The history of the 20th century, and especially the history of the Holocaust, is replete with bureaucratic heroes like Raoul Wallenberg, Chiune Sugihara, Frank Foley, and Aristides de Sousa Mendes, diplomats who combined to save hundreds of thousands of lives by bending the rules and issuing unauthorized passports or visas to people fleeing persecution. Now, in the 21st century, as we stand ever closer to repeating the horrors of the past century, these rule-bending insiders are nowhere to be found. It isn't that people aren't capable of morally taking a stand. It's that they physically can't do so.
I would know, because I once tried. As a midlevel visa manager at the U.S. Consulate-General in Mumbai in 2022, I tried to help an Afghan family marooned by the Taliban takeover. The parents already had U.S. visas, but when I tried to issue a visa to their baby, a computer overrode my decision. To this day, I don't know what happened to that family. These kinds of scenes are repeating around the world, from the closed-up Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt to U.S. deportation proceedings that end in shipment to Salvadoran prisons. Photographs of emaciated people peering through gates are once again becoming common—and their fate is increasingly controlled by faceless systems.
