The day before yesterday, my Syrian friend who’s in a refugee camp in southern Bulgaria sent me a video of townspeople protesting the asylum seekers. He was worried they’d breach security. Security at the camp consists of a single fat, racist cop, so his fear was understandable.
Fortunately the protestors just yelled a bit and then went home. But, how fucking stupid are people? The demonstration appeared linked to the war in Gaza. What do 23-year-old Syrian refugees have to do with the Israel-Palestine conflict? It’s part of a larger pall of anti-immigrant sentiment that’s attached to whatever happens in the news cycle.
First, some context. Bulgaria, perpetually treated like an embarrassing village cousin with bad teeth in international organizations, has valid gripes about how the EU handles refugees. Rich countries bribe/threaten poorer countries in the EU to contain asylum seekers from Africa and the Middle East. That way, they don’t have to meet their legal duty to process and give them asylum.
Most recently, the EU has been dangling letting Bulgaria join the Schengen Area — if the country can secure its borders.
When my friend Julie and I went to the camp, we heard awful stories of “push-backs.” That’s when border cops beat the fuck out of you so you go back to Turkey instead of to the West by way of Bulgaria. We met a couple, where the woman was 7 months pregnant when she went on the perilous journey to cross the Turkish-Bulgarian border. She’d kept slipping and falling. When her husband called the Bulgarian equivalent of 911, border cops showed up and beat him while his hurt, pregnant wife cowered behind. “I wouldn’t do it again,” he told us about the crossing.
Despite such vigorous border enforcement, Bulgaria’s most recent bid to join the Schengen, which would be life changing for many people, failed. So, people should be protesting the Austrian and Dutch embassies—countries that voted against Bulgaria—not Syrian 23-year-olds who didn’t start a war when they were 13.
“They’re just really silly,” my friend wrote about the protestors. Still! Imagine being protested against, just because you want a new life somewhere else than the war-torn country in which you happened to be born.
From a dusty Bulgarian village to the hallowed pages of a news outlet founded by Bari Weiss: “Free Press” for “Free People” (lol), right-wingers are exploiting this horrific moment to push anti-immigrant agendas. Nothing screams freedom like, “You have to live and die where you are born.”
“The Day the Delusions Died” is the lofty title of a post on Weiss’s site:
When Hamas terrorists crossed over the border with Israel and murdered 1,400 innocent people, they destroyed families and entire communities. They also shattered long-held delusions in the West.
A friend of mine joked that she woke up on October 7 as a liberal and went to bed that evening as a 65-year-old conservative. But it wasn’t really a joke and she wasn’t the only one. What changed?
Look, the college kids fucked up. I think it’s more a matter of curated social media feeds that hid the horror of the Hamas attacks than anti-Semitic indifference to the loss of Jewish life. But now, conservatives are weaponizing that fuck-up to rail against immigration. Because for reasons that are as unclear as Bulgarian villagers protesting Syrian refugees, the poor reaction to Hamas attacks is being used, in all quarters, to lobby against refugee seekers. As the post on Weiss’s site, which has gone viral, continues:
For decades, both Europe and America basked in an “unconstrained vision” of immigration. In the U.S., the melting pot that could integrate the nineteenth-century Germans, Irish Catholics, or Japanese could surely absorb those crossing the southern border. And many of these new arrivals would do jobs Americans didn’t want to do. Europe needed immigration to deal with an aging population, with many European countries inviting people from their former colonies to fill labor shortages and skills gaps.
But over time, especially from the late 1990s onward, the unconstrained vision ran rampant through media and political elites, and immigration went from being a solution to specific problems to a moral good in its own right. (I am myself an immigrant. When I moved to Britain from Russia in 1996, net immigration into Britain ran at 55,000 people a year. Last year, net immigration stood at over 600,000 people.)
