Category Archives: Syrian refugees

November 17, 2015 · 8:01 am

The New Xenophobia

One of the scarier consequences of the Paris Terror Attacks are the waves of renewed xenophobia that have swept Europe’s already seething right wing, and somewhat surprisingly travelled across the Atlantic. The suicide bombings by jihadis were widely mapped in Paris at first, in attempts to comprehend the coordinated suicide bombings and sites at which terrorists struck with AK47’s and Kalshnikovs in quite shocking near-simultaneity. (Coordination of the attacks, which claimed 130 lives, and left 368 wounded, undoubtedly increased their terror, and eerily echoed the parallel hijacking of planes on September 11, 2001, in suggesting vulnerability and geographic reach of an unseen network.)

The transformation of reflexive spontaneous public displays mourning the victims or in solidarity with migrants have all too rapidly been replaced in many European cities, as if leading us through a looking glass, into nationalist protests of anti-migrant sentiment, channeling fears that have grown with threats of another attack into neo-nationalist sentiments–as if governments had failed to defend public safety, following on the immediate declaration of a state of emergency, closing of borders, and multiplication of police raids. The initial reflexive show of widespread solidarity of mourning and commemoration at the unprecedented attacks appeared to heal profound shock and disbelief at the murders at outdoor restaurants and night clubs in Paris and attempted assassinations at a soccer stadium attended by the President of the Republic outside the city. Those public displays of sentiment contrasted sharply to how the deadly attacks have fed a new xenophobia in Europe and America, and a deep suspicion of the “other” of the refugee–now increasingly suspected of disguising their own ties to terrorist cells. If these protests appears–inadequately–to orient and focus fears of further terror attacks of such terrifying scale, they suggest the disorientation before the shock of the Paris attacks, if not outright cynical deception. After ISIS claimed responsibility for the coordinated attacks, President Hollande’s immediate declaration that ‘France is at war‘ prepared the stage for a rhetoric of opposition evoking George W. Bush’s declaration of a clash of civilizations, giving broader circulation to a misguided concept first theorized by Samuel P. Huntington, but that gained startling currency to justify the so-called war on terror: it returned as a master-narrative of global oppositions reduced to the easiest alterity of us v. them and cast less in terms of law than religion; if it was readily reclaimed by ISIS news releases to magnify the actions of a group of attackers resident in Belgium who were second-and third-generation immigrants, the group of plotters was not based in Syria.

Despite clearly harmful over-simplifications in so faulty an opposition, the narrative have mobilized unjustified fears of infiltration removed from evidence: mapping ties between ISIS and the perpetrators of the attacks shifted nefariously to mapping terror onto Syrian refugees. Only three days after shock and outpouring of global sympathy to shootings that left 129 dead in six simultaneously timed attacks in the city’s center, fears of infiltration of displaced Syrian refugees by ISIS terrorist cells have gained unprecedented currency based on only the flimsiest of circumstantial proofs. It is as if this responds to the relative inadequacy and failure of efforts to comprehend the plight or the scope of needs of Syrian refugees, and shock at the use of military-grade weapons in civil spaces. Many of the multiple attackers in fact held French or Belgian nationality, and for disaffected underemployed Europeans living in the Brussels’ district of Molenbeek and other poor urban neighborhoods, the Islamic State appears to have exercised a particular appeal. And although the attacks were coordinated by the Belgian ISIS Lieutenant Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who sought to impress higher ups with a devastating attack in France, the group of terrorists and gunmen, if many were trained in Syria, are poorly mapped onto Syrians writ large, even if they were adept in evading security forces at airports and in cars. For despite his presence in every available database of terror, Abaaoud evaded suspicion, as did other Paris plotters and Belgian jihadists, who had sequestered large amounts of triacetonea triperoxide explosives and automatic explosives. The danger of terrorist threats and operations is profoundly mis-mapped and poorly apprehended as originating abroad, even if Abaaoud was indeed eager to “do jihad”: ISIS propaganda has lavished praise on the “eight knights” for having “brought Paris down to its knees” but increasing evidence points to local coordination of the attacks, most probably planned and executed by a contingent of Europeans. Yet rather than being coordinated at a remove from secretive locations in Pakistan, Syria, or Yemen, as Al Quaeda, European residents who joined ISIS have apparently hatched plots of their own–as firing automatics at close range in a concert hall or stadium–that reflect ISIS’ increased exploitation of social media and crowd funding to attract jihadis eager to pose beside the black ISIS flag.

From ISIS’ online recruiting magazine, Dabiq

The topography of the Paris attacks is increasingly reveled to have unfolded in the changing urban sociology of European cities in France and Belgium, and neighborhoods plagued by high unemployment rates and disaffected youth as St. Denis and Molenbeek; although some suspects have indeed traveled to Syria, they are removed from a central command, and seem to have enacted their own fantasies of violence in crowded public spaces (a rock arena and soccer stadium), rather than being orchestrated from abroad as the French President Hollande has asserted: indeed, despite the target of ISIS’s Syrian de facto capital, many of the ISIS higher ups have left the city long ago, and bombs are focussed, it is argued, on empty lots. The perpetrators are among thee roughly one thousand French citizens and six hundred Germans who have travelled to Syria to join the Islamic State; over 3,000 Europeans committed to jihad, attracted in part by IS’s increasingly effective use of the internet as a recruitment and fundraising tool, as well as for diffusing a call to jihad.

1. It is striking how public spectacles of collective mourning have rapidly mutated into frustration to contain deep fears of where terrorists might strike, and desperation at the unexpected attacks–even as parallel protests have occurred sympathetic to the plight of refugees.

The government’s official denunciation of attacks as “planned in Syria” have justified airstrikes against the Syrian capital of the Islamic State, led to over 600 raids and numerous house arrests across France, and increased visible military presence in much of the nation. French President François Hollande’s involvement of the army across the country “confirms we are at war“–as is, by extension, suddenly, much of the world. The absence of the face of the “enemy” has led concern to be projected upon the next potentially scary suspect, in an attempt to contain fears of repeat attacks, with the whereabouts of their actual coordinator unknown. We assume that it must be contained in fixed border, and arrive from a place that lies far outside the boundaries of the European Union.

Yet if France is at war, where’s the enemy? Molenbeek? The problem of mapping the threat has provided substantiation of deeper fears of the arrival of terror cells in the European Union’s borders whose provenance was limited to the Middle East is no longer tenable, and the bombing of unidentified targets in Syria may not even be an adequate response to a network of men in their late twenties or early thirties, mostly petty criminals, who are presumed to have recently traveled to Syria. Even if their radicalization occurred in Syria, they are not refugees.

New York Times

The lack of clear compass to where the enemy exists has made the apparent insinuation of terrorism into the European Union so startling that a finger has been quite deceptively pointed toward refugees. A similar lack of knowledge and growing fears of further attacks have come to justify an unprecedented public expansion of xenophobic protests calling for a rethinking of the European Union’s previous decision to admit refugees. These protests, stoked by threats of continued terror attacks, mirror a broad attack on outside, external forces as if they have indeed coordinated the vicious jihadi attacks, and the de facto ISIS capital of Raqqa constitutes an odd localization of the the terrorist threat. Bombings have been unleashed against northern Syria, announced to be in retaliation, concentrated in the operational capital of the Islamic State, have been concentrated on its outskirts. Even in the face of evidence locating coordination of attacks in Paris among local jihadis, the unprecedented intensification of anti-migrant rhetoric across Europe mismaps and exploits the danger of further jihadi attacks in irresponsible ways, largely because of the discovery of a Syrian passport near the corpse of one suicide bomber in the Paris attacks at the Stade de Paris.

Marion Ruszniewski/Agence France Presse

The Syrian refugee crisis has already provoked severe human rights violations, from sequestrations and confinements to arrests and strip-searches, and numbering, dehumanizing displaced refugees who try to enter Europe in search of residence and work. The renewed currency of ties between terror and migrants have also led American politicians eager to find common ground to condemn Barack Obama’s offers of asylum within the United States to those displaced–as if it constituted a heedless abetting of the spread of terror attacks, mirroring inflated anti-refugee rhetoric throughout the European Union. The wholesale borrowing of such groundless charges from right wing European parties is a particularly toxic manifestation of anti-Islamic xenophobia, transported by means of tweets and social media, and giving rise to a melding of anti-immigrant xenophobia and nationalism that attract an inverse demographic than protests welcoming immigrants in recent months, demanding their repatriation and literally cloaking themselves in regional nationalisms.

Russia Today

The protest of Germans anointing themselves as “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident” hearken back to visions of oppositional political history framed by Karl Schmitt in the Nazi period. The pressure they have put on Germany’s continued promises to resettle refugees has forced its Minster of Justice, Heiko Maas, to caution against equating refugees with terrorists, and affirm the absence of any actual ties between Syrian migrants and the perpetrators of the Paris attacks, and the EU to tighten security on the boundaries on the Schengen region.

The actual geography on the ground hasn’t at all changed. But the links already insinuated between hidden terrorist cells and Syrian refugees have materialized as a rationale for collectively turning our backs on the growing refugee crisis as if our actual well being and survival depended on it–and the acceptance of refugees has provided an entry point of sleeper cells who may execute similar attacks. As the manhunt for the terrorists who committed the atrocities has expanded, waves of panic have spread, stoked by accusations that resemble a witch craze, as the association of migrants and terrorists has virally mutated not only in Europe, but migrated across the Atlantic to the United States, in ways that stand to infect political discourse and debate. The recent reassessment of how open America’s doors would remain to refugees–and absurd request for assurances that none would engage in “terroristic activity,” as Greg Abbot of Texas put it, or, as Senator John McCain glibly demanded, while defending migrant asylum, that “there’s a process that prohibits any kind of infiltration like we’ve just seen in Paris,” entirely misses the point. And they stand to expand the waiting-time to process Syrian refugees in the United States beyond the 18 to 24 months now required, and hamstring plans to grant 10,000 refugees asylum in 2016–by requiring the heads of the FBI and Secretary of Homeland Security to personally approve each refugee for entrance, radically reworking practices of processing Syrian and Iraqi refugees at a crucial and sensitive time.

The discovery of a passport of the Syrian Ahmad Almohammad, who entered Europe from the island of Leros in Greece and the traversed the Balkans, near one site of terrorist attack offered circumstantial evidence but needed grist to identify refugees who have arrived in Europe with feared terrorist groups. Links between ISIS terrorists and Syrians refugees in Europe acquired the sort of substantiation which politicians believed to exist, even if they were not searching for them. Although no previous proofs of actual connections exist that could have prevented the Paris attacks, the fingerprints of one of the suicide bombers on a Syrian passport has suddenly substantiated fears of terrorist infiltration of groups of millions of undocumented refugees. Such identifying signs, no doubt since they provide the archetypical clues for how the police have apprehended and identified criminals, offer the needed grist for inflammatory ties between national security and displaced Syrian migrants and substantiating long latent xenophobic fears. The documented passage of the holder of the passport through the Greek island of Leros tied to the cluster of deadly attacks under the name Ahmad Almohammad suddenly offered possible grounds to fear potential infiltration by Islamic State operatives among the 1.5 millions displaced entering Europe from Turkey–even though the other perpetrators were of longstanding European residence, including a French national and Belgian resident. The poor sense of the geography of terror is to blame. For even the discovery of the even crudest hand-drawn map of a route from Turkey through Greece and Hungary to Germany provokes speculation about terrorist plots. Suspicions of the presence 4,000 “covert gunmen” in Europe have been stoked by ISIS videos promising further attacks, and led refugees to be stopped on suspicion in Turkish port cities.

Ahmad was clearly not the ringleader of the operations–local police finger the Belgian-born jihadist Abdelhamid Abaaoud–but the apparent presence of a Syrian refugee at a site of terror has provided the needed catalyst for expanding increasingly inflammatory rhetoric linking jihadi terrorism to Syrian refugees, despite the unfounded nature of these links. The potential links of terrorist threats and the arrival of Syrian refugees in Europe has been often cited by countries than had already built barbed wire fences in order to discourage the arrival and block the progress of Syrian refugees across the Balkans in the Schengen region. The border barriers built in Greece, Hungary, Bulgaria and Croatia served as physical barriers to transit points of entrance to the Schengen area of passport-free travel–

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But the identification of the fingerprints–regarded as a clue that conceals the illogical association of guilt with all refugees from the region to seek a home in Europe–has become grounds to criticize whatever agreement existed for resettling refugees within the European Union.

