Deport. Detain. Deter: The moneymaking anti-migrant machine
00:00Media Storm is brought to you in partnership with Open Britain.A grassroots campaign group making democracy work for everyone, not just the rich and powerful.The EU is building something they don't want you to know about.Across the US, ICE is shooting people, disappearing people and tearing families apart.Here in Europe, they're taking notes.European governments and institutions are pushing through a new law,which the far right have celebrated as the start of the era of deportations.This is not a fight between people with papers and people without.
00:40It's a fight between the people who believe human rights belong to everyoneand politicians and corporations gaining power and profit from taking them away.Media Stormers, it's that time of year again.World Refugee Week.Happy Refugee Week, everyone.Regular listeners will know that every year, Media Storm marks the week with an episode spotlightthe latest migration trend peppering our news.It's true, and last year, we looked at community solutions.
01:11So next to that, this year marks a dark turn.Why?Because the biggest rising trend in global migration policy today is deportation.Mass deportation was still a taboo term when we last visited the topic.But since then, Trump's ICE invasions, immigration internment camps, and deportation deals with devilish governmentshave become a secret prototype for governments all across the wealthy world.If you don't know it's happening in your country, well, whose fault is that?The medias!
01:44Precisely.Today, somehow, despite our media's incessant coverage of immigration, solutions aremiraculously no closer.We simply do not have a global infrastructure to deal with displacement.And we desperately need one, because this problem is not going to.away. Since I started researching displacement 10 years ago, the total number of displaced people in theworld has doubled in a decade to a record high. More than one in 70 people on earth are displaced.It's doubled. Why is it rising so quickly? I know. I asked myself exactly that when I realized
02:24how different the number that I was staring at was to when I began this work. And the answer to thatquestion is primarily climate change. More than half of the people displaced today are displacedby climate-related issues. Okay, and I can definitely understand that, but I actually saw a headlinea few days ago saying that the number of refugees in the world went down last year. For the first timein ages, the article said. Isn't that a good thing? Well, this is exactly the kind of headlinemedia storm loves to unpick, because yes, last week, this. Last week,The UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, released its annual report.And for the first time in a decade, the number of forcibly displaced people worldwide had fallen.
03:12So queue, lots of positive headlines.But read past the headline and actually read UNHCR's report.You'll hear that there's serious concern about why this number fell.Because the main thing that was different this year is that record numbers of people were forced back to home countries like,Afghanistan, Sudan, Syria.The UN report raises alarm that most of those returns happened under pressure, in danger,or in their words, in extremely fragile contexts.So this isn't a crisis being solved.
03:47It's people being pushed back into danger and then that being turned around and counted as good news.In many cases, at least.And I personally have one contact who was sent back to Syria and was murdered.So I can tell you that the only solution here is out of sight, out of mind for the countries forcing them back.But this sudden change in direction embodies what today's episode will focus on.The rise of the deportation machine.Explain.Until recently, the closest thing the world had to a global displacement infrastructure was UNHCR's resettlement scheme.
04:26Now, resettlement refers to the safe relocation of people.people in need of refuge. This involves people actually being given legal pathways to countriesof sanctuary rather than having to make those journeys illegally themselves. In 2024, only 0.2% ofdisplaced people were resettled anywhere in the entire world. Zero.2% that's shameful. And youthink that's bad. The data just out this week for 2025, so resettlement numbers drop by more thanhalf. You see, the wealthy countries of the world refuse to build a solutions-focused infrastructureto deal with displacement. And it's not because they don't have the resources. Because in its absence,they are rapidly building a sophisticated global infrastructure. But it's not designed to deal
05:17with displacement. It's designed to deal with deportation. Paints me the picture. What does thisdeportation machine actually look like? Well, let's start in the US, because Trump's icehas become the blueprint.As we speak, 18 people have died in ICE custodyin the first five months of this year alone.That was one person every nine days.And as the body's mount,the agency's response has been to quietly stop reporting some of them.
05:45They changed the rules, right?Yeah, their reporting rules were rewritten, basically,to exclude anyone who died having recently been released from custody.They changed this after a blind Rohingya man was found deadwhen ICE released him miles from his home in sub-freezing temperatures in the middle of the night.Horrendous. Horrendous.It's so sad.And ICE is detaining these people under Trump's plans to deport them.
