Sixteen Volts

Perhaps my all-time favourite among the essays of Jussi Halla-Aho is "Ceuta, Melilla ja suvaitsevainen vastuunpakoilu". It was written in October 7, 2005, and refers to an event that I can't recall ever hearing anything about in our news. On the other hand, I never even knew that Spain has territory in Africa: Ceuta, Melilla, Ceuta Border Fence, Melilla Border Fence.

Anyway, here is the complete essay, as translated by your humble narrator:

During the past few days, immigrants from the sub-Saharan Africa have tried to go over, under and through barbed wire to get to the special Spanish territories in the coast of Morocco. Some have got through to fill a refugee application, some were hit by a rubber bullet or a real bullet, and the bodies of some are still hanging from the barbed wire. Yesterday, Spain announced that it will send back everybody who got in Ceuta and Melilla this way.

Human rights organizations again got a chance to be loudly upset. In the news last night, a representative of a Spanish human rights organization (where the Finnish translator had apparently thought that "Spanish human rights organization" was the name of the organization itself) explained in a huffy tone that sending these people back to Morocco is effectively a death sentence for them.

The events at Ceuta and Melilla have once again unfortunately brought up the typical way that the "tolerant" crowd lectures, acts morally superior and accuses, but at the same time carefully avoids presenting any solutions whose practical real-world consequences they would then be responsible for.

As far as I have understood, the human rights crowd is angry because some Africans died trying to cross the barbed wire fence, and demands that those who got through must be given access to Europe. Let's analyze this demand for a moment.

There are goals, and then there are instruments that try to fulfill these goals. Fulfilling a goal is the function of an instrument. For example, prisons have iron bars whose function is to keep the prisoners inside. Cars have locks whose function is to keep the car thieves outside. Even if a prisoner succeeded in sawing through the bars, the goal --- keeping the prisoner inside --- is still in effect, which is why first the guards and then the police try to return the prisoner to his cell. Guards and police exist for the possibility that the primary instrument, iron bars, fails. Surely nobody can believe that if the prisoner succeeds in breaking out, his escape must be accepted and we should just let it be. Surely nobody can believe that if the car thief (or as they are known these days, "unauthorized car users") manages to get past the first security feature, the locks, he has earned the right to steal the vehicle, and thus secondary security features such as steering wheel locks are ethically questionable.

The purpose of the fences around Ceuta and Melilla is not to prevent lizards or Southern winds to enter Spain. Their purpose is to prevent illegal immigration. Even if they failed, the goal of preventing illegal immigration is still in effect. The secondary instrument is an armed border guard, and the third instrument is the possibility to catch and return the illegal immigrants who managed to get past the first two instruments.

When you listen to the interviews of the border crossers and their Europeans enablers, you get the feeling that crossing the fence is a criterion after which the ones who got through it have earned a moral right to get into Europe. It's almost like the fence is not an instrument whose purpose is to fulfill a goal set by a political decision, but some strange force of nature so that there is nothing morally questionable in fighting against it, but doing so is in fact something heroic.

Ceuta and Melilla are surrounded by a barbed wire fence because Spaniards have democratically decided that you can't just walk from Africa into Spain. The fence, the same way as the guard and the procedure for sending back illegal immigrants, are instruments that enforce this decision. You can't seriously think that the decision itself is OK, but it's not OK to try to enforce it by stopping people who want to sneak in. You also can't seriously think that the decision is OK and the fence is OK, but the guard and the procedure for sending back illegal immigrants are not OK. The guard and the procedure exist for the same reason as the fence.

In my opinion, it is perfectly justified for somebody to believe that all restrictions of immigration must be lifted, but such change must be done in legislation as a democratic decision. First you must remove the goal, preventing illegal immigration, and only after that you can start removing the instruments that serve this goal, that is, the fence, guards and the procedure for sending people back. The human rights crowd, at least the ones that have made their voice heard, have not demanded changing the immigration policy, or even taking down the fence. They merely demand that border guards and immigration officials stop doing their jobs. Guards should have no right to stop Africans from crossing the fence, and the officials should have no right to send back illegal immigrants that were caught.

