A Crisis of Responsibility and Compassion at the Border

The Second of Two Articles on the Senate Border Security Bill and the Political Climate

Last week, it was widely reported that the Biden White House is considering measures that would use the power of the executive branch to limit the flow of asylum seekers across the U.S.-Mexico border and make it more difficult for asylum seekers to establish a “credible fear of persecution,” the initial test of whether an asylum seeker has a legal claim to remain in the United States. These executive actions are on the table after the failure of a Senate border security bill that would have enacted similar policies, while also providing some additional avenues for migrants to enter the U.S. legally. Last year, the Biden administration likewise implemented a policy barring those who have crossed through a third country from seeking asylum.

The United States is not the only country contemplating harsh measures to limit the number of migrants seeking asylum. For example, writing in America, David Stewart, S.J. describes a policy proposed by the government of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of the United Kingdom to deport asylum seekers to the African nation of Rwanda, where their claims to asylum would be processed and where they would be expected to settle. In recent years, the U.K. has seen an increase in the number of migrants reaching its shores by boat, crossing the English Channel from France. Notably, the migrants are coming primarily from countries like Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and Albania, making the choice of Rwanda as the proposed destination particularly bizarre. Jesuit Refugee Service UK, one of the major agencies serving the migrant population in the U.K., has strongly opposed the proposal, among other reasons because Rwanda likely cannot successfully resettle the migrants and adequately protect their rights. The U.K.’s Supreme Court agreed last November, striking a serious blow against the proposed policy.

Coincidentally, I was recently reading British theologian Anna Rowlands’ 2011 article “On the Temptations of Sovereignty: The Task of Catholic Social Teaching and the Challenge of UK Asylum Seeking.” In terms of recent British history, the year 2011 seems worlds away—David Cameron had just completed the first year of his premiership, and the Brexit vote was still five years away. Still, Rowlands’ theological diagnosis of the U.K.’s evolving approach to asylum at the time was prescient, shedding light on more recent policies in both the U.K. and the U.S.

For example, even in 2011 she notes “new practices of displacement of the responsibilities of the sovereign state [toward asylum seekers] onto private actors, and into offshore and inter-territorial spaces” (850). The British state, as the authority responsible for the public good and the guarantor of rights, had previously taken on the responsibility for welcoming and integrating asylum seekers (one might make a similar claim regarding the U.S. government, at least for significant parts of its history), but increasingly it has sought to shift those responsibilities to others. One clearly sees this in the U.K.’s attempt to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda for resettlement. But one can also see it in the Trump era “Remain in Mexico” policy and the attempts by both the Trump and Biden administration to force migrants to seek asylum in third-party countries. One might also consider the use of private prisons to detain migrants.

Rowlands likewise describes the increased use of the coercive powers, or what she calls the “cruel power,” of the state against migrants, pointing to a rapid increase in detentions, removals, and deportations in the 2000s under Labour Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. One could mark a similar trend in the United States, starting with the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which made it much easier for the government to deport noncitizens and contributed to the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, and continuing with the creation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2003.

Rowlands turns to the philosopher Hannah Arendt to help diagnose this abdication of responsibility and turn toward cruelty on the part of the state. Here I will quote two lengthy passages:

Arendt argues that out of the double moral failing (faith and politics) of the Holocaust emerge powerful and difficult questions about how political and moral judgments have come to lose their anchor points in older forms of moral reasoning. In the absence of regenerated and binding moralities, and through increased drives towards automation and consumption, states are at increased risk of viewing the world in largely utilitarian terms. The shadow side of our technologically driven modernity is a corresponding tendency to render some kinds of people superfluous; and given the stateless vulnerability of many migrants, those seeking refuge are among the most vulnerable to such practices of superfluity. In the light of the economic and technical character of human exchange relations in late modernity we are called to exercise a constant moral vigilance as the state creates and expels its superfluous other. …

Arendt thus offers the following as warning signs of political judgment that has lost its moral force: firstly, in instances where the political system has become in some sense non-communicable—that is, the complexity and opaqueness of the system seems to defy the comprehension of those whose lives and well-being are dependent on it; secondly, where individual human life comes to be treated as superfluity and artifice—where human life appears to be treated through a system of vitalist activism or automation where "calculating" rather than "thinking" dominates. Taken together these factors indicate signs of a crisis of judgment and responsibility with roots in a much deeper crisis of human value. (854-56)

It would not be wrong to see in Rowlands’ interpretation of Arendt here a foreshadowing of Pope Francis’s warnings regarding the “technocratic paradigm” of contemporary life, the “throwaway culture” that sees vulnerable life, and the Earth itself, as disposable, and the “globalization of indifference.” In the homily given during his 2013 visit to the island Lampedusa, the transit point for many migrants passing from Africa and the Middle East to Europe, Francis likewise laments the abdication of responsibility: “We have become used to the suffering of others: it doesn’t affect me; it doesn’t concern me; it’s none of my business!” Whereas Arendt calls for thinking, Francis calls for compassion, which he describes as an ability to weep for those who suffer:

“Adam, where are you?” “Where is your brother?” These are the two questions which God asks at the dawn of human history, and which he also asks each man and woman in our own day, which he also asks us. But I would like us to ask a third question: “Has any one of us wept because of this situation and others like it?” Has any one of us grieved for the death of these brothers and sisters? Has any one of us wept for these persons who were on the boat? For the young mothers carrying their babies? For these men who were looking for a means of supporting their families? We are a society which has forgotten how to weep, how to experience compassion – “suffering with” others: the globalization of indifference has taken from us the ability to weep! In the Gospel we have heard the crying, the wailing, the great lamentation: “Rachel weeps for her children… because they are no more”. Herod sowed death to protect his own comfort, his own soap bubble. And so it continues… Let us ask the Lord to remove the part of Herod that lurks in our hearts; let us ask the Lord for the grace to weep over our indifference, to weep over the cruelty of our world, of our own hearts, and of all those who in anonymity make social and economic decisions which open the door to tragic situations like this. “Has anyone wept?” Today has anyone wept in our world?

In the U.S. context, Arendt and Francis’s words suggest we must work to support border policies that accompany migrants with compassion and solidarity, rather than treating them as superfluous objects of an inhuman system.

Migrant Camp in Tijuana, Mexico near San Ysidro Border Crossing (Photo: Barbara Zandoval, Unsplash)