Belarus, Closer to Home

4 min readNov 17, 2021

I have been studying and analyzing US/Mexico border policy for so long that it is upsetting to learn about crises in other borderlands around the world and have to put in so much work to understand. Reading this week about the conflict between migrants and state forces on the Belarusian/Polish border has been troubling and thought provoking but the thoughts do not come easily. I only know one actual Polish person in real life here in New Mexico and, shamefully, I was probably just 50% sure Belarus was a country before this week. In my imagination, when I picture the borderlands of Eastern Europe I see thick, dark, and snowy woods with wolves slinking around. As I sync this Russian fairytale inspired vision with a more informed version of reality, one thing is consistent: it’s really, really cold.

The news is reporting refugee families camped outdoors against the Polish border in bitter cold, hungry, and without options. The photographs are harrowing, especially ones of the kids. The reports of people freezing to death are astonishing. The callousness with which governments are using these peoples’ bodies as tools for political maneuvering is unbelievable.

If I am understanding the mainstream US media’s account of what is happening correctly, here is what is going on: Belarus has a President whose brutal crackdowns on protesters and opponents last year caused EU sanctions on the country. Late this summer, Belarus lifted visa restrictions and allowed, even aided refugees from the Middle East to cross to the borders of Poland and Lithuania and Latvia in an attempt to create pressure for the EU to lift the sanctions. The EU is refusing their entry. What has resulted is a severe humanitarian crisis. In the last 24 hours it appears to have turned violent with migrants physically rushing the border and throwing things and being met with water cannons and tear gas by Polish forces. It’s all such a terrible human tragedy.

The EU means for us to believe that President Lukashenko of Belarus is this story’s truest villain, and he may well be. But the EU has deeply restrictive attitudes towards refugees and favors externalized immigration policies such as providing financial incentives for other neighboring countries, like Turkey, to restrict the free movement of migrants from reaching its borders. In a sense, Lukashenko’s understanding that he can leverage migrant bodies in economic negotiations is correct, though that doesn’t mean he isn’t also a monster. And Poland’s insistence that Belarus is “weaponizing” immigrant bodies and then meeting those bodies with force is confusing. As is often the case, these refugees are clearly pawns of the politics of nations yet cannot be treated as innocent victims because the global insistence of the moral weakness of migrants will always cast them as perpetrators whose sins must be punished.

I am way out of my comfort zone talking about Eastern European affairs, but that’s ok, because I don’t have to look far to find similar themes on our own country’s Southern Border, a comparison that has been remarkably absent from the media’s coverage of the Belarusian/Polish crisis. Like the EU, the US also favors externalized immigration policies that defer enforcement into Mexico in an attempt to keep migrants from reaching the border. The Obama administration famously implemented the “Plan Frontera Sur” which paid Mexico billions of dollars to interdict Central American families in its Southern states and rapidly deport them. Trump threatened Mexico with sanctions if they didn’t control the flow of migrants to the US border. This month US political leaders are fear mongering about a migrant caravan in Southern Mexico and sending the now typical warnings of “do not come”. It’s not impossible to imagine a maniacal president in the Americans leveraging refugee bodies against our country’s strong need to avoid political conflict by ensuring asylum seekers never set foot on US soil.

And if migrants do come they will also find themselves jammed up in encampments on the border in freezing weather, albeit not nearly as cold as Eastern Europe. Our border is dead closed to asylum seekers. They will be put on flights and sent back to some hell that they walked across a continent to escape. Will they ever be met with fire hoses and tear gas? Not yet. But I am certain there are politicians in the US who would endorse a violent policy in a heartbeat. The horses and whips of this fall show us that we are closer to that kind of force than most probably think.

For the most apt comparison between our border conflict and those in Europe is that the migrants will suffer and they will suffer because they moved and because the sins which nations commit against them will always be secondary to their own sins of being poor, vulnerable, brave and hopeful and because of that, we will hurt them.

I have said it before, but if any of this interests you, you should really read Harsha Walia’s book Border and Rule. It’s a banger.

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Belarus, Closer to Home

Written by allegralove1