Disclaimer: The contents of this blog are my own and do not represent the views or opinions of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.

“Why do we want people from Haiti here?”—President Trump at an immigration meeting on January 11^th, before going on to call Haiti, El Salvador and all of Africa “shithole countries” and claim that we should bring in immigrants from more countries like Norway.

It’s not really relevant that he is now denying he ever said this because plenty of people are still defending it as is, with the harsh language he claims he never used. Furthermore, this is a man who has denied repeatedly saying things we have video and audio evidence of him saying. I’m not yet prepared to believe his story. Also, both Trump’s and the media’s inordinate amount of attention on the word “shithole” distracts from the real problems inherent within the statement and the description—the American relationship with other countries (not to mention what the UN says “cannot be called anything other than racism.”). Regardless of whether he used the word “shithole,” the sentiment behind the statement is clearly the stance of he and those who support him.

Normally, I would try to avoid posting anything like this, but since I happen to live in one of the (rather large) areas of the planet which was described as a “shithole,” it seems like I should address it, especially since I’ve seen several people who I know regularly read this blog defending the statement on social media.

There are only a few possible reasons that Trump could have made a statement like this, so let’s tackle the possibilities, one by one.

He thinks people from those countries are lazy

I once heard someone I looked up to and respected say, “Extreme poverty, war—you don’t see things like that in America. And there’s a reason for that.” First, I should point out that you can see extreme poverty in the United States if you know where to look and don’t remain in only the area that you are from (likewise, you can go to Malawi, Jamaica, and plenty of other “poor countries” and remain in safe havens away from the poverty and never experience it first hand). But yes, I take your point, poverty is much more visible in developing countries than it is in the United States.

But the main thing that this statement was used to imply was that somehow Americans (or Western countries in general) know how to build a nation and create peace better than other nations. At first glance, it might actually seem that way, if you don’t look at the way Western nations build success. How many of our consumable goods in the US are imported from low wage works in developing countries? How much of our development was built on the backs of slaves? How many Americans regularly do manual labor? Is it expected or required? It is here. Malawians laugh when I tell them that I didn’t plant a seed until I was 21 years old. Life here is much slower because everything requires so much time and energy to do. My cooking time increased by an hour here when I no longer had electricity (as the majority of Malawians don’t). And I usually just cook once a day. People here cook three times a day, over fire, with wood that they carry on their backs from the woods, for entire families. We wash our clothes with our hands, not with a machine. We wash our dishes in a bucket. 80% of the country gets its food from subsistence farming, meaning they go into the field with a hoe and work all day. And in addition to all this, they raise their children. One of the most common forms of transport here is the bicycle taxi, offered by men who will cycle upwards of 20 kilometers carrying you on their back, not stopping once and not even breaking a sweat. In addition to that, despite a plethora of obstacles, most people desire to get an education, even though secondary school education isn’t free. People here are not lazy. They work ten times as hard as I ever did in order to have the same opportunities that I did simply by virtue of the country in which I was born.

You might say that I’m proving the point that I started with, that this somehow shows that America is better. But all this shows is that America offers more and easier opportunities than many other countries, which does not make them inherently worse or us inherently better. In fact, dealing with those obstacles and encountering resiliency is what has caused the vast majority of African immigrants to the US to be candidates for Master’s Degrees, Doctoral Degrees, and people who are generally considered to be at the pinnacle of society. They know how to work hard and they don’t stop when they arrive on the shores of the US. Also, America can only provide those opportunities because the US is able to import so many of the things (that are unavailable in Malawi) from other countries. I’m not going to claim that America somehow causes all the poverty in the rest of the globe. Poverty is a complex issue with complex causes. But to pretend that we are not all somehow complicit in propagating poverty around the world (as Trump’s statement does) is dishonest.

