We the People, and Them the Others

When the hurricane named Katrina hit the US Gulf Coast, I was on a plane flying into the country. It's hard to think too clearly on a cross-Atlantic flight (our evolutionary history has obviously not prepared us for flying across nine time zones or sitting in a narrow seat for over 12 hours in the company of several hundred other people, balancing cups of red wine and hot coffee through turbulence, and trying to pretend that it's all normal), so the only coherent thought I managed to muster as we watched the BBC news segment between the two movies was that luckily this time it was a natural disaster. Four years ago, in 2001, we had just gotten here, fresh off the flying boat if you will, when you-know-what happened, and it was a relief that at least this time there would be nobody to blame, no world-changing, paradigm-shifting hysteria to follow.

I was wrong, of course. Blaming someone is very much in our evolutionary coping package, so we pull it out and employ it even when the circumstances are less than ideal for this particular trick. Some are more adept at this method than others. There are the wrath of God folks, who are always convinced a Supreme Being will obviously hate the same bunch of people they do, and everything bad that happens is obviously divinely directed at those miscreants/infidels/perverts. Katrina was not an opportunity the self-righteously religious would pass up on, so we were entertained to several theories from various faiths as to what evil characteristics condemned New Orleans to the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah (den of immorality, not reading the Torah, materialism, being one evil city in the evilest country in the world). Not to be left behind, some good people rightly concerned about the effects our burning of fossil fuels is likely to have on the Earth's climate suggested the hurricane was the fault of those who refuse to join the Kyoto Protocol but want to riddle Alaskan nature reserves with unsightly oil wells and poison the caribou. These latter claims were much more reserved, of course, because their proponents failed to employ unfalsifiable supernatural arguments, and in the absence of those, most people actually remember there is such a thing as evidence or point to the historical record of nasty hurricanes known to have occured before the current US administration.

But the real hysteria this time involved not the "who's to blame" routine, but another one of our deeply ingrained lame behaviors: the primal "we vs. them" instinct. The "us decent folks" vs. "those others" dichotomy. The archetypal "mob at the door" narrative.


As I was slowly recovering from the jet-lag haze, the refugee scandal evolved precipitously. I mean both the slow and inadaquate response to the humanitarian crisis in the affected areas, and the uproar about whether the word "refugee" was appropriate to describe the people displaced by the hurricane. The word was widely used in the media in the first few days, until the first protests from the African-American community, in which many, for good reasons, thought that if the majority of the hurricane victims had been white not only would help have reached them faster but nobody would have thought to use the word refugee. The word popped into the picture, they argued, because of its associations with third-world crises and images of masses of desperate, dark-skinned people in need of assistence. They were absolutely right, of course, about the connotations of the term, despite efforts by people like William Safire to argue that a word equals its dictionary definition (a refugee is someone who seeks refuge) and that people who perceived racial undertones were imagining things. (Safire later changed his mind and recommended the use of "flood victims".)

But connotations aside, even looking at dictionary definitions of "refugee" (see M-W here and the AHD here) seems to suggest that the word was not being used in its most common sense ("especially" or "as in" sense), as neither the crossing of international borders nor fleeing from war or political/religious persecution was involved here. And indeed, during previous disasters on American soil, "refugee" has not been in common use to describe the people needing to be moved out of an area and housed elsewhere (though the word did occur occasionally). In addition, there is the definition by the United Nations Refugee Convention, where "refugee" clearly refers to a foreigner who's fleeing from violence and persecution in his own country. The bottom line, of course, is that these days such persons tend to be non-white, desperately poor and resented and unwanted in the countries they flee to. Refugees, simply put, are a big messy problem.

And Katrina was a big messy problem, with masses of people needing lots of expensive help, people who were non-white, poor and would likely be resented by many in the communities they would be taken to. Anybody who doubts the validity of these observations needs only to look at the countless fake accounts of rude, ungrateful or criminal behavior by evacuees, and of course the wild myths of murder and mayhem in New Orleans following the hurricane. Not to mention the rate at which they spread and were believed by people because they conformed with their expectations. (The items reported by mainstream media, like the snipers shooting at rescue helicopters, were naturally believed by practically everyone, including myself, I have to admit. There are also psychological reasons involving a natural state of anxiety, insecurity and shock that made the hurricane victims in the Superdome and the Convention Center fall for the same rumors, but that's a different story from the motivations of the outsiders.)

What has taken place, of course, and what drove both the preference for the term in early media reports about the breakdown of law and order and the objections by the black community is the linguistic process called pejoration: the word "refugee" is no longer associated with the god-given right of the pursuit of liberty and with compassion for those who are in need, but with poverty, blackness and criminality. Refugees are seen today as, at minimum, a heavy burden for hard-working tax-paying citizens; and at worst, a serious threat to civilization, culture and morality.