And so, three days after outbursts of sympathy and horror at the Paris shootings, panic has been fostered about the fear for admitting terrorists disguised as refugees and displaced. European nations from Poland to Czechoslovakia, a nation already eager to turn away refugees from its borders, and a rousing chorus of tweets from others to close their borders in the light of terror attacks for which ISIS claimed responsibility,–by linking the danger of the further attacks that ISIS has promised to the presence of refugees within their borders, as if accepting refugees constituted surefire vulnerability to further attacks. But even closing borders won’t help stave off the attacks that ISIS promises would be repeated, though the reflexive agenda of far-right politicians in Europe–and, shortly after, in the U.S.–has been surprisingly swift. Poland provided one of the easiest cases for accepting this policy, its new right-wing government having been elected on a platform of anti-migrant platform. Such right-wing opponents of accepting refugees have even found recognition and previously implausible legitimacy as defenders of the common good: they obscure the fact that such home-grown jihadis originate in districts of European cities with unemployment rates exceeds 30%.

The Paris attacks may have broken a delicately negotiated managed solution to a growing crisis, despite the reluctance of Austria, Hungary, and other nations. Only shortly after the President of the European Commission, Jean Claude Juncker, instituted an emergency quota system to spread the admittance of an expanding number of refugees who entered the Schengen region among EU member states and their neighbors–requiring almost all of the member states to welcome a total of 160,000 people–the Paris attacks that claimed 129 victims have provided a pretext for Europeans as the incoming Polish president or Slovakia’s government to bend to popular protests against the acceptance of immigrants from Syria and the Middle East. (None other than the now-cranky Lech Walesa has reared his head again as a nationalist spokesperson, asking the world “to remember that Poland has been transitioning from communism for only 25 years.”) Yet the market has little to do with the rampant xenophobia nourished in anti-migrant marches in Polish cities, which have prominently included emblems of explicit nationalist protectionism.

But the Euroscepticism of several incoming conservative governments has relished in having found new fodder for their claims. Just after an equably distribution of refugees among Europeans seemed reached, the shock of processing the terrible deaths of innocent civilians in Paris seems to have helped redraw the map again, giving far-right European politicians from Marine Le Pen–tweeting an “immediate halt to all intake of migrants in France”–and Poland’s European Affairs Minister Konrad Symanskic, with Viktor Orbán not far behind, occasion to tweet about the need to close borders to prevent unsubstantiated fears of terrorist infiltration. Even in France, where President Hollande had recently if only grudgingly decided to accept 24,000 displaced refugees over two years, the readiness to evoke fears of admitting unwanted terror cells give expression and justification to longstanding deeply-seated anti-migrant and -immigrant attitudes that have been suddenly given a new boost by conservative social media.

While Facebook unveiled the Safety Check app to alert friends ‘I’m Safe’ just after the Paris shootings, post-shooting tweets have disseminated particularly dangerous rallying cries from the right on social media. The rage of tweets from members of the radical right from Filip Dewinter of the Flemish secessionist Vlaams Belsang party to Nigel Farage of England’s UKIP echoed the decision another Eurosceptic, Poland’s Foreign Minister, to use the events to revise his nation’s policy toward migrants. The tragedy has sadly provoked the weirder, post-tragedy tragedy of making it even harder for refugees to be accepted in Europe who are fleeing ongoing civil war, even as that war seems to have visited Europe. The New Xenophobia is of the most dangerous sort–a xenophobia prominently rooted in the fear of enemy agents potentially destabilizing the nation, based on linking the displaced to the most nightmarish event visited on a nation for several years. The new xenophobia stigmatizes the humane acceptance of displaced migrants based on the paranoid fear that displaced migrants, rather than seeking asylum, seek to attack our security and our cities and our homes.

The stoking of all this barely logical fear has, back in our own country, somehow swiftly set the stage for the weirdly unpredicted closing of ranks that Presidential candidate Donald Trump couldn’t have possibly foreseen himself. But it stands to add an element of distinct charm to the presidential race: for in the face of President Obama’s humane decision to multiply the number of accepted refugees accepted by the United States from Syria five-fold, a strikingly cynical consensus has emerged among American republicans in the wake of the Paris tragedy that state governors must act as federalist sheriffs to protect the country, and refuse the entry to displaced Syrian refugees which Obama had earlier promised. If Donald Trump has taken the opportunity to impugn the President’ sanity as much as his foreign policy choices–

–other candidates have not hesitated to broadcast their own readiness, unlike the President, by implication, to protect similar tragedies in the United States, and rather put at risk the hopes of entry of the 30,000 refugees that the United States government promised it would soon increase from 70,000. Indeed, the strike in Paris, claimed to be the proportional equivalent of the Twin Towers’ destruction in New York City back in 2001, and “France’s 9/11,” has led Republicans to direct renewed attacks on President Obama’s offer to resettle a small share of the refugee crisis to be equated with putting Americans at risk.

And so, just three days after the terror attack in Paris, Texas’ Governor, Greg Abbott, took it upon himself to write a letter informing President Obama that, given his experience in dealing with the dangers of migrant crises and immigrant threats, and the foiling of an ISIS-related terrorist attack, and by extension his greater familiarity with terrorist threats, he would refuse to allow Syrians to be placed in the state he represented, and called on the President to “halt your plans to allow Syrians to be resettled anywhere in the United States,” given the possible danger that they pose to the country. The chorus of Republican governors, from Bobby Jindal’s advice of prudence to Charlie Barker of Massachusetts, to Chris Christie of New Jersey, seemed an attempt to drown out the airwaves after shock over the terror attack. The bizarre move imitated far-right European parties again evoked the degree of “unacceptable peril” Republicans have long liked to Obama’s presidency, rather than any material threat. But within a few days, sympathy was overwhelmed by isolationism, as the television news network CNN trumpeted in banner headlines that governors of over half of the states in the union–twenty-seven states–have unilaterally refused to accept Syrian refugees, although the position has limited if any legal ground, in ways that have been imitated by a spate of Republican presidential candidates eager to prove their executive abilities. All have been magically transformed, including Jindal, into foreign policy experts.

CNN

The map of those still honoring their commitments to accept displaced refugees struggling to find homes appear to be in the vast minority–five states that seem almost foolhardy embraces of national vulnerability, from Vermont to Pennsylvania to Colorado and Washington, against the dominating common sense of declaring closed doors to the displaced. When placed in context of nearly five million Syrian refugees displaced truth, of course, regions of the United States have hardly absorbed their share–and those states whose governors were so quick to condemn the possibly plausible terrorist ties of refugees from Syria or Iraq had admitted far fewer than 300 or 250 refugees since 2011 at most: their governors seem to be showing their own ignorance by taking such a broad stance.

The map of those local Republicans who took it upon themselves to retract any offer of resettlement to all displaced Syrians–by far the greatest majority of refugees who left homes with hopes to resettle in Europe–seems not only an eager posing as patriots, or launch grenades at the existing foreign policy of the Obama White House yet again, but reveals an unforeseen opportunism as well as little familiarity with the workings of the federal government: those most quick to reject entry to refugees as if this were within their competence responded to the fears of their own constituents, or so it looks in the below visualization printed by the New York Times–the graphic may not map clearly onto where displaced Syrians have been relocated or placed, but to the demographics that local politicians seek to reach. The declaration spread like a meme, at any rate, over the airwaves of the United States, alerting constituents that their immediate governors would not place them at risk–as, by implication, the folly of the President had, and Hillary Clinton and the Democrats had been uniformly duped to advocate. And it is not a surprise, to enter the world of the archeology of data visualizations, that they mirror those states that reject the federal government’s expansion of Health Reform.

And so, the entire party has been associated with irresponsibility, and the other accepted xenophobia as the cry of the day. Quickly, not only Donald Trump but Marco Rubio and Chris Christie and Ted Cruz have joined in calling for shutting the borders to the displaced, and Bobby Jindal can appear a model of executive authority–whose deeply felt opinions illustrate little familiarity with constitutional law or Geneva Conventions.

New York Times

The opportune nature of such a quick in-step realignment of the debate about immigration took up its lines went without much comment. But it unsurprisingly seems to replicate opportune lines of political pandering at its worst: if it was the ultimate insult to most refugees, and the perhaps poorest forms of protection mirrored political opportunism below the historical 48th in the United States parallel that so sadly seems to continue to divide north and south, and have little correspondence to the areas where most of Syrian extraction live–or Syrian refugees have been placed by the US Government since 2012, and mirror the red/blue divide, as configured in these cartograms reflecting the electoral results of Presidential elections of 2004 (state by state) and 2012 (county by county).

What do they have in mind? Out-Trumping Trump? Winning, more likely, or hoping to do so by stoking fears and bringing them to the surface again.

For the close-minded knee-jerk refusal stokes the most unfounded fears in the wake of the tragic terrorist attacks that we are all vulnerable: and to pretend we are living in the shadow of 9/11, when Republicans once unbelievably came to be improperly equated with protecting our nation’s safety and common good, and to wallow in complete amnesia by bandying about the word “terrorism,” ISIS, and “terror attack” with undue frequency to suggest the benefits of responsibly closing our frontiers. The good old days.

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Filed under Clash of Civilizations, ISIS, Paris Terror Attacks, refugee crisis, refugees, social media, Syrian refugees

Tagged as European Union, Francois Hollande, Geneva Conventions, Greg Abott, Marine Le Pen, UKIP, xenophobia

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Fenced In/Forced Out: On the Uncertain Fate of the Refugees Kept Outside of Hungary’s Borders

The coils of razor-wire lain by a rag-tag group of workforce workers atop the thirteen-and-a-half meter high fences seek to define Hungary’s southern border by mapping a visible barrier against refugees fleeing Syria’s civil war. It is low tech. As much as blocking attempted passage across the border, the project has been a crusade of Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, in an attempt to inject vigor into the Hungarian strongman’s flagging political career, as much as to create fear among border-crossers. Since Orbán’s public promise in mid-June to construct a fence that defined Hungary as Europe’s frontier to mid-September, made mostly by state-paid workers, created a sufficiently imposing fence to close the country’s border with Serbia. This is border building as performance–introducing the sort of fencing that reveals his own strength to his nation, and to the European Union, staged by thousands of uniformed soldiers and with military vehicles and designed to illustrate the integrity of Hungarian border policy before the world media, as much as to demarcate Hungarian territory. The spectacle of the border has made a lasting impression on Europeans and the global media, creating a visual representation of a border for entry into Europe, even if it has not helped process refugees.

The fence has come to symbolize the tragic plight and obstruction faced by refugees who took a humanitarian corridor across the Balkans on foot or by car to enter Schengen countries, and present them face-to-face with an unexpected obstruction that would define Hungary’s integrity. The fence topped with razor wire and manned by improvised forces of military policing has become a notorious national symbol reveals the blatant disregard for human rights in a time of increased humanitarian crisis. It rests on a deeply misguided mapping of the bounds of the Europe Union, an entity under increasing pressure, now understood more as an employment zone than a geographic entity. The state police who ask refugees to apply for asylum at the newly prominent border as they wait in “transit zone” create a spectacle for Hungarians as much as for the global news. The liberal use of concertina wire along one hundred and ten miles (one hundred and seventy-five km), topped by security cameras and surrounded by border guards, created a newly militarized space–whose relation to an earlier iron curtain, by no means lost on bloggers, clearly evoked an earlier sense of a work-camp.

The eagerness with which Orbán promoted and adopted the project of border boundary building may originate in the somewhat liminal geographic situation of Hungary in Europe, but the viciousness of the enterprise reflects Orbán’s increasing desperation–and that of his nationalist anti-immigrant FIDESZ party–makes due on his promise to Hungarian voters to act as defenders against the imagined enemy of “migrants” entering the country, to inflate its power by bolstering its own borders in increasingly militaristic terms. For while the construction of the wall is indeed part of an increasing construction of fences, border barriers and border controls that have emerged across central Europe to repel an increasingly desperate attempt of refugees to enter Europe, and find employment and safety in the Schengen region, the decision to construct such a brutal wall complete with “transit zones” to process refugees may be understood as having its origins in the grotesque theater of Hungarian politics: although the decision to erect the wall along Serbia’s frontier may precipitate a crisis in refugee flows, it has origins in the willingness of the current Hungarian government to act as the defender of an imagined “European” identity–as evidenced in its blame of the European Union itself for not clearly formulating a plan or policy to deal with refugees, and to assign soldiers along European borders to process human rights migrants. And as winter descends along a well trodden “West Balkan route” of travel, migrants face new dangers that demand a humanitarian response. For the dramatic expansion of an even larger two-hundred-and-sixteen-mile long fence topped with razor wire along Hungary’s border with Croatian frontier in mid-October promises to interrupt refugees’ movement on an established West Balkan route, but create a backup that would constitute and even more shameless affront to global human rights and an affront to their actual plight. Orbán has portrayed the entrance of migrants as an offense against Hungary’s frontiers in manipulative ways–but also wanted to strengthen border boundary to illustrateHungary’s ability to guard the border of “Europe,” after an unprecedented number of 20,000 refugees illegally crossed the border to enter the European Union by crossing the Hungarian border in the Balkans during 2013, a number which had doubled during 2014, increasing alarm of poor border management and giving rise to an unprecedented wave of xenophobic violence.

