Trump, colombia and mass migration | thearticle

Donald Trump’s first high-profile effort to reduce the number of foreigners in America has caused a spat with Colombia over returning overstayer or undocumented immigrants back home from the

US. The problem here is that the two protagonists – President Trump, 78,  and his Colombian counterpart Gustavo Petro, 65 — are far more similar than the superficial reporting of the affair

conveyed. Both waited a long, long time as political maverick outsiders to become presidents of their respective nations – Colombia and the United States. Both are avid middle-of-the-night

  users of X, formerly Twitter, to blast out messages about what they think or are doing or propose to do. And both are populist nationalists who need a state of excited permanent

mobilisation to enthuse their supporter base. There is one difference: Trump doesn’t drink alcohol, but Petro enjoys more than a glass or two of the excellent liquors and wines of South

America. The problem of returning foreigners who have no legal right to stay in a country is now a major issue across the world. I experienced it first hand as Minister for Latin America in

the Foreign Office. On a quiet August day I took a call from an angry David Blunkett, then Home Secretary. He was on holiday in Spain and furious. “Denis, I have two planes full of Brazilian

illegal workers waiting to be deported but the Brazilian government won’t let them land! You are the minister for Brazil. Get it sorted please.” I called my friend, the Brazilian foreign

minister, who was clear. “You, the UK, let all Brazilian citizens (like most of Latin America) enter the UK without a visa. Some of them go and work for British employers. That’s illegal and

we have no problem with them being deported. “But not a mass expulsion with them all landing at the same time to humiliate them publicly on Brazilian media. They are not criminals. You have

no ID cards or any check on hiring. Sorry, but lots of young Brazilians take advantage of your lax labour market controls.” I told him we were rather keen on lots of publicity for the

deportations to discourage others, but he was not to be moved. President Trump was perfectly within his rights, like any other head of state, to return citizens of another country who

arrived in the US and then went to work for American employers greedy for low-wage workers, even if they had no right to work in the US. But it all went wrong when news spread that US

officials were shackling Brazilian deportees and not allowing women to use the airplane lavatories. Trump made it worse by calling them “criminals” when none had been convicted of a felony

(unlike the President himself), with the passengers being told to keep their heads down during the flight – in short, a maximal Trump-style exercise in bullying and humiliation. In the

middle of Sunday night, the President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, issued a long rambling WhatsApp statement attacking Trump. Petro is the first Left-wing leader of Colombia. The nation has

never been too keen on Washington. Reading the collected journalism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia’s Nobel Laureate novelist, on a plane from Bogota to London, I concluded that for

“Gaba” there was no problem Colombia faced that would not be solved if the United States did not exist. Yet Colombia makes its money from selling exports and tourism to the United States.

There is also the enormous unofficial income from middle-class and professional Americans snorting cocaine, as well as drinking coffee and driving gas-guzzling automobiles. Petro himself,

like Trump, is a climate change denier who has granted licences to US firms to drill, bambino, drill. Early in his presidency he approved a US military project on Colombia’s Gorgona Island,

one of the most bio-diverse locations in the Pacific. Now there is a big US Coast Guard centre on this environmental paradise to interdict cocaine smuggling, as part of the futile American

war on drugs, which is attacked by Colombia’s green lobby. Petro is half-way through a single five-year term. Hopes on the far-Left that he would turn Colombia into a paradise for Jeremy

Corbyns have floundered, along with his popularity. In his first year in office he sent out 5,000 tweets – far more than even Trump. He has fired many of his ministers, again following the

example of Trump. He refused permission to the USAF planes carrying deportees to land. Trump responded with threats of tariffs on Colombian exports and travel bans on rich Colombians and

officials. In the middle of the night Petro issued a statement: “_I don’t like your oil, Trump. Your greed will destroy humanity. You see me as an inferior race, and I am not—nor are any

Colombians._ _“You can use your economic power and arrogance to attempt a coup, like you did with Allende.  Colombia is the heart of the world, and you don’t understand that. _ _“You may

kill me, but I will survive in my people, who came before yours, in the Americas. We are the peoples of the winds, the mountains, the Caribbean Sea, and freedom._ _“Bring me down, Mr.

President, and the Americas and humanity will respond to you.”_ At this point his officials, presumably wearing white coats, persuaded him to shut up before he did any more damage to his

nation. Washington sensibly dropped the USAF deportation flights and planes from Colombia brought home the deportees. They did not say _Gracias _to their president. Instead they complained

that his antics had cost them an extra two days of hanging around on different airplanes instead of going home. Over-excited commentators in London have praised Trump’s line, thinking it

could apply to Britain. If only. Our undocumented or “illegal” immigrants tend to be refugees fleeing the various failed states – Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya – British foreign policy

helped create this century. The mass immigration promoted by the Tories of a million workers from Nigeria, Pakistan, India, Ghana and other Asian and African nations is perfectly legal, as a

consequence of shutting the door to nearby European workers who were shunned following Brexit. Unless Britain tears up  a raft of international conventions, many written by British jurists,

the idea that instant RAF deportations can ship refugees back to countries they have escaped from is not realistic. Switzerland and Sweden, which host many more refugees than Britain does,

  insist they go out and work to earn income to pay for accommodation, instead of the bonkers British practice of housing them for years in hostels or hotels. Trump could easily have

deported Colombian workers in a calm and measured way. But his opposite number in Bogota, who also rules via tweets on X and also has a deluded idea of his nation’s history, reacted in a

Trump-like manner. It is over now. Coffee, oil and recreational cocaine will flow into the US from Colombia as before. Latin America turned away from the Left some time ago. The Right is

back, cutting social provision and keeping Latin America poor and divided. And there are no lessons to be learnt from Columbia in handling the mass migrations created by the wars and

upheavals in the Middle East, Ukraine and sub-Saharan Africa. A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important

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