the embarrassment at lampedusa

"The deaths of some 300 illegal migrants off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa has caused a stir, as spectaculars tend to. But, really, this is no more than freak news. Like mass shootings in America or (middle-class white) child abductions, it is a statistically insignificant event attached to an emotive story. Freak news events don’t actually mean anything, but they look like they should.

It would be silly to make policy on the basis of such events. And yet the stir itself is worth looking into. The pope said such tragedies are shameful, but I would describe Europe’s emotional state as one of embarrassment.

The embarrassment relates to our reluctance to confront the hypocrisy embedded in how we think about immigrants from the poor and broken parts of the world. On the one hand, we have high moral standards about our duty of care to refugees fleeing lives of squalor, fear, and oppression and these are embedded in various international treaties and national laws. On the other hand, if we applied those standards generally, we would have to accept that over a billion people have some legitimate claim to refugee status. (Including most women in the middle-east and perhaps central America; homosexuals from most of the world; most inhabitants of failed states like Somalia and the Central African Republic; everyone but the elite in totalitarian dictatorships like Eritrea, N. Korea, and Uzbekistan; the 12 million people without citizenship of any state; religious minorities in intolerant countries like Pakistan and Burma; all the civilians in war zones like Syria and Baghdad; India’s untouchables; China’s Tibetans; the vast number of refugees interned for decades in long-term camps in poor countries, like the Somalis living in Kenya or the ethnic Nepalis expelled by Bhutan. And so on.)

We who are lucky enough to live in rich countries are understandably reluctant to live up to our moral standards when we realise the full scale of what that would require. Yet we don’t want to admit that we can’t have our cake and eat it too, that we can’t have our sense of moral superiority and also carry on as usual. That would be embarrassing, in an ‘the emperor has no clothes’ way. Such a conflict between our values and our interests is particularly hard to avoid when we are directly confronted by people in need asking for our help. It is distinctly embarrassing to have to tell obviously suffering people to their face that, actually, we don’t care enough about them to want to help.

So just as we might cross the street to avoid the pleading gaze of a beggar, we instruct our governments to protect us from being put into that situation. Thus, European governments on the Mediterranean, acting on the clear desires of their citizens, have spent vast amounts of money trying to prevent such embarrassments from occurring by bribing North Africa’s dictators to ‘deter’ refugees from ever setting off. (A ‘dirty hands' policy with some success, until the Arab Spring removed several of those dictators.) The result is that we proudly offer refuge and asylum to all the deserving people of the world who ask for our help, but only if they can climb over all the walls and laws we've erected to keep them from asking.

Given this, it is easy to see why events like Lampedusa cause us such acute embarrassment. When refugees die trying to reach our beaches it is hard for us to avoid acknowledging how very bad their lives must have been to drive them to take such a risk for such a cold welcome. It is hard for us to avoid recognising the scale of the problem that our own moral standards identify: more than a billion people living in fear, squalor, and oppression.

So we pretend such events are merely individual tragedies, dramas of human suffering that are no one’s particular fault. And in a sense that is true. As long as people refuse to live in squalor and oppression, and as long as people like us refuse to let them have a chance at a better life that might dilute our birthright prosperity, there will be a lot of human suffering. But preventing the refugee boats from setting out would merely prevent telegenic catastrophes that might embarrass our moral bankruptcy. It would do nothing about the real tragedy of vast human suffering in the places refugees come from.

From a moral perspective what is perhaps most strange is the reflexive inter-nationalisation of our moral standards. The suffering of people who happen to live in other countries is not considered to be our problem. Helping them is seen as an exercise in charity rather than a strict moral duty, an act of magnanimity that we might fit in after our day to day concerns have been taken care of. As a result, levels of international aid are a tiny fraction of what we are willing to spend to help needy members of our own society. Helping our own is a matter of justice and a real moral priority; helping foreigners is an afterthought at best. It is as if our moral concern ends at our borders. Hence, it is only when refugees actually manage to cross our borders that we feel a moral obligation to help them (an obligation we would prefer not to feel). We seem to be in the grip of a peculiar prejudice or moral delusion: that political borders delimit a moral boundary, with justice on the inside and mere charity on the outside."

interesting argument