06:12Increasingly, to deport them to places they have no connection to.Trump's government is paying more and more countries to take in their discarded migrant populations.Some 20,000 people have been deported to at least 23 countries they have no connection.to, mostly it's Mexico, but also Uganda, Iswatini, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo.You literally just told us on the last News Watch episode of Media Storm that migrants in the DemocraticRepublic of Congo are being forced by militias to work in mines. Yeah, the Trump administrationdoesn't care what happens to them when they get to this other country. They don't reallycare about the human cost and frankly they don't care about the financial cost, judging by the numbers,
06:55because a US congressional investigationfound the government spent at least $40 milliondeporting roughly 300 people this way.I was going to say this and I realised that this isn't the point,but that's not exactly good value for money.Well, actually, I would say it is part of the pointbecause someone is getting very rich at those exchange rates.Some individual removals have cost close to a million dollars per person.
07:24Now, we'll get to that.But first, let's continue our tour of this deportation machine.Because here in Europe, as we record, the EU Parliament, which has a right-wing majority,is expected to approve a sweeping new deportation law.It would allow families, families, to be detained for up to two years awaiting deportation,and it would allow European governments to negotiate deportation deals with return hubs all over the world.This follows the model of Italy with Albania.So which countries are they looking at to be return hubs?
07:59So far, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark and Greece have collectively just said thatthey're looking at Africa.Yeah, not a country.Also, remember when the UK's Rwanda deal was seen as inhumane and ridiculous?I know it's true.Like it shows how rapidly we've degraded our standards of human rights.But even that is like nothing.The EU has just invited the Taliban to Brussels
08:25to discuss taking back Afghans who tried to flee them.Sorry, the same Taliban the West spent 20 years and trillions of dollars fighting.We're now inviting them in to help us deport people.The very same.Because in this machine, the goal isn't safety or rights.The goal is removal.And removal, it turns out, is enormously profitable.There is a whole industry growing up around this.
08:51security firms, detention contractors, surveillance companies, deportation airlines.Border surveillance alone is projected to be a $68 billion market by 2034.So someone's getting rich.Someone's always getting rich.And taxpayers are paying for something that fundamentally doesn't work, not even on its own terms.People don't stop fleeing war and famine and certainly not climate change because a wall gets higher.They just take more dangerous routes.The Mediterranean Sea has just seen the deadliest start to any year on record.
09:25Deportation doesn't make displacement disappear.It just makes it more lethal and more lucrative.And presumably our media is letting them get away with it.Well, what do you think?Despite blanket coverage of human traffickers and illegal immigrants,how much have you heard about the corporations profiting from the problem?That's what Media Storm is here to fix.Today we'll ask why,
09:50is the wealthy world spending billions to avoid the refugee crisis rather than simply solve it.How did deportation become an industry? And who is it making rich?The whole idea about Rwanda is deterrent.Keeping them all here, putting them up in the rich and sending them to Eden.Deaths of people being held by immigration and customs enforcement are now at their highestlevel in two decades. So those who have been here for years, entirely legally, could be rounded upand deported. People want them sent home. They don't want them to beThey don't want them in hotels, they don't want them in their communities.
10:22Welcome to MediaStorm, the news podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last.I'm Matilda Mallinson.And I'm Helen Awadia.This week's Media Storm.Deport, detain, deter.The money-making anti-migrant machine.Welcome to the Media Storm Studio.Our first guest today knows today's topic all too well, but has used his experience of border violence to campaign against others having to say.
10:53to suffer it. Born in Darfur, Sudan, he was first forced from his home as a child in 2003 and hasexperienced mass displacement camps, detention centres and some of the world's most dangerous borderson his search for sanctuary. He now lives in Italy and campaigns for the rights of refugeeseverywhere. A very warm welcome to Media Storm, Mohamed Dawood. Thank you so much.Our second guest is a writer, researcher and campaigner working on migration, climate change andgeopolitics. He's also a civil search and rescue volunteer who's operated in the Mediterranean Sea.He's currently writing a book tracking a decade of escalating violence at Europe's borders.Welcome to Median Storm, Nathan Aikurst. Thanks for having me.
