The official visuals of Ukrainians blocking Africans from getting on trains. #AfricansinUkraine pic.twitter.com/hJYpM3LY0A
— Damilare (Deechi) (@DamilareArah) February 26, 2022
I saw this tweet today and naturally it got me thinking about how racism in our society is constantly perpetuated in all spheres of our modern world. People are very good at othering others. We saw this type of behavior when it came to acceptance of Syrian refugees, but now that Ukraine is being invaded Europe opened its borders almost instantly. In response to Syria, it created an entire military to sink their ships in the Mediterranean.
Perhaps part of this is Europeans claiming to expect that Syria won’t improve and that Ukraine will. But I believe his notion is absurd, racist, and wrong.
There might be a reason to deny visa free access to countries which are underdeveloped… maybe. The argument for visa free access is simply viewing movement as a human right. The argument against visa free access for everybody is it could potentially create brain drain and the only people left in the original country will be those who are too corrupt or too poor to leave. I am not convinced either way on that issue. There is no reason to deny visa free access to countries which are fully developed however when there is every reason to expect people will go home. We see there are numerous countries which are highly developed which the United States still requires arduous visa applications in order to travel to. The Schengen Area is better on this topic. I do believe that visa restrictions are too common today and more countries should be able to travel without visas.
If we look at a list of countries which are currently at war, most of them have a democracy score under 50, and have low incomes. Ukraine, Colombia, and Mexico are the richest countries which have ongoing conflicts with over 1000 deaths this year or last year as of today. It’s pretty hard to ignore the trend that as wealth increases, corruption decreases, and inequality decreases, violence decreases. This means one of the easiest ways to reduce violence in the world is to target these three metrics (wealth, corruption, inequality) and then the world will be a more peaceful place. That’s what the data suggests.
This goes back to something I keep coming back to again and again. If you want peace, you need to democratize and develop your economy. If you want to have freedom of movement, you need to democratize and develop your economy. We need fewer tyrants with resources in the world, support emerging democracies, and make sure that they have the tools they need to rapidly develop in environmentally sustainable ways.
Also, it’s common knowledge in economic circles that oil doesn’t just erode the environment, it also breeds corruption, inequality, and degrades democracy overall.
What can we do here at home? Well, first of all we can improve our democratic institutions and move towards decarbonizing our economy. The best way to improve our democratic institutions right now is to implement ranked voting so we can kill the spoiler effect. The best way to decarbonize our economy is through a carbon tax. In order to help people from Less Developed Countries we need more people from those countries to come to the US and EU to study so they can bring cutting edge science and knowledge of politics back to their home countries.
Go get involved with FairVote and Citizens Climate Lobby right now!
Also, travel and meet people from other countries and start to grow a movement to build real visa free travel and eventually have the US and Canada join the Schengen Area.
Better democracy through ranked voting.
Better international relations through more people to people connections (it really works).
Fight for policies to improve our climate quickly and efficiently. AKA carbon taxes.
Our politicians need to let Ukraine and Georgia into NATO ASAP along with any other democracies which want to join.
We have been seeing democratic backsliding for the last few years. We can reverse it. WE MUST REVERSE IT.
That’s what we can do today to prevent future conflict.