In other words, "refugee" has joined the ominous semantic group that also includes "illegal aliens" (or just "illegals"), "wetbacks", "immigrants" (except for one's own antecedents, who were different) and other assorted "darned for'ners". (Add "economic migrants" and "asylum seekers" in Great Britain. We might suspect that these word are also close relatives of "welfare mothers" , "urban" and "minority".)

It's obviously based on this new sense that Jesse Jackson said: "We are not refugees. That in itself is racist language. We are American citizens. We are not refugees." (This and other quotes here.) And many others, including the people referred to by the objected term, emphasized the same: they were Americans, and therefore they deserved better treatment. From one side, mainstream America threw up their hands in the air and drew the line between themselves and the suffering population of New Orleans by calling them "refugees" and thus placing them safely on the "other" side. In response, black New Orlineans and the rest of the American-American community fell back on the very same instinct and drew another line, putting themselves in the inner circle and identifying someone else - apparently non-US citizens - as the unworthy other. Neither side meant to do what they were doing. Neither side was aware of the implications of their choice of words. They were just following the basic pattern: we vs. them. As did an aquaintance of mine when he (rightly) complained about the difficulties of passing on his citizenship to a child he adopted in another country, even while all those children born to immigrants just landed in his country were automatically citizens. On second thought, he acknowledged the two issues had nothing to do with each other, and the two groups were in no competition - it wasn't like if you gave one of them citizenship you'd run out and have none left for the other. But the pattern is too strong, the temptation is too great: there always has to be an other, it seems. There always has to be a them. In making an argument for our own rights, we have to identify someone who's undeserving of the same.

Trafficking in Reverse

The stickiest part about starting a blog (right after finding out that one's carefully thought-out username is already taken, of course) turns out to be picking what on earth the first post should be about from among the countless vague ideas habitually haunting one's brain.

So as not to start out with a bigger mess than is inevitable, here's something small and of little importance to most people in the world, but like every such thing, tying in nicely with the rest of the madness. (And perhaps a bit Vonnegutian too in its futility.)

As we well know, all around the world people are trying to move from poorer countries to richer ones to find a better life, or at least to make some money to take back home and maybe start a little business with. The "First World", naturally, in the primary target of this migration, but there's an intricate hierarchy of countries out there: South Africa worries about Botswanan immigrants, while Botswana wants to keep out Zimbabweans. Jamaica deports Haitians, the Bahamas deports Jamaicans, and the US deports everybody.

There is nothing new about this migration, of course; people have been moving around from the beginnings of human history, and often a lot less peacefully than today's migrants are doing. This natural process has become a lot more difficult though since nation-states were set up, and passports, visas and work permits introduced. The poorest of the people are the least likely to secure those goodies, so on all susceptible borders there's a steady flow of humans being trafficked from south to north, from east to west, from poorer to richer.

If we are to believe the rumors though, for probably the first time in history a government has managed to reverse that direction, and it has to do with passports too. On the border where people are normally smuggled from Romania to Hungary (with a view to continue on further west, in most cases) Romanians are now paying the coyotes to get them back into Romania without being greeted by their own friendly Romanian immigration officer. According to a new regulation, any Romanian citizen who spends more than three months out of a six-month period in the European Union without additional permits will be stripped of his passport upon re-entering his own country. By his own coutry's authorities.

The three-months limit, of course, is EU regulation for tourist stays, and the Romanian government says they're doing this on Brussel's request. But that is a hard one to swallow, as the EU usually expects accesion candidates (Romania is slated to join in 2007) to adhere to basic human rights legislation, and interfering with citizens wishing to leave their country is not acceptable under such. Romanian border guards have also been checking if Romanians traveling to the EU have sufficient funds for their stay, another unusual situation: after all, its the target country's authorities that typically make such inquiries, not one's home country.

Here's a Romanian civic organization's take on the situation (scroll down to "Circulation Rights")


And here's the Romanian government's website explaining their case. (It might be more convincing in Romanian, I don't speak the language. The English version is seriously mangled, evidence that the translation business is not exactly a meritocracy in Romania...)


The irony, of course, is that such interference with emigration was/is common practice in dictatorial regimes, and thus figures greatly in the region's past. But while in other "post-communist" countries it was properly discarded after the democratic transition, in Romania the idea that the state can tell citizens whether they can travel to a foreign country and for how long seems to linger on. Only this time it's not intended to keep everybody in at all costs, but to prevent embarassment to the country's image by its less fortunate citizens. The law of course does not discriminate, but border guards do: everybody in Romania knows what visible ethnic minority should preferrably not cross the border lest they give trouble and make things bad for all Romanians. To many, it even seemed like a legitimate objective, trying to prevent the (unlikely) re-introduction of visa requirements or a delay in the country's EU accession. Now, when passports are being taken away, people are finally seeing this for what it is: a state seriously overstepping its boundaries and violating its citizens basic rights - and all in the name of European integration.