Frontex Risk Analysis reports

In ways which will have quite steep consequences for the actual fates of many refugees in Europe, constructing so prominent a wall is a bizarre exercise both in Hungarian historical memory, and a posturing of a a local strongman who seeks to represent a global crisis through the distorted lens of purely local terms to Hungarians, in what he paints on a global stage as a crisis in European identity. Orbán has quite outrageously called for “defending the common borders of the European Union with European forces,” but blocking the transit of refugees–or quarantining the newly arrived in euphemistically dubbed “transit zones”–will not intimidate them or prevent their arrival in Europe, but only reroute them, and delay or divert any successful humanitarian strategy from being effectively framed.

This makes the pretense of acting as a defender of Europe all the more outrageous.

1. Although the wall was ostensibly built to protect Hungarians from the arrival of refugees, the symbolically powerful wall across the Hungarian border has become an attempt to preserve the strength of Hungary’s government against a largely imaginary enemy. While few refugees hope to settle in the country permanently, the border-fence is a particularly tragic rewriting for the start of the twenty-first century of Marx’s bold statement at the start of The Eighteenth Brumaire that figures and personages of history not only often repeat, as Hegel believed, but do so first as tragedy and then as farce–if the farce is poised to precipitate an international human rights tragedy of its own. For the walls evokes historical memories for Hungarians and for Europeans as an assertion of the right of state, even as it seems staged a spectacle to illustrate the strength of the Hungarian state to ward off an entirely imagined enemy, and aggressively grandstand on an international stage in myopic ways.

For if the actual iron curtain was dauntingly divisive, the rather hastily erected fence nominally sought to prevent the arrival of refugees, far less impermeable for desperate refugees than an illustration of the Hungarian government’s resistance to allow progress across a Balkan passage, than notice of the government’s open disregard for their rights. Refugees are penned like animals along the fences congruent with national borders, rather being than extended asylum or offered any needed humanitarian assistance or refuge. The building of the border barrier by conscripted labor–as much a police–the border boundary is more of a declaration, and a site for exhuming memories–both of the electric wire fences taken down along the Hungarian-Czech border in 1989-90, pictured below, retained when the fall of an “iron curtain” was celebrated–with far more violence than that longstanding boundary barrier. Indeed, the sole surviving fragment of that border is far less threatening than the new barbed wire barrier that was ostensibly built to block entry of the destitute into Hungarian lands.

Along Bulgarian-Turkish Border, July 17, 2015 (REUTERS/Stoyan Nenov)

The fence on the Hungarian-Serbian border was allegedly constructed only after Orbán declared himself open to consider all options which could stop the flow of refugees into Hungary short of physical closure of the border, after discussions with Serbia. Hungary’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Péter Szijjártó mustered the declaration that he believed that its planned construction would not violate international accords or laws–yet it is truly hard to even imagine how he thought it did not, and was quickly recognized in Budapest to be a somewhat ghastly public unthinkable refashioning of the Hungarian state.

Budapest Beacon (June, 2015)

Beyond obstructing or refusing entrance of those who have travelled from former homes through crowded refugee camps in Turkey and Greece, recast refugees fleeing destruction in Syria and Iran as criminals. For as well as a means of preventing passage across borders, the notorious construction of the border fence is particularly opportunistic move of Prime Minister Orbán: constructing such imposing border fences cynically re-regulates the very legal procedures to which asylum-seekers are forced to submit. Is the recent rehabilitation of this oldest and most authoritarian of fictions of national identity not the most reactionary of performances of national exclusion?

Triple Concertina-Wire Fence at Hungary’s Serbian Border near Kelebia (Photo: Freedom House )

The geographical location and situation of the imposing border fence have been mapped multiple times in the news as an obstacle to the northward progress of “thousands of migrants and refugees”, and portrayed as a crisis in European unity as Germany and other countries ordered temporary border restrictions. But the fences that run across Hungary’s borders are less often examined as a dangerous psychological projection of the Orbán government’s loose understanding of legality and manipulation of national identity. For the increasingly militarized boundary fence not only traces the border barrier around Hungary. It translates the mapped boundary line into an impassible frontier, surrounded by resettlement camps, which effectively places refugees outside both the status quo and apart from the state.

Has the marginalization of refugees along Hungary’s borders also become an occasion for recovering memories of the marginalization of populations in Hungarian politics, most recently the Roma people and other immigrants? The patrolled barrier on Hungary’s southern border ostensibly responds to fears of an “endless flow” of illegal immigration which Prime Minister Orbán warns would threaten to “overrun” Europe. By militarizing the border barrier on its southern border, the Hungarian government ostensibly seeks to defend its protection of its citizens, but also allows itself to charge refugees with violating local laws and protocols in ways that disrespect international law. Since the fence was completed on September 15, Prime Minister Orbán’s priority recasts him a strongman able to protect the country and defend the state. The barrier offers Hungary’s government the excuse to punish attempted crossings with three years of imprisonment and automatic deportation.

This haunting but perverse image of the reception of migrants–at a time when Hungarians view emigration as a more dangerous threat to the nation than immigration or the arrival of new and potentially skilled workers–offers an illustration of the strength of the nation and the extent to which the nation will go in taking strong mesures against an imaged enemy. For in refusing entry to refugees as they seek to enter the European Union, confining them in “transit zones” sealed off from Hungarian territory, but open to Serbia, Orbán’s government turns the other face to many without medical, legal, or financial assistance.

2. By declaring “a state of emergency due to mass migration,” that expands police rights to stop suspected “illegal” refugees, the Orbán government has rewritten the rules refugees follow while authorities decide asylum applications and decide who can be admitted to Hungarian territory: hence the need for the fence. (The decisions are unilaterally made without possibility of appeal.)

The barrier quarantines those pleading from asylum on the margins of the country through which they desire passage. Does the fence, patrolled by police and the state army, not provide an image of the defense of the nation where one lacked before, blocking transit across a route where some 170,000 refugees have already entered the EU this year? The militaristic maneuver seems a show of force disproportionate to, as does the recent dispatching of armored vehicles and hundreds of troops to its Croatian border. In undermining the most central values of granting asylum that most all European Union countries affirm, dehumanizing refugees as the new target of xenophobic accusations recasts their plight as a disturbance to the state. And in using national workers to create this boundary barrier, as an artificial boundary of the state, the Orban government could be accused of reallocating funds that the EU had in fact provided his country.

Hungarian Border near the village of Horgos, Serbia; September 15, 2015 (The Independent)

Even if it is not the impermeable boundary it has been touted–

Near Röske, Csaba Segesvari (AFP/Getty Images)

What role does the fence serve in blocking refugees entrance to the Schengen countries where they have travelled in search of work? Designating those who attempt to cross its borders as “illegal” dramatically reinforces regional ethnic prejudices, blaming those undocumented for their circumstances and alternately recasting their identities as muslims, opportunists and actual terrorists, the construction of border barriers crudely exploits the mapping of the national unity as a way to divide space and the flag as a threatening sign of national belonging.

3. Hungary may lack prison space to accommodate refugees, but seeks to portray itself as able to manage the “crisis” of refugees’ arrival, choosing deportment while ignoring their presence or dilemma. It is almost paradoxical that the insistence on protocols of boundary-crossing and legal procedure should be so strongly espoused by Prime Minister Orbán–who has regularly flouted and rewritten laws and the constitution, and attacks an independent judiciary. For the Hungarian border barriers continue Orbán’s openly anti-democratic defense of the Hungarian “homeland” even as he flouted the many EU reprimands his government has already received. Building the border wall offers a way to ignore global actualities even as refugees cannot continue to comprehend the interruption of their attempt to flee civil war.

Refugees from Turkey and Syria who have crossed the Balkans have been met by similar barriers along the borders of Bulgaria, Slovenia, Austria, Germany, and Macedonia, to be sure. While Hungary insists, in double-speak fashion, it hasn’t betrayed the Schengen Accords allowing free transit, whereas border controls were thought dissolved by the European Union, they have returned with a vengeance, stranding many families and individuals in the non-places of airports, parking lots, and improvised camps guarded by attack dogs. Current plans to expand similar fences and border barriers have spread to Serbia, Ukraine and Estonia, who see themselves as victims of Germany’s vice-chancellor promise to accept one million refugees and half a million yearly. The fence has served to direct media attention at the problem of a refugees trying to enter western Europe, illustrating the reflexive response of a government providing similar fences of barbed wire on its borders with Romania and Croatia–lest Europe indeed be “over-run,” whatever being over-run by those on foot might mean. Perhaps we have a failure to map their arrival less in terms of lines of sovereignty–and border fences–and governmentally than charting their painful itineraries.

BBC

The erection of such border fences on Europe’s edges echo a concept of state sovereignty that seems outdated at a time when the national protection of governments in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere no longer exists. Their creation on a map offer a truly paradoxical means and symbol to cynically assert his own authority, openly rebuking human rights traditions even as he shrouds himself with legitimacy, but has sanctioned the spread of similar frontiers that obstruct the local overland routes on which most refugees have travelled.

ˆNew York Times

By 2016, they had grown, and seemed to reflect not only growing xenophobic suspicions but a deep distrust that actual borders provided meaningful national frontiers, with the number of countries that had completed boundaries or planned to do so providing cordons against future travel that eerily illustrated the removal of the Iron Curtain:

Economist: January 7, 2006

And the world looked little different, as the reaction to growing global migration was to construct imposing walls to impede human motion:

Economist: January, 2006

The long-planned fence championed by the Orbán government as a response to the “mass-migration” of refugees seems to have sanctioned the “return of the long repressed.” For it has given a green light to the proliferation of other border controls that constrain refugees’ movement as they search for safety and homes. The effective obstruction refugees now face has redefined their movement as “illegal”–in ways, that, as Bill Frelick warned, create a categorical confusion that questions the value and rights of humans and transforms their movement across boarders into a punishable event. If this seems to respond to the 85% jump in requests for asylum since 2014, mostly Syrians followed by Afghani, Albanians, and Iraqi, the abdication of actions of processing or accepting individuals in civil society intentionally marginalize refugees. Even if Hungary is only a transit zone for these families of refugees, the construction of a fence responds to their arrival in ways that have only unleashed as a response latent xenophobic tendencies.

4. As increasingly desperate and uneasy refugees walk on foot to reach the perpetually receeding illusion of the “rich EU”–many hoping to join their families–by foot, taxis, rented minibuses, trains, or through human traffickers, their searches for asylum are complicated by the relative nature of European prosperity in the poorer countries through which they travel. After refugees and immigrants were granted asylum at rising rates in western Europe since 2010, Hungary has erected a militarized border against those forcibly displaced entering central Europe as if to distance the plight of those crossing the Balkans through Turkey and Greece from the mental space of Hungarians and portray their entrance into the country as a national danger–inordinately magnifying the role of Hungarian law on the already unduly onerous lives of refugees beyond what they ever expected. The difficulty in mapping the numbers of those seeking asylum, and the difficulty of determining where increasingly desperate refugees might settle, complicate the inhuman exaggeration and magnification of the difficulties they pose to governments who may grant them asylum, as do the multiplication of dehumanizing metaphors of swarms of insects, tidal waves, a tsunami, herds of animals, or indeed as an army convert the almost two million who have fled from Syria and live in refugee camps in Turkey. Such metaphors certainly seem to sit well with the Hungarian government, who demolished neighborhoods where Roma live only to pay the cost of their reconstruction; other party members call for a ““final solution” for Roma in Hungary–even as the EU has both funneled money to Hungary to aid Roma and prioritized their integration in Hungarian society.

Are our very maps complicit in concretizing and perpetuating such dishonest and profoundly unuseful metaphors as they show the routes refugees take across the Balkans, and the exclusion from countries they confront?

