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Plane grounded in France over human trafficking fears
A small and largely ignored story from this afternoon (now pushed off the BBC news homepage, and barely reported on in the American press).
The official facts, then, are that a chartered Romanian plane flying from the UAE to Nicaragua, but carrying 300 Indians, was grounded en route in France because of an “anonymous tip” about “human trafficking”.
The details of the story raise some interesting questions. There is no Indian community in Nicaragua to speak of; the relationship is so unimportant that neither nation even has an embassy in the other (India’s affairs are handled via their embassy in Panama, Nicaragua’s via their embassy in Tokyo). There is no plausible reason for Indians to be trafficked for labor in Nicaragua, which has a large poor domestic labor pool itself and high unemployment.
So what explains this curious set of affairs? Reading between the lines suggests a different story, one that is barely even hinted at in the plain text.
The Indians on board intended to immigrate illegally to the United States, part of a growing number of migrants from outside the Americas now using the southern route. The plane was chartered by an organization promising to facilitate at least part of that journey, with someone who doesn’t ask questions.
The “anonymous tip” was almost certainly from the United States, which is waging a largely futile war against the above by trying to limit global migrant inflows to Central America. Grounding a foreign plane transiting two other foreign nations is something the US has done before, but would prefer to avoid if possible, hence the “anonymous tip” whose source the French obviously know (grounding a plane merely traversing one’s airspace because of an anonymous tip about some passengers, barring threat of imminent terror attack, isn’t something countries do often) but choose not to share.
As long as birthright citizenship exists, the United States will be uniquely attractive to any would-be illegal migrant. No other major wealthy nation (other than Canada, which almost necessarily requires migrants to traverse the US to reach it) promises the descendants of illegal migrants immediate, guaranteed citizenship.
What's the usual outcome of such groundings? I presume there are issues with seizing an aircraft indefinitely when it belongs to a foreign nation, and no actual crime has been committed, yet.
If refused permission for onward travel, the carrier would have to return the passengers to their point of origin or home country, and would then keep the plane, after the immediate legal proceedings are over. They could then be sued and/or criminally charged if the evidence exists. The plane wouldn’t be seized indefinitely unless there were some weird circumstances.
One wrinkle is that the passengers in this case arguably could claim asylum in France, and although it’s unlikely their claims would be accepted because France does consider India a safe country, they probably wouldn’t be deported any time soon. But they seemingly haven’t technically passed through French customs/immigration, they’re stuck airside, so it’s an unusual situation.
Just as an aside, it's kinda crazy to me that illegal immigrants can cross the border in groups of hundreds or thousands, but have to be individually processed and deported.
How many man-hours of time does it take to handle a single deportation. 100? 1000?
This reminds me of the military asymmetry where the U.S. uses a $11 million missile to shoot down a $1000 drone. Unless we use a radically different approach, the Western World will be bled dry by immigration just by this simple math.
Yes exactly, laws need to be changed to allow for bulk deportation without appeal.
Either that or allow lethal force against mass border crossings like that, but the optics would be hilariously terrible. (Even if it reduced total deaths crossing the border, which I think is plausible - 8000+ have died crossing the border in the past 30 years, and shooting a few hundred people making the crossing might reduce the overall flows enough to compensate)
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I think remain in Mexico was an attempt to go there. It didn't go far enough, obviously, but it was an attempt.
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My understanding is also that any airline that was perceived as doing anything other than maximally cooperating with immigration authorities in a given country would probably be denied landing slots in future.
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I keep telling myself that this state of affairs can't continue because it's insane, but it keeps happening. I think if the US had a parliamentary system then this would have been fixed by now, but our 2 party system is also insane and incapable of solving problems like this. I actually think we're going to see a constitutional crisis soon, maybe with Trump, because there are just too many problems our outdated system can't fix.
European countries have parliamentary systems, strong anti-immigrant majorities, and even worse problems than the U.S.
Even when they elect anti-immigrant parties, they never actually seem to reduce immigration. Giorgia Meloni, for example, has been a massive disappointment.
While I think parliamentary systems are better than strong presidential systems, I don't think it matters in this case. It's simply that elites are unwilling to make the hard choices to defend their country lest they be treated like Orban or Trump.
That's probably less a consequence of Meloni personally and more just the effects of Italy having gone through a period of very low fertility (dipped to 1.35 already in 1990 and hasn't gone up over 1.5 ever since) that has lasted for over three decades already, expectional even for a Western European country. At this point of time you really start getting into making decisions like "let grannies die due to lack of trained nurses, or allow labor-based immigration", and few politicians are going to go with the first one (indeed, I believe that one of the reasons why right-wing populist parties are not particularly popular with the seniors in Europe is the fear that they might, indeed, be willing to let seniors die if it means less immigrants, even when they indicate otherwise).
Of course, Meloni would almost certainly like to address this at the source - ie. get those birth rates up, by hook or by crook - but even then it would take decades until the effect would be felt, and indeed the problem would even worsen in the short term (new moms out of the work force, health system would have to divert resources to infant and child issues etc.), meaning you'd have to depend on the immigrants during that time anyway.
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The problem isn't parliaments but ECHR and the US.
1950s refugee conventions.
French recently ignored ECHR and deported a terrorist suspect to Uzbekistan, despite ECHR rulings saying you can't deport to countries like Uzbekistan, where secret police have boiled people to death iirc. Now the courts, as always lawful stupid, want that guy back..
https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20231212-council-of-state-orders-france-to-bring-back-man-deported-to-uzbekistan
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Yes, the conservatives in the UK have an overwhelming majority in Parliament, which in theory gives them power to rewrite the entire immigration system. They don't.
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How would an up to date system fix the problems you see?
If immigration laws are unenforced, updating the laws won't fix the problem.
An up to date system would fix the inherent contradiction of having nationalist institutions and no borders by removing the former or reinstituting the latter.
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If people can create new parties and displace old ones then in theory they can change policy. Right now the only option is to take over a massive party and that is pretty much impossible. If you have a parliamentary system you can actually create a brand new party and start to change things if people agree with you i.e. Swedish Democrats,
The US arguably does have a modified parliamentary system with a president as popularly elected monarch, the problem is inherent to all Westminster-descended systems. To become more like Sweden you’d need to change to proportional representation, although that has sclerotic failure states too (like Belgium and Israel).
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