11:36So today we're looking at the default systems that our governments rely on to deal with theso-called refugee crisis. These include deterrence, harsh, hostile policies designed to put peopleoff coming here in the first place, detention, containing those who come,separately from society, and deportation, evicting them out of the country altogether.All of these are part of a wider strategy called externalisation.Nathan, we're going to ask you to explain that term in a moment.But I just want to make a quick media storm point on language.It's noticeable that the words we use to describe these policies are often highly euphemistic and bloodless,
12:14words like deterrence or returns or closed borders.But in reality, these concepts are often far from.from bloodless. Now, Nathan, what is meant by externalisation and how common is it in migration policytoday? Yeah, I guess in very simple terms, it's pushing our border policies out into other countries.I mean, you know, migration is a very contentious issue. We don't stop talking about it,but I think most people have this quite straightforward mental model that is about howopen or close the border should be, depending on your political opinion. And I think that missesis the massive systemic complexity of all of this, because we're not just talking about who
12:56does or doesn't get turned back at the entry point to your national border, but this very,very large system and this expanding system where other countries are coerced or paid to actas border guards and enforcers on behalf of usually wealthy Western states. Now, there's a lot ofways in which this takes place. One is funding, training, and operational cooperation withviolent armed groups and security forces with the aim of preventing people from moving.There's then this kind of carrot and stick politics, a foreign policy that rewards countriesthat accept subordination and alignment to European or North American border regimes andpunishes those that don't through restricting visa access and things like that.
13:44There's mass surveillance machinery, so deploying equipment, collecting data on peopleand creating interoperable systems to surveil people migrating, and increasingly just everyone ingeneral. And then there's the creation of carceral infrastructure outside EU borders. For yourBritish listeners, the Raranda plan will probably be the most relevant example. I'm currently in Brussels.The EU Parliament this week is voting on a deportation regulation that would remove legal barriersto these offshore detention camps that would send people to places they've never been, have noconnection to, and it's hard to overestimate the scale of this, right? We're talking about dealswith dozens and dozens of countries, huge amounts of resources, and usually occurring along
14:30the same lines that traditional colonial hierarchies did. Thank you so much for that comprehensiveoverview, and it's really important to speak about what this actually looks like in real life.We'll go through this stage by sage. Muhammad, let's bring you in here. During your journey,Europe's externalised border reached you when you arrived in Libya after crossing the Sahara Desert.Libya is one country the EU pays to stop people before they cross into Europe.You were arbitrarily imprisoned there by EU-funded security forces and you saw how others were treated as well.What do you think people in Europe need to understand about what happens inside that system that their governments are paying for?A lot of common European people do not understand why and how their countries or the policemakers are supporting those people in order to manage what they call is migration management.
15:27But in fact, this is a way to fund a lot of detention centers prisons where people torture it and beaten for so many times, so many years inside the detention centers.I personally talked about my experience in Libya from 2020 till 2003.The European people should understand that these taxes are not going to support people or not going to solve any problems.In fact, creating new damages.People are dying.Women are rapid.We receive it so many messages through our hotline videos that people are asking to help, people asking to evacuate.So for me, that's the idea that the common European people,
16:09and people can understand that this money are not going to save people.Actually, it's going to kill a lot of migrants and refugees in Libya.And also something I recently learned that completely shocked mewas another militia that was funded by the EU to control migration,besides those in Libya that extort and torture and rape, as you say, routinely.Another one was the Sudanese rapid support forces,which is the genocidal militia that is helping to createsuch devastation in Sudan, your country, Muhammad, and this is one of the reasons you had to
16:43leave your home. And that militia, the rapid support forces, that paramilitary group used tobe funded by the EU to control migration. Hameti, the general in charge, used to parade aroundboasting about controlling Europe's borders and has been found by most rights groups to beperpetrating genocide in the region. I did not know that the RSF was among those militias and I wasreally, really shocked to find out.But Nathan, what alarming new tactic have we also started to see Libyan anti-migrant militiasemploy to block people on the Mediterranean Sea?So yeah, the Libyan Coast Guard, and I say that in heavy quote marks, was created out of
17:25the remains of the Gaddafi era navy.That meant that European money was going in, not to helping Libyans, not to helping refugees,but to building out and equipping this new military force, which had one job to interceptpeople seeking safety and drag them back to the horrific conditions that you've just heard described.And there's been incidents of them violently interfering with rescues for a long time now.But what's striking in the last year is that there's been three cases in 10 months of themopening fire on civilian rescue ships. In one case, the case of the Ocean Viking last year,I was just talking last night actually to a young crew member who was on his first ever mission
18:03when he was fired out for a full 20 minutes in an attack that shattered the windows on the bridgeat head height and caused, I think, over 150 grand's worth of damage to rescue equipmentand could have been lethal. And these attacks were carried out from boats paid for by the EU,Italian Guardia de Financer boats. So I think there's an interesting question here,where border control gets framed as protecting Europeans when actually it's handing over money tohostile foreign military forces that put European rescue workers along with everyone else atsevere and potentially lethal risk.Amahamat, you also met the sharp edge of European deterrence at the border between Morocco and
18:45Spain. You survived the massacre at the Malila Nadar border in June 2022, where dozens of peoplewere killed trying to cross from Morocco into the Spanish enclave. Almost all were fleeing Sudan. You witnessedit, you lost friends that day. Spanish and Moroccan officials said that their border guardshad been assaulted and had to fight back in self-defense. And the Prime Minister of Spain,Pedro Sanchez, said the incident was a well-organized violent assault by organized crime groupsand thanked Spanish and Moroccan security forces for their actions. So that's sort of theversion of events that was publicised across Europe. As someone present, how would you characterizethe events that day?
