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Resisting the Dehumanization of Refugees: 2. Dehumanizing or Humanizing Refugees? A Comparative Assessment of Canada, the United States, and Australia

Resisting the Dehumanization of Refugees
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“2. Dehumanizing or Humanizing Refugees? A Comparative Assessment of Canada, the United States, and Australia” in “Resisting the Dehumanization of Refugees”

Chapter 2 Dehumanizing or Humanizing Refugees? A Comparative Assessment of Canada, the United States, and Australia

Yasmeen Abu-Laban

Although statistics can in and of themselves render actual human beings invisible and even dehumanized, it is nonetheless the case that they are helpful in drawing attention to changes we have been witnessing in the 2000s. On a global scale, the past decade has been dramatic in relation to forcibly displaced persons worldwide. The alarm clearly sounded by the then United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) António Guterres in 2014 of the “mega crisis” stemming from rapidly increasing numbers of refugees from Iraq and Syria (Morello 2014) was the midpoint in a decisive trend of ever-increasing numbers over the 2010s. Thus, whereas in 2010 there were 41.1 million forcibly displaced persons worldwide, by the end of 2019, this number had nearly doubled to 79.5 million, amounting to one in every ninety-seven people worldwide (UNHCR 2020, 7–8). At the end of 2019, 26 million of the 79.5 million forcibly displaced persons were refugees, with 20.4 million falling under the mandate of the UNHCR and 5.6 million Palestine refugees falling under the mandate of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNHCR 2020, 2). A further 4.2 million were asylum seekers who had submitted claims (UNHCR 2020, 2). A major concern buttressing these numeric trends has been the political conditions that sustain and foster the growth of refugees. These include the inability to solve the wars and conflicts that produce refugees, growing numbers of protracted refugee situations, and the limited number of refugees accepted for resettlement in host countries (UNHCR 2020, 11–12).

There is no doubt that the policy embrace of border closure as a common response across states to the COVID-19 pandemic further exacerbated the numeric trends, with clear evidence of dropping numbers of asylum applications in many jurisdictions (UNHCR 2020, 12). More broadly, speaking in September 2020, Francesco Rocca, the president of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, observed, “COVID-19 has been cruel for all of us. It has been catastrophic for migrants. They face even more restrictions in terms of accessing basic services in ways that contribute nothing to public health. They are disproportionately impacted by border closures. They face heightened risk of detention and deportation. They are increasingly scapegoated for the pandemic” (cited in International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies 2020; my emphasis).

The speed with which migrants and refugees are blamed for public health concerns, such as the spread of COVID-19 during the pandemic, is notable (Banulescu-Bogdan, Benton, and Fratzke 2020; Varela 2020). Such a quick turn (or return) to presenting insecure refugees and migrants as threats—in this case, in the form of disease—raises questions about the tenacity of negative and dehumanizing tropes and how they are sustained.

Dehumanization can be defined as “denying humanness to others, introducing an asymmetry between people who have human qualities and people who are perceived as lacking these qualities” (Volpato and Andrighetto 2015, 31). Dehumanizing discourses are central to the drawing of boundaries between “in-groups” and “outgroups” and, at the extreme, can lead to violence and atrocities (Volpato and Andrighetto 2015, 31). Of course, dehumanizing language and actions can occur without an explicit disavowal of the “humanness” of those cast into outgroups (Smith 2016). For example, for some time, it has been noted that in public debates and media depictions in liberal democracies formally committed to human rights and the legal protection of asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants may be represented in dehumanizing ways. Refugees, and immigrants more generally, have been subject to zoological images (coming in “swarms”), botanical images (communities of refugees “mushrooming”), and water images (refugees “trickling” or even “flooding” in; Hintjens 1992, 13; see also Bender 2015, 35–58; Pruitt 2019). Additionally, in the post-9/11 environment, refugees have been subjected to discourses that construct them as a “threat” by stereotyping them as bogus, as carriers of disease, and as terrorists (Esses, Medianu, and Lawson 2013, 525–28). As well, similar to animals, refugees may also be presented as having high birth rates and lacking culture (Esses, Veenvliet, and Medianu 2012, 134).