New York Times

Since the now rightly notorious wall was completed on September 15, the Orbán government announced that any attempted crossing the border barrier by families and children will be punished by Hungarian law. The continued “mass-migration” has led the Orbán government to declare a state of crisis in which it needs to defend its borders in ways that trump international law–and the rights of persecuted refugees arriving from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, detaining them in “transit zones” controlled by military police. If the fence responds to a crisis in governmentally–alleging that the river of refugees who have crossed the Balkans from Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq were not displaced–the newly militarized borders of nations facing arriving refugees have cast themselves as victims of “mass-migration” by desperate people fleeing on foot; hastily erected fences are monitored by officers in riot gear, bearing ammunition, and water-guns, installing security cameras at a barrier they are investing a paranoid tenor with quite terrifying concreteness.

The chain-link fence topped by barbed wire and security cameras suggests a knee-jerk response to mass-migration with eery echoes of the past. Hungary’s government has only proposed its rights to build analogous fences on the country’s borders with Croatia and Romania–even as UN officials and the UNHCR voiced dismay at the militarization of its southern borderline. For while those seeking asylum view Hungary as a site of transit to Europe, and to a new home, this affirmation of local boundaries and exercise in territoriality places those following the hundreds of thousands who have already fled civil wars in countries like Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, in a sort of legal limbo of displacement unforeseen by countries who became members in the Schengen Agreement promising unity to asylum requests. Rather than grant asylum, the labelling of refugees as terrorists, criminals or violent, collectively not deserving entry, rehabilitated flimsy conceit of the border as impassible barrier.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

The Guardian UK

Such widespread projects of constructing militarized border fences mark unprecedented local distortion of the thirty-first article of the Geneva Conventions. The consensus of preventing punishment for refugees illegally entering any territory of a contracting State responded to an era of violence Europe sought to banish. But the barrier distorts Hungary’s place in the world, by treating those who seek passage through Hungarian lands as criminals who are to be kept at a gate. While the Geneva Conventions affirmed rights for those with refugee status, without medical care or financial means. the criminalization of border-crossing lies not within any nation’s right to police its boundaries, as has many sustain in the United States, is an affront against humanity and international law.

So much is already apparent ent in locally-produced videos seeking to persuade refugees–here identified “illegal Immigrants”–to adopt alternate pathways for eventual asylum in Germany, across mine-filled Croatia:

The desire to shunt refugees through Croatia, rather than Hungarian lands, conceals the ugliest of inheritances in the Balkans–and its distinctive topography of active land mines blocking most paths and roads to Austria or to Zagreb.

The obstruction of the progress of landless refugees lacks any sense of the global dilemma we increasingly face. For the notorious fence strikingly reveals how this oldest of designators of territoriality has been rehabilitated and so openly championed when the pathways of refugees across borders is both common and challenging to visualize–and distorts their plight as if it were a purely local affair of following procedures, but whose Kafkaesque character conceals a hatred fueled by xenophobia.

“Global Trends in Displacement”/New York Times (based on UNHCR data from 2014)

Such authoritarian boundary-building is all too easily justified by ignorant questions of who deserves refugee status or which government is rightly tasked with processing petitions of asylum–even if Schengen accords clearly place that responsibility in the country of entrance, the massive movement of nationals across the Balkans was never imagined. Rather than appreciate human displacement, the Hungarian decrees unilaterally police entrance into a region of passport-free travel by local law; those seeking asylum are “othered” as illegal, and deserving punishment, without recognition of their dire trajectories or desperate search for new homes: labelled “migrants,” rather than refugees, those fleeing civil wars and destroyed states are portrayed as opportunistically seeking benefits and jobs–rather than the economic air political security that is their legal right.

As much as the arrival of refugees challenges a notion of governmentality, refugees are unfairly recast as offenders decorum who stand in violation of legal codes. The argument for building boundaries on our borders to prevent human border-crossing is not without other precedents, as Americans well know–and are knee jerk responses to questions of governmentally, as much as they offer responses to human needs. Is it a coincidence that the assertion of this imaginary borderline by an actual wall–similar to the fortified border barrier between the US and Mexico, lambasted by Vincente Fox as “disgraceful and shameful”? President George W. Bush had prioritized the fence to prevent “illegal entrance” and immigration in 2001. It has not prevented migrants from crossing–and, as Michael Dear noted, whatever deterrence of migration is created by the barrier, it can hardly justify the “enormous expense of maintaining the fortifications — estimated to be $6.5 billion over the next 20 years.” But the game was always primarily political, and when it was resurrected in the first platform paper Donald Trump released for his presidential run, he cast the plan to expand the border barrier in particularly xenophobic terms–and may have led the hapless Scott Walker to continue the folly of drawing borders by casting wall-building on the US-Canada boundary as a “legitimate issue”.

The border barrier Orbán erected along Hungary’s southern frontier echoed that on the US-Mexico border, but averts eyes from the refugee crisis: “Don’t come,” an aid to Orbán quipped, “because this route doesn’t lead where you want to go.” “Don’t come here anymore,” chimed in Serbia’s Interior Minister, pressing his government’s control over passage; “This is not the road to Europe.” Inhumane response almost taunt refugees–as liberal use of pepper spray, water canon and teargas against those who have tried to breach the barrier materialize these only slightly veiled threats. The fence not only keeps out refugees, but imagines their distance from the Hungarian state, and indeed costs Hungary as a frontier of Europe–and a country of Christian Europeans. Much as patrol agents prevent passage at the US-Mexican border, the border barrier distorts questions human rights by way of recasting them in terms of national defense, in ways far less constructive or considered response to human needs or occasion needing international cooperation.

The fence that several presidential candidates propose to further expand the fence that runs along a third of the boundary ignores that the fence’s ineffective role in stopping migrants than has the US Border Patrol–the border barrier has been ineffective in discouraging migration, although it has actually prevented migrants from returning to Mexico–expanding 83 miles of fenced border to militarized expanse of 700 miles at a cost of $2 billion. The embrace in Hungary of fortifications that recalls the triple curling of concertina wire atop the US-Mexico fence at Tijuana “to make the border safe and secure” claimed to have reduced illegal border-crossings by 50% in 2008, forgoing the “aesthetically pleasing” federal design standards used in other regions of the US-Mexico fence, the fence is a similarly foreboding remapping of the boundary line for visual effect in a new rallying cry.

Razor Wire Fence Patrolled along the US-Mexico Border

AP (2006)

Donald Trump’s logic that “A nation without borders is not a nation” seems adopted by the Orbán government’s actual plan.

The improvised barricade constructed iduring the summer of 2015 runs along Hungaryy’s southern border with Serbia seeks to create the absolute division one might read in a regional map. But protection of the actual border may have somewhat less relevance to FIDESZ Prime Minister Orbán than the desire to appear strong in the face of the anti-migrant and anti-gypsy rhetoric he has profited from and continues to incite. Orbán declared with mock magnanimity that “the tolerance period is over” for granting refugees asylum as it was erected, intentionally creating, seeking to “stir up popular sentiment against immigrants and refugees” by any means possible, observed Marta Pardavi. Despite being a signatory to the Geneva Convention that makes it incumbent to accept refugees from war-torn lands, even to a country which sees itself as poor, the wall prevents recognition of refugees–each of whom the far-right-wing Jobbik party, which has portrayed the arrival of refugees as a failure in local governance, argues will cost Hungarians 4300 HUF daily, in a country where daily unemployment benefits for its citizens come to 2362 HUF.

In this politicized context, the plans for enforcing the construction of the fence along Serbia’s border primarily constituted a strong public statement. The enforcement of the boundary barrier illustrates Orbán’s commitment to a distorted image of the Hungarian nation’s integrity, and suggesting his willingness to defend Europe from refugees who most saw as fleeing from their lands, but he portrayed as alien migrants. After protesting delays in its construction, the deployment of troops to this newly militarized zone to stop those seeking transit to Europe creates fixed portals for processing people without according them human dignity, for the rationale that “They don’t look like people who could become useful members [of society].” There is all too clear a danger that the refusal of Hungary’s Prime Minister and government to process refugees who seek asylum and have traveled across the Balkans on foot from Syria, Afghanistan, and also Iraq is an attempt to pander to the right-wing Jobbik party, who have consistently claimed and asserted that the current government will not be able to solve the refugee crisis as it has staged public anti-refugee rallies in Budapest that distort the dangers that the “migrant crisis” will cause the nation–and that Hungary’s current government fails to fully address.

The imagined dangers posed by such refugees, wrongly cast as opportunistic threats, or immigrants in search of work, uses the border from a map as a way to disengage from refugees’ actual plights. (Indeed the unstinting support Hungary’s Foreign Minister voiced for Germany’s decision to start border controls on rail travel from Austria seems a poorly disguised attempt to unite Europe against the arrival of refugees.) Meanwhile, alternative routes refugees might take to have been proliferating on social media. Will the creation of such controls, now enacted by both the Netherlands and Slovakia and apparently being considered in Denmark, impel more human smuggling of refugees who are often both educated and able-bodied and even with cash reserves, and expand the humanitarian crisis of refugees?

Border Barrier Under Construction in Bulgaria

Has the Hungarian government’s sanctioning of the building of this fence from June 2015 given rise to a knee-jerk defense of territoriality? Or has the fence also inspired a return of memories of strongmen from Hungary’s past?

The completed border fence on Hungary’s border with Serbia is more suitable for animal chattel to halt the progress men, families and children, and constitutes a new low point in local respect for human rights–oddly resonating with how members of Orbán’s party liken Roma people in Hungary to “animals” who are “not fit to live among people.” As much as it reveals a panicked response to the global rise in refugees, the chain fence reveals the reluctance of Hungary’s government to confront the problem of refugees, and refuse, ostrich-like, to believe that problems might enter their own national space–a space from which Orbán’s circles have already expelled Roma. The rhetoric of the wall closely mirrors the project of wall-building US Presidential candidate Donald Trump openly xenophobic proposal to extend a fence across the US-Mexican border to ward off the arrival of “criminal” Mexicans, as much as migrants in search of work who the wall originally targeted. Indeed, the Orbán government’s “defense” of the boundaries to Schengen countries of the European Union both recalls the creation of an impermeable US-Mexican wall, 700 miles of which already exist–and uses the outdated nature of the national border despite the limited value of border patrols beyond public political posturing.

Is it only a coincidence that the strengthening of such walls parallel the vanishing of the frontiers and borders that once defined the imaginary integrity of the nation-state? Both “walls” ignore the growing irrelevance of the borders in a global situation. Both take refuge behind the most antiquated of artifacts: indeed, the construction of such barriers only affirms the declining significance of the border as an actual divide, in the face of anxiety about the diminished meaning of national borderlines, and offers opportunities for photo-shots to affirm a national imaginary. Is it only a coincidence that Trump trumpeted an expanded border barrier against the “extreme danger” of Mexican arrivals at the campaign stop he made at the border city of Loredo, TX, for the first time sporting a now-famous trucker hat bearing his campaign promise to restore America’s national greatness?

Donald Trump First Sports His Campaign Hat at the Border City of Loredo, TX

When the unlikely presidential candidate looked at the camera declaring that the future of the United States rested in extending border barriers along the entire US-Mexico boundary against “illegal” migrants, Trump unwittingly offered a defense that has been adopted by countries who take it upon themselves to militarize and police Europe’s borders. As Trump espoused the expansion of border barriers that illustrate national sovereignty in an age that demands increasing international cooperation, the devotion of attention to the policing of boundaries comes at huge cost for addressing refugees’ actual needs.

5. The Hungarian government has similarly linked the militarized border-zone built along its southern border to the preservation of its national identity. The fence intentionally creates a no-man’s land and quasi-police state suspending human rights, filled with refugee camps which fail to help prioritize or meet individual needs, and dehumanize refugees, in the ugliest of illustrations of inhumane treatment at “migrant centers.” For the razor-wire fence that traces Hungary’s southern border with Serbia seems both to be an abdication of legal responsibility and ethical obligation to those seeking asylum from war-torn nations–and a misguided local response to a global problem whose actual proportions it sadly seems to seek only to obscure. As much as the wall on Hungary’s border has complicated questions of European unity and identity, it puts into crisis a coordinated response to the global problem of refugees.

As Hungarians seem to refuse to grant asylum as the first country in the Schengen area, where passport-free travel is allowed, it has offered a case where the global crisis of refugees in need of protection have been met by a hostility that treats their movement from shattered pasts as a threat to the civil society–and intentionally obscures the role of Hungary as a transit country.

