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Utilising reactionary anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine rallies in Melbourne organised this week, police forces have unveiled an array of new weapons and equipment. This includes pepper ball firearms that shoot hard pellets the size of marbles, stinger grenades, and paramilitary-style vehicles and body armour.

As the World Socialist Web Site has previously outlined, the anti-vax protests have no legitimacy whatsoever. A small layer of construction workers appear to have been involved in one of the rallies on Tuesday outside the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) office (see Australian anti-vaccine, extreme right demonstrators target construction industry). Numbers of reports, however, point to the predominantly petty bourgeois layers involved in the other events, including small business owners and contractors.

Politically, the rallies are dominated and led by extreme right-wing libertarian and outright fascist individuals and organisations. Some of the administrators of Telegram accounts promoting and organising the protests have previously been exposed as admirers of Adolf Hitler. Supporters of the fascistic Proud Boys and the now defunct United Patriots Front have been involved in the rallies.

The police are exploiting widespread hostility towards the protests and their homicidal calls for an immediate end to lockdown measures as the pretext for trialling new weaponry and a massive state mobilisation.

Senior police previously expressed concern over how the population would respond to the use of new, so-called non-lethal weaponry.

In 2018, police put on a display of their enhanced firepower for selected journalists. The weapons included VKS Pepper Ball firearms, capable of firing blunt force pellets or dye markers to brand people for later arrest, baton round launchers capable of firing larger rubber or plastic bullets, stinger grenades that release nine rubber projectiles, and sound/flash bombs that release noise, light and smoke. This was accompanied by new body armour and paramilitary-style police vehicles.

An Age journalist noted at the time, we have been given a sneak preview of gear that looks more like Star Wars than regulation police equipment.

Police Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton declared: It is an ugly look to see police in riot gear in a suburban street. It will be confronting to watch. We now have some equipment that has not been seen before that may alarm people.

The Melbourne Activist Legal Support noted that the new weapons posed severe dangers.

Pepper Ball pellets, the organisation reported, can blind, maim and leave permanent injuries depending where they hit the body, while the baton round launcher has resulted in significant injuries and fatalities around the world, [including last year] a 25-year-old protester [who] was killed by a rubber bullet in Paraguay. In addition: The flash/noise distraction grenades designed to shock and disperse crowds are routinely being used in Israel/Palestine and other conflict zones and have maimed children, can burst ear drums and generate dangerous fear and panic in crowds.

For three years, this equipment has gone unused. Now, however, the anti-vaxxer rallies have provided the police with the hoped-for pretext.

The real target of the repressive build-up is not the extreme rightmany of the fascists enjoy close relations with sections of sympathising policebut the working class.

The state Labor governments bolstering of police powers and weaponry has always been driven by the fear of social unrest and working class and youth protest, fuelled by escalating social inequality and attacks on living standards and democratic rights. Labor Premier Daniel Andrews has boasted of his law and order credentials. In 2016, his state government committed an unprecedented $2 billion in additional spending to expand the police by 20 percent, with 3,100 more officers employed. The government has since boasted that its annual police spending is 35 percent higher than its Liberal predecessor.

The police operations against the anti-vax events represent a warning as to how the state is preparing to respond to a genuine movement of the working class in defence of its independent interests.

Numerous acts of police violence were recorded by witnesses and uploaded to social media. This included the gratuitous use of pepper spray on already restrained people, indiscriminate firing of plastic pellets, and one incident in which a person speaking with officers at Flinders train station was grabbed from behind by another cop without warning and body and head slammed into the concrete floor.

In another incident, a passer-by who was not involved in the right-wing protests recorded three masked men wearing khaki-coloured armour emerge from an unmarked car and aggressively force a person to the ground. These were members of the Special Operations Group police branch, an elite unit usually reserved for counter-terrorist responses and incidents involving firearms or explosives.

The confrontation recalled the police-state operations coordinated by US President Donald Trump in the final weeks of his presidency, including having unidentified police in Portland hauling protestors into unmarked vans for interrogation.

In another precedent-setting move, on Wednesday the police had the Civil Aviation Safety Authority declare central Melbourne a no-fly zone. This aimed at preventing the broadcast of aerial footage of the anti-vax rallies. Police later permitted overhead media coverage, but insisted that video broadcasts from helicopters be delayed by at least an hour so that live police operations were not visible to protestors. The ban on live overhead coverage was subsequently overturned by the Federal Court.