The potential consequences of dehumanization in relation to refugees are substantial given what is potentially at stake. The nation-state is a historically specific form of human organization. Because humans have divided the planet into nation-states, holding citizenship is a basic criterion for membership in the modern world. Indeed, this is so central that Article 15(1) of the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights holds that “everyone has a right to a nationality.” Persecution resulting in the violation of basic human rights may cause people to flee a state. Because the international community has thus far failed to prevent the conditions that give rise to refugees in the first place, there is a strong case to be made for states having not only a legal responsibility toward refugees (as established through post–World War II refugee law) but also an ethical obligation. Put differently, the state system itself creates refugees, and therefore, this is one major component of an ethical obligation on the part of states to be responsive to refugees (see also Carens 1991). However, dehumanizing rhetoric may undermine support for policies reflecting such legal and ethical responsibilities toward refugees.

In this chapter, I focus on the policy responses and rhetoric of key leaders in three settler-colonial liberal democracies—Australia, Canada, and the United States—on refugees, with special reference to the period from 2015 to 2020. These countries share many features. What I argue is that each country exhibits elements of restrictiveness in refugee policy, but there are qualitative differences when it comes to the degree to which it impacts other categories of immigration, the party system, and the degree to which leaders employ discourses that humanize refugees. In making this argument, this chapter takes a threefold approach. First, I address how the countries are similar and useful for comparison. Second, I review recent developments in each country. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of the relevance of the findings for broader legal and ethical concerns as well as our understanding of dehumanization/humanization.

The Relevance of Empirical Comparison: Post-truth Politics, Settler Colonies, and Refugees

In an era that has been dubbed one of “post-truth politics” to characterize the way in which appeals to emotion may shape public opinion in liberal democratic countries more than actual facts (Oxford Dictionaries 2016), a lot is being said about immigrants and refugees in the media, in social media, and in popular conversations. As such, the five-year period spanning from 2015 to 2020 was remarkable for combining ever-rising numbers of forcibly displaced people and refugees worldwide alongside numerous examples of xenophobic populism and backlash to migrants and refugees. We know from some experimental studies in social psychology that negative and dehumanizing portrayals of migrants and refugees, however inaccurate, may drive support for restrictionist policies (Kteily and Bruneau 2017; Utych 2018). The work we do as social scientists and the work that is done by policy-makers and immigrant- and refugee-serving organizations is really at its best when it is informed by considerations of knowledge and evidence (Howlett 2009, 159). An international comparative lens is helpful to such efforts, and indeed, within the discipline of political science, comparative research has played a key role over the post–World War II period in terms of being a site for the production of empirically based theory building.

Canada, the United States, and Australia share a lot in common as countries with pre-existing and diverse Indigenous populations. Forged by settler colonialism and historically connected to Britain, all three countries were shaped by repeated waves of immigration and frontier expansion. The persistence of what might be called “settler privilege” continues to be in wide evidence (see, e.g., Battell Lowman and Barker 2015). Indeed, these three countries and New Zealand are referred to as the CANZUS countries by Indigenous scholars and activists because until recently, they were all holdouts to the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). The conspicuousness of this reluctance on the part of the CANZUS states can be seen in the fact that the vast majority of world states voted in favour of UNDRIP in the UN General Assembly (Abu-Laban 2020). Only because the CANZUS countries were pushed by international organizations committed to human rights did they all come to belatedly endorse UNDRIP, but they also did so with caveats. Indigenous scholar Sheryl Lightfoot (2012, 116–19) calls this process “selective endorsement” because it was a stance designed to quell international criticism but also avoid implementation.

This perspective is useful to keep in mind because it alerts us to the fact that there may be a contradiction in relation to how the settler colonies deal with Indigenous claims, especially when issues of sovereignty, resources, and power are at stake (Abu-Laban 2020). This contradiction finds parallels when we think of responses to migration in settler states like Canada, Australia, and the United States. As Shachar has observed, states engage in practices of inclusion and exclusion when it comes to human migration, making for a “potential contradiction between the sovereign power to exclude and the human need for inclusion in a political community that treats us as equal and worthy of respect and dignity” (2015, 1). It is refugees who represent “the embodiment of the paradox of a human rights discourse as they flee a persecutory nation state and lay their claims to rights derived from their shared, universal humanity at the feet of another nation state—concerned with its sovereignty and the rights of its citizens” (Fiske 2006, 223).

