The Global Immigrant War

A “qashaqshi” posted a “new and guaranteed” map for human smuggling on the Internet, used for smuggling “more than a meal.” In the Iraqi dialect, “qashaqshi” means smuggler, and the smuggler’s map begins in Madrid: “Take the metro to the city center, then a bus to the city of Granada, and from there cross the sea on a rubber dinghy for $1,200, or on a tourist yacht for $2,400. After crossing, turn yourself in in Morocco, and they will hit you with deportation documents. Take a taxi to the Algerian border and get on a train to the Sinai in Egypt. Then take a taxi to the Jordanian border and a bus will bring you through Trebil in Iraq. Finish the trip by bicycle to a Baghdad car park, turning yourself in in the al-Alawi district. The authorities will question you and transfer you to Camp Zora. They allocate a salary of $500 to you, a habitation and residency, and double your salary after a year. Take up permanent residency, and you become entitled to family reunification. The timeline for obtaining citizenship is between five and seven years.”

If this is an Iraqi wisecrack, then the throngs of Syrian and Iraqi immigrants crossing the straits of the Mediterranean are a festival. Fingers are raised in signs of victory, and veiled women blow kisses to the TV cameras. Then you see the elderly with their crutches, and the border guards kicking them, and bloodied faces, and parents running, carrying their infant children through the fumes of tear gas canisters. They burst onto trains through the windows and sleep on the side of the road, or in the courtyards of the stations. Some Syrian travelers jump from rubber dinghies in T-shirts and shorts, sending pictures with their cell phones to their parents at home: “We’ve arrived, thank God!” They rendezvous with friends who have come before them to Greece, Macedonia, Serbia and Hungary.

The Islamic State is not the first to labor in the work of displacing millions; rather, more than 30 countries preceded it when they invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, destroyed Syria and Libya, and utterly plundered Palestine. If refugees were distributed according to each country’s responsibility for the disaster of global migration, the share of the United States would be the greatest, followed by Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland, Hungary and other allied countries. These wars have displaced 60 million people, half of them children, with 11 million of them displaced within their own countries, according to a report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. And Hungary, which was a training center for the Iraqi invasion forces in 2003, is currently setting up metal fences to protect Europe from the 14 million people displaced last year, most of whom can neither return to their homes nor settle permanently anywhere.

The global war over immigration is a “boomerang effect,” a phenomenon described by the French philosopher Michel Foucault:

“It should never be forgotten that while colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions and techniques of power.

“Western security and military doctrine is being rapidly reimagined in ways that dramatically blur the juridical and operational separation between policing, intelligence and the military; distinctions between war and peace; and those between local, national and global operations.”

British academic Stephen Graham says this in his book “Cities under Siege,” also saying that terrorist attacks by groups and nations “demonstrate that asymmetric warfare is the vehicle for political violence across transnational spaces. More and more, contemporary warfare takes place in supermarkets, tower blocks, subway tunnels and industrial districts rather than open fields, jungles or deserts.”

The “global immigrant war” has entered a new phase in the United States, a nation founded by immigrants. Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s insults toward Mexican immigrants and his demand that 11 million Mexicans be returned to their country are not electoral propaganda but the perpetual ideology of the “Clash of Civilizations,” which Samuel Huntington expanded on in his new book “Who Are We: The Challenges to America’s National Identity.” In it, he states that “the fabric of American power and national identity are threatened not only by international Islamic terrorism, but by nonwhites, and by Latin American groups in particular, which colonize and control the cities of the United States.”*

*Editor’s note: Correctly translated, this quote could not be verified.