Norris McDonald | Poverty, wars, refugees and Boris Johnson’s shameful Rwanda plan

Migrants deserve fair and equal treatment, whether they are Black, White or Coloured, but that is not what British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has cooked up. He has devised what his critics have called “a callous, inhumane plan” to deport Black migrants to Rwanda, even as Great Britain welcomes White Ukrainian refugees.

Many of the Black migrants’ lives were disrupted by wars of which the UK, America, and their other Western partners were active participants.

The Syrian conflict was “by far the biggest driver of migration,” the BBC says, along with “the Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libyan wars”.

WARS, POVERTY AND REFUGEE CRISIS

Driven by desperation, over 18,000 migrants, mostly Black Africans, have died since 2014 as they risked their lives to cross the stormy waters of the Mediterranean Sea.

These victims, quite sadly, were desperately seeking to escape turmoil in their homelands.

“The majority of the deaths – some 65 per cent – occurred in the Central Mediterranean, as people attempted to reach Italy or Malta from Libya,” the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) noted.

The push factors – wars, political conflict, poverty, and a general decline in people’s standard of living. And the mystic lure is the expectation that a better way of life awaits them in Europe.

Extreme poverty in several North African countries has worsened in the last few years; the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic created additional stress. And now there are rising food prices, increased hardship and hunger that are a blowback from the Russia-Ukraine war.

It is a grim picture of rising hunger and increased economic misery that is facing the poorer classes of people worldwide.

The United Nations estimates that there are nearly 900 million extremely poor people worldwide who live in slums, lack access to adequate water, sanitation, and adequate housing.

With things changing for the worse, given the COVID-19 economic downturn and now rapidly rising costs, we can expect an even grimmer picture of worsening human suffering globally.

BORIS JOHNSON’S DEPORTATION PLAN

The many African people who have risked their lives to cross the Mediterranean have earned the wrath of Boris Johnson.

“Anyone entering the UK illegally will now be relocated to Rwanda,” Boris Johnson reportedly said.

He has cooked up a truly diabolical plan to solve this irritancy of “unwelcomed Black North African migrant boat-people”.

Boris Johnson’s government has cut “a shameful, disgraceful, inhumane deal,” some critics say, to pay Rwanda US$160 million to take and keep these unwelcomed Black migrants “to Rwanda for processing”.

This Great Britain ‘catch-and-deport-to-Rwanda’ refugee plan is typical British snobbery and hypocrisy at work.

Clearly, it’s a way for the UK to run away from the mess they helped to create in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and other areas where the first wave of immigrants came from.

Boris Johnson’s critics have compared his deportation plan to the Windrush debacle.

Caribbean immigrants who went to rebuild Great Britain were denied their rights, and some were deported or prevented from re-entering when they left. This move was against the judgement of British civil servants in the Home Office, as is the case with Johnson’s current plan.

The British press is reporting that several government workers are in an extremely rebellious mood against the Johnson government.

The emergence of the refugee/immigration crisis – as a political, economic and social phenomenon, over the last 20 years or so – is directly connected to the imperialist American/NATO-led wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, and the civil war in Sudan.

There is no escaping this fact.

IMMIGRANTS BOOST ECONOMIC GROWTH

Meanwhile, immigrant labour has been a boon to the UK and European economies.

Political economists say that after being absorbed into the shrinking white European labour force, between 2012 and 2016, African migrant labour sent an estimated US$60 billion to their homelands.

Migrant labourers, irrespective of how they come, perform necessary services. Many were highly skilled in their homeland and therefore helped to increase the knowledge potential of the societies that absorbed their skills. These factors, among other things, help to boost the productiveness of these recipient societies, since immigrants, as a part of the labour force, increase spending power and brain power.

Germany, for example, as the economic engine of Europe, has had perpetual labour shortage. It is now estimated that their economy needs to absorb 400,000 skilled workers to keep growing.

Migrant labour creates a win-win situation, as we can see.

And it is the same everywhere, even in America, where many studies have shown the tremendously positive impact immigrants have had on boosting economic growth.

MALEVOLENT POLITICIANS

No doubt, the onset of COVID-19 added to the stressful situation created by wars and poverty.

The global threat of rising hunger, caused by food shortages, triggered general rise in prices throughout the entire sphere of the capitalist world economy.

This truly is a general crisis of international capitalism, with the more malevolent politicians cooking up the most diabolical schemes to save their callous political skin.

Paul Kagame is the president of Rwanda, the country with whom Great Britain cooked up the deportation deal. He is a military strongman who is close to America and the other Western countries.

President Kagame came to power in 2000, with British and American Western support a few years after the 1994 horrendous Rwandan massacre.

Is Kagame’s acceptance of the British deportation plan, the UK’s way of calling in political debts, helping his raise to power? One may never know. But the West has a way of using and discarding political leaders they put in power.

Mobutu Sese Seko, Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega are a few examples of Western imperialist back-stabbing and skulduggery.

Either way we take it, this is extremely shameful for Great Britain to run away from giving fair and equal treatment to migrants, whether they are Black, White, or Coloured.

And Rwanda should have never supported this Boris Johnson-UK deportation plan!

That is just the ‘bitta’ truth!

Norris McDonald is an economic journalist, political analyst, and respiratory therapist. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and miaminorris@yahoo.com.