Of course, many other political scientists have not always explicitly dwelled on the settler-colonial foundations of countries like Canada, the United States, and Australia, instead classifying them as “liberal democracies” for their support of the individual rights of citizens and human rights. Even more specifically owing to their similar histories and electoral processes, they have also been dubbed the “Anglo American Democracies” (Alford 1963). All these distinctions matter as well. For example, part of the way the “human rights revolution” came to be expressed in these countries in the 1960s and 1970s was that all three countries formally moved away from the overtly racially discriminatory laws that marked their immigration intake in ways that favoured white British-origin Protestants historically. The United States did this by abandoning the 1924 National Quota (Johnson-Reed) Act in 1965, Canada did this with the adoption of a point system in 1967, and Australia did this by abandoning its graphically but tellingly dubbed White Australia policy, which barred various non-Europeans from the time of the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act until 1973. As well, Canada adopted an official policy of multiculturalism in 1971 for reasons relating to internal debates and especially a movement for an independent Québec, and Australia borrowed the lexicon from Canada and by 1977–78 had its own version of multiculturalism in the context of a growing intake of Indochinese refugees (Mann 2012). Both Canada and Australia are parties to the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, and the United States is a state party to the 1967 Protocol. In other words, all three countries have accepted legal obligations toward refugees as part of their human rights commitment.

Notwithstanding the relevance of liberal democratic norms and principles, it is also relevant to center the settle-colonial foundations of these three liberal democratic countries for a variety of reasons. First, all three countries continue to be challenged by Indigenous claims and relations as well as racism particularly directed at minorities of colour, reflecting on their shared historical status as “white settler colonies” that held a place of privilege in the British Empire (Abu-Laban 2020). Second, racialized and violent exclusion in immigration is not merely a feature of the past, and in particular, all three countries have also been implicated in trends reflecting on the criminalization of immigration and refugees, as they have all increasingly made greater use of practices of detention and deportation (see Kretsedemas and Brotherton 2017). Third, in the case of all three settler colonies, the sovereign power to exclude (or include) has largely denied Indigenous peoples a say in who immigrates and the terms, and this absenting is part and parcel of contemporary discussions of “reconciliation” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in countries like Canada (TRC 2015a, 2015b; Abu-Laban 2020).

The subject matter of political science as a discipline directs attention to issues of power and inequality, leadership and political parties, and conflict, contestation, and resistance, including resistance to dehumanization. Given the many similarities among the three countries, a key factor motivating interest in developing a comparative assessment of Canada, the United States, and Australia is the question of whether and how contemporary political leaders can be seen to contribute to the humanization or dehumanization of refugees and with what consequences for policy, political parties, and the broader society. For example, we know from the case of Denmark that in the face of restrictive asylum policies, individuals and groups may consciously resist what they see as dehumanizing policies toward asylum seekers through discourse and actions (Lassen 2018). By focusing on these similar countries, each case carries lessons for how we might think about dehumanizing and humanizing refugees.

The Settler-Colonial Liberal Democracies: Australia, Canada, and the United States Compared

Space limitations necessarily preclude a detailed description of all aspects of the discourse and policy of each of these countries. However, some key points can be drawn out to isolate key elements of the distinct features implicating the settler-colonial liberal democracies. In particular, while they all exhibit restrictiveness in refugee policy, there are also relevant qualitative differences when it comes to humanizing or dehumanizing refugees. Each will be briefly discussed in turn.

Australia

While geographically, Australia’s island status might provide a convenient explanation for its well-known contemporary harsh treatment of asylum seekers arriving by boat, in point of fact, arrivals of primarily Vietnamese asylum seekers between 1976 and 1981 were largely met with sympathy from the government and Australian public (McKenzie and Hasmath 2013, 418). In this sense, geography is not inevitability. There is widespread agreement in the literature on Australia that the rise of Pauline Hanson’s right-wing One Nation Party in 1998 marks a turning point in domestic politics because even though it was a fringe party in relation to votes, in criticizing multiculturalism and immigration, it had a major impact in making immigration an electoral issue (Wazana 2004; Pietsch 2013, 149; Maley 2016, 672–73). Specifically, One Nation presented refugee claimants arriving by boat as “queue jumpers” taking “pleasure cruises” to find a better country in which to live (Wazana 2004, 84). In this context, immigration—and particularly refugees—became a politicized issue that the mainline Liberal and Labor Parties did not want to lose votes on (Gale 2004; McKenzie and Hasmath 2013; Maley 2016), thereby encouraging a consensus around a policy of “deterrence” in relation to refugees arriving by boat.

