Chameleon refugee politics is a tempting but dangerous blind alley

Apartheid museet Sydafrika

Denmark is entering a dangerous path where security, justice and protection are negotiable, and ethnicities can be ranked according to political winds. The refugee debate has now been enriched with a political candyfloss language in which Eurocentrism, ethnicity and religion are used to bend the concept of refugee. Where it has previously been wrapped up and has acted as a hidden opponent in the area of ​​refugees and integration, the discrimination in Denmark is now obvious and tangible. Suddenly, Danish politicians are just as hostile to self-reflection as they are to refugees.

After the First World War, the League of Nations gave Russian refugees the so-called "Nansen Passports" - a passport that gave all refugees the same status. After World War II, the UN adopted the Refugee Convention to protect all refugees on earth with the same set of rights.

Now Russia, whose citizens in its time benefited from the Nansen Pass, has started a war against a Ukraine that is strongly inferior in physical armor. That is an argument for preserving a global, uniform concept of refugees. When the same state power can benefit from refugee conventions for decades later to even be the cause of refugee flows, then refugees will always have a need to be protected by a convention. At the same time, the countries that adopted the UN Refugee Convention have decided that they will not directly protect the Ukrainian citizens in their home country, so they now have no choice but to flee. The attacking party, Russia, has failed its military equipment to collapse on the road, and their intelligence is blatantly erroneous, so the planned quick war has now become a slow-motion remake on social media - facilitated through millions of mobile cameras - by the historic battles over Leningrad, Aleppo and Grozny and not least the destruction of the Basque city of Guernica by the German and Italian air forces at the request of the leader of the Spanish nationalists, Franco.

In addition to being the first live-transmitted hell on earth, it is also a war that for the first time reveals that new winds are blowing with a bad smell in Europe under human rights. Among refugees from Ukraine, up to 30 percent who come from other countries, and they were rejected at the Polish-Ukrainian border, where they had to spend the night in the forest in no man's land. European countries are now battling the consequences of politicians' increasingly bizarre ethnic ranks and cramped twists and turns to legitimize discrimination. Such as. in England, who have had difficulty finding a suitable Brexit grimace for the Ukrainian refugees while at the same time being required to send the rubber dinghies with refugees back to France. Former Home Secretary Amber Rudd told BBC radio that "people like us are being slaughtered in Europe" (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/11/vladimir-putin-war-britain- refugees). African university students in Ukraine were left in an extremely vulnerable situation without money, without rights and subjected to full-blooded European discrimination at the borders where they are brutally rejected or physically removed from the trains running towards Poland. The help has not come from authorities but rather from civil society, such as. a Somali organization in Poland (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0brq5yy). It is estimated that there are over 75,000 foreign university students in Ukraine, all of whom will have problems fleeing.

Politicians across Europe lure voters into mental alleys, where the inflection of people is normalized and justified with exceptions, special laws, threats, crises, disasters, and armed conflicts. The first act becomes the second act that facilitates the third act. Neighboring areas suddenly become a concept we are all familiar with, just as we are completely confident in where the Storm Middle is located. The government argues for a special law by establishing a narrative that the asylum system is in ruins, as the government spokesperson on integration issues Rasmus Stoklund puts it in Information on 4 March: “I do not in any way believe that it discriminates. On the other hand, I think it reveals the somewhat depressing fact that the asylum system has in fact collapsed ”. And to the question of discrimination, Stoklund establishes in the same interview an idea that Denmark has long worked to help refugees close to the area where they come from. Syrians must be helped in neighboring Syrian countries, and therefore Ukrainians must be helped by Denmark.