Over the past decade, more and more people in America and Europe have quietly shifted toward the “constrained” view of immigration. The Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump were early warning signs of this ongoing transformation. Today, we see New York, where nearly 60,000newly arrived migrants are putting tremendous strain on shelters and city services like healthcare, education, and public transport. The city has already spent over $1 billion to address this crisis, and projections indicate that housing costs alone could exceed $4.3 billion by next summer. Lifelong Democrats in Manhattan tell The New York Times that “we have too many people coming in,” and that “Biden could do something more about putting our borders up a little stronger. I mean, we’re not here to take in the whole world. We can only do so much.”
Europeans have learned similar lessons from their own migrant crisis. In Britain, we spend approximately $10 million a day on hotels for people who have come here illegally. We refuse to deport foreign criminals over “human rights” concerns. Readers may recall seeing recent media reportsabout the small Italian island of Lampedusa, whose population quadrupled in a day as large numbers of illegal immigrants arrived. We have now learned that a man who shot two Swedish soccer fans dead in a terror attack in Brussels last week arrived there illegally via the island in 2011. The man was known to the authorities as a security risk due to his jihadi links, but when his asylum application was rejected in 2020, he was not deported. How many such people are allowed to come and stay in Europe is impossible to say, as hundreds of thousands of people make illegal crossings into Europe every year.
This is just ahistorical and stupid enough to go viral after being prominently featured on Weiss’s website. There has never been a time in modern history when large swaths of Europe and America had an “unconstrained” vision of immigration, except for when it comes to their own grandparents. Every generation has brought up bile like Donald Trump who weaponize people’s fears about immigrants for political gain. Marie Le Pen, etc. Then alleged leftists go “Well we sympathize with immigrants but there’s only so many resources!” This is also a total crock of shit, a Shock Doctrine-type excuse for gutting public benefits (“It’s the immigrants!”). Eric Adams for example is pretending that New York has to take food away from poor old people because of refugee seekers, even as the city jauntily funds the NYPD at 12 billion dollars a year and constantly pays out lawsuits for abusive police behavior instead of firing the abusive police officers.
And hey look, Henry Kissinger is still alive and making the world a worse place. “It was a grave mistake to let in so many people of totally different culture and religion and concepts, because it creates a pressure group inside each country that does that,” the 100-year-old told POLITICO.
“We must stop importing people who hate Jews and hate America. The experiment has officially failed,” opined Charlie Kirk. “hey guys im starting to think mass importing people from countries who hate america was a bad idea,” some blonde right-wing lady said.
Meanwhile, pundits on the ostensible left revel in America’s apparent poor standing in the world. “It’s wild to see that many Americans are only NOW waking up to the reality of how utterly despised we are by most of the world,” said Saira Rao, of making White Women cry fame.
That’s also wrong, and harmful, because it feeds the narrative that asylum seekers and immigrants can’t be trusted. Most people in other countries are fascinated by America, thanks in large part to the three most successful organs of propaganda in the history of the world, Hollywood, Disney and Friends. Hahaha. It’s true though. My Syrian friend is dying to come to New York City. It’s his dream. Same for my Bulgarian friends. I have to watch what I say when I’m there. Complaining about the US reeks of extreme and obnoxious privilege.
Anyway, my Bulgarian friends will probably see New York one day, my Syrian friend probably won’t.
Wow. People are still quoting Kissinger like his opinion is worth a shit.
Great points, I do agree that this moment brings an opportunity to talk about a bunch of stuff from the left. Like empathy for humanity, foremost, as you say. But also, we can talk more about a ton of societal assumptions (about refugees, borders, and a whole lot of other words that get thrown around) and bring people around to a more radical viewpoint. As in, working to truly see the roots of everyone's problems.
One of those problems is old white men like me making shitty, fascist decisions. And anyone listening to them. Kissinger, shit.
Too bad for those right-wing freaks. The world was again reminded just yesterday that white males are the biggest terrorist threat to you and your family. Army reservist, firearms instructor just slaughtered innocents in Maine yesterday. White dude, pilot, charged with attempted murder of 89 just three days ago. McVeigh, Kaczynski, Reid, Rudolph. KKK. List goes on and on.