Another point of agreement in the literature is that the Tampa crisis of late 2001 instigated the response of “deterrence” relating to how refugees arriving by boat are treated (Wazana 2004, 84; Gale 2004; McKenzie and Hasmath 2013, 418). The Tampa was a Norwegian freighter that rescued some 430 people, mostly refugees from Afghanistan, and entered Australian waters. Australia refused to let the Tampa dock even though the refugees were in desperate need of medical assistance and food. When the Norwegian captain attempted to dock the ship anyway, Australia responded with aggressive military commandos, and the refugees were transported to the small island nation of Nauru, where they were held in detention.

Notable as concerns a discussion of dehumanization is the fact that during this incident, the office of the Australian defense minister literally banned the release of any “personalising or humanizing images” of asylum seekers as part of Prime Minister John Howard’s response (Maley 2016, 674; my emphasis).

As the Tampa crisis coincided with 9/11, the Australian public also tended to support government action, and this set forth a refugee deterrence policy based on declaring certain Australian external territories (such as Christmas Island and Cocos Islands) outside of Australia’s migration zone and therefore not sites where a refugee claim could be made, intercepting boats militarily, and processing and detaining refugees in offshore facilities, particularly in Nauru and Papua New Guinea (McKenzie and Hasmath 2013, 418). Arguably, when we are talking about detention offshore on remote islands, we are talking about imprisoning people who are highly likely to be UN Convention refugees. Irrespective, in 2016, the Papua New Guinea Supreme Court itself ruled that Papua New Guinea’s agreement with Australia to hold asylum seekers in a facility on Manus Island was in breach of its own constitutional provisions protecting personal liberty (Buchanan 2016).

The overall harshness of the deterrence response and the fact that it has been directed primarily at non-white asylum seekers have led some to liken it to a form of return to the White Australia policy of yore (Wazana 2004). Still others have suggested the policy harkens back to Nazi concentration camps in Europe, although as Amy Nethery notes, there are plenty of parallels that are actually specific to Australian history, including Indigenous reserves, quarantine stations, and enemy-alien internment camps (Nethery 2009, 66). What at base unites the various parallels and descriptions made to criticize the deterrence policy is the attention they have drawn to human rights abuses as well as the way humanity itself is seen to be at risk in the response of successive Australian governments to refugees arriving by boat since 2001 (Fiske 2006; Gosden 2006).

Australia is largely a two-party system that swings between the left-leaning Labor and right-leaning Liberal prime ministers. Overall, the debate between the mainline Liberal and Labor Parties is not on whether to continue the deterrence policy established from the response to the Tampa but rather on details of how it is best implemented (for example, debates on how much medical assistance detained people should get, with Labor favouring a more generous approach). Since 2015, Prime Ministers Malcolm Turnbull (2015–18) and Scott Morrison (2018–22) have hailed from the Liberal Party, and in both cases, they governed in a coalition with the National Party, another right-leaning party with support in rural areas. Both Prime Ministers Turnbull and Morrison supported deterrence of the sort established with the Tampa. Moreover, although the deterrence policy has drawn wide rebuke, including from the UNHCR, Morrison’s prime ministerial office featured personal mementos and photos that included a metal replica of a migrant ship boasting “I stopped these,” in reference to a previous stint in charge of immigration (Cave 2018). Hence, there is a consensus across the dominant parties to continue deterrence as concerns ships, although overall, this has not impacted other areas of immigration, including refugees accepted for resettlement from the UNHCR. Generally, Australia’s immigration policy—until early 2018 with the introduction of new rules for admitting high-skilled workers and more recently with border closures inspired by the response to the COVID-19 pandemic (Wyeth 2020)—has placed an emphasis on attracting high-skilled immigrants (Boucher 2020).