The irony here is that many of Trump’s supporters would agree with me in the idea that most Americans don’t know how to do manual labor and this is a travesty, that corporations should source workers from home rather than abroad, that this is best for the country. But by that very admission we should be able to acknowledge that this would mean that people from foreign countries are more hard-working than us (not to mention that Trump himself has foreign business interests which he has always refused to let go of). This is something that I remember my uncle mention when I was younger, a time in which our town’s Hispanic population was booming. He said, “All of my friends keep hiring Mexicans, and I don’t blame ‘em because they work so hard.” This was not an uncommon thing to hear from many people. Yet I heard those same people turn around and claim that Mexicans needed to be deported for being lazy. I could never figure out which one they actually believed.

Poverty

Maybe he’s saying those countries are poor and we’re rich so we don’t want people coming here because they’ll somehow make us poor also. As I mentioned above, this ignores the role that the US and Western trade policy plays in global poverty. The IMF intensely regulates the economies of most developing nations, but the US is allowed to raise the debt ceiling as much as it wants (currently $20,492,000,000,000 as of December 8, 2017). Why? Because we’re already so powerful. Part of the reason that bailouts were necessary after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis is that the US economy plays such an influential role in the rest of the world. This also proves that just because we aren’t a “poor country” doesn’t mean we are smart with our money. We are not inherently better with regard to economics or the 2008 crisis wouldn’t have happened. The oil crisis in the 1970s wouldn’t have happened. The Great Depression wouldn’t have happened. People like to make grand claims about the culture and society that the Founding Fathers gave us, but we should all remember that for the first 200 years of American history, the United States would have been considered a developing country by today’s standards, a backwater. It wasn’t until World War II, when Europe had tons of war debts and damages (which we didn’t have, since aside from Pearl Harbor, none of the fighting occurred on our soil), that we were able to become a true superpower. These things are not innate. They were not destined to happen.

In addition, even if we were somehow inherently better in this area than developing countries—is this a reason not to let people from those countries in? Is this something that makes us inherently better than people from those countries in general? Poverty breeds creativity and innovation, because people make use of what they have. William Kamkwamba, who I’ve mentioned before, taught himself how to make a windmill by just looking at diagrams in an English book whose words he couldn’t understand. He used old bicycle parts from a junkyard. It powered 4 lights and was able to charge some phones. He later got a degree in the US (despite being forced to drop out of secondary school due to lack of money) and is now back in Malawi working to implement and improve irrigation systems to help with times of drought. Yet, for some reason, these are the kinds of people I hear most of the people I know back home don’t want in the US.

He thinks they’re uneducated

I covered this above, but I’ll basically just leave some statistics here about immigrants from these countries:

• African immigrants have a higher level of education than the total foreign-born population. 41% of African immigrants have at least a Bachelor’s Degree, while the number is closer to 20% for the total foreign-born population.
• Just to put that into perspective, only about 31% of Americans as a whole have Bachelor’s Degrees.
• If you focus in on specific countries, the rate goes up. Immigrants from Egypt, which is often particularly hated by Trump and Trump’s supporters, have a 64% rate, while Nigerians have 57%.

I would also like to share excerpts from what an educated Malawian (Mwiza Nkhata, University of Malawi Law Professor) had to say on Trump’s comments:

I have to agree with those that find a racist tenor to the remarks. Remember, the way these remarks were reported included an immediate comparison between the shithole countries and Norway. It is said President Trump would rather have immigrants from Norway than from the shithole countries. It is not insignificant that the so-called shithole countries are largely populated by people of colour (never mind that Africa was, again, treated as a country).

There was a very demeaning intent in the remarks by President Trump. I don’t think these remarks were accidental. They are very much in keeping with the Trump presidency. This presidency was vigorously supported by racist elements in the USA and, at times, it still panders to these supporters. Recall how President Trump equivocated when asked to comment about the Charlottesville violence? The disdain shown by President Trump has no place in the world today and, in the context of the USA, it smacks of deep ignorance. The USA is a nation of immigrants, except if you are a native American! For a nation that has been built on the back of migrant labour, some of it patently illegal—recall the transatlantic slavery?—Such remarks are very unfortunate. Sad?

