideologically superior.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Western countries became less interested in defending refugees. They looked for ways to reduce their obligations.
That year, the US Coast Guard began banning Haitian boats fleeing political unrest at home. Rather than letting the boats reach Florida, which would force the United States to give protection to Haitian refugees, they have sent many people back to Haiti or diverted them for treatment at the US Guantánamo military base.
This practice may have violated the spirit of refugee protection, but the Supreme Court decided in 1993, by a vote of eight to one, supported by the Clinton administration, that it was in accordance with the law. international and national.
This gap – a country can avoid its responsibilities to refugees by forcibly preventing them from reaching its borders – has since become a common practice in Western countries.
Australia directs potential refugees to gruesome facilities in foreign island countries like Naura. The European Union has joined forces with brutal despots, such as Muammar Gaddafi, to prevent refugees from reaching Europe.
When this plan failed, he avoided helping boats filled with future migrants, even as hundreds of people died during the trip.
And now, Mr. Trump has deployed thousands of soldiers to prevent a Honduran caravan from reaching the southern border.
Could the asylum system break?
This is already happening as Western countries continue to claim rights and protections, and to place the burden on the poorest countries, less likely or less able to protect refugees.
Although Europeans and Americans have struggled to accept the arrival of Syrian refugees in their country, for example, the vast majority of them reside in Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon.
Knowing that the Western powers will look away, these countries feel less obliged to grant full protection, preventing refugees from working or limiting their place of residence.
They can also force refugees to return home before the return of their child is safe. And they will certainly prevent refugees from reaching the European borders.
As a result, our current system is no longer a global refugee protection system, but a loose network of norms observed occasionally and partially.
This means that there is no reliable process to mitigate the political, social and economic pressures created by the sudden influx of refugees. This creates dangers primarily for refugees, but also for governments that have deconstructed the system.
We have seen in Europe in recent years how important the political impact can be.
And we should expect it to get worse. Scientists predict a short and medium-term future in which climate change will result in large population movements, either directly when people will abandon areas made inhospitable by rising temperatures or extreme weather events, or indirectly, by climate change. exacerbates violence.
The resurgence of populist and nationalist politics is also ominous. The "us against them" movements, skeptical of international agreements and immigration, have little interest in the fundamental concepts of asylum law of global burden-sharing or rights. universal.
If asylum rights declined, even in the era of the gloomy world liberalism of the 1990s, it is hard to imagine that they were getting much better at it. 39, the time of Donald J. Trump, Viktor Orban and Vladimir V. Putin.
"It takes a lot of time to establish these standards, especially when they restrict government actions in one way or another," Schwartz said. "It's so much easier to shoot them."
If this happens, the consequences will be felt far away from the US-Mexico border, in places like Honduras, Myanmar, Jordan or Burundi, where millions of people displaced by war or persecution will have to to pass protections promised by a world that was agreed "never again."