Given the failure of the party system to be a site in which the refugee deterrence policy can be challenged, humanitarian and humanizing impulses have come from a flourishing of NGO groups and movements of Australians seeking to end dehumanized detention and welcome refugees (Fiske 2006; Gosden 2006). The impulse for change has also come from refugees themselves, including those who experienced detention. The world has heard the story now of Kurdish refugee Behrouz Boochani, who managed to eke out the award-winning international bestseller No Friend but the Mountains ([2018] 2019); the book’s title is a reference to a Kurdish saying that highlights a sense of abandonment and betrayal by successive powers. Boochani’s book details in prose and poem the experience of being incarcerated in the recently closed Australian-run detention center on Manus Island. This book was awarded Australia’s top prize in literature, with the selection committee unanimously deciding to waive the requirement of being an Australian citizen, and in the words of Australian writer Bill Flanagan, it chronicles the five years Boochani spent on an island as a result of “policies in which both our major parties have publicly competed in cruelty” (Flanagan [2018] 2019, xi). In accepting the prize, Boochani claimed it is “a victory for human beings, for human dignity. A victory against a system that has never recognized us as human beings. It is a victory against a system that has reduced us to numbers” (Boochani 2019).

Canada

As a point of entry, it can be noted that Canada has a history of turning back ships as a result of its explicitly racist immigration policy. These include the Komagata Maru, containing persecuted migrants from India, held at shore for over two months in 1914 before being forced to return, with many passengers dying or being imprisoned, and the MS St. Louis, containing Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in 1939, many of whom perished in death camps after their return to Europe (see Bakan’s chapter). However, as with Australia, there is nothing inevitable about how those arriving by boat (or at the border) are received, even by the same governmental administration. Hence, for example, in 1986, the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney welcomed a boatload of 155 Tamil refugees seeking entry into Canada (Anandasangaree 2016), but less than a year later, when a boat of 177 Sikhs arrived, the same government responded with an emergency recall of parliament and introduced Bill C-84, the Refugee Deterrents and Detention Bill.

From this period, appearing in the initial legislation was a provision to designate the United States as a “safe third country” in relation to asylum claimants arriving from or via the United States to Canada, although it ultimately did not get enacted (Bissett 2002, 36). However, both Liberal and Conservative governments favoured this plan, and thus after September 11, 2001, in the context of working out a “Smart Border Plan” to foster the continued flow of people and trade across the US-Canada border, Canadian officials were the ones to push for a provision relating to refugees (DeVoretz and Hanson 2003, 2). The resulting 2004 Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), enacted under the Liberal government of Paul Martin, holds that an asylum seeker must make their claim in the country where they first arrive (i.e., Canada or the United States). The agreement applies to land ports of entry only, with certain specified exceptions (e.g., relating to a family member being present in the state where the claim is made or being an unaccompanied minor). Immediately and for many years thereafter, the STCA had the predicted effect of reducing the number of asylum claims in Canada in a way that was hard for the media or civil society groups to trace (Canadian Council for Refugees 2005; Alboim and Cohl 2012, 30).

This effect was predictable, since claims in the United States from asylum seekers arriving from Canada were negligible. For instance, in 2001, there were 13,497 claimants who arrived from or through the United States to Canada, in comparison with only a few hundred who came from Canada to make claims in the United States (DeVoretz and Hanson 2003, 4). Despite early attempts by the Canadian Council for Refugees, Amnesty International, and the Canadian Council of Churches to legally challenge the STCA on grounds that it violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms by potentially denying refugees the right to make a claim in Canada, their case was not successful (Canadian Council for Refugees 2009). However, this agreement and a new legal challenge would come into sharp focus following the inauguration of US president Donald Trump in 2017, in the process highlighting the contradictions in the policy of the government of Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau, one of the most publicly humanitarian and “pro-refugee” governments Canada has had (see also Ayres’s chapter).