19:30Well, the event of 24 of June 2022, as we name it, it's as a racist massacre ever happened in the contemporary of history.As the Spanish and Moroccan police said, they were depending themselves.But actually, that's not because when we came down from the mountains, we already found them ready to massacre.We have been locked to some space where we cannot out.We have been beaten us like animals.People are crying.that we saw, the humanization that we have been through.It is absolutely reveals that this is not defending themselves.
20:08There is a lot of people who date and who also remain missing, hundreds of them.Those who also survived are in prison for over five years.I personally lost my close friend in that situation,and there is a lot of people who also remain not find their relatives,their friends, their family, who has been asking for so many years,also if they're still alive or not.The Europe who is trying to protect its border in those situations,even if it takes thousands of people who died or remind massacres
20:40just to save their borders, it could not be right,because those people also are humansand maybe seeking just for something called peace and protections.When I come to remind such situations,it feels like why this is happening.Is it all about saving borders,or it's also something behind of this?For me, those people who is still seeking for their justice should be recognised it, especially
21:05in the 24 of June.Absolutely.This is the exact point.These are the stories that we should be hearing in the media, but far too often thehuman cost is going underreported by a media that reports obsessively on the so-calledmigrant crisis.Nathan, you do search and rescue on the Mediterranean Sea, where Mohammed, you eventually crossedinto Europe on a dinghy with over 45 passengers.
21:31What many listeners may not know is that 2026 has so far been the deadliest year on recordin the Mediterranean.Nathan, how much of this death toll does the public never see?And given how much time the media spends reporting on small boat crossings,how do you feel about the level of coverage on these deaths?Yeah, I was flying out of Lamberducar on a small monitoring aircraft about a couple ofweeks ago now, we had five people trapped on an oil platform. We had two or three rescues,fortunately, that did take place. We had an interception by the Libyan Coast Guard. We had a
22:07terrible case where, well, 50 people were rescued, but one one-month baby was brought to shoredead. This is routine. It's been happening for, you know, a very long time now. And I thinkabout 10, 11, 12 years ago, I naively thought that all of these horrors would be dead. And I think,dealt with that someone would put a stop to them. And then we normalised it and we stopped talkingabout it and now worse with the emergence of the far right across Europe. It's becoming activelycelebrated in a lot of quarters. As you say, this has been one of the most lethal starts to theyear on record. In February, we had Storm Harry, which could have potentially killed up toa thousand people crossing according to some estimates. One of the things that I found disturbing and fascinating
22:54about that storm is that it's taking place in a climate breakdown and the system of fossil fueldependence and extraction chains linked to it and the conflicts and political turmoil that it causesis a variable in why some people have to leave in the first place and now it's making their journeysmore more dangerous as well. I mean, I think it's very telling that we hear these stories almostconstantly about arrivals. The image of rubber boats crowded with people is a defining image onthe news of our times, and yet the level of cultural and media literacy about who these people are,where they're coming from, and a desire to engage with the text here of their stories is almostnon-existent. Now, you know, I believe in solidarity, in compassion, in treating people how we'd
23:42like to be treated in their position. But even if you don't, one of the things that I wonderabout the media in all of this is where, where's a lot of their basic curiosity and where'stheir desire to understand out of rigor, if nothing else, the people, the human being is at theheart of these very consequential stories. Now, Mahmat, you live in Italy today. You speak thelanguage, you work, you have a life. Let's talk about returns deportation, because UNHCR has justreported the first drop in global displacement in a decade. Now this looks like a positive change,but if you look at the reasons behind it, the story becomes a bit darker.Displacement has fallen largely because many thousands of people are being forced to return