A word or two on those that have come to President Trump’s defence. It has been argued that President Trump was only speaking the truth since the bad governance in many African countries has indeed created shitholes. Well, I would never defend bad governance, but I would find racism abhorrent anywhere, at any time. Apart from the fact that the President’s remarks lacked diplomatic tact, it is the underlying bigotry that worries me—and, I repeat, this bigotry is no coincidence. We should all be worried that the supposedly most advanced and prosperous nation on earth is led by a president who believes in racial superiority and that he has support for his nefarious ideas.

The Trump presidency is probably going to be the most ‘controversial’ presidency in American history. Just a nagging thought though, post the Second World War America maneuvered itself into a position of global prominence. Others believe the USA actually became the global hegemon and has maintained some sort of hegemonic dominance over the world. This resulted in the USA playing key roles in many parts of the world in terms of, for example, democratisation and respect for human rights. The current administration’s ambivalence about such issues and its almost blind adherence to ‘America First’, risks eroding the American influence across the globe. Hegemonic dominance is only meaningful if the lesser partners in the matrix are also made to tow the same line and see the benefits of towing the line.

(Read the whole thing here)

They’re not white

The racism angle on Trump would be difficult to push here if he hadn’t ended the discussion by claiming we should take in more people from Norway, a country which has free healthcare, gun laws, and more open immigration. Why mention Norway, of all places? Who is trying to immigrate from Norway to the US? There are very few reasons I can think of that he would possibly cite that country out of any others. Actually there’s only one. If I can’t convince you that this is problematic, then I don’t really know what else to do, other than throw my hands up in the air.

One thing that has bothered me a bit about the response to this whole debacle is the majority of posts on social media trying to prove that these countries are not, in fact, shitholes, have been of landscapes rather than the people within the countries, when what Trump was clearly referring to and criticizing was the people (I’ve heard some claim he was criticizing the institutions, but if that were the case, he would want to welcome people in, not turn them away. For him, it seems bad institutions are inseparable from the people in the countries they occupy). We should be focusing on the people. They are the ones who make these countries wonderful, not only the landscapes.

Opportunities are disproportionately given to those who live within the US boundaries who are white. The thought of giving those opportunities to others, those who live outside our borders (we should also remind ourselves that the majority of immigrants would like citizenship and would thus become American when they came in), or those who have been denied them even within, is seen as bad, because it “neglects” Americans. And this is seen as right, this is seen as “taking our country back,” this neglecting the rest of the world is seen as good because “they’re not our responsibility.”

Peter Singer has a now-famous thought experiment called “The Drowning Child.” It’s long, but if you’ve made it this far, indulge me.

