The latest immigration practices of President Donald Trump’s administration are stirring criticism domestically and differ sharply from the practices of other countries struggling with migrant issues.
The challenge the U.S. faces on its southern border pales in comparison to other migrant flows around the globe, and the inability of other countries to host them. The United Nations reports that developing countries are responsible for 85 percent of refugees worldwide, up from 70 percent 20 years ago.
Yet that hasn’t stopped Trump from declaring an invasion of migrants and asylum-seekers coming from Latin America, despite record-low illegal border crossings. Last week Trump signed an executive order to end the practice of separating children from parents who illegally enter the U.S., a problem that escalated after the administration opted to treat illegal border crossings as a criminal rather than civil matter in April.
The president and Justice Department officials have defended the forced separations — as well as the decision to eliminate flight from poverty and gang violence as a legitimate cause for seeking asylum — as a form of deterrence. Over the weekend Trump advocated for deporting people without ” judges or court cases,” a move that many consider illegal and unconstitutional.
Regardless of whether the White House is manufacturing a crisis, as some experts believe, the tactics it is employing are unprecedentedly harsh compared to elsewhere in the world, including in Europe, which in recent years has absorbed millions of refugees fleeing violence from the Middle East and Africa.
“That’s not done. I’m not aware of any cases of children being separated from their families in Europe,” says Susan Fratzke, a policy analyst and program coordinator with the Migration Policy Institute’s International Program.
In Europe, countries generally detain migrants much less frequently than in the United States. Authorities detain children only if there are special facilities in place, only after they try less-coercive measures and only if the separation is in the best interests of the child, Fratzke says.
While European practices may be starkly different, the attitude in some parts of the continent is similar to the U.S. Far-right political movements have gained traction in countries like Poland, Hungary and France largely due to anti-immigrant backlash. And though countries like Austria have in recent years welcomed refugees, those governments more recently have begun looking for ways to skirt their legal responsibilities to process and potentially accept asylum seekers, Fratzke says.
Yet she and other experts question whether such deterrence will stop the migration of people fleeing their homelands for fear of imprisonment or death.
“There’s been a lot of different challenges involved in actions that have the aim of deterring people,” Fratzke says. “But they’re up against the risks that people are willing to take depending on the circumstances they’re coming from — fleeing violence, persecution.”
The situation along America’s southern border is relatively benign compared to migrant crises in other parts of the world, where poorer countries with fewer resources, like Lebanon, Bangladesh or Thailand, are accommodating hundreds of thousands of displaced people.
Lebanon, one of the poorer countries in the Middle East, currently hosts more than 1 million people displaced from the wars in neighboring Syria.
Campaigns of alleged ethnic cleansing in Myanmar in recent decades have displaced hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants into neighboring countries. More than 100,000 ethnic Karens remain in camps in Thailand after fleeing in the 1980s, and more than 400,000 ethnic Rohingya fled to Bangladesh in the past two years.
Neither Thailand nor Myanmar are signatories of the 1951 United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees — the international standard governing who is a refugee and outlining a nation’s responsibilities to grant asylum. Neither Southeast Asian country has clear laws in place for handling refugees like the U.S. does, for example, so there are no clear policies for detaining families or separating them from children. Instead the United Nations is allowed to provide aid.
Reports have emerged in recent years, however, about detention of hundreds of Rohingya children separated from their families in Bangladesh on charges such as consorting with insurgents, according to Reuters.
The government of Thailand and international aid groups have worked to relocate at least 100,000 refugees into third countries for resettlement. Now it’s facing a burgeoning additional crisis as monsoon season sets in and threatens displaced people living in makeshift camps there.
By comparison, the U.S. is very fortunate, says Bill Frelick, refugee rights program director for Human Rights Watch and an expert on displaced people in Asia: “A lot of of this is just a matter of geographic luck.”
The Trump administration has “drummed up” the U.S. situation along its southern border, amounting to a “distortion” and an “abdication of responsibility,” Frelick says. “The U.S. has the capacity without building walls and without taking draconian measures to approach this in an expeditious but humane manner, that can handle this challenge.”
America is comparably lucky to not be geographically positioned next to a country Frelick describes as “on fire,” and to have the resources and space to accommodate far more migrants, refugees and asylum seekers than other countries, like Bangladesh or Thailand.
“It has the capacity to handle this, and frankly it’s not a crisis, it’s not an emergency,” he says. “What I just saw in Bangladesh, that’s a crisis.”
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How Other Countries’ Treatment of Detained Migrant Children Compare to the U.S. originally appeared on usnews.com