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Australian police exploit extreme right-wing, anti-vax rallies to deploy new repressive weaponry - WSWS

The Supreme Court Building in Washington D.C., August 5, 2021(Brent Buterbaugh/National Review)

If youre like me, you will have enjoyed reading the legal commentary thats been published ahead of the Supreme Courts oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization on December 1. At issue in the case is Mississippis 2018 Gestational Age Act, which prohibits abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for medical emergencies and severe fetal abnormality. The scholarship on the issue both in formal amicus briefs and in longer-form essays has been richly educational. That so many constitutional-law professors, advocacy groups, and nonprofits have decided to submit their thoughts for consideration isnt surprising, given that this is perhaps the most consequential case the Court has decided to take up in decades. Mississippis law although modest and broadly popular is self-evidently incompatible with the Courts prior rulings, and therefore threatens the abortion regime thats been constructed over the past half century.

I was surprised, then, when I learned that the Cato Institute the prominent libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C., which boasts a center dedicated to the study of constitutional law has decided not to file with the Court in this case. Surprise quickly turned to confusion when I read Ilya Shapiro, the centers director, on its justification for not doing so.

Cato hasnt and wont be filing in Dobbs, as we havent in any abortion case, for three reasons: (1) libertarians in good standing span the gamut from the staunchest pro-choice to the staunchest pro-life, (2) we have nothing unique to add about what an undue burden is or how it may apply to any particular abortion regulation, and (3) while Cato lawyers may each have our own views on when rights attach see point 1 this is fundamentally a philosophical, theological, and thus ultimately political question, not a legal one.

Lets consider each reason in turn.

First, Ill take Shapiros word for it that libertarians, both at Cato and elsewhere, hold a range of views on abortion. Yet maintaining a wide range of opinions on abortion does not preclude Cato or any of its fellows from opposing Roe and Casey, which they ought to do on constitutional principle alone. Indeed, any pro-choice libertarian in good standing should advocate exactly this position. More on this below.

Next is the admission that they dont have anything unique to add about what constitutes an undue burden the standard established in Planned Parenthood v. Casey for determining whether a state restriction on abortion pre-viability is legitimate. As a constitutional matter, this is fair enough. The undue-burden standard has been sufficiently, even exhaustively, examined. Take, for example, a brilliant new essay from Mary Ann Glendon and O. Carter Snead in National Affairs. In making the case for overturning Roe and Casey, they note that the standard has been an exceedingly vague concept since its creation. The new standard, they write,

doubled down on Roes freewheeling derivation of a constitutional right based on the justices own normative balancing of competing interests: a womans interest in being free to make intimate, personal, and self-defining reproductive choices on the one hand, versus the states interests in defending the unborn, preserving the integrity of the medical profession, and promoting the respect for life more generally, on the other.

It failed, yet again, to ground the Courts abortion jurisprudence in the Constitution. As it so happens, made-up rules tend to beget more made-up rules.

Consider, too, this brief description from Chief Justice John Roberts, on the sort of balancing act that Casey demanded: There is no plausible sense in which anyone, let alone this Court, could objectively assign weight to such imponderable values and no meaningful way to compare them if there were.

So, in short, yes: Casey is well-trodden ground. To posit this as a justification for not filing in this case, however, is unpersuasive. One could write about any number of things unrelated to the undue-burden standard and, indeed, the majority of those filed in support of the state of Mississippi have done just that. But beyond this, the case itself hardly turns on whether the states law constitutes an undue burden prior to viability. Its ban with minimal exceptions at 15 weeks pretty obviously amounts to one. Mississippi does not even argue otherwise; it knows its law violates the Supreme Courtmade standard. Instead, the state put forth a wholesale stare decisis argument against Roe and Casey.

Last is the contention that rights-attachment that is, when the fetus retains the rights attendant to personhood is a philosophical, theological, and political question. Here, too, Shapiro is generally correct. (Some noteworthy conservatives such as Robert P. George and John M. Finnis disagree, advancing the notion that unborn children are constitutional persons entitled to equal protection pursuant to the 14th Amendment; in other words, it is fundamentally a legal question.)