To challenge my students to think about the ethics of what we owe to people in need, I ask them to imagine that their route to the university takes them past a shallow pond. One morning, I say to them, you notice a child has fallen in and appears to be drowning. To wade in and pull the child out would be easy but it will mean that you get your clothes wet and muddy, and by the time you go home and change you will have missed your first class.I then ask the students: do you have any obligation to rescue the child? Unanimously, the students say they do. The importance of saving a child so far outweighs the cost of getting one’s clothes muddy and missing a class, that they refuse to consider it any kind of excuse for not saving the child. Does it make a difference, I ask, that there are other people walking past the pond who would equally be able to rescue the child but are not doing so? No, the students reply, the fact that others are not doing what they ought to do is no reason why I should not do what I ought to do.Once we are all clear about our obligations to rescue the drowning child in front of us, I ask: would it make any difference if the child were far away, in another country perhaps, but similarly in danger of death, and equally within your means to save, at no great cost – and absolutely no danger – to yourself? Virtually all agree that distance and nationality make no moral difference to the situation. I then point out that we are all in that situation of the person passing the shallow pond: we can all save lives of people, both children and adults, who would otherwise die, and we can do so at a very small cost to us: the cost of a new CD, a shirt or a night out at a restaurant or concert, can mean the difference between life and death to more than one person somewhere in the world – and overseas aid agencies like Oxfam overcome the problem of acting at a distance.At this point the students raise various practical difficulties. Can we be sure that our donation will really get to the people who need it? Doesn’t most aid get swallowed up in administrative costs, or waste, or downright corruption? Isn’t the real problem the growing world population, and is there any point in saving lives until the problem has been solved? These questions can all be answered: but I also point out that even if a substantial proportion of our donations were wasted, the cost to us of making the donation is so small, compared to the benefits that it provides when it, or some of it, does get through to those who need our help, that we would still be saving lives at a small cost to ourselves – even if aid organizations were much less efficient than they actually are.I am always struck by how few students challenge the underlying ethics of the idea that we ought to save the lives of strangers when we can do so at relatively little cost to ourselves. At the end of the nineteenth century WH Lecky wrote of human concern as an expanding circle which begins with the individual, then embraces the family and ‘soon the circle… includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity, and finally, its influence is felt in the dealings of man [sic] with the animal world’.1 On this basis the overwhelming majority of my students seem to be already in the penultimate stage – at least – of Lecky’s expanding circle. There is, of course, for many students and for various reasons a gap between acknowledging what we ought to do, and doing it; but I shall come back to that issue shortly.Our century is the first in which it has been possible to speak of global responsibility and a global community. For most of human history we could affect the people in our village, or perhaps in a large city, but even a powerful king could not conquer far beyond the borders of his kingdom. When Hadrian ruled the Roman Empire, his realm covered most of the ‘known’ world, but today when I board a jet in London leaving what used to be one of the far-flung outposts of the Roman Empire, I pass over its opposite boundary before I am even halfway to Singapore, let alone to my home in Australia. Moreover no matter what the extent of the empire, the time required for communications and transport meant that there was simply no way in which people could make any difference to the victims of floods, wars, or massacres taking place on the other side of the globe. By the time anyone had heard of the events and responded, the victims were dead or had survived without assistance. ‘Charity begins at home’ made sense, because it was only ‘at home’ – or at least in your own town – that you could be confident that your charity would make any difference.Instant communications and jet transport have changed all that. A television audience of two billion people can now watch hungry children beg for food in an area struck by famine, or they can see refugees streaming across the border in search of a safe place away from those they fear will kill them. Most of that huge audience also have the means to help people they are seeing on their screens. Each one of us can pull out a credit card and phone in a donation to an aid organization which can, in a few days, fly in people who can begin distributing food and medical supplies. Collectively, it is also within the capacity of the United Nations – with the support of major powers – to put troops on the ground to protect those who are in danger of becoming victims of genocide.Our capacity to affect what is happening, anywhere in the world, is one way in which we are living in an era of global responsibility. But there is also another way that offers an even more dramatic contrast with the past. The atmosphere and the oceans seemed, until recently, to be elements of nature totally unaffected by the puny activities of human beings. Now we know that our use of chlorofluorocarbons has damaged the ozone shield; our emission of carbon dioxide is changing the climate of the entire planet in unpredictable ways and raising