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Hypocritical Inhospitality: The Global Refugee Crisis in the Light of History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2020

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Abstract

One of the justifications offered by European imperial powers for the violent conquest, subjection, and, often, slaughter of indigenous peoples in past centuries was those peoples’ violation of a duty of hospitality. Today, many of these same powers—including European Union member states and former settler colonies such as the United States and Australia—take increasingly extreme measures to avoid granting hospitality to refugees and asylum seekers. Put plainly, whereas the powerful once demanded hospitality from the vulnerable, they now deny it to them. This essay examines this hypocritical inhospitality of former centers of empire and former settler colonies and concludes that, given that certain states accrued vast wealth and territory from the European colonial project, which they justified in part by appeals to a duty of hospitality, these states are bound now to extend hospitality to vulnerable outsiders not simply as a matter of charity, but as justice and restitution for grave historical wrongs.

Keywords

colonialismforced displacementglobal refugee crisishospitalityhypocrisyreparations
Type
Essays
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , Spring 2020 , pp. 3 - 12
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2020

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Peter Balint, Bina D'Costa, Toni Erskine, Joseph Mackay, Erin Wilson, and the editors of Ethics & International Affairs for helpful comments and suggestions that strengthened this essay.

References

NOTES

1 Nikki Haley, quoted in “Press Release: Ambassador Haley on the UN's Criticism of U.S. Immigration Policies,” United States Mission to the United Nations, June 5, 2018, usun.usmission.gov/press-release-ambassador-haley-on-the-uns-criticism-of-u-s-immigration-policies/.

2 The Peace of Westphalia, signed in 1648, for example, which is often (mis)represented as having attributed absolute authority to sovereign states to govern their territories as they wished, clearly imposed upon signatory powers an obligation to grant rights of emigration to religious minorities.

3 Among numerous analyses, see Anghie, Antony, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Benton, Lauren, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

4 de Vitoria, Francisco, “On the American Indians,” in Pagden, Anthony and Lawrance, Jeremy, eds., Political Writings (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 278–81Google Scholar.

5 Francisco de Vitoria, “Letter to Miguel de Arcos, OP Salamanca, 8 November [1534],” in Pagden and Lawrance, Political Writings, p. 332. See also Vitoria, “On the American Indians,” in ibid., p. 282.

6 Cano, Melchor, “De dominio Indorum,” in Pereña, Luciano, ed., Corpus hispanorum de pace, vol. 9 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1982), p. 579Google Scholar; and Domingo de Soto, De iustitia et iure (1553), V.3.3, pp. 417–27.

7 Cortés, Hernán, “The Second Letter,” in Pagden, Anthony, ed. and trans., Letters from Mexico (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 79–80Google Scholar.

8 Grotius, Hugo, Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty, ed. Van Ittersum, Martine Julia (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006), pp. 304–5Google Scholar. See also Grotius, Hugo, De jure belli ac pacis libri tres, vol. 2, trans. Kelsey, Francis W. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925)Google Scholar, II.2.15–17, pp. 201–3.

9 “A True Declaration of the Estate of Virginia,” quoted in Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500–1625 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 145.

10 Tendayi Achiume notes, “The European colonial project involved the out-migration of at least 62 million Europeans to colonies across the world between the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century alone.” E. Tendayi Achiume, “Migration as Decolonization,” Stanford Law Review 71, no. 6 (June 2019), pp. 1509–74, at p. 1517.

11 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2018 (Geneva: UNHCR, 2019), pp. 2–3, 17, 22.

12 Ibid., pp. 3, 30.

13 Kelley Currie, “Explanation of Vote in a Meeting of the Third Committee on a UNHCR Omnibus Resolution” (speech, U.S. Mission to the United Nations, New York City, November 13, 2018). See also UNHCR, Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2018, p. 4; UNHCR, Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2017 (Geneva: UNHCR, 2018), p. 30 (reporting that 189,300 refugees were admitted for resettlement in 2016).