But to maintain that this is expressly political as Cato says that it does is to have sufficient cause to support Mississippis case. That the question of when rights attach is a political matter, without any inferable language in the Constitution, supports the Courts doing away with its precedent that treats it as a constitutional matter, thereby kicking deliberation back to the states, where it belongs. Shapiros comment then is indeed a justification just not in the direction that he imagines it to run.

Finally, some also may suggest that to overturn such precedents would be dangerously political. But the opposite is true: Roe itself was the original political sin, and the Courts removing itself from that sphere would be entirely apolitical. As has been discussed in these pages and elsewhere the Courts abortion jurisprudence has no legitimate grounding in the Constitution. Roe, in the words of pro-choice legal scholar John Hart Ely, was not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be. Its hardly political, then, for the Court to correct a serious mistake that has caused significant negative jurisprudential and real-world consequences. To do so, in fact, would arguably enhance its legitimacy and restore its proper place in our constitutional order.

The opportunity before the justices is grand. So, too, is the one before the Cato Institute. Its unfortunate that Cato has chosen to sit it out and doubly so, that this is its reasoning for doing so. The Court must fight the temptation to do likewise.

Originally posted here:
Cato and the Court - National Review

Jessica Vaughan| For the Headlight

After the alarming surge of 15,000 illegal border crossers fording the Rio Grande into Del Rio, Texas in just a few days, the Biden administration has finally cried uncle and begun to enforce our border laws. It is an important admission that, on top of the Afghanistan fiasco, Bidens open border approach is undermining public confidence in his leadership, to put it mildly, and potentially endangering the Democrats larger agenda.

Andshock of all shocksthe enforcement is working to slow the flow.

First, the Texas State Police, later joined by Border Patrol agents on horseback, showed up to blocked off the main entry points from the river. Then, the feds began bussing the migrants to other sites for faster processing and, even more noteworthy, began deportation flights to Haiti and Central America.

According to my colleague Todd Bensman, who has been reporting from the bus station in the Mexican city of Acuna, across from Del Rio, large numbers of Haitians are giving up and turning around. Having lived and worked in South America for the last several years, the last thing they want is to be sent back to Haiti. Clearly, barriers reinforced by consequences for illegal entry work much better than a show of addressing the root causes of migration through foreign aid.

It remains to be seen how long the migrants will be deterred. Reportedly, it is mainly single adults who are being sent home, and those who brought children along still are being allowed to enter, as has been the Biden policy all along. This has brought record numbers of illegal crossers; more than 200,000 were apprehended in both July and August, on pace for a total of about 1.5 million by the end of the fiscal year. About half of the migrants have been allowed to enter pending a court date long in the future, and another half-million so-called gotaways (mostly criminals and prior deportees) are estimated to have successfully evaded arrest.

Judging by the settlement patterns of arriving minors as reported by the Department of Health and Human Services, so far they have clustered in a handful of locations with more than one-fourth landing in just 11 counties: Harris, Dallas, and Travis Counties in Texas; Miami-Dade and Palm Beach Counties in Florida; Los Angeles County; Queens and Long Island, N.Y; Davidson County, Tenn.; Prince Georges County, Md.; and Mecklenburg County, N.C.

Most of the newly arrived Haitians likely will head for Florida, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.

Because the sudden restart of deportation flights is likely a temporary stopgap, state and local officials need to have a plan to deal with the influx. Texas and a few other states have taken the Biden administration to court to compel them to enforce federal laws. That is useful and necessary but has not yet made a difference in the policies, or in relieving the huge fiscal and security burden imposed on the states.

So far this year, an estimated 40,000 children who crossed the border illegally have settled in Texas alone. They will be enrolling in school, to the tune of about $10,000 per student, for a total cost to taxpayers of $400 million. Add to that the cost of emergency health care and other assistance, not to mention criminal justice costs for the MS-13 gang members sprinkled in, and this is a major unfunded mandate. In addition, according to one of my ICE sources, about 30 percent of the women arriving illegally will soon add a US-born child to the family.

State officials need not watch helplessly as the bills mount. They can use state authorities to attack the problem.