Hungarian Soldiers Building a Fence near Asotthalom, southern Hungary, on Aug. 30, 2015 (Xinhua/Attila Volgyi)

How did this come to be? The border-fence built by Hungarian soldiers seems created to prevent any passage of refugees seeking asylum, but suggests a cynical exploitation of a global crisis. Building an improvised wall of some one hundred and eight miles, complete with a public announcement that any damage to the temporary fence along Hungary’s Serbian border will be punished by imprisonment, is a theatrical attempt to refuse housing or accommodating the refugees who have travelled across the border since the Spring by foot. For the highly staged building of a such a highly symbolically charged, breachable, and deeply inhumane metal-link fence–whose breaching will be punished, according to the books, by three years imprisonment.

For those seeking refuge from persecution are indeed regularly beaten by police as if they were criminals and left “in legal limbo” in Serbia and Macedonia, wbhie seeking asylum as they try to enter the European Union. Refugees have been forced to face increasing barriers created to their entrance to Europe even as they are subject to routinized bad treatment and forced to negotiate police brutality on Europe’s borderlands. “We are human too,” plead refugees, fearing state police. Orbán’s fear that Hungary may receive some 800,000 asylum requests, and by “next year we will be talking about millions and this has no end,” has fomented xenophobia against refugees at significant human cost, and perversely magnified the problem of those seeking refugee status as a purely national problem at significant cost.

But the true disgrace, as the invocation of a line on a map–the line of the European Union–but is the last in a series of protective insular walls of small-minded construction. It symbolizes a quite desperate and panicked attempt to keep reality at bay, in the perversely misguided belief that a truly global disaster could be either held at bay or flat-out locally denied. But the arrogant assertion of the fence is far more emblematic of the hysteria that the Hungarian government seeks to stoke rather than it contains any legal justification.

At the same time as refugees seeking asylum have abandoned perilous transit across the Mediterranean, and were rebuffed by Iran, Hungary has become a default to enter the EU and area Schengen accords that permit travel without a passport. Passage by the Balkans is now the recommended by smugglers as a route of transit–such smugglers seem to have a more clear map of the geography of displacement and challenges of asylum than even the UNHCR. Although Hungary has received a significantly larger number of applications for asylum for refugee status by June, 2015, when Orbán announced the wall’s construction, the requests are merely a way to enter a new life in Europe–as all refugees are obligated to declare their status at a point of entry. Rather than process those seeking asylum, the wire fence barrier is both a blatant and a cynical rebuff to human rights and legal rights, and an exercise of turning the other shoulder to those attempting passage.

The dedication of public funds to such a barrier seems a further violation of refugees’ legal rights, and constitutes a glaring slight to if not an actual crisis of international law. The position adopted by Hungary’s FIDESZ government deeply distorts its position in relation to Europe and the world by casting the “crisis” in purely local terms–far beyond the practical difficulties of processing and registering refugees who cross its southern border with Serbia. The distortion of a ‘local’ crisis created by “migrants” has led the government to use state radio and immigration police to use the border barrier to remove desperate global refugees from their own mental space. The dangers distort precedents of anti-semitism and xenophobia that the government has long pandered: indeed, the strongly anti-gypsy rhetoric Orbán’s party has recently exploited and normalized has been rapidly refashioned as Islamophobia, in ways that echoes the antisemitic rhetoric of one of Hungary’s pasts.

As much as the fence reflects an actual rise of immigrants with Hungary as their destination, the figures of those seeing asylum in Hungary the wall is part of a highly choreographed if misguided moment to rebuff refugees that will allow his xenophobic FIDESZ government to prevent refugees from entering the attention of the government–and claim to represent not only the Hungarian people, but by arrogant and increasingly evidently self-important assumption, all Europe. As the Balkan route of refugees grows, even as the rights of refugees fail to be adequately defended, a renewed on-foot march of refugees to Austria and beyond has resumed. Even as a refugee policy is not clearly in place. Illustrating belonging and its boundaries is what the Hungarian government’s spectacle seems chiefly to address and to do in particularly terrifying terms. The severely imposing barricade (or fence) constructed from June is the latest attempt to prevent refugees who have travelled from Syria and elsewhere from crossing the frontier–although their suggestion of a fence more worthy of animal pens than humans reveals the disdain and hatred that the Orbán government has concertedly sought to direct to the refugees, to obscure their own dire situation, as much as the threat that they purportedly pose to Hungarian social services–and to treat refugees as human chattel that Roma people have been so regularly cast.

Sergey Ponomarev/New York Times

The fence is most inopportunely placed. The fence is an assault on human dignity which however has clear origins in the theater of Hungarian politics. For it was in part built as a response to the threat refugees pose to the mental space of the Orbán’s government and his FIDESZ supporters, as much as Hungary–as is the recent confinement of desperate refugees who have arrived, homeless, at Budapest’s nineteenth-century eastern Keleti railway station, in search of final passage to Germany and the European Union. (The buses that had carried thousands of refugees to Austria–where they have been more generously received–are no longer being provided, according to Hungary’s police chief, but some 1,200 also attempted to walk the same distance, on the highway, to seek to try to reach their destination by foot in the stifling midday heat, after westward buses and trains to Austria and Germany were suspended.)

There a sense that the current and ongoing crisis of processing refugees creates a conceptual crisis in the nation-state, but the reaction to an influx of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, or Iraq. But it has been highly staged as a way to deny the humanity of those fleeing, rather than to need to address their misfortunes, and the response of other countries, as Austria, reveals a clear possibility of a different reception for refugees in Europe, less dictated by fear.

The cyclone chain link fence that along ten miles in length was planned on a political map, in hopes to prevent a global disaster from entering the mental space of the Prime Minister and of sustainers of the right-wing FIDESZ party, as well as Hungarian territory–it stands for a reactionary impulse to affirm the impermeability of the country’s national frontier is an unacceptable reaction to the arrival of refugees in increasing numbers and with increasing desperation. By exploiting the status of Hungary as the first Schengen nation able to grant asylum, tasked with the job of fingerprinting and processing refugees, the Hungarian government has opportunistically and inhumanely decided to exploit its situation to prevent those seeking asylum from entering the European Union, in ways that have tended to elevate its status as a frontier for its own ends.

While the problem of processing refugees is surely not only a European one, the position that the Hungarian government has taken is more than opportunistic. The overtly protectionist barricade is an attempt to force those desperately seeking asylum, and may also encourage them to search for other, riskier, overseas routes. It seems, moreover, inseparable from terrifying images of the mute rebuff met by the anguished face of terrified refugees. But it is also a deadly political game. Prime Minister Orbán’s Foreign Minister, Peter Szijjarto, stoically vowed in mid-June of 2015, unilaterally and with the apparent intent of stoking alarmism, that his country “cannot afford to wait any longer” having processed 54,000 immigrants and with the count of refugees poised to rise 120,000 by the year’s end–even though Hungary was actually way-station to asylum elsewhere, rather than a final destination, for most, and was obligated as the first nation in the Schengen area to grant asylum to refugees who had crossed the Balkans.

But the sense of desperation that he voiced reflected a deep confusion about the place that Hungary seemed to have inherited on the border of Europe. The fence slated for completion in August, 2015 was not alone; it was only one in a series of fences that Europeans are engaged in building as they wrestle with new global patterns of refugee traffic in Calais, Greece, Bulgaria, Estonia, and the Ukraine, misguidedly construe local perceptions of a truly global crisis–much as Orbán has recast the plight of refugees as a conflict between opposed faiths. The reaction to refugees has been particularly poignant in Hungary, and has prompted news maps to characterize the dreams of the ruling party to create a gate to Europe, as much as provide a possible response to hopes many refugees will continue to nurture.

Yahoo News

Sealing the border with a militarized chain-link barricade provides a particularly stony rebuff, truly terrifying, evident in images of recent encounters with the anguished faces of desperate and panicked refugees who sought asylum.

For the attempt to block the flow of refugees what one seems to erecting is not only an inhumane gesture, but a desperately local distortion of a global problem. The fence has recently impelled French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius to express credulous wonder at the scandal that this act disrespects European respect for human rights–as United Nations refugee agencies stepped just short of condemning the construction of a fence as a fit response to those searching for safety and protection–and asylum; the Swiss would ban Orbán’s travel to their country, and freeze Hungarian assets in response to indignation at the “human rights situation and the refugee scandal” in the country.” The fence may well encourage those fleeing their own perilous conditions from adopting still more dangerous itineraries and routes of illegal migration. “This wall–we will not accept it,” Syrian refugee Mohamed Hussein bitterly observed, pausing on travels through Turkey and Serbia, as he attempted to walk from Iran to Turkey.

How can one, however, insist on responding locally to a truly global dilemma of desperate flight?

Even though the actual routes of illegal immigration of refugees are so complexly negotiated and improvised to defy a clean cartographical synthesis, the actual routes of refugees were rarely imaged as running through Hungary on earlier news maps.

But if the routes of refugees are difficult to map, the propaganda map issued by the Hungarian government’s Office of Immigration and Citizenship pictured the routes of refugees in ways that seem particularly distorting : the map almost openly validates fears of invasion in a crudely (and no doubt intentionally) propagandistic map designed to stir up fears that shows the Hungarian nation as imperiled from an onslaught of “illegal immigrants” needing to be stopped:

Hungarian Office of Immigration and Citizenship

The bold and forceful red arrows that lead directly through Hungary conjure the flows that the proposed barricade proposed to stop or “staunch” along the boundary lines between Hungary and Serbia.

The propaganda map issued by the Office of Immigration and Citizenship seems designed to intentionally stoke xenophobic fears, emphasizing the nation as a unit of continued meaning in an emergency of truly global proportions, as well as to magnify the role that such a fence on Hungary’s border would have. There is something grotesquely inhumane to chart the itineraries of refugees who have travelled on foot from Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria as if they were a phalanx of approaching Panzers, adopting the rhetoric of a map of military advances–although the refugees who often took these paths often travelled not only without arms, but barefoot. But the map conjures a threat as if it were in danger of being immediately posed to the national frontiers.

The actual routes of refugees take are considerably more complicated and improvised, of course, but when schematically mapped reveal routes less exclusively focussed on a Balkan itinerary–although this is one of the sites of greatest police push-back according to Amnesty International–until they find detention centers to welcome them across the Sebian border.

Financial Times (September 2, 2015)

Yet the image echoes the deeply xenophobic fears that the Orbán government has intentionally sought to stoke. Faced with growing unemployment rates and nourished by openly racist xenophobia, the 23,000 people who applied in the past year for asylum in Hungary alone from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq no doubt created a basis for panic in the Orbán government and ruling Fidesz party, whose prominent display of public billboards cautioning asylum-seekers “IF YOU COME TO HUNGARY, YOU CANNOT TAKE HUNGARIANS’ JOBS” in Hungarian were not only the revers of a red carpet, but widely cast their xenophobic rhetoric–long adopted by Orbán’s FIDESZ ruling party–in the disquieting garb of national protectionism. Despite the posters, however, Oban has continued to state that the arrival of Muslim immigrants poses not only a challenge to jobs, however, but a challenge to Europe’s faith in particularly incendiary rhetoric, describing the “madness” of the current EU immigration policy as a departure from common sense.

Independent

As the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner of Refugees has noted, such response hardly befit refugees seeking asylum who are in need of international protection. And in an attempt to gain the upper hand, UNHCR displayed its own counter-billboards in Budapest–

–providing images of integration of immigrants that the FIDESZ seeks to banish from Hungarians’ minds.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

The rhetoric of preventing the arrival in European territories of refugees who have travelled through the Balkans appeals to the nationalist imagination of some Hungarians. The fence was build, allegedly, in a move of protectionism of European identity, “to stop the flood,” as Zoltán Kovács, government spokesperson, coldly put it, indulging a particularly dehumanizing rhetoric that has led not only to the construction of the fence. In going so far as to claim that Hungary is “the most affected EU country in absolute terms,” the government has perversely distorted a crisis of painfully global proportions by representing it in local terms. The defense Prime Minister Orbán openly made advocating the use of internment camps as suitable responses to immigrants reflect this perception that Hungary lies the “forefront” of the immigration crisis–although this crisis is clearly global–in order to justify the building of a fence along the Hungarian-Serbian border of over 100 miles in length.