14 “‘All Refugees Want to Go Home Someday’—UNHCR Spokesperson and Author Melissa Fleming,” UN News, May 26, 2017, news.un.org/en/story/2017/05/558212-all-refugees-want-go-home-someday-unhcr-spokesperson-and-author-melissa-fleming. For a critique, see Lena Kainz and Rebecca Buxton, “All Refugees Want to Go Home. Right?,” openDemocracy, October 18, 2017, www.opendemocracy.net/en/all-refugees-want-to-go-home-right/. On repatriation more generally, see Gerver, Mollie, The Ethics and Practice of Refugee Repatriation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018)Google Scholar.

15 Betts, Alexander and Collier, Paul, Refuge: Rethinking Refugee Policy in a Changing World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 230Google Scholar. For a critique, see White, Benjamin Thomas, “‘Refuge’ and History: A Critical Reading of a Polemic,” Migration and Society: Advances in Research 2, no. 1 (2019), pp. 107–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Bulley, Dan, Migration, Ethics and Power: Spaces of Hospitality in International Politics (London: SAGE, 2017), pp. 88–116CrossRefGoogle Scholar (USAID's description of the “natural hospitality” of Jordan's people is at p. 109); and UNHCR, Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2018, p. 3.

17 See, for example, Frelick, Bill, “I Have No Idea Why They Sent Us Back”: Jordanian Deportations and Expulsions of Syrian Refugees (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2017), p. 1Google Scholar.

18 Pufendorf, Samuel, De jure naturae et gentium libri octo, vol. 2, ed. Oldfather, Charles Henry and Oldfather, W. A. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934)Google Scholar, I.7.7, pp. 118–19.

19 Ibid., III.3.9–10, pp. 363–67.

20 Kant, Immanuel, “Toward Perpetual Peace,” in Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Gregor, Mary J. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 328–29Google Scholar.

21 Derrida, Jacques, “On Cosmopolitanism,” in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Dooley, Mark and Hughes, Michael (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 1–24Google Scholar. For critiques of Derrida's reading, see Baker, Gideon, “The Spectre of Montezuma: Hospitality and Haunting,” Millennium 39, no. 1 (August 2010), pp. 23–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Brown, Garrett W., “The Laws of Hospitality, Asylum Seekers and Cosmopolitan Right: A Kantian Response to Jacques Derrida,” European Journal of Political Theory 9, no. 3 (July 2010), pp. 308–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace,” p. 329.

23 See Schwartz, Daniel, The Political Morality of the Late Scholastics: Civic Life, War and Conscience (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 64–67Google Scholar.

24 Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations, or: Principles of the Law of Nature, Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereign, with Three Early Essays on the Origin and Nature of Natural Law and on Luxury, ed. Béla Kapossy and Richard Whatmore (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008), preliminaries §14, II.10.131, pp. 73–74, 326.

25 Ibid., II.10.136, pp. 328–29. See also II.18.332, pp. 454–55. For further discussion, see Glanville, Luke, “Responsibility to Perfect: Vattel's Conception of Duties beyond Borders,” International Studies Quarterly 61, no. 2 (June 2017), pp. 385–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 On Global North responsibilities for global inequality and injustice generally, see Pogge, Thomas, World Poverty and Human Rights, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2008)Google Scholar; Miller, Richard W., Globalizing Justice: The Ethics of Poverty and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Young, Iris Marion, Responsibility for Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Souter, James, “Towards a Theory of Asylum as Reparation for Past Injustice,” Political Studies 62, no. 2 (June 2014), pp. 326–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Coen, Alise, “Capable and Culpable? The United States, RtoP, and Refugee Responsibility-Sharing,” Ethics & International Affairs 31, no. 1 (Spring 2017), pp. 71–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nevins, Joseph, “Migration as Reparations,” in Jones, Reece, ed., Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2019), pp. 129–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hovil, Lucy, “Telling Truths about Migration,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 13, no. 2 (July 2019), pp. 199–205CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Achiume, E. Tendayi, “Reimagining International Law for Global Migration: Migration as Decolonization?,” American Journal of International Law 111, no. 1 (July 2017), pp. 142–46Google Scholar; and Achiume, “Migration as Decolonization.”