Dust off the state smuggling and trafficking laws, monitor the transportation routes, follow the illegal money trails, investigate and prosecute the identity theft necessary for employment, and go after those who hire illegal workers. Equally important, scrutinize the activities of NGOs that participate in re-locating illegal aliens and insist that they stay within the bounds of their business license and state law. South Carolina has prohibited child welfare agencies from contracting with the feds to resettle illegal unaccompanied minors. Oklahoma collects about $12 million each year with a tax on illegal residents who wire money overseas.

Eventually, Congress will have to act because, as Joe Biden has discovered, open borders are fiscally and politically unsustainable. Besides showing once again that barriers and deportations work to control illegal immigration, the Del Rio episode may have quelled the appetite of some Democrats to ram through a mass amnesty and expansion of legal immigration. What we really need, besides more enforcement, is a long period of more moderate immigration so we can more easily absorb the recent wave.

Jessica Vaughan is director of Policy Studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C., research institute. She wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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Your turn: Migrant crisis needs more action from states - The Deming Headlight

The US has made a distinction between Afghan refugees and the other vulnerable populations arriving at Americas doorstep. And its a false one.

Afghans fleeing Taliban rule have so far occupied a unique space in the immigration policy debate. In a climate where immigration has become a political wedge, there has been overwhelming bipartisan support for resettling at least some of them in the US: Polling has shown that 76 percent of Republicans and 90 percent of Democrats back resettlement efforts for Afghans who aided US troops. When it comes to other asylum seekers, the numbers are starkly different. For example, 64 percent of registered voters believe Biden needs to institute stricter policies at the southern border.

What makes Americans sympathetic to Afghan refugees compared to other people seeking protection? Some rightly feel a moral responsibility to protect those who were forced to leave their home due to their governments ill-conceived and failed nation-building efforts, especially those who worked alongside American forces.

But what may also be a factor is that the Afghan war was also the kind of faraway conflict typically associated with the sort of refugees the US has historically admitted, like Somalis fleeing ongoing civil war in their home country.

Complicating this idea, however, is the fact that the kind of persecution and peril Afghans face in their home country is markedly similar to that faced by asylum seekers arriving on the US-Mexico border. Those from Central Americas Northern Triangle Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala are fleeing brutal gang violence, extortion, and government corruption, which are compounded by poverty, lack of economic opportunity, and climate-related issues. The same is true of many other groups as well, like the thousands of Haitians gathered in Del Rio, Texas.

Though the US has not fought a 20-year war in the Northern Triangle or in Haiti, it has played a direct role in creating the societal ills people are running away from, meaning the moral obligation many feel America has toward Afghans ought to extend to migrants from those countries as well.

That, of course, hasnt been the case. Often invoking racist dog whistles, Republicans have falsely painted them as criminals who threaten public safety, carriers of disease, or economic migrants who want to skip the line of legal US immigration. Democrats have not necessarily been much better: The Obama administration detained migrant families on a large scale and told them dont come while the Biden administration has maintained Trump-era policies, effectively blocking all asylum seekers from gaining access to protection amid the pandemic despite claiming to take a more humane approach.

Afghan refugees deserve protection. But so do the other vulnerable populations arriving at Americas doorstep. The Afghan refugee crisis has clarified this in a way other recent mass migration movements have not, and it also presents a unique opportunity for the US to recalibrate its policy about who is worthy of American protection.

Some Americans whether they are veterans, Afghan Americans, or just witnesses to the USs longest war feel a personal connection to and ownership of the Afghanistan crisis that has motivated them to step up in refugees moment of need, even if they might not otherwise take a liberal stance on immigration issues.

Their support often extends beyond Afghans who worked alongside American troops in the US. Anecdotally, refugee advocates say they have seen people who didnt directly aid the US war effort including Afghan NGO workers, gender rights activists, and other at-risk minority groups receive a bipartisan welcoming.

Theres a debt many Americans understand and seem eager to repay, Krish OMara Vignarajah, president and CEO of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, said. They know the courage and generosity of Afghans who risked their lives to protect ours and that weighs on them. They feel a responsibility to meet our military maxim of leaving no one behind.

On top of that, the US hurried evacuation of Afghanistan played out on worldwide broadcasts, featuring searing images of people desperately clinging to a military plane mid-takeoff and parents who lifted their babies over the Kabul airport wall and into American soldiers arms. That helped put a face to the crisis and galvanize American public support.

