text stringlengths 0 1.71k |
|---|
destitute, persecuted, and stateless men and women simply be- |
253 |
Practical Ethics |
cause they are foreigners? In Walzer's view the community is |
bound by a prindple of mutual aid and he rightly notes that |
this prindple may have wider effects when applied to a community |
than when applied to an individual, because so many |
benevolent actions are open to a community that will only |
marginally affect its members. To take a stranger into one's |
family is something that we might consider goes beyond the |
requirement of mutual aid; but to take a stranger, or even many |
strangers, into the community is far less burdensome. |
In Walzer's view, a nation with vast unoccupied lands - he |
takes Australia as his example, though by assumption rather |
than by any examination of Australia's water and soil resources |
- may indeed have an obligation in mutual aid to take in people |
from densely populated, famine-stricken lands of Southeast |
Asia. The choice for the Australian community would then be |
to give up whatever homogeneity their sodety possessed, or to |
retreat to a small portion of the land they occupied, yielding |
the remainder to those who needed it. |
Although not accepting any general obligation on affluent |
nations to admit refugees, Walzer does uphold the popular prindple |
of asylum. In accordance with this prindple, any refugee |
who manages to reach the shores of another country can claim |
asylum and cannot be deported back to a country in which he |
may be persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, or |
political opinion. It is interesting that this prindple is so widely |
supported, while the obligation to accept refugees is not. The |
distinction drawn may reflect some of the prindples discussed |
in previous chapters of this book. The prindple of proximity |
clearly plays a role - the person seeking asylum is just physically |
closer to us than those in other countries. Perhaps our stronger |
support for asylum rests in part on the distinction between an |
act (deporting a refugee who has arrived here) and an omission |
(not offering a place to a refugee in a distant camp). It could |
also be an instance of the difference between doing something |
to an identifiable individual, and doing something that we know |
254 |
Insiders and Outsiders· |
will have the same effect on someone, but we will never be |
able to tell on whom it has this effect. A further factor is probably |
the relatively small number of people who are actually able to |
arrive in order to seek asylum, in contrast to the much larger |
number of refugees of whose existence we are aware, although |
they are far from us. This is the 'drops in the ocean' argument |
that was discussed in connection with overseas aid. We can, |
perhaps, cope with all the asylum seekers, but no matter how |
many refugees we admit, the problem will still be there. As in |
the case of the parallel argument against giving overseas aid, |
this overlooks the fact that in admitting refugees, we enable |
spedfic individuals to live decent lives and thus are doing something |
that is worthwhile, no matter how many other refugees |
remain whom we are unable to help. |
Moderately liberal governments, prepared to heed at least |
some humanitarian sentiments, act much as Walzer suggests |
they should. They hold that communities have a right to dedde |
whom they will admit; the claims of family reunion come first, |
and those of outsiders from the national ethnic group - should |
the state have an ethnic identity - next. The admission of those |
in need is an ex gratia act. The right of asylum is usually respected, |
as long as the numbers are relatively small. Refugees, |
unless they can appeal to some spedal sense of political affinity, |
have no real claim to be accepted, and have to throw themselves |
on the charity of the receiving country. All of this is in general |
agreement with immigration policy in the Western democrades. |
As far as refugees are concerned, the ex gratia approach is the |
current orthodoxy. |
THE FALLACY OF THE CURRENT APPROACH |
The current orthodoxy rests on vague and usually unargued |
assumptions about the community's right to determine its membership. |
A consequentialist would hold, instead, that immigration |
policy should be based squarely on the interests of all those |
255 |
Practical Ethics |
affected. Where the interests of different parties conflict, we |
should be giving equal consideration to all interests, which |
would mean that more pressing or more fundamental interests |
take precedence over less fundamental interests. The first step |
in applying the principle of equal consideration of interests is |
to identify those whose interests are affected. The first and most |
obvious group is the refugees themselves. Their most pressing |
and fundamental interests are clearly at stake. Life in a refugee |
camp offers little prospect of anything more than a bare subsistence, |
and sometimes hardly even that. Here is one observer's |
impression of a camp on the Thai-Cambodian border in 1986. |
At the time the camp was home for 144,000 people: |
The visit of a foreigner causes a ripple of excitement. People |
gather round and ask eamestly about the progress of their case |
for resettlement, or share their great despair at continual rejection |
by the selection bodies for the various countries which will accept |
refugees .... People wept as they spoke, most had an air of quiet |
desperation .... On rice distribution day, thousands of girls and |
women mill in the distribution area, receiving the weekly rations |
for their family. From the bamboo observation tower the ground |
below was just a swirling sea of black hair and bags of rice hoisted |
onto heads for the walk home. A proud, largely farming people, |
forced to become dependent on UN rations of water, tinned fish |
and broken rice, just to survive. |
Most of these people could hope for no significant change in |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.