the level of the sea; and fishing fleets are scouring the oceans, depleting fish populations that once seemed limitless to a point from which they may never recover. In these ways the actions of consumers in Los Angeles can cause skin cancer among Australians, inundate the lands of peasants in Bangladesh, and force Thai villagers who could once earn a living by fishing to work in the factories of Bangkok.In these circumstances the need for a global ethic is inescapable. Is it nevertheless a vain hope? Here are some reasons why it may not be.We live in a time when many people experience their lives as empty and lacking in fulfilment. The decline of religion and the collapse of communism have left but the ideology of the free market whose only message is: consume, and work hard so you can earn money to consume more. Yet even those who do reasonably well in this race for material goods do not find that they are satisfied with their way of life. We now have good scientific evidence for what philosophers have said throughout the ages: once we have enough to satisfy our basic needs, gaining more wealth does not bring us more happiness.Consider the life of Ivan Boesky, the multimillionaire Wall Street dealer who in 1986 pleaded guilty to insider trading. Why did Boesky get involved in criminal activities when he already had more money than he could ever spend? Six years after the insider-trading scandal broke, Boesky’s estranged wife Seema spoke about her husband’s motives in an interview with Barbara Walters for the American ABC Network’s 20/20 program. Walters asked whether Boesky was a man who craved luxury. Seema Boesky thought not, pointing out that he worked around the clock, seven days a week, and never took a day off to enjoy his money. She then recalled that when in 1982 Forbes magazine first listed Boesky among the wealthiest people in the US, he was upset. She assumed he disliked the publicity and made some remark to that effect. Boesky replied: ‘That’s not what’s upsetting me. We’re no-one. We’re nowhere. We’re at the bottom of the list and I promise you I won’t shame you like that again. We will not remain at the bottom of that list.’We must free ourselves from this absurd conception of success. Not only does it fail to bring happiness even to those who, like Boesky, do extraordinarily well in the competitive struggle; it also sets a social standard that is a recipe for global injustice and environmental disaster. We cannot continue to see our goal as acquiring more and more wealth, or as consuming more and more goodies, and leaving behind us an even larger heap of waste.We tend to see ethics as opposed to self-interest; we assume that those who make fortunes from insider trading are successfully following self-interest – as long as they don’t get caught – and ignoring ethics. We think that it is in our interest to take a more senior better-paid position with another company, even though it means that we are helping to manufacture or promote a product that does no good at all, or is environmentally damaging. On the other hand, those who pass up opportunities to rise in their career because of ethical ‘scruples’ about the nature of the work, or who give away their wealth to good causes, are thought to be sacrificing their own interest in order to obey the dictates of ethics.Many will say that it is naive to believe that people could shift from a life based on consumption, or on getting on top of the corporate ladder, to one that is more ethical in its fundamental direction. But such a shift would answer a palpable need. Today the assertion that life is meaningless no longer comes from existentialist philosophers who treat it as a shocking discovery: it comes from bored adolescents for whom it is a truism. Perhaps it is the central place of self-interest, and the way in which we conceive of our own interest, that is to blame here. The pursuit of self-interest, as standardly conceived, is a life without any meaning beyond our own pleasure or individual satisfaction. Such a life is often a self-defeating enterprise. The ancients knew of the ‘paradox of hedonism’, according to which the more explicitly we pursue our desire for pleasure, the more elusive we will find its satisfaction. There is no reason to believe that human nature has changed so dramatically as to render the ancient wisdom inapplicable.Here ethics offer a solution. An ethical life is one in which we identify ourselves with other, larger, goals, thereby giving meaning to our lives. The view that there is harmony between ethics and enlightened self-interest is an ancient one, now often scorned. Cynicism is more fashionable than idealism. But such hopes are not groundless, and there are substantial elements of truth in the ancient view that an ethically reflective life is also a good life for the person leading it. Never has it been so urgent that the reasons for accepting this view should be widely understood.In a society in which the narrow pursuit of material self-interest is the norm, the shift to an ethical stance is more radical than many people realize. In comparison with the needs of people going short of food in Rwanda, the desire to sample the wines of Australia’s best vineyards pales into insignificance. An ethical approach to life does not forbid having fun or enjoying food and wine; but it changes our sense of priorities. The effort and expense put into fashion, the endless search for more and more refined gastronomic pleasures, the added expense that marks out the luxury-car market – all these become disproportionate to people who can shift perspective long enough to put themselves in the position of others affected by their actions. If the circle of ethics really does expand, and a higher ethical consciousness spreads, it will fundamentally change the society in which we live. –Peter Singer, “The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle.”

All of this is seen as right.

It isn’t. It’s not.