When Trudeau came to power in a surprise victory in 2015, he did so with a promise to immediately bring in twenty-five thousand Syrian refugees, a pledge aimed at countering the hostile and sluggish response of the reigning Conservative government of Prime Minister Harper specific to Syrian refugees. Recalling how Australia attempted to ban personalizing or humanizing images of refugees during the Tampa crisis helps us better understand the impact of the photo of Alan Kurdi that went viral. The image captured Kurdi, a lifeless three-year-old Syrian refugee, after he had drowned while trying to reach the Greek island of Kos. The image was called a “silent scream” by the journalist who had taken it (Virtue 2015). But the fact that Kurdi had a Canadian aunt who had been unable to bring Kurdi and his family to Canada made it a Canadian moral issue (Macklin 2015). This image literally impacted the Canadian media coverage of Syrian refugees in ways that made much more direct and explicit links between Syrian refugees alongside Canada and Canadians (Wallace 2018), and it also impacted the 2015 election in ways that were humanizing of Syrian refugees. Not only did it allow Trudeau to seize the popular imagination with his promise of bringing in twenty-five thousand Syrian refugees, but it created divisions in the Conservative Party, with people as high profile as former foreign minister in the Mulroney cabinet Barbara McDougall chastising the then prime minister Harper for his stance on Syrian refugees in an op-ed in a leading paper. In McDougall’s words,

He [Harper] surely does not want to go into history, whenever that may be, with the heartrending picture of a tragically drowned toddler at the top of his file. And it may well dominate, no matter what his accomplishments in government have been, unless he can find a way to navigate the flood of sympathy now rightly being expressed by Canadians from all walks of life, including many Conservatives. (McDougall 2015; my emphasis)

The Canadian party system and, in particular, the two mainline parties, the Liberals and Conservatives, have not thus far been impacted by a politicization of refugees that makes immigration policy restriction the main thing parties compete for. In fact, since Trudeau came to power, he made good on his 2015 campaign promise of bringing in Syrian refugees. In the process, he reactivated many civil society groups to support refugees through private sponsorship—a program first pioneered and developed by Canada involving the Canadian public along with various levels of government in supporting Indochinese refugees in the late 1970s (Molloy et al. 2017, 3–4). Overall, immigration levels have been higher, although like Australia, there is a solid preference for skilled immigrants (Harris, Hall, and Zimonjic 2017; Abu-Laban, Tungohan, and Gabriel 2023). Trudeau has also been colourful in his humanitarianism, with photo ops greeting Syrian refugees at the airport and tweets pronouncing Canada’s openness to refugees. For example, when newly inaugurated President Trump announced the travel ban on select Muslim-majority states in January 2017, Prime Minister Trudeau tweeted, “To those fleeing persecution, terror and war, Canadians will welcome you regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength” (Paling 2017).

At the same time, the Trudeau government clearly does not want to deal with refugee claimants showing up at the border, and the policies across successive governments since the 1980s have been geared at limiting this, culminating with the 2004 STCA. However, the gaps in the STCA became more visible early in Trump’s presidency, when he threatened the withdrawal of protective measures extended to specific groups (ultimately rescinded in November 2017 for Haitians and January 2018 for Salvadorans). This led to a new surge of refugee claimants attempting perilous journeys from the United States to Canada, entering through unofficial points (Bilefsky 2018). Trudeau’s then minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship, Ahmed Hussen, made it clear that these asylum claimants were not wanted, stating, “We don’t want people to illegally enter our border, and doing so is not a free ticket to Canada. We are saying, ‘You will be apprehended, screened, detained, fingerprinted, and if you can’t establish a genuine claim, you will be denied refugee protection and removed’” (cited in Bilefsky 2018).

In December 2017, the Canadian Council for Refugees, the Canadian Council of Churches, and Amnesty International Canada announced that they would once again challenge the designation of the United States as a “safe third country” in the Federal Court, especially in light of Trump’s policies (Canadian Council for Refugees 2017). In July 2020, the Federal Court ruled the STCA to be unconstitutional (and in violation of Section 7 on life, liberty, and security of the person) on the grounds that asylum claimants returned to the United States were very likely to be put in detention; however, the federal government appealed (Public Safety Canada 2020), achieving success on procedural grounds. That the decision was appealed is reflective of the contradictions involved in public humanitarianism underpinned by a settler-colonial sovereignty impulse aimed at control. The matter came before the Supreme Court of Canada in 2022.

That the Trudeau government used the border closure inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic to announce that asylum seekers entering at unofficial points of entry via the United States would be put in detention for fourteen days and then sent back to the United States or returned immediately to the United States is reflective of and related to this same impulse to control—one that has been criticized as a reversal that risks Canada not meeting its obligations under the UN Convention on Refugees and Protocol (see Ling 2020).