For Orbán has gone to great pains to defend the impassibility of a border rather than devote public funds to possible resettlement of immigrants, or to their processing as refugees. While the construction of an improvised fence of coiled razor-wire and chain link, to be monitored by armed officers who will guard the border with the aim to prevent the fence from destruction with wire-cutters, builds on a conviction that Hungary is the gateway of illegal immigrants to Europe’s borders, and filled his self-assumed charge “to keep Europe Christian,” as Orbán told the German Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung in a particularly ill-considered attempt to win sympathy, does not conceal disregard for human rights in proclaiming the risk of Europe being “overrun“–adopting a explicitly anti-islamic xenophobic tenor that unabashedly invokes a politics of global opposition, if not a conflict between faiths, that echoes Samuel P. Huntington’s clash of civilizations. The very deployment of this inappropriately oppositional rhetoric all too conveniently overlooks the desperation behind refugees’ flights. (FIDESZ is an acronym, but evokes the Latin deity of trust and reliability–much as Agenzia Fides remains the news agency of the Vatican, adopting the term for faithfulness or faith to link its pronouncements to those of the Catholic church–even as Pope Francis has ordered all churches and clergymen in Hungary and Europe to open their doors to those claiming status as refugees.)

Attila Kisbenedek / AFP / Getty Images

Overrun, we might well ask, with whom, or with what?

It is true, the strident rhetoric of Orbán’s government may build on a series of similarly xenophobic precedents by which flustered bureaucrats have, maybe imitating the United States, built walls–perhaps more for their own populations than as actual preventive measures. In seeking to terrify immigrants and refugees, Orbán has all too openly conflated the dangerous criminal and the immigrant with particular zest. For the image of a fortressed Europe is a scarily common reaction to fears of immigration that many Europeans can barely suppress, and may press unique pressures on the European Union.

If English newspapers like the Daily Mail seized up on the image of the Hungarian fence as a response to illegal immigration–

Daily Mail

–no doubt in part due to the proximity of London to the 3,000 refugees crowded into substandard camps in Calais, where refugees are waiting to cross the channel, even as British PM David Cameron has publicly ruled out the granting of safe havens, as Englishmen have volunteered to provide them with some relief in migrant camps, and hundreds from Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia daily risk travel to England by train and ferries.

6. The demands to contain the global flow of refugees has often been perceived in a very distorting local optic that seem less interested in care–or of conceptualizing care–than of creating clearer boundaries than refugees might perceive.

The widespread trending across much of Europe toward “fencing” borders to turn back immigrants echo a broad misconception that the best defense is to built fences that blithely believe they can push the “problem” elsewhere in areas on the edges of Europe, as public projects that resemble the extensive ditches dug in the Middle Ages, if they are far less effective:

Such public works projects suggests unique pains of the human rights crisis of refugees seeking asylum, albeit that these attempts have so far been largely located on the margins of the EU (Bulgaria; Greece; Estonia; and Ukraine)–and uncomfortably imitate the same sort of strong-man statist rhetoric with which Orbán confronted his own government’s crisis.

But the truly terrifying materialization of the border line with razor wire in the lengthy fence along Hungary’s border with Serbia conjures a distinct flavor of xenophobia, no doubt, of dubious legality, oddly analogous to the Catch-22 type of situation at Budapest’s Keleti station, where refugees are clustered, confined by guards, in ways that have increasingly come to reflect the markedly increased brutality that the creation of fences so often inspires among border guards and police officers. Did the existance of the fence not increase the markedly inhumane violence of border guards and police at Keleti station?

Such rhetoric is tied to the improvised creation of a counter-city that has emerged at Budapest’s Keleti railway station, as migrants are denied transit on trains that would provide passage to other EU countries where they would more readily be granted asylum.

Lazar Simeonov/Al Jazeera

Is detention, and the prospect of the completion of the iron fence–so analogous to the fences that Donald Trump has promised to build along the United States’ border with Mexico, and based on the distorted logic of viewing non-nationals as akin to terrorists that has been diffused by the US Office of Homeland Security–either an adequate or humane response? Fears of the brutality of guards brought into face-to-face confrontation with immigrants who border guards feel are both illegal and guilty of having entered across a state-built barrier seem more likely to occur.

Lazar Simeonov/Al Jazeera

There is something deeply troubling–and deeply pathetic–that the Eastern Railway station of the capital, a triumphalist beaux arts symbol of the Hungarian nation’s new image of industrial progress, has become a site of confinement–and of refusing to asylum or refugee status to those seeking passage to Europe. The marginalization of these refugees to a stateless limbo hopes that their problem will go away, rather than develop a consensus that their fate remains a pressing problem needing collective attention. So much seems a symptom of the priorities that the Orbán government has established, as if to deny any possibility of refugees’ entry and to deny their actual itineraries and travails.

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September 3, 2015 · 2:19 pm

June 25, 2015 · 5:47 pm

Refugee Traffic Scars the Globe’s Surface

Almost any graphic is inadequate to represent the plight of displaced refugees. The aggregate numbers astound: the sixty countries from which 30,000 people were forced to leave their countries each day over the previous year. While these numbers reflect only those designated candidates for asylum and refugee status–and do not reflect the extent to which those fleeing from persecution and have expanded so dramatically–the image charts the number of asylum-seekers that grew to over 1.2 million in 2014. Yet the quantities of those considered for refugee status can hardly be adequately processed, let alone mapped in aggregate–or the recognition of refugee status processed on Europe’s borderlands. The map of refugee flight in red arcs across a map lacking political frontiers and boundaries seeks to foreground just how frantic the desperate search for pathways to new homes have become, and how wide-ranging these itineraries. If they seek to provide a sort of negative to the privileged paths of an age of increased air travel and suggest the desperation of forced spatial migration, they silence the actual stories of refugees.

What sort of stories does this simplified map simply omit? The stories of those journeys are interrupted by death, while they are far smaller, of course remain absent: the perilous trajectories of individuals fleeing Syria, Iraq, Africa, Indonesia, Afghanistan and Pakistan however risk not only their lives, but increasingly their legal status as they undertake huge geographic migrations in search of new homes elsewhere, traveling by boat, on foot, or along paths promised by human traffickers. The sleek image, despite its attempted accuracy, shows the intensity of itineraries as embossed on the map as if to disfigure the notion of global unity that runs against the very narrative of global unity implicit in a iconic equidistant azimuthal projection centered on the North Pole which emphasized global harmony as World War II was tried to be forgotten, which as the official flag adopted by the United Nations adopted in October, 1947 promoted an image of global unity:

Harrison Polar Map/Official UN Flag

But the problem of effectively mediating the growing plight of stateless and displaced from “hot-spots” across the world poses not only a problem of the geographic imagination, but of the ethics of mapping. For the aggregate mapping of those deserving or awarded refugee status not only presses the limits of the data visualization, bound to simplify itineraries of refugees far more fragmented and indirect than can be mapped, but that no data visualization can group the individual stories that the sheer numbers of those displaced by conflict and violence are barely possible to comprehend. Refugee traffic suggests a level of instability difficult to condense in any map: and is “traffic” not a fatally flawed metaphor, suggesting a possibility of monitoring or policing, bureaucratically inflected, blind to varied reasons for the rapid growth of refugees?

The hot-spots from which those crossing borders were readily recognized as refugees were increasingly focussed on wealthier countries since before World War II, but the growth in those granted humanitarian status as refugees had already been defined around clear epicenters back in 2007, when millions of the population in Pakistan, Syria, Palestine, and Iran were accorded status, after having crossed borders, as refugees, and large numbers of asylum seekers in the United States, Canada, and Europe had started to grow–the map, which seems an earlier version of the decentered azimuthal projection later chosen by the graphics editor and cartographer at the New York Times, similarly serves to suggest the global nature of a problem largely centered in the Middle East.

WRSC

The choice of trying to map the data of those declared refugee to show the arcs of their arrival from global hot spots on a decentered azimuthal terrestrial projection aptly maps the crowding of the globally displaced in 2014. But the choice of transferring the collective itineraries to a global projection–in a sort of perverse mapping of flight paths suggests the most deeply troubling side of global inter-connectedness, and perhaps its deepest source of stress–by scarring the world’s surface in a frenetic criss-cross of arcs. UNHCR data of the global monitoring of refugees’ origins and points of arrival in new homes served to reveal an aggregate picture of resettlement in “Global Trends in Migration of Refugees” based on the accordance of refugee status, but in doing so erases the complex negotiation of the fate of asylum seekers, as well as the painfulness of the itineraries the globally displaced increasingly suffer. Is it ethical to hope to draw equivalences of the growing problem those claiming asylum as refugees by showing their arrival along idealized clean arcs?

Are we in danger, moreover, of representing refugees by the designation that western countries who grant them asylum accord them, for lack of complete or adequate data of the dynamics of displacement and mass-migration?

1. The graphic seems apt by rendering a scarred world. But it also seems an all too cool comment on the violent status quo, in which the number of displaced people raising risks by falling back on a modernist aesthetic that fails to capture the violence of displacement and indeed the placelessness of the refugees: the distinctive azimuthal projection, whose particular properties orients the world around the common locus of refugees’ eventual destinations, so as to suggest the range of their flights, rendering the range of collective arcs of geographic displacement at a uniform scale. Although the projection, which echoes the cartographical rendering of a global space in the flag of the United Nations, illustrates the actual global consequences of the heartbreaking tragedy of over fifty million refugees and internally displaced (IDP’s) across the world, their fortunes remain impossible to map, and difficult to visualize. Indeed, despite the difficulties of mapping those displaced, and problems of protracted displacement that have eroded societies, images often remain far more powerful than maps.

By mapping the aggregate destinations of the displaced by flared arcs, of uniform size, the visualization maps the eventual destinations of refugees, as determined according to the UN’s Refugee Agency, and foregrounds the question of their destination rather than the reasons for their displacement. The costs of such an omission are considerable. The question of how to represent displacement, and how to mediate the experience of the refugee, raises questions of how to visualize population within a map. The record numbers of those forced to flee their homes over the past year raise questions of whether resettlement can ever be enough–and if the tragedy incurred by displacement, without a clear destination and often just beyond the borders of the country one fled, trapped in war zones, or stranded in temporary settlements, aggregate trends of displacement seem oddly removed from refugees’ experience.

For while the smooth arcs of geographic relocation data are compelling, they transform the often desperate flight of refugees by an aesthetics of minimalism that rather reduces the scope of the spatial displacement that the terrifying numbers of persecuted refugees experience, and foregrounds the sites at which the displaced arrive–perhaps to remind us of the distance of the United States’ retention of an annual ceiling of resettling 70,000 refugees–and not the unrepresentable scope of the violence of spatial dislocation and tragedy of searing social disruptions. The deepest difficulty to represent is the precipitous slide toward poverty, hunger, and poor health care of most refugees, whose arcs of travel are both far from smooth, but so rocky and economically destabilizing that the challenges of orienting oneself to its crisis are indeed immense. And they only begin to chart the number of internally displaced and causes and scale of displacement–and the lack of political will that protracted displacement and flight have created on the ground, in their abstraction of refugee flows. For while the distribution of internal displacement challenges one to create a compelling graphic, the dynamics of displacement by the Norwegian Internal Displacement Monitoring Center across some sixty countries seem so difficult to embody–or process–that to demand clearer visualization to comprehend the scope of internal displacement of those who are rarely granted asylum–or are accorded the so desired status of refugees.

IDMC

In its gesturing to the equidistant azimuthal projection of the United Nations, the visualization of refugee traffic evokes the clear ideals of the UN as an institution in its refusal to privilege a specific geographical centering.

The focus in the visualization on UNHCR data of resettlement emphasizes a narrative of resettlement, even some sixty years after UNHCR first directed global attention to the “World Refugee Year” in 1959, with hopes “to encourage additional opportunities for permanent refugee solutions through voluntary repatriation, resettlement or integration, on a purely humanitarian basis.” For in showing clean arcs that deliver the displaced, analogously to a frenetic set of flight paths, collapsing the time of one year, the tragedy of the unsettled are oddly ignored. For although the flared arcs on the projection effectively pose questions to the reader about the impact of refugees’ arrival in Europe and wealthier countries, it shifts the question provocatively from the human rights abuses and disasters which provoke such flight–and ignores the terrifyingly young age of so many refugees, over half of whom are less than eighteen.

In seeking to grasp the scope of statelessness and displacement, and the psychic as well as economic questions of displacement, can’t we do better?

