Broken Countries and Immigration Woes

Sadly, the world is full of broken countries.  At the risk of generalizing, I would characterize most of Africa, Central and South America, and a good portion of the Middle East as seriously broken.  Some of these countries are broken because of war and terrorism.  Some are broken due to natural disasters and limited natural resources.  Some are broken because of tribal and ethnic hostility.  Almost all are broken by political corruption and plundered by oligarchies, plutocracies and military elites.

The wealthy, developed nations have contributed substantially to this brokenness.  The long history of colonization and imperialism by Europe and the United States has tragically altered the evolution of much of the developing world.  It is of course impossible to say how these areas would have fared had they been able to develop independently of the imperialist nations, but it seems clear that there are significant burdens that are a legacy of this earlier exploitation.

There is also a legacy of war and turmoil.  The Middle East and North Africa have been strategic battlegrounds for hundreds of years.  European powers, the Ottoman Empire, Russia and more recently, the U.S., have all contributed heavily to the morass that is the present Middle East. 

Africa and Latin America (not to mention Southeast Asia) were all proxy hot war sites for the cold war.  Every left-wing movement within these countries was met with strong opposition by the U.S., and we often supported incredibly ruthless authoritarian regimes, both politically and militarily, in our frantic efforts to stop the expected domino effect of world communism.  Ironically and sadly, this was a fear that proved to be entirely unwarranted, but it had a dramatically negative effect on many countries.

And then there is the drug war.  The U.S. and, to some extent, the European thirst for drugs has fueled criminal and political anarchy throughout Latin America, Afghanistan, and, to a lesser degree, other parts of Asia.  Central America is currently a dystopian nightmare as a result of five decades of U.S. drug demand and the unending debacle of our related military, law enforcement, immigration and judicial policies.

Central and South America were for the most part dysfunctional long before the drug wars.  The legacy of Spanish colonial oppression and the long and shameful history of U.S. economic imperialism and gunboat diplomacy doomed Latin America to an almost continuous trauma of coups, counter-revolts, military juntas, puppet governments and U.S. military or CIA intervention.

All of these countries have similar characteristics:  a weak middle class, incredible extremes of wealth and poverty, massive political, economic and judicial corruption, an interventionist military elite, and fragile economies that are heavily natural resource-based and/or internationally manipulated.  They may also be torn by racial, ethnic, religious or tribal strife.

They also have the common attribute that many of their citizens are fleeing them in the hope of reaching a less broken country.  Some are refugees from war or other types of conflict – Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Myanmar are examples.  Some are fleeing crime and gangs – Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua come to mind.  And many are leaving because of a desperate economic situation.

When broken countries show no sign of improvement and no logical scenario for relief is on the horizon, is it any wonder that mass emigration occurs?  In an age where information about other worlds and opportunities is readily available, and travel is no longer quite as daunting, the decision to leave must be much easier to make.  In many cases, there is no option – war and desperation force one’s hand.

In the last ten years we have witnessed a worldwide wave of immigration from broken nations to advanced economies – mainly Europe and North America – that has unleashed a xenophobic counter reaction and resulted in dramatic shifts away from liberal democracy and globalization such as the Brexit movement, the Trump ascendancy, and the rise of neo-fascist and nationalistic organizations. 

Large scale immigration has often been met with hostility.  The United States touts its unique status as a country that welcomes and thrives on immigrants, yet it has had wave after wave of anti-immigrant fever and has often legislated aggressively against various aspects of immigration.

The fact is that most people will ultimately shed their humanitarian inclinations when they sense their own good fortune threatened in any way.  Jesus said welcome the stranger, but Christians throughout the western world have found it convenient to ignore or water down this exhortation.

Not only are developed nations severely limiting the immigration of desperate people from broken nations, but they are also skimming off the cream of the crop of those nations by offering educational or employment opportunities that later turn into permanent relocations of the best and brightest from the broken lands.

It is capitalism 101 to compete for the best talent in the world to strengthen one’s technical and industrial might, but this only contributes to the shocking further decline of the broken countries.  In some things there is indeed a zero-sum game, and the world may be careening recklessly toward unintended consequences of a very apocalyptic nature.

Is there hope for these broken countries?  Some have called for a Marshall Plan for Central America.  But the Marshall Plan’s biggest beneficiaries (the U.K., France and Germany) were countries that had a long history of industrial and middle-class success as well as political and judicial institutions that were conducive to a positive recovery.  Any aid sent to broken countries is likely to be squandered in great part and end up lining the pockets of the corrupt leaders and oligarchies.  When there is no institutional stability, it is almost certain that aid will fail, as it has so often in the past throughout the developing world.

Fixing broken countries would seem to require a more complete intervention by the world community, which of course smacks of paternalism and would be anathema to those countries.  Furthermore, the United Nations and other global organizations have tepid support from the most powerful nations, who are increasingly seeing their future in terms of aggressive and bellicose unilateralism, the United States under Trump being a prime example.

 And so we once again find ourselves impotent in the face of global problems, and immigration joins global warming, war and revolution, and genocide as cataclysmic issues that the world needs to solve jointly, but has neither the will nor the wisdom to do so.

Happy Easter!