But Americans dont feel the same ownership over the issues driving migrants to seek refuge at the southern border, as is their right under US and international law. Thats despite the fact that many of those migrants face real danger in their home countries, leaving them just as vulnerable and desperate to flee as Afghans.

Haitians are afraid to return home on account of a political crisis stemming from President Jovenel Moses July assassination, resultant gang violence, and the one-two punch of a 7.2-magnitude earthquake and a tropical storm that left about 2,200 dead and thousands more injured or missing. In their desperation, some of those who have been sent back on deportation flights have even tried to force their way aboard planes heading back to the US, believing there is nothing left for them in Haiti.

And the Northern Triangle countries have some of the highest rates of poverty and violent crime in the world. Migrants are commonly robbed, kidnapped for ransom, raped, tortured, and killed. Each country has rampant government corruption and high rates of violence against women and LGBTQ individuals and remains a hot spot for international criminal gang activity, some of which has roots in the US.

The pandemic-related economic downturn and a pair of hurricanes late last year that devastated Honduras and Guatemala have only exacerbated those more longstanding problems.

It may not be the Taliban going door to door in search of its enemies instead, its narco-traffickers and gang leaders, OMara Vignarajah said. We see repression that puts a target on anyone who dares to speak out against these corrupt governments.

Just as America bears responsibility for the crisis that Afghans are fleeing, it has also played a well-documented but often-overlooked role in creating the conditions that are driving people to make the journey to the US southern border.

The US economically knee-capped Haiti from its inception as a nation, with American banks managing and financing Haitis independence debt of 150 million francs to France, meant to compensate enslavers loss of income in exchange for Frances recognition of the former colonys independence. The US also occupied Haiti for 19 years, beginning in 1915, in order to preserve American commercial and political influence in the country, transferring its national financial reserves to the US and rewriting its constitution to allow foreigners to own land.

The US has continued to force its interests in the country in recent years. Then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton intervened in Haitis 2010 presidential election, handpicking former President Michel Martelly, who has been criticized for mismanaging millions in international disaster relief funds in the wake of that years devastating earthquake.

The US has a similar history of intervention in Central America. Dating back to Theodore Roosevelts assertion of the USs right to exercise international police power in Latin America, the US has stifled democratic movements, backed military coups, and enabled extractive economic policies in the region that have led to todays poverty, instability, and violence.

That approach extends to more recent history, as well. For example, the Reagan administration provided military assistance to El Salvadors authoritarian government amid a civil war that left more than 80,000 dead, most at the hands of Salvadoran military and death squads. It also supported two back-to-back military coups in Guatemala that resulted in the deaths of more than 150,000 civilians and a genocide against Indigenous people.

Later, the Bush administration pressured El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala over the objections of local unionists, farmers, and informal economy workers to enter a free trade agreement with the US that gave multinational corporations more power over domestic trade and regulations, leading to exploitative labor and wage practices.

And the Obama administration tacitly supported a military coup that ousted Hondurass democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya, paving the way for repressive dictator Juan Orlando Hernndez who has been named as a co-conspirator in his brothers drug crimes by US prosecutors and remains under investigation by the Department of Justice to take power.

Nevertheless, US border policy has continued to focus on turning away people fleeing those countries, and attempts to find solutions have been piecemeal.

President Joe Biden recently restarted the Central American Minors program, which allows children from countries in the Northern Triangle to reunite with their parents living in the US. He has also allowed more than 100,000 Haitians who arrived in the US before July 29, 2021, to apply for Temporary Protected Status, which is typically offered to citizens of countries suffering from natural disasters or armed conflict. Those people are able to live and work in the US free of fear of deportation.

But he has simultaneously sought to maintain pandemic-related border restrictions established by Trump under which more than a million migrants have been expelled. Biden is also restarting Trumps Remain in Mexico policy, which forced tens of thousands of migrants to wait in Mexico for their court hearings in the US. And he has resumed repatriation flights to Haiti despite conditions on the ground remaining precarious, sending people back without determining whether they are eligible for humanitarian protections in the US.

For refugee advocates, the discrepancy between the USs response to Afghan refugees and others seeking protection is difficult to parse.

Its hard to reconcile how one pro-democracy activist may be admitted and another is turned away, OMara Vignarajah said.