24:26against their will to countries like Afghanistan, Sudan and Syria.And now presumably many people would love to return to their old homes, but they also havenew homes and they probably want to return when they're safe.How do these accounts of repatriation make you feel?Well, yeah, first of all, I totally agree that when the return home, it is one ofthe best things someone could have, but when it comes to say returning home forcefully,it of course is something different and difficult. For example, in Sudan, people arereturned forcefully to fight with the National Army Sudanese. So I feel that now, absolutely,
25:11the idea of UNHCR, it is to reduce the number of the migrants, refugees, and people whowar countries, but people should be more accepted if they want to go back or not.And how wonderful that you now live in Italy are safe, you contribute to their country,you learn a whole new language. I wish that the media could celebrate that. I wish we couldchange the narrative to turn that into a celebratory thing. Well, I think this is somethingthat so many people like me wish to have it, including European and the other people's.How do you say in Italian, let's take a break?Prendiam a bit of time.
25:54Pretendiamo en poti tempo?A bit of tempo.Welcome back to Media Storm.Before the break, we learned about externalization and its human realities.Next, we'll ask, does it work?And who benefits?This entire policy rests on a logic of deterrence,the belief that if you make the journey dangerous and degrading enough,
26:23people will simply stop coming.Now most articles about asylum seekers fail to speak to a single asylum seeker, which makes it prettyhard for them to get an accurate answer to this question.Muhammad, you literally crossed the Sahara Desert.I don't think man could make a more hostile environment than that.So I want to ask you directly, at any point on that journey, was there a wall, a law,a threat of rejection that would have made you turn back and accept the life that you were fleeing?Sahara Desert, there is no life, no water. Where there's no water, there's no life. It is not only a way of traveling. It is a root of death. And never one can go through that day unless facing a very, very serious situation. I left Sudan in my early days where the genocide is starting, Darfur Sudan in 2003s. And I start asking, wondering myself, why someone could out of his country?
27:25I never knew what does it mean war.I could barely hear the screaming of the people, the falling down of such individuals.I start to understand what does it mean and why people fleeing.But of course, when we face a danger in front of our lives,we would never imagine what in the future would come, whether good or bad for us.The only thing we do is to seek how to save ourselves.So for me, I would never imagine that at the end I would first,Sahara Desert, but this is what it is. It could be possible that human being can do everything
28:00in order to save his life. So I would say if I have been giving away more safe withinSahara Desert, I would choose the other one. Well, Nathan, give us the overview on a macro scale.Is there any actual evidence that deterrence, as opposed to safe legal roots, as Mohamed justdescribed, is there any actual evidence that deterrence works? I mean, I think if you madeto anyone audit this stuff for longer than five minutes,it will immediately start falling apart.You can get short-term gains,if you're coming from that perspective,
28:34from enforcement.At a US, for instance, has drastically cut encountersover the last year or so with its border surge.I was just in Texas.I mean, we can talk about the other consequences of that, right?Like, we were driving through a heavily militarised desertwhere drones were buzzing overhead,and communities on both sides of the border
28:54were split apart from each other and dealing with checkpoints all over the place every day,very, very kind of hostile environment of people that live there, let alone people trying to cross.But the first problem with that approach is that what it's done is just for now push the problemdown into Mexico, where you get a lot of evidence of these internal deportations further tothe south of the country. And then sooner or later, people have a habit of finding another route,and you can only keep up the operational tempo of enforcementand maintain the enforcement chain down the line for so long,especially when, as in the Libya case,
29:31the militias you're paying to stop peopleare the exact same people who are also profiteeringfrom incarceration and smuggling in the whole system.So there's a kind of deliberate amnesia in it, almost, I think.I think what captures this whole story best for meis when we had riots in England a couple of years ago,people trying to immolate asylum seekers in their homes.And onto the TV comes a Labour Baroness who says that we need to have a conversation about
29:57migration as if we'd stopped talking about migration at any point in the interview ofliterally.But I don't really see deterrence politics as border control at all.It's not planning in relation to how people move.It's not managing the flow of people into an area.It's creating chaos.And the purpose of that chaos is not border control.It's dividing people.
