Belarus "weaponises" migrants, longtermism is BS and why we’re running out of translators | Borderline Brief #3

⏱ This is a 2-minute read.

Globalisation

• 🤐 Streaming is going global and we’re running out of good translators.
• 🗞 The New York Times reached 1 million international digital subscribers. That’s the most out-of-country subscribers of any news outlet apparently. What does it mean that the global paper of record sees the world through mostly American eyes?

Identity & belonging

• 🇩🇪 The first Black woman in Bundestag, an Eritrean immigrant, is fighting to change the meaning of “Germanness.”
• 🇺🇸 How do do nationalism right. (I know, I know.)

Immigration & asylum

• 🇦🇫 Afghanistan is facing “the worst humanitarian crisis on Earth.” Nobody can act surprised when they desperately reach for Europe. Perspective.

“It is as bad as you possibly can imagine.”
- David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Programme

• 🇦🇺 $4.3 million. That’s the yearly cost to Australia of detaining a single refugee on Nauru.
• 🪖 An estimated 1,000 US veterans are barred from returning to the country they served because of their immigration status.

Go deeper

• 🤔 Longtermism - a favoured philosophical movement among tech elites –cares about humanity, but not humans
• 🌍 With the global South heating up and the global North depopulating, restricting mobility is just increasingly nonsensical. (Author Parag Khanna is our guest on the Borderline podcast this week. Coming up tomorrow.)
• 😤 Public support for immigration is the highest it’s ever been. The problem is, “people who are opposed are really opposed.” And loud.
• 🇧🇧 Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley is the breakout star of the climate summit.

“How many more crises must hit before we see an international system that stops dividing us and starts to lift us up?”
- Mia Mottley, prime minister of Barbados

Long Story Short: Europe’s "hybrid war" with Belarus

• Belarus is accused of “weaponising” migrants against the EU, as payback for the block’s sanctions against the dictatorial Lukashenko regime. The crisis escalated Monday when Belarus marched hundreds of migrants to its border with Poland, a point of entry to the European Union.
• Belarus has for weeks been facilitating visas and flights to Minsk for mostly Iraqi Kurds hoping to eventually pass into Germany.
• The EU is outraged and has temporarily forgotten it’s mad at Poland. NATO is angry too. Lithuania started building a razor wire-topped fence at its own border with Belarus. Lukashenko is earning himself and his mates more sanctions.
• Caught in this “hybrid war” as the EU calls it are a few thousand people, including children, without housing, food or medical care, stuck in Europe’s oldest forest in sub-zero temperatures. At least eight are known to have died of exposure.
• For context: 472,395 people applied for asylum in the EU27 in 2020, down 32% from 2019 and a far cry from the peak in 2015. This year is on track so far to be about similar. Refugee resettlement was down 60% in 2020 and the number of people turned away at EU borders divided by five. If there is a crisis, it is not in the numbers.