Many refugee advocates see the discrepancy in some Americans attitudes toward Afghan refugees and asylum seekers arriving at the southern border as the result of an education gap.

OMara Vignarajah said that she still gets questions about why a family would risk making the treacherous, 1,000-mile journey north from the Northern Triangle with a toddler. She has to explain that they feel its a better alternative to the certain death they would face if they stayed.

She said that she has even had conversations with members of Congress who, while being staunch advocates for Afghan refugees, describe asylum seekers at the southern border as illegals, even though those people are legally entitled to claim asylum.

Those kinds of comments are rooted in a misunderstanding of the kind of circumstances that asylum seekers are fleeing and that, in effect, they are looking for the same protection as refugees. Denise Bell, a researcher for refugee and migrant rights at Amnesty International, said that she boils down the distinction to where they ask for protection: For an asylum seeker, its on US soil; for a refugee, its abroad.

Bell said that its not so much that Americans are inherently opposed to offering protection to people arriving on the southern border. They just dont see them as a vulnerable population equivalent to refugees. The more Americans have experiences with refugees and asylum seekers, the more immigrant advocates can begin to close that education gap, Bell said.

On one hand, Biden has taken some steps to facilitate that contact. For instance, hes already pledged to raise the annual cap on refugee admissions from 62,500 to 125,000 starting in October (still short of the 200,000 that advocates and progressives in Congress have called for). He is also seeking to create a private refugee sponsorship program, which would allow private organizations and groups to financially support even more refugees for resettlement in the US.

But on the other hand, the Biden administration continues to deny migrants arriving on the border the opportunity to seek humanitarian protections to which they may be entitled.

The president has clung to pandemic-related border restrictions, known as the Title 42 policy, implemented by the Trump administration last year. Since March 2020, that policy has been used to rapidly expel more than a million migrants without hearings before an immigration judge. A federal judge partially blocked the policy, effective September 30, and the Biden administration has appealed that decision.

The administration is also preparing to detain migrants at facilities in Guantanamo Bay should there be a surge of migration at the southern border. (Though administration officials told NBC they had no intention of sending Haitians arriving at the border to the facilities, the administration is seeking to hire guards who speak Creole.)

Overall, Biden could do more to change Americans perceptions beginning by creating clarity around what constitutes a problem that merits asylum or refugee status and consistent standards for who can seek those statuses.

As things stand, it might be hard for Americans to recognize that migrants on the border are also worthy of protection for as long as Trump-era policies remain in place and Biden continues to implore them not to come.

But refugee advocates see the current crisis with Afghan refugees as an opportunity to inform a broader, more attentive audience.

This is the moment where, in the short-term, we help all the tens of thousands of Afghan refugees who will be arriving, she said. But this is also the moment to create a movement of welcome. This is about everybody. Right now we start here, but its about everybody.

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Afghan refugees and Haitians at the Texas border: Whos worthy of US protection? - Vox.com

When Angela Merkel steps down as chancellor once Germanys elections later this month produce a new government, the tributes will centre on her role as the figurehead of western liberalism; an island of stability, caution and openness in an era marked by turbulence and far-right reaction. She will be remembered for serious work, stable leadership and having a gift for political compromise, wrote Ishaan Tharoor in the Washington Post last week. When she faced off against Donald Trump after his inauguration in 2017, some newspapers dubbed her the new leader of the free world.

Fundamental to this image is the intervention she made in late summer 2015, at the height of Europes refugee crisis. Wir schaffen das well manage this was Merkels public statement as thousands of people, mainly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, were making their way through Turkey, Greece and the Balkans to western Europe. By declaring Germany and, by extension, Europe open to refugees, she was making a bold, pragmatic statement of intent.

Yet two contradictory myths have grown up around the wir schaffen das moment, both of which overstate the significance of her intervention and mischaracterise its effects. The populist right blames Merkel for prompting one of the largest mass migrations in the continents recent history, a catastrophic mistake, as Trump later put it, that would undermine Europes security and identity through an overwhelming foreign intrusion.

Liberals, meanwhile, treat it as a triumph. Merkels stance, in this telling, held true to the values that supposedly underpin the European project the EU, after all, is the only geopolitical bloc to have been awarded the Nobel peace prize and showed that a crisis could be met with compassion.