2. Representing the global crisis of the displaced is by no means simple, and data visualizations are often inadequate to represent the travails of the refugee. But although the movement of the displaced mirrors what UNHCR determined were the destinations of the displaced in 2014, the minimalist projection of terrestrial expanse oddly and dissonantly removes them from the humanitarian crises that created their displacement: the countries noted in the terrestrial projection recedes into the background behind bright flared arcs that trace in aggregate the migratory paths refugees actually took in ways almost abstracted from experience–and in ways that may effectively unintentionally serve to diminish their plight by expressing it in an aggregate. While an alternating focus on Southern Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine and Burma where many have been forced to flee their homes can afflict the most clear-headed with a temporary case of Attention Deficit Disorder as they puzzle at the multiple crises that convulse refugees to flee, leaving millions of Iraqis (2+), Syrians (3.2+), and Rohyingya to remain stateless, their flight is rarely linear, and the omission of the uncertainty of any refugee’s path or flight is troubling.

If the global visualization illustrates the increased intensity of the problem of displaced refugees over the previous year, even as it tracks the scars that divide it. By using a set of specific points to another on a globe centered on where the greatest refugee traffic occurred, the data vis represents actual distances to countries of asylum, displaying pathways of asylum refugees took on a map of accurate distances, and traffic of truly global scope. Although the densely crowded red arcs obscure much of France, Germany, and other sites of destination for the displaced as if to exaggerate an influx of to Europe, they illustrate a growing recognition that the scale of human displacement is a global crisis–as much as a crisis of resettling refugees.

The array of intersecting red arcs in the map underscores the proximity of an inter-related world, and provocatively foregrounds the increasingly global scope of a multiplying crisis of displaced persons that have come to scar much of the world’s surface. The problem of how to synthesize the diverse local experiences displacing increasing refugees across the globe both internally and to other countries is resolved by using UNHCR data to map the growing traffic of the displaced that the we will increasingly be challenged to come to terms. Yet what of the image of interconnectedness that they reveal? While foregrounded in an equidistant projection that renders evident the symbolic unity of around a nexus of departure of refugees from Africa, Syria, and Ukraine who arrive in Europe, the crimson arcs literally cut across the image of coherent harmony emphasized in the azimuthal projection, by locating sites at uniform distances to emphasize its unified image of the inhabited world–the same reasons it was adopted in different form in the flag of the United Nations–which also downplays the very national differences and frontiers more often inscribed in terrestrial maps, using an equidistant azimuthal projection of the world centered on its pole to project an ideal of global harmony.

The data visualization “Global Trends of Migration” foregrounds a marred world, however. In it, the sites of refugees’ arrival is often even rendered illegible, disorientingly, by blotches of solid red created by converging flared red arcs. Was there a somewhat alarmist decision to flare the ends of these arcs at the sites of the “arrival” of refugees, as has been suggested elsewhere by Martin Grand Jean? For Grand Jean observes that in doing so, the concentration of apparent endings attract greater visual attention than the sites from which persons are displaced, or the intensity of the displacement: we hide our eyes from the atrocities, in short, and the true nature of the crisis and humanitarian disaster, perhaps in ways informed by UNHCR data on the need to better process refugee flow. One might go farther in this critique: for in flaring such endpoints, the image not only oddly downplays the sites of emergency from which they seek asylum, and the unmitigated tragedy of those who remain displaced, but conveys a sense that the flights are smooth.

To be sure, the very term “traffic” that recurs to describe the “Trends in Global Migration of Refugees” seems a bit of an oblique misnomer. It almost obfuscates the experience of those who were only recently forced to flee their homes, as much as render them for the viewer. For the elegant aggregation of such a uniquely tragic dataset may not fully come to terms with the growing global tragedy of the apparently unmitigated spread of refugees from an expanding range of sites–and the steep human rights challenges the exponential expansion of global or internal exiles creates. Although the attempt to synthesize UNHCR data and map those flows offer one of the clearest tools by which to process, comprehend and synthesize the rapid expansion of individuals who were forcibly displaced over the past year, and come to term with that expansion. But it hardly comes to terms with the desperation of their travails or the difficulty of their departures. Indeed, by covering much of Europe in busy red blotches it disarmingly foregrounds and describes the arrival of refugees who have successfully left their countries–more than the mechanics of their displacement. And there is a sense, almost paranoiac, and to be resisted, that the arrival of these streams of refugees who enter the Eurozone almost threaten to cancel its identity.

What is lost in the image’s busily crowded surface is perhaps made up for by the frenetic intensity it uses to ask us to confront such trajectories of tragedy and desperation. But as an illustration, the elegance of the visualization seems to mislead viewers through its concentration on a geometry of arrival–and the smoothness with which it invests the desperation of forced departures. Despite its impressive effects, there seem multiple reservations about the possibility of creating an adequate data visualization. In translating the tragic dataset of forced migrations as a point-to-point correspondence, its simplification approximates the wide geographic itineraries of that the globally displaced have been forced to seek–and understates the tortuously complex paths they actually followed.

Indeed, tensions are implicit in the stark modernist aesthetics of rendering the paths of refugees and the global imperative to address the pressing refugee problems that raise questions of the ethics of mapping the displaced. The cool modernist aesthetics of “Trends in Global Migration” obscure the messiness of refugees’ own lives. In recent years, the Refugee Highway and others have sought to address in foregrounding the global “hotspots” of mass-migration–by combining qualitative and quantitative data. They have tried to reveal what open routes exist for those seeking asylum and capturing the resourcefulness of the refugee–noting possible destinations of asylum, and sites of resettlement, or differentiating between routes taken in fleeing by land and sea to help viewers appreciate the scope of the refugee disaster. In the image below, Refugee Highway reveals the presence of airplanes over industrialized nations where more refugees are apt to settle or seek asylum suggests the steep symbolic liabilities of Wallace’s stark “Global Trends.”

The Refugee Highway

Another alternative visualization, proposed by Grand Jean on the basis of the very same UNHCR 2014 database, places less visual emphasis on the sites of refugees’ arrival, or sites of eventual asylum, but use similar lines as the red arcs of migration, apt for suggesting bloody scars but less illuminating of the proportions of displaced and, as Grand Jean nicely notes, not weighted in any way, so that the 6,000 Mexican refugees that arrive in Canada are illustrated in an equivalent manner to the million refugees from Syrian territory that have arrived in Lebanon. Gran Jean has generously proposed an alternative visualization that salutary in varying the thickness of lines that denote refugees’ displacement from sites of humanitarian crisis that confronts the limits of doing justice to the representation of displacement, sacrificing the modernist aesthetics of the image to ensure its greater readability:

Martin Grand Jean

The attention Grand Jean returns to the sites of displacement can be easily rendered in ways that distinguish the different regions and countries from which the 14.37 refugees UNHCR registered have sought asylum, using color to start to distinguish the sites from which refugees were displaced–and start to diminish the information overload of the data visualization of this global crisis.

Martin Grand Jean

There is value to imitating the information overload created by the expanding crisis of global refugees, but it raises questions of the ethics of mapping disasters. Much as it is difficult to comparatively map the multiplications of centers of forcible displacement, it is difficult to even heuristically approximate the varied qualitative circumstances of the world of the refugee–as much as one would like to grasp the extent of the desperation of exile from the boundaries and neighborhoods of one’s former home.

2. The elegant economy of the jaw-dropping visualization in the Times of the refugee crisis compellingly transposes the aggregation of annual refugees to illustrate its deeply global nature. The crisis of those forcibly displaced on a symbolic level by the harmony of uniform spatial relations–in the mode of early modern cordiform maps–although, of course, those thin red lines of scarification disrupt whatever harmony exists across the globe, despite the attention that it calls to its inter-relations, in the manner of the polar azimuthal projection surrounded by two olive branches of peace that was designed as an emblem of the United Nations to suggest the proportional representation of the continents, and lack of privileging one area of the world by Donal McLaughlin, who interest in the transparency of visual communication led him to propose its design in 1946 as a seal for the UNO.

The popularity of the visualization of “Global Trends” lies in its success in cleanly sorting a significantly large dataset in a readily legible terms in ways that insist on the proximity of accumulated crises dispersed across the globe in isolation from one another–but which affect the world and demand a global response.

One unarticulated if implicit institutional message of the equidistant polar projection in the “Global Trends” graphic is that it captures the pressure that the displaced place on the ideals expressed by the equidistant polar azimuthal projection featured on the UN flag.

Even if the very globalization of a refugee crisis makes it hard to focus on the status of those forcibly displaced or the context of collective hot-spots from which folks have fled, so clearly does it abstract individual itineraries of flight from their local contexts, the intensity of its busy red lines captures the overwhelming image of desperation, even if limited to those who have found asylum–not the refugee camps clustering on the borders of Syria, Sudan and Myanmar–it captures the intensity of forced migrations worldwide, if not the circumstances of their internal displacements or their deaths in transit and at sea. The poor and often perilous conditions of the camps and settlements are left off of the map, as it were, as are the circumstances of ocean travel often brokered by human traffickers.

For the greatest lie and fabrication in the narrative of Global Trends of Displacement is the illusion it perpetuates that all refugees possess and have a destination–and indeed that all refugees arrive. The extreme unmessiness of rendering the actual tragedy of refugees’ itineraries in purified form with a coolness worthy of Le Corbusier or Eero Salonen frames the crisis of refugees as if tracking airplanes’ movement or allocating resources. To an extent, this is the result of the UNHCR dataset, which focuses on the arrival in camps or countries of asylum, rather than displacement or the camps were refugees and fleeing persons congregate along the borders of nearby countries. But the visualization deriving from the data provides readers with a quite misleading illustration of the crisis at hand. For in concealing local details, they obscure both the individual stories of sacrifice as well as the conditions or scarcities that has driven such a steep expansion of fleeing across what have often increasingly become quite shaky and undefined border-lines, readily renegotiated in theaters of war.

UNHCR, Refugees from Southern Sudan by mid-December, 2013

Rather, the image created communicates an impression of cleanly engineered arcs of geographical mobility and direct paths to resettlement. Unlike earlier visualizations, the elegant red arcing lines adopted in “Global Trends” present the UNHCR data as if to suggest that all refugees arrive–even though the dataset is of course only about those who do seek asylum and resettle elsewhere, and predominantly in countries far removed from their homelands. This narrative of spatial displacement may obscure a deeper set of narratives of dislocation.

New York Times

One sacrifices a sense of the local in the arching red lines in the gripping aggregation of global refugees over the past year in “Global Trends,” also pictured the header to this post. The data vis indeed broached the difficulties of comprehending what has increasingly and ultimately become a global crisis at the end of an age of empire in readily comprehensible terms. Although the paths of refugees’ flights threatens to muddy the specific travails from which folks are forced to flee in the data visualization, as well as their specific circumstances and travails, it synthesizes and processes the almost unsustainable streams of forced flights from refugee hot spots by foregrounding the actual routes of displacement–while misleadingly suggesting that all refugees found future homes.

Indeed, it maps the unmappable by mapping the pathways of those forcibly displaced: yet of the 60 million displaced globally, the map focusses on the 14 million (almost a quarter of those displaced worldwide) who have left their countries in 2014 alone, offering what is probably an under-estimation of the encyclopedia of travails that can never, at another level, map or synthesize–as if the routes of fleeing can ever be adequately represented by being sketched on the perfectly engineered arcs akin to the smoothly engineered pathways of multiple airplane flights along which a very different demographic travels. Refugees are of course unlikely to experience such travel, more characteristic of readers of the Times, who would surely be prone to recognize the map as a sad perversion of global flight paths, converging on Eruopean capitals, the United States, Canada, and Australia.

New York Times

One feels only awe at the overwhelming nature this sort of dataset, itself difficult and dizzying to process because it offers little real cue for orienting oneself to the complex totality of narratives it collectively encodes. Whether the augmentation of refugees worldwide can be seen as a quantifiable crisis–and removed from human terms and individual costs–is a question that cannot be here addressed. But the conversion of the crisis into human flows is a compelling way to try to come to terms with how we’ve come to inhabit the world in rather chilling ways, by plotting some of the data from the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees on a global projection centered on the primary areas of regional crisis–not without posing the question of why such a global focus of the refugee crisis exists. The nexus of the refugee “crisis” is so widely spatially distributed, indeed, to leave its “focus” dizzying as one tries to better internally process the extent of displacement worldwide:

New York Times

3. The frenetic business of the long distance “traffic” pictured on the global map can also be reorganized and viewed, or disaggregated, piecemeal, luckily, in order to make some sense of the terrifying abundance–or obesity?–of the disturbing dataset whose aggregation reveals the close relations between countries in an age of globalization, if it cannot threaten to obscure the dramatic narratives of individual experience. The data is condensed into misleadingly orderly (if dizzyingly distracting) mesh of intersecting red lines, arcing over the earth’s surface and boundaries–as if to capture the global nature of the crisis, but which painfully erase the multiple individual narratives of struggle, internal displacement, and blossoming of the unplanned cities of refugee camps, and the different material and environmental constraints against which refugees have to contend and struggle. The comforting illusion that each refugee has a destination–or endpoint–ignore the improvised settlements now dot maps of Jordan, Turkey, Chad and South Sudan, and hold some two million souls, or the deaths of refugees in transit or at sea–runs against the demand for an adequate dynamic map of their own, as if in a sort of reverse map of sites of human habitation inscribed on maps.