As a side note, I noticed this same attitude a while back when the university was full of posters that demanded that an illegal immigrant (who was apparently some kind of "warrior queen", although this title or honorific wasn't really explained in the poster) who had been caught at the university must not be sent back. No reasons for treating her as a special case over everybody else who wants to come to Canada were given, of course. I guess that it was just wrong: once you manage to dodge the border guards and the immigration officials, you should just be allowed to stay. But back to the article:

Why is this so? Why don't these people demand making the borders wide open? Because even the most ardent human rights activist knows perfectly well what would happen. If anybody who wants in was allowed to come in, there wouldn't be hundreds or thousands of them, but millions. The ironclad argument "but there's only so very few of them" of the tolerant crowd would collapse overnight and Europe would fall into chaos that even the most pedagogical diversity education could not explain to be a good thing. For this reason, the tolerant crowd secretly thinks that it's good that the fence is out there to keep the swarm of illegals in a manageable level. They are content to loudly condemn the border guard for shooting the fence crosser and the sneaky immigration official for sending the illegal immigrant back to Morocco. What is it that the border guard should have done, if we start from the fact that his task, guarding the border and preventing illegal crossing, is legitimage? Was he supposed to persuade the fence crossers to turn back by talk alone? And what was the immigration official supposed to do? If he didn't turn back the illegal immigrant, he would lead others to believe that the illegal immigrant had the right to do what he did, and the Spanish immigration law, the fences of Ceuta and Melilla and the border guards who watches over these fences all represent sheer injustice.

What would follow from the policy that the law and fence shall remain, but the guard cannot shoot? It follows that those who break the Spanish law by crossing the fence are rewarded with a residency permit, whereas law-abiding Africans are kept outside. In practice this certainly is a better option than changing the law and removing the fence, but in what sense is it moral? Is the human rights crowd happy now that Spain closes its doors from children, old people, the disabled and women, that is, people who are physically unable to cross the barbed wire fence?

The representative of the Spanish human rights organization said that sending the people back to Morocco is an effective death sentence on them. He didn't bother to explain this claim, and I really can't understand how these people survived for weeks and months in Morocco at the time when they were going to Ceuta and Melilla. And most certainly I can't understand why those who managed to cross are in a bigger danger than the vast majority that failed to cross the fence. If this danger of death applies to all those people, both those who got across and those who did not, shouldn't Spain let in everybody, including those who did not manage to cross the fence? Why is it worse to send somebody back to a certain death than it is to leave somebody else to a certain death? Even so, the human rights activists have demanded Spain to give residence permits only to those who managed to cross the fence, not to those who were left on the other side.

As I have written before, the swarm towards Europe even with suicidal means will continue for the reason that if you succeed in getting in Europe, they will not send you back. Twenty out of 500 people who try manage to get in, and every man who leaves Nigeria thinks that he will be among that happy twenty. The lure of Europe, whether it is based on real facts or the fantasies of MTV and porn movies, is so big that it's worth the risk. According to the news, the horde of hopefuls will keep rushing the fence as long as life in the countries where they came from remains bad. (This obviously contains the implicit idea that guess whose responsibility it is to improve life in these nations.) But the real reason is that there is no harm in trying. If the border guard really shot at you and the immigration officials really sent you back, the knowledge of this would quickly reach the countries where these people come from. Pretty soon there would be no corpses hanging from the barbed wire fences of Ceuta and Melilla. And in a longer term, closing the entrance from Africa to Europe and having the entrepreneurial Africans remain in Africa might benefit Africa itself in surprising ways.

But this is certainly not OK with the tolerant crowd. Every African who is hit by a rubber bullet gives the "tolerant" crowd another reason to "express its shock". At the same time they accept the existence of the fence, because it keeps the influx of immigrants so small that they don't have to take responsibility of the consequences that their policies ("open the borders wide") would lead to. This is why the present situation is so ideal for the tolerant crowd.

And oh yeah, today's newscast said that Morocco dumped the Africans that Spain sent back in the middle of a desert. The newscast also said that these people don't have any money to get back. Apparently, both reasons somehow justify letting them in Europe. For some reason, the human rights activists didn't consider it necessary to "express their shock" by condemning Morocco. And why would they, since you can't demand as much from the Moroccans as you would from the Europeans. Regarding the insufficient funds for the return trip, this problem was caused by the fact that these people weren't prepared for the possibility that there would be a return trip. This is because the Europeans have, with their schizophrenic "don't come here, but if you happen to come anyways, welcome!" -policy, given the Africans an impression that they will not be sent back. It came as a total surprise for both Africans and human rights activists that Spain, violating the modern traditions of the multicultural Europe, once happened to enforce its own laws.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Wednesday, March 15, 2006 at 2:54 PM