The times are heavy, on a large and small scale, with steps and desires for expulsion, banishment, eviction. Internationally and locally, recent news has accumulated a notable number of cases, all registers combined: war of annihilation in Gaza, significant police repression of pro-Palestinian students on campus, migratory debates polluted by xenophobia, “social cleansing” of neighborhoods of Paris with a view to the Summer Olympic Games… If our collective lives obviously cannot be summed up by this single trend, and exaggerating it risks harming its argument, the fact remains that the phenomenon is too salient to be ignored. It illuminates, here as elsewhere, a “not in my backyard” for the worst reasons. It reflects a reality that we tend to normalize, thanks to an anxiety-provoking social climate and the normalization of a populist right which works for its own benefit to sharpen distrust.
In Gaza, the Israeli army is obviously applying a strategy of complete destruction of infrastructure and buildings, without regard for the tens of thousands of deaths, so as to definitively condemn Gazans to exile, without hope of reconstruction. If it succeeds, the Israeli government, which the United States will continue to arm despite everything, will expand the borders of this fortress country, following its security approach, while continuing, by grabbing land, its plan to expel the Palestinians. of the West Bank. Hamas should survive in one form or another: the confrontation with unequal weapons that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will remain trapped by a desire for mutual erasure with, as a result, a risk of regional war.
There is no more explicit plan for expulsion than that currently applied by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right government – except that of Vladimir Putin, who denies the very idea of Ukrainian nation, like “Bibi” denies that of a Palestinian state.
The use of violent expulsion of populations in the history of humanity is not new, far from it. It has given rise, in its most sinister manifestations, to genocides and ethnic cleansing enterprises. But its implications today are more broadly global in nature, given the prospect of growing and massive population movements which are emerging with the repercussions of global warming. Migration issues will continue to gain momentum, while panicked governments, overwhelmed by arrivals, too reluctant to make the complicated effort of coordinating, struggle to broaden the debate to the imperative of getting involved. usefully, upstream, in the sustainable development of countries of the Global South.
The result is that in Europe the right-wing parties, whose general positions on immigration mainly involve policies of return, refoulement and restrictions on social rights, are on the rise in view of the European elections next June .
The result is that in the United States, less than six months before the presidential election, Donald Trump continues to exacerbate the issue of “illegal” immigration with dismaying effectiveness. Again on Saturday, he compared migrants to snakes. A recent Harris poll added fuel to his mill, with an unprecedented majority of respondents (51%) speaking out in favor of “the mass expulsion of irregular migrants”.
In a broader sense, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han reflects in his essays on the current propensity for the “expulsion of the other” by linking the degradation of democratic debate to the prison of social networks, this window which reduces people to goods and through which we no longer understand the world except in isolation. Mr. Trump is fully exploiting this state of affairs, which the pandemic has deepened, just as he is fully exploiting feelings of economic insecurity. Furthermore, fear – of the other and of precariousness – is an inexhaustible electoral selling point at the same time as “legitimizing exclusion”, to use the words of Christiane Vollaire, another philosopher.
Among the insecurities, there is obviously the complex and fundamental question of access to housing, which is “in crisis” almost everywhere. As if yesterday “thief of job », the immigrant today risked being seen as a housing thief, when it is a crisis from which governments – is this really too much to ask of them? — should normally have had foreknowledge. Moreover, it is a crisis which presents an allegory: the foundations of our democratic houses are cracking while in the kitchen, men of power prepare political recipes which poison consciences.