United States

Like Canada, the US impulse for immigration control has also been exerted in different periods. In terms of headline-grabbing attention in the two-party system of Republicans and Democrats, both parties have fixated more on the issue of undocumented immigration from Mexico than refugees per se, with the period preceding the passage of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act marking one such period (Zolberg 1990) and with many more to follow, including the growing use of deportation by the Obama administration (Golash-Boza 2017). It is in the context of the focus on undocumented immigration that Trump’s campaign kickoff speech in June 2015 needs to be situated. As Trump put the issue, “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall” (cited in Anderson 2017). In actual fact, while the wall has been a graphic and striking image suggestive of unchecked migration across America’s southern border, contemporary figures show Mexicans only compose 26 percent of all US immigrants (down from 30 percent in 2000), and further, the emigration rate from Mexico has been fairly steadily low since the recession of 2009 (Zong, Batalova, and Hallock 2018, 8–9). Moreover, apprehension rates of unauthorized immigrants at the border were lower in 2015–16 than in the late 2000s, with Mexican nationals constituting about half (Zong, Batalova, and Hallock 2018, 21–22).

However, Trump’s kickoff speech is a good point of entry into a distinct “post-truth” immigration politics. Trump’s discourse was different in qualitative terms due to the repetitive nature of dehumanizing language in relation to immigrants and refugees as well as for ushering in a more radical shift in both refugee and immigration policy. These features make the contemporary US case stand out in relation to Australia and Canada as well as the Trump presidency stand out in relation to past US administrations. For example, on language, it is notable that Trump by far exceeds all presidential candidates in both the Democratic and the Republican Parties across the 2008, 2012, and 2016 elections for the sheer frequency with which he employed dehumanizing language in speeches on immigrants and refugees (Warnock 2019, 55). In terms of content, his speeches focused on refugees as a threat and included the dehumanizing injection of words like pouring, flowing, and infiltrating to illustrate their migration journey (Warnock 2019, 56).

In substantive terms, Trump also did a lot within the first days and year of his presidency. Analysts Pierce, Bolter, and Selee (2018) suggest that the August 2016 campaign speech given by Trump contains clues into ten key planks of his immigration policy. These are the following: (1) building the (southern) border wall; (2) ending so-called catch-and-release policies and practices allowing some unaccompanied minors and asylum seekers to be in the community as they await claims determination; (3) pursuing unauthorized immigrants who have committed crimes; (4) forcing compliance at local levels, especially vis-à-vis sanctuary cities; (5) ending the protection of some unauthorized immigration, especially ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents introduced by President Obama; (6) introducing a travel ban and extreme vetting; (7) making other countries take back deported nationals; (8) enhancing surveillance through a biometric entry-exit visa system; (9) limiting jobs and benefits to unauthorized immigrants and supporting the hiring of Americans; and (10) reforming the legal immigration system to emphasize “merit” (Pierce, Bolter, and Selee 2018).

These planks may be further summarized as border security, interior enforcement, and a merit-based system, with Canada’s point system of selection favouring skilled migration being a model for determining merit (Dogherty 2018). Each one of these areas has carried consequences. For example, as Human Rights Watch drew attention to, while deportations at the southern border were down, at the interior of the country, immigration arrests and deportations of people who had never committed a crime tripled in the year 2017, when Trump came to office (Human Rights Watch 2017, 14), although ultimately, Trump’s attempted cancellation of DACA, which protects nearly one million unauthorized young immigrants from deportation, was rejected by the US Supreme Court in June 2020. In the area of refugee intake, the impact of the Trump presidency has been decisive in creating massive reductions. In his first year of office, Trump reduced refugee intake by 50 percent and limited those coming from Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen (Zong, Batalova, and Hallock 2018). By the end of 2018, in a period of escalating global numbers of refugees, the United States had actually fallen behind Canada (with a population ten times smaller) in formal acceptances of refugees to be resettled and, under Trump, dramatically lowered the ceiling for refugee admissions to a record low for 2019 of 30,000 (in comparison with the 110,000 set by Obama for 2017; Blizzard and Batalova 2019).

