Héctor Schamis: Remigration and deportation

Some examples. On the night of July 14, 2016, a nineteen-ton truck was driven into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, killing 86 people and injuring 434 others. The State Islamic claimed responsibility for the attack. In December 2016, a truck was driven into a Christmas market on Breitscheidplatz in Berlin, leaving twelve dead and 56 injured. ISIS claimed responsibility for the incident. In April 2017, a truck plowed into pedestrians along a shopping street in central Stockholm, crashing into a store. Five people were killed and 14 others were injured. The attacker, an Uzbek immigrant, later sentenced to life in prison, had shown sympathies for ISIS. Four months later, jihadism used the same method to murder fifteen people on Las Ramblas in Barcelona. There exists, then, a certain pattern of terrorist actions: running over innocent people for participating in religious or civic festivals or for the very Western custom of shopping along pedestrian promenades. This coincides with the attack this Christmas.

In response, neo-Nazis and far-right activists gathered in Magdeburg the next day to demand the “liberation of the German people” and the “remigration” of foreigners. Precisely the platform – and the language – of the AfD, precisely when Germany enters an electoral period due to the dissolution of the Scholz government and the early elections on February 23. AfD is today a minority party, but terrorism multiplies the unknowns of every electoral equation.

The recent episode of Magdeburg, and this German election that all of Europe views with natural concern, once again underline the fiasco of identity-based multiculturalism of our time. Multiculturalism is possible, of course; Every complex society is diverse in its ethnic, religious and linguistic dimensions. The secret is constitutionalism, the great homogenizer of differences that builds a comprehensive citizenship and with it a “national being.” Celebrating “the difference” is a boomerang if it creates a regime of parallel citizenships organized on cultural subjectivities to which discursive legitimacy is granted, but not necessarily constitutional legality. This violates the regulatory order that structures the State and gives consistency to the social fabric, starting with its cornerstone: equality before the law.

This is how multiculturalism works today, especially in relation to Muslim communities. Well, this is a blatant double standard. For the most part, these communities emigrated from oppressive systems in societies organized under the paradigm of Islam. Once in Europe, they enjoy the rights and guarantees granted to them by a constitutional State while restricting others from exercising those same rights; be those others infidels, gays or blasphemers. And, furthermore, they do it with violence. In the West we are all a kind of ‘Charlie Hebdo’ and Salman Rushdie; that is, potential targets.

The term “remigration” is not part of the political lexicon on the other side of the Atlantic, but its analogue “deportation” is, which has been central in last November’s election and in the face of a new Trump presidency. A good part of his election campaign was organized around the idea of ​​strengthening borders; that is, restrict and reverse immigration, mainly from the south. Hence, its good results in Latino and working-class districts caused surprise. Initial surprise, of course. More detailed analyzes revealed that when going to the polls voters valued inflation (disproportionately high in food and gasoline, the items that most affect the economy of working families), but also crime and insecurity that has them as the main victims. . Unlike Europe, the rejection of irregular immigration is not due to intransigence against multiculturalism, but rather due to the need for better state protection; that is, greater rule of law.

A good part of the migratory flows without state control have been promoted by organized crime in the hemisphere, especially acting in collusion with governments hostile to the United States such as the Maduro regime. True integrated and diversified criminal conglomerates, they transform into parastatal agents, subcontractors of the foreign policy of dictatorships. Crime expels the most humble from their countries and then traffics them through the Darién heading north, just as it traffics cocaine, gold or coltan. The caravans that go in that direction today, just as in the past they headed south, are permeated by elements of organized crime, who are confused with genuine migrants on said journey, as well as with the Latino population once in the United States. Hence the suspicion of migration between these communities, since they are especially vulnerable to the insecurity that entails. This is palpable in the case of the Tren de Aragua, an organization that operates throughout the continent. In February 2024, he kidnapped and murdered Lieutenant Colonel Ronald Ojeda, a Venezuelan officer asylum in Chile, in an operation carried out on behalf of the Maduro dictatorship. But it was also present in the US with actions in Colorado, New York and Texas, among other states. This has alerted the authorities; It is no longer so much about jobs as it is about national security.

It is not progressive to create fragmented citizenships that erode the constitutional principles of the State, as in Europe. Nor is it xenophobia to control the borders of the State, as Trump proposes, regulating migratory flows in a rational manner. Ideology has its place in the discursive sphere, but it is inadvisable when it informs the design of public policies that make up the legal order. Ideology is problematic when it interferes with the task of governing. Biden also understood it that way. In fact, in 2024 deportations by the immigration service reached the highest record since 2014, then under Obama. In other words, both of them “remigrated” more foreigners than Trump, considered racist by a good number of voices in the Democratic Party. This is about ideology and its frequent clashes with reality.