In truth, Merkels contribution to Europes politics of immigration went much further than wir schaffen das, and her legacy is far more mixed. As an investigation by Die Zeit has since shown, wir schaffen das did not, for the most part, encourage migration: it acknowledged a reality that already existed.

The refugee crisis had already been under way for several months by the summer of 2015, with people motivated to travel more by what was pushing them from their homes than the reception they expected in Europe. Syrians in 2015, for instance, were facing a worsening conflict, decreasing food rations from aid agencies, and employment bans in Lebanon and Turkey, where most Syrian refugees have settled. When Germany announced in early September 2015, a few days after Merkels speech, that it would keep its borders open to refugees who were heading westwards from the Keleti railway station in Budapest, people had been travelling for months already.

Whats more, Europes crisis the chaotic and deadly arrival of people not just through Greece but across the central Mediterranean from Africa was in large part a product of the continents own border policies, which had closed off safe routes to asylum and funnelled people into dangerous bottlenecks. Germany under Merkel, as the EUs most powerful member, played a key role in creating the problem. It helped maintain a system in which border security was given higher priority than refugee reception between 2007 and 2013, according to Amnesty International, the EU spent 2bn on the former, and only 700m on the latter. Likewise, Merkels insistence on punitive austerity as the solution to Europes earlier economic crisis fatally weakened the capacity of frontline states such as Greece to respond to greater numbers of refugees at a crucial moment.

Even the moment of openness that wir schaffen das expressed was short-lived, with Germany soon working to rebuild and strengthen Fortress Europe. By mid-September 2015, Germany had introduced temporary controls on its border with Austria, the beginning of a process that would eventually see migration routes through south-eastern Europe closed off. A few months later, Merkel was a leading proponent of the 2016 deal that effectively trapped many refugees in Turkey, while Germany has done nothing to challenge the EUs authoritarian turn that has made search and rescue in the Mediterranean almost impossible. Merkel may have been a bulwark against far-right domination of European politics, but the price was to absorb some of the far-rights agenda on border control.

Yet while Merkel did not radically alter the European course of the crisis, she shifted the tone of debate at a crucial moment. Fleeting as it was, this mattered. Its effects can be seen in the way German society accommodated the 1.7 million people who claimed asylum there between 2015 and 2019. Despite the dire predictions from the right, this has been an undoubted success: a survey published last year suggested that refugees who arrived in Germany between 2013 and 2016 were finding jobs more rapidly than in previous years. As the Guardian reported last year, another survey suggested that more than 80% of refugee children felt that they belonged in Germany and were welcome. The xenophobic backlash, playing on fears of crime or terrorism, is real, but it is something that can be and is being challenged.

Britains government makes an instructive comparison: even as it proclaims its generosity towards a small fraction of the people currently trying to flee Afghanistan (the official scheme promises to resettle 20,000 people over five years), this is drowned out by its authoritarian posturing. The latest of these, a promise to turn around migrant boats in the Channel, one of the worlds busiest shipping lanes, risks deadly consequences if it ever comes to pass. The response to recent Afghan arrivals sustained by a huge volunteer effort itself reveals the shoddiness of Britains asylum system: why is it being left to volunteers and charities to provide essentials such as clothes?

Ultimately, Merkels legacy tells us less about one politicians actions than about what can be done if a society has the will to help people in need. That is a collective effort. But the myths and symbols politicians trade in have the capacity to enable such efforts, or to destroy them. In Britain, it often feels like the debate on asylum is dominated by a competition to see who can sound the toughest: between politicians who enthusiastically push a hard-right agenda, and those who purport to be liberals but take a tough stance because they think its what the public wants.

This goes beyond the peculiar cruelties of our current government: it is the product of years of xenophobia encouraged by the rightwing press, and will take a huge effort to unpick. But Merkel should remind us, however inconsistent her actions might have been in reality, that there is always an alternative.

Daniel Trilling is the author of Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe and Bloody Nasty People: the Rise of Britains Far Right

This article was amended on 22 September 2021, as it suggested that more than half of refugees in Germany were in work, but this was drawn from a study that suggested that 49% of those who had been in the country for more than five years were employed.

Read more:
How the refugee crisis created two myths of Angela Merkel - The Guardian