Our prejudices are promoted to facts: Syrians are not really refugees but convenience migrants because they have lived in refugee camps for several years. Ukrainians, on the other hand, are real refugees, because they come directly from a war we can see on television and which, almost, takes place in our own country. Ukrainians are even like "us", they can learn Danish, and they can start with a t work the day after they have crossed the German-Danish border at Krusaa. Just like the Turkish guest workers of the 70s. At the same time, the Ukrainian refugees can cause problems for the municipalities because in the Parallel Society Act they are still perceived as “non-Western”, and if they are placed in vulnerable housing areas, the municipalities may suddenly face an acute hard ghetto. As the mayor of Elsinore, Benedikte Kiær, put it in Berlingske: “We stand with some people who are very similar to us and who stand and jump to get to work. We want to give them a place to live, but we run the risk that residential areas will be on the parallel community list if we offer the vacant housing we have ", and the mayor followed up with a comment on Twitter on March 17:" Give Ukrainian refugee status as a Westerner. It will remove stupid legs for the municipalities when we have to give Ukrainian refugees permanent housing in our residential areas ”. We learn from Integration Minister Tesfaye that discrimination can be curtailed: “It is discrimination, but I do not think it is discriminatory. This is objectively justified by the fact that the number of people coming now is so violent that it would otherwise overload the systems ” and that the area of ​​foreigners is already so full of discrimination that a little more will not keep the minister awake at night, for discrimination is completely normal: “We must keep in mind that the Aliens Act is full of discrimination (..). I do not think there is a problem with that. Of course, we must not discriminate, let alone on the basis of ethnicity or religion. But it is quite normal that we have special schemes with individual countries.  The same interview also highlights a new, previously hidden parameter in discrimination against ethnic groups - there are obviously problematic and unproblematic refugees: “..the Ukrainians who have come to Denmark have settled well into Danish society. If I see some statistic that now there are more Ukrainians coming to Denmark, it does not keep me awake for a single second at night, because it is completely unproblematic for Danish society ”. However, should one follow the current rules and conventions in the field of refugees, which are done in relation to Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Syria, then most Ukrainians do not yet meet the requirements for asylum. The rules should be the same for everyone. There is a difference between emergency care and emergency asylum. It is not the legitimate needs of Ukrainians that are the problem, it is the politicians' opportune interpretation of the right to asylum that is regrettable because it opens up a very plastic interpretation of the refugee concept and a categorization of rights according to political needs. Som general secretary of the NGO Mellemfolkeligt Samvirke Tim Whyte said to Altinget.dk on 21 March: "It is paradoxical that a special law will have to be made to help the refugees, because our existing asylum policy is so restrictive that it cannot provide good protection. Or as Syrian refugee Mahmoud Almohamad dryly stated on Twitter on March 16: Escape has no color.

The refugee debate has now been enriched with a political candyfloss language in which Eurocentrism, ethnicity and religion are used to bend the concept of refugee. The story does not repeat itself but it is good at rhyming. Where it has previously been wrapped up and has acted as a hidden opponent in the area of ​​refugees and integration, the discrimination in Denmark is now obvious and tangible. Suddenly, Danish politicians are just as hostile to self-reflection as they are to refugees. Refugees are mostly ordinary people who can no longer handle abuse, the ugly faces of war and meaninglessness. They deserve a life of security, ie. a passport and safe ground under their feet so they can live their undramatic life unnoticed further in safe surroundings.

If we treat people who have walked on foot between grenades and humiliations with children, warm clothes and a domestic animal and have moved to less dramatic circumstances, such as cattle, our democratic welfare society loses its credibility. When the only thing one dreams of, a secure basis for residence, is unattainable, and the only thing that seems to make one feel welcome and included is met with banal nationalist attitudes about belonging to a "problematic" ethnic group, it is difficult to explain to refugees from countries outside Europe, what the Danish politicians really want with integration. The conscious and strategic ambiguity of integration policy has become even clearer. Laws are drafted in a distant echo chamber and with short-term and symbolic tools, but the consequences are neither short-term, distant nor symbolic - they become concrete and violent when they hit reality.

Former Prime Minister Thatcher refused in 1979 to provide shelter to 10,000 Vietnamese boat refugees and warned his officials that it would lead to riots and demonstrations because many Englishmen were left without a roof over their heads. Vietnamese boat refugees were farther away than street fights in London. The principle of subsidiarity is not a humanistic expression, but to make a virtue a necessity, because one must invent new reasons why some refugees must bypass the asylum system, while others have to wait for years. It has been deliberately argued for years that refugees belong in undefined "neighboring areas" that are often very far from their home country. The policy has never really succeeded, yet it is used as an argument that Ukraine is a neighboring area. The world community has a duty to help all refugees and there are conventions that govern the framework. It has been decided that it will receive the Ukrainian refugees, so it is necessary to find an argument. Or as the professor of psychology Svend Brinkmann has put that kind of logic: Now I know why I'm unmarried! It's because I'm a bachelor. Danish politicians would prefer to help where a high level of proximity and identification factor can be played.

The Danish parliament has locked the fox into the chicken coop with the legitimation that people can be divided into "problematic" and "unproblematic" and thus the justification of discrimination in rights. There are people on the run who have direct access to the whole package of human rights, and then there is a motley group of people with different accesses to the discount edition, who are even distributed as a kind of charity. As an elderly patient in the Immigrant Medicine Clinic, she answered the question of what was most important for her to get help for: "Do not you just have some very small human rights for me?".

The South African apartheid regime ended up trapped in its own spider web by bizarre ethnic subgroups so vaguely defined and influenced by changing frameworks of understanding that they were dubbed "chameleons" because they constantly had to change their ID cards. depending on the volatile attitudes of politicians. European countries, including Denmark, are embarking on a dangerous path where security, justice and protection are up for negotiation and ethnicities can be ranked according to political winds. Refugees are not stupid, but they will be if we make special laws to be able to discriminate. One can clearly see that politicians are throwing themselves into more and more insane rhetorical acrobatics to make the arguments stick together. Politicians have created a chaotic mural of a world that has let go of the thin reins that the League of Nations and later the UN created through the Nansen Passport, the Convention on Human Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Refugee Convention. When the German Gestapo asked the painter Picasso if it was, he who had painted 'Guernica', he replied: no, You have.