Such a map would describe dislocation in greater detail than the valiant ESRI “story map” of those refugee camps administered by the UNHCR, whose slippy map invites one to inspect the numbers of displaced in different camps, but stands at a significant remove from their actual circumstances or experiences of displacement of the story it purports to tell.

Fifty Most Populous Refugee Camps (an ESRI story-map) Darfur Refugee Camp in Chad Arbat Transfer Camp for Syrian Refugees in Iraqi Kurdistan

4. Could one rather include in such a map variables such as the length of time required for transit from each country, the amount of time required for transit, or the possibility of making such travel–all potential ways to represent the ordeal of displacement in ways that viewers might understand? Or could one indicate the violence of the displacement in a quantitative way?

Indeed, the focus of the data vis on the routes of migration that refugees take runs against the widely accepted and reported truth that the number of internally displaced persons has expanded far beyond the growth of refugees seeking asylum in recent years–also reported by Sergio Peçanha–if the growth of IDP’s worldwide has surely increased the desperation of those refugees who leave countries of origin.

New York Times

The greatest single lie that this elegant map of refugees across the world tells in its distribution of a dataset is that all refugees have a destination to which the flee that can be mapped–a lie that the red arcs that imitate the paths of air traffic encourage. For the paths of those fleeing are of course rarely so removed from the ground or so truly globalized in their dispersion. In addition, there is a shift of attention from the sites where a truly unmanageable set of crises for refugees exists to the density of points of arrival in European countries as France, Germany, England, Italy, and Sweden, as well as Australia, Canada and the US–all rendered by but a single point or nexus of arrival, or destination–and often obscured by clotted red lines. Does this detract the readers’ attention from the sites of humanitarian emergency that prompted the rush of refugees? The crowded the image evokes the image of something like a blood splatter, the result of the expansion of the intensity of combat in multiple theaters that, after all, set the mechanisms of displacement in motion, which the practice of aggregation erased. In ways that imitate the The Refugee Project’s attempt to map arcs of resettlement of those seeking asylum since 1975 in interactive fashion within a single globe, the density of lines that converge in Europe and elsewhere suggest the deeply linked question of the global multiplication of forcibly removed refugees, and the proliferation of a forcible statelessness across so much of the modern world.

The Refugee Project

But, on the other hand, the visualization’s immediate popularity, registered by wide retweeting, responds to the cognitive difficulty–if not impossibility–of coming to terms in a clear-headed manner with the dizzying multiplication of growing numbers of refugees and internally displaced people in our increasingly destabilized world. There is considerable clarity in how the orderly arcs mirror the readily recognizable form of a map of destinations of flights, if there is something truly odd in how they represent the terrifyingly troubled transit of peoples in times of war. Perhaps the map aptly captures in symbolic fashion the desperate flight from regions in its numbers alone, acting like a sort of blood splatter map on the world–although one where the wounds seem to lie in those countries that receive refugees, rather than the sites of the violence that provoked their transit.

For the greatest difficulty with the data visualization remains the remove of its narrative content from the subjective experiences of the refugees than the absorption of refugees in their new countries, and the apparent equivalence that it draws between both the proportion of refugees or the experiences of refugees from different countries. Hence, the conspicuous inclusion of numbers of departed whose final destinations were a specific country and the foregrounding of the names of those countries that were most likely destinations in the developed world–the United States, Canada, France, and Sweden among them–several countries were a sharply xenophobic ultra-right has been recently recognized as on the rise. Take, for instance, the dispersion or draining of Syrian populations, which despite its orderly symmetry offers only a stripping of data to approximate the ongoing struggles on its disintegrating borders. During the recent Civil War, some 11.6 million people, almost half of its entire population, have been displaced, half arriving in Egypt, and only a relatively fortunate few arriving in European or industrialized/westernized nations. Representing the length of time required for resettlement would at least be a surrogate and index for the nature of the experience of refugees that would be a possibly more ethical model for mapping displacement than the dispersion of the Syrian population on simple arcs–without notation of how many displaced Syrians remain, and omit the distortion suggested below of a smoothly engineered migration from refugee camps.

New York Times

5. The infographic maps but one corner of the dilemma of global refugees. One way that the infographic must be read is in dialogue of the as-yet limited reactions of advanced economies to the growing global refugee crisis, to be sure, at a time when it may make less sense to retain the attitudes of protectionism and fears of immigration, evident in the expansion of only 70,000 refugees to the United States during Fiscal Year (FY) 2015 on the basis of “humanitarian concerns” as “in the national interest,” and the retention of limits of admissions in accordance with clear ceilings for each region. For does such an imposition of such ceilings come to terms with the global desperation felt by the displaced?

White House

There is an obligation to come to terms with the steep fears of immigration and better help readers better wrestle with the plight of the displaced.

An untold understory of the infographic that is less evident in the image used in this post’s header is the considerable concentration of a huge proportion of refugees–some 85% by the count of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees–in one specific geographic region, and the lack of resources that are effectively able to be devoted to these refugees’ fates. (And this may well be an underestimation of population flows among the internally displaced.) The majority congregate in regions running from Turkey to Southeast Asia, past Ethiopia to Kenya and the Central African Republic, although one imagines that the displaced in Ukraine are just absent from the dataset, and less able to be accurately measured by the UN numbers. The region populated by millions of displaced is circled by dotted lines below. In each of these regions, most relatively impoverished, refugees are often exchanged among countries with limited resources to process compelling human needs–for example, Ethiopia holds 665,000 refugees from Somalia and South Sudan–where they are bound to press further upon limited existing resources and fragile economies.

What will be the result of these interconnections–and whether they won’t demand far greater global interconnectedness–is not clear.

But the ongoing expansion of refugees in areas where there is no clear governmental or administrative organization will prove especially difficult to map adequately, despite the compelling nature of the “Recent Trends” visualization, such trends are poised to expand in future years, especially from Ukraine as well as Syria and Myanmar.

New York Times

It seems most likely that, at some level, the data visualization of the destinations of refugees as seeking asylum from their country of origin unconsciously records how far we have come from the optimism of picturing the possibility of global unity the United Nations auspiciously hoped to inaugurate in 1946–by the agency which compiled the UNHCR database.

6. There is a significant difficulty, of course, in mapping refugees and the increased clustering of camps that they create in so-called demilitarized border zones. For each image condenses multiple narratives that one wishes one could tease out, but confronts an image in which one sees limited apparent possibility of resolution save further instability. South Sudan possessed some of the greatest emergency of the refugees of modern times and the twenty-first century both in the some 700,000+ asylum-seeking refugees in neighboring countries at most recent count and one and a half million plus internally displaced persons (IDP’s) within its fragile boundaries, many driven by intense food shortages as well as by an increasingly militarized and fearful situation: almost a third of the country’s population lack food. Emergency refugee activities have haven mapped in South Sudan from 2012. Even as the subsequent refugee crisis generated in the Syrian Civil War has further pressed credulity, South Sudan exemplifies a refugee situation spun out of control with no clear resolution, before which one stares at the map agape,–almost conscious of the continuing inadequacy of ever resolving its narrative in the immediate future. Back in 2012, UNHCR helpfully mapped refugee settlements (camps) and clusters of individual refugees–denoted in the second map of South Sudan below by inverted triangles; refugee settlements are shown by pink houses–spread both to camps in Ethiopia, and less organized communities on the borders of poor (and undeveloped) countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo or Central African Republic, states with their resources already spread thin.

UNHCR By 2013, the number of displaced was combined with arrivals of those displaced from nearby areas and states:

By 2014, about three-quarters of a million displaced persons were displaced and 4.9 million were in need of assistance as the borders continued to be particularly permeable and fear drove displaced persons out of the country:

The continued displacement of refugees has only grown considerably during 2015, with increased fighting in South Sudan and the Upper Nile states, at the same time as water and sanitation has continued to deteriorate across the region. Spurring the possibility for increased refugees, food insecurity of food has grown–as food grows more scarce–in ways that the visualization leaves silent but might provide a telling under-map of the flow of refugees across increasingly fragile borders, in situation maps that foreground departure and the failure of containment within civil society. Such maps obscure the systemic problems that are bound to make the tally of refugee counts only tic higher over time, perhaps, which might be revealed in deeper layers to suggest the levels of instability that afflict the region. One telling map to compare reveals the increasingly imperiled aquifers and drastically declining availability groundwater.

If we consider the drought to be located in California’s central Valley–a thin orange strip by the Pacific Ocean–the decrease in groundwater NASA satellites have mapped over the past decade quite dramatically extends across the Sudd Basin and Lower Chad Basin in Africa and the entire Nubian Aquifer System and the Congo Basin–as it groundwater shortages has drastically grown across the Arabian aquifer and Indus Basin over the same time. Water is not the sole issue here, of course, but the unrest that scarcity provokes demands mapping, and GIS visualization, as a layer below the civil society, which in much of Africa and regions without and which never saw the need for infrastructures of water transport is no doubt particularly acute.

The consequences of depleted aquifers and groundwater across the Lake Chad Basin, Sudd Basin and the Nubian Aquifer System (NAS)–the greatest body of fresh water in the Nile basin, and Congo Basin have provoked a catastrophe of global proportions, while we returned to the possibilities of the contagious spread of Ebola across the world as if it were the sole apocalypse on our mental radar for much of the past year. The rise of fatal–or near-fatal–the expansion of those attempting to flee food shortages and declining economies in Africa have appeared in or occasioned increasing news reports from the western media, as Italians have called in increasingly strident tones for all of Europe to turn its attention to focus on the flight of refugees in the Mediterranean ocean–which the Italian navy can barely respond to in adequate manner, and create a web across the Mediterranean simplified in the red routes below. Already the most “deadly stretch of water for refugees and migrants” in 2012, the refugee crisis intensified in 2014–often encouraged by human traffickers who deceptively promise perilous passage that is often not followed through, perhaps making this current year–2015–the most deadly in recent memory for those attempting the crossing in ships as they flee humanitarian disasters in Libya in ways that have only begun to be quantified and mapped.

The Guardian

National Geographic

The complex story of tragedy and loss that the map conceals is difficult to communicate in conventional cartographical forms, as the each circle represents the suspected or confirmed loss of human passengers.

New York Times

One understory to this migration, without doubt, is the huge refugee crisis across the Sub-Saharan continent, where 15 million have been displaced in the past year alone:

The “refuge flows” are oddly almost not with a human face, as if they seem a triangular exchange of goods. As we map refugee traffic in a manner that suggests that the flows of people are removed from a dynamics of struggle on the ground, but guided by an invisible hand or able to be imagined as a coherent network of flow, as if they at times arrive and depart from the same place, we lose a sense of the human costs of the deep scars that they draw over the surface of the inhabited world.

But these overlapping and crisscrossed waves of displacement, if terribly difficult to disentangle, are compressed into so many misleadingly orderly arcs: their stark form and geometric curvature elided or erasef the struggle, or indeed desperation, that we know companies the experiences of all refugees, and show an image of migration that may be as good as it gets. It surely sends an alarm about the status and state of the stateless refugees forced to flee their homes that forces us to negotiate our own relation to the changed face of the world. But its curved red lines decisively and assertively arrogate the numbers of those who have sought asylum into smoothly completed arcs in an oddly unproblematic way, given the scarcity of solutions at hand.

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Filed under data visualizations, global refugees, immigration, infographics, refugee crisis, refugees, Syrian refugees

Tagged as displaced persons, global projection, human trafficking, IDP's, infographics, internal exiles, mapping refugee routes, New York Times, refugees, Syria, The Refugee Project, UN, UN High Commissioner on Refugees, UNHCR, United Nations

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