A final point that can be made is that all these changes were accompanied by an “in-your-face” anti-humanitarianism during Trump’s presidency. Everything from the decision of First Lady Melania Trump to wear clothing literally proclaiming she did not care en route to visit undocumented detained children separated from parents (Gambino and Laughland 2018) to Trump claiming that undocumented immigrants are “animals” (Korte and Gomez 2018) is a distinct form of the new mean-spirited politics of immigration (Dauvergne 2016). This is not about banning personalized or humanized stories but about overriding them with indifference. This has left it to courts, local-level leaders proclaiming “sanctuary cities,” elected officials at all levels (particularly in the Democratic Party), civil society groups, and even leaders outside of the United States (such as Trudeau on occasion) to counter the dehumanizing rhetoric and impact of Trump on immigration.

Reflections on Dehumanization and Humanization

As this chapter has suggested, there are similarities among the three settler-colonial liberal democracies when it comes to their historical formation, their immigration histories, and their clear preference for the migration of “skilled” immigrants today. However, the extent to which leaders are employing humanizing versus dehumanizing discourse varies considerably, as does their overall impact on immigration policy as well as refugees. As this chapter has pointed out, there was both something distinct in the embrace of the US Trump administration for dehumanizing rhetoric and equally something distinct in the Trudeau administration for its humanizing language and performative embrace of refugees (albeit advanced in ways that are not always reflected in policy responses at the Canada-US border). Therefore, it underscores that there are language choices that implicate refugees and that choices that are dehumanizing may be linked to policies that exhibit greater restriction. Indeed, with the inauguration of Democrat president Joseph Biden in January 2021, changes in language and policy are already in evidence. In May 2021, Biden revised the refugee cap from its historic low of 15,000 to 62,500 for the fiscal year and also committed to a goal of 125,000 refugee admissions in the following fiscal year (Biden 2021). In Biden’s words, “The United States Refugee Admissions Program embodies America’s commitment to protect the most vulnerable, and to stand as a beacon of liberty and refuge to the world. It’s a statement about who we are, and who we want to be” (Biden 2021). Likewise, in 2022, refugee advocates were encouraged by the willingness of Australia’s newly elected majority Labour government led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to consider alternatives to detaining refugees (Karp 2022). However, Albanese has, rather paradoxically, pledged to be “strong on borders without being weak on humanity” by refusing permanent residence to those arriving by boat (quoted in Senanayake, Geeth, and Doherty 2022).

This discussion on the settler-colonial liberal democracies would be remiss without also stressing that the bulk of the world’s refugees are from and located in the Global South. The Global Compact on Refugees agreed to in December 2018 by the UN General Assembly offers some hope that adequate responses to refugees can be done more predictably and equitably. There has been criticism of the compact for its non-binding character, lack of commitment to more resettlement on the part of northern states, and silence on the external forms of state intervention that create refugees (Chimni 2018). What might also be noted is that the three settler-colonial liberal democracies investigated in this chapter also responded to the Global Compact on Refugees differently. Hence while Canada played a lead role in developing the Global Compact on Refugees and agreed to it along with Australia, the United States, under Trump, quit the negotiations and refused to sign the compact because they saw it as interfering with American sovereignty. As a consequence, Trump’s position in relation to multilateral agreements between states and in relation to basic human rights norms is one that is really standing as a new frontier to contemplate the question of humanizing refugees and raises both legal and ethical issues.

On a legal level, an alternative vision might come from revisiting the important 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which supports the idea that people can leave their country (i.e., the country where they hold nationality) but do not have a right to enter or stay in a different country. As Pierre Sané (2007, ix) has argued, “From a human rights point of view, we are faced with an incomplete situation that sees many people being deprived of their right to emigrate by an absence of possibilities to immigrate. It is therefore worth envisaging a right to mobility: in a world of flows mobility is a right to which everyone should have access.”

The experience of refugees demonstrates that even with provisions specific to the rights of refugees, there continues to be a tension between sovereignty and human rights. In a world of nation-states that police borders and determine belonging and membership, ethical responses are ones in which refugees and their allies can all play a part in advancing through shared stories that challenge dehumanizing falsehoods and foster empathy and agential action. Part of that agency is also reflected in the words leaders (and people) choose to use in talking about refugees because what is said seems to be connected with what is done.

Acknowledgement

My thanks to co-editor Reza Hasmath as well as Ayelet Shachar and other colleagues in CIFAR’s Boundaries, Membership and Belonging Program for comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

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