It’s time for leaders and citizens in all developed countries — from the U.S. to Europe, Asia and Australia — to ask themselves wrenching questions about migration. Answering honestly will take us far out of our comfort zones, challenging the way we define ourselves as individuals and societies.
Here’s an opening question: Are Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis, the Republican governors of Texas and Florida, moral analogs to Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus, or Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the strongman president of Turkey?
That may seem far-fetched, but it isn't. Lukashenko and Erdogan have used some of the most vulnerable human beings in the world — refugees from the Middle East — as pawns in their games against perceived political enemies in the European Union. Erdogan has prodded migrants to cross Turkey’s land and sea borders with Greece. Lukashenko has flown refugees to Belarus before herding them toward Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.
Abbott and DeSantis are doing something similar. In their games, Venezuelans and other Latin Americans assume the role of Syrians or Afghans. And liberal “blue” states such as New York, Illinois or Massachusetts, and “sanctuary cities” such as New York or Washington, D.C., play the part of the E.U.
Abbott, facing a surge in undocumented migrants from south of the border, has put thousands of them — men, women and children — on buses, fares paid, to New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C. He even had one busload dropped off at the residence of Vice President Kamala Harris. DeSantis has organized planes to bring migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in deep-blue Massachusetts.
The unsurprising chaos at the receiving end — at Port Authority in New York and other spots — reminds me of scenes I witnessed in Germany in 2015-16, during the refugee crisis. Volunteers do their best to provide water, food, toys and basic orientation to befuddled — and sometimes traumatized — arrivals. But as the numbers grow and order breaks down, the helpers are overwhelmed. So are local governments.
And that — from the vantage point of Abbott and DeSantis, or Lukashenko and Erdogan — is the point. They want to call the moralizing, bleeding-heart liberals’ bluff. Don’t lecture us about treating aliens humanely, they’re saying. See how you get on with them.
The truth is that nobody gets on, not really, once refugee numbers get too big. That’s why Eric Adams, New York City’s mayor, this week in effect sued for peace. With some 11,000 migrants arriving just since May, the city’s vaunted system of sheltering anybody in need, regardless of status, is near a breaking point, he said. It may become impossible to find beds for all.
Adams’ admission also reminded me of 2015 in Germany. As hundreds of thousands of Syrians, Afghans and others were showing up, then-President Joachim Gauck stated the obvious. “This is our dilemma,” he said: “We want to help. Our hearts are wide. But our capabilities are finite.”
To make that universal dilemma clearer, it helps to exaggerate the scale. Imagine a generally good society — ours. It views itself as tolerant, open and welcoming to strangers, especially those in need of asylum. One year, a woman shows up with her babies. They’ve been bombed out of their homes by an evil dictator. Without hesitating, our whole country embraces her. Before long the woman has integrated into her host society — she’s become one of us.
A few years later, more refugees ask for asylum. But this time there’s a billion of them. Some have, again, been bombed out by evil dictators, others are starving because climate change has made their formerly arable continent barren, seeding wars instead of crops. But we can’t embrace them, because we can’t integrate a billion as we embraced one. If we tried, we’d forfeit our own society — we’d stop being us.
The migrant crises in the real world have so far been somewhere between these extremes. The problem is we don’t know, and can’t agree, where on that spectrum we are. And that ambiguity leads to polarization and political backlashes.
Almost all European countries nowadays have far-right populist parties whose rhetoric ranges from merely anti-immigrant to downright xenophobic. In places such as Hungary and Poland they’re in power; in Italy and elsewhere they could soon be. They do well whenever parts of the electorate feel anxious — about their wallets, safety or way of life — amid the ominous presence of large numbers of exotic-looking foreigners. (When refugees look less exotic, like the Ukrainians who’ve fled to Poland, the backlash tends to be manageable.)
As alienation spreads, open societies, such as Denmark, run the risk of closing in both law and mind. Sweden is another example. In its election last week, the Sweden Democrats, a far-right party with neo-Nazi roots, soared to come in second, after a campaign largely focused on immigrants and their putative role in rampant gang shootings.
But a productive debate about migration can start only after society rejects the simplistic pseudo-answers given by the extremists on both sides.
The do-gooders would love to pretend that we have a moral duty to keep our societies and borders completely open, limits be damned. With that stance, they’re naively choosing — as the German sociologist Max Weber famously put it — conviction over responsibility. When an influx of migrants reaches a certain threshold, a society loses cohesion, becomes polarized and dysfunctional. It’s bad policy to ignore this limit.
The tough-talking builders of walls and fences, by contrast, want us to forget that closing borders necessarily means closing our hearts too. In the 1940s, it meant abandoning Jews to their fate in the Holocaust. Today, it means pushing dinghies back into the Aegean Sea — and then dealing with the bodies of dead children washed up on beaches. It requires aiming water cannon through barbed wire at moms and their babies. It means becoming societies and individuals we don’t want to be.
If, however, we reject the simplistic answers on both sides, we can stop acting like one another’s caricatures and confront the big question. In 2022, the world has more than 100 million refugees. This number will keep growing, owing to climate change and all the wars and famines it will cause. What are we going to do about it?
We can’t let them all in; nor can we lock them all out and pretend not to notice what happens next. In an ideal world, we’d talk about how to solve the problems that cause migration, starting with climate change. And we’d explore ways for countries, parties, leaders and citizens to work together to help refugees as best we can. It wouldn’t be Hungary against Germany or Texas against New York; it’d be all of us searching for solutions.
None of that is possible as long as populists caring only about the next election nab headlines with cheap stunts that dehumanize and weaponize the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. If we ever want to find answers to the global challenge of migration, we must start by punishing the cynicism displayed by the likes of Erdogan, Lukashenko, Abbott and DeSantis. And then we’ll have to ask ourselves those wrenching questions.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering European politics. A former editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist, he is author of “Hannibal and Me.”
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