30:18It's normalising.authoritarian measures and surveillance and crucially transferring a huge amount of public wealth intothe private sector. Right. At a time of a cost of living crisis, we are seeing huge amounts ofmoney directed away from public services towards this deportation machinery. Politics is obviouslyone reason why, but today we want to talk about the lesser understood and lesser reported partof that formula. We want to follow the money. Nathan, walk us through the industry,that's grown up all around this.The surveillance companies, the detention firms, the deportation airlines.
30:55Who are the corporate winners of the deportation boom?Yeah, I mean, where do you want to begin?The new statesman cover story last week was quite interesting.It's about Circo, this huge bloated outsourcing firm, that among many other things,runs temporary accommodation for asylum seekers in Britain, often at a very high cost of the state,whilst keeping people in very poor conditions, and also,whilst we suffer from a chronic housing shortage across the board. So you just have this system thatfails for everyone. You have people seeking safety being held in awful conditions. You have taxpayers
31:30angry about the inflated amount of money that is being spent on migration. And they've also got another200 million, I think, for GPS tagging asylum seekers, which is a worrying step for a range ofreasons. But this is, you know, a firm of a broader record, right, that poured insane amounts ofmoney into a black hole during COVID, has screwed up public services from not just asylum,but across the welfare state and across the NHS. And essentially kind of at this,at this point just exists to rip copper wire out of public services. It's this like parasiticentity that doesn't really make any money other than through state contracts. Now, like,that's not an atypical story, right? As soon as, as you say crisis, and in this case,
32:10migration crisis, you whip up a panic. And suddenly there's little scrutiny on what you're doingto actually handle that crisis. I mean, I bring up a crisis. I bring up a crisis. I bring up aCOVID as an example, but there was a genuine emergency at that point, and so you can understandkind of loosening procurement rules for a short period of time, even if it creates potentialvectors for corruption. But this migration architecture is structural. It's gone on without properscrutiny for years. You know, you have all of this money to the Libyan Coast Guard, which isessentially a subsidy to the Italian military industrial complex. You have Pamelucky's Anderilbuilding surveillance towers on the British South Coast that I'm not.
32:48not exactly sure of the cost, but I doubt it's small. And you have the Palantir data grab. You havethe flights, the surveillance, the detention camps that you've mentioned. Yeah, it's a, it's a vastmechanism for profiting off the human lives of people crossing borders and also profitingoff the paranoia of voting publics largely in the global north. And it's not an accident. It'sset up to be that way. I'm going to drop in a plug here, but I write about this quite extensivelyin my book along the Watchtower, which is coming out in November.and has a chapter on the enforcement industry and kind of how it's grown upand the lobbying relationships it has with particularly the EU but other governments as well.
33:28Serco, by the way, the first company you mentioned there,their own annual report actually frames conflict and climate changeas drivers of future demand for its services.But look, Mahamat, when our media covers the dark money of this displacement machinery,they point to traffickers and smugglers as the villains here,the exclusive sort of evil profiteers of exploiting vulnerable migrants.Meanwhile, this corporate machinery stays almost invisible in our news.Do you think that the corporations and the CEOs legally getting rich
34:05off of this deportation economy, do you think that their profits are ethical?No, because this is a system where connected all,when we said mafia in Africa, it is not a mafia or.of African itself, but also a mafia of European,because you cannot go and sign agreementswhen you well understand that these people are exposed to tortureand extortion crimes.So under these agreements, people can, or the politicians,
34:30can take whatever they want from natural resources,whether from Libya or from everywhere in Africa.After the deportation, people would be put it into the detention centers.What is happening in detention centers?The European know this is a system where we may thinkhundreds of years had been almost done. But this is a slavery mechanism which is work. For me, I havewitnessed so many people who paid money to get out. People who don't have had been beaten andtorture it. People who have called their family to sell their homes in order to get out from this
35:10campus. Who construct this campus? It's from Europe. Millions of, you know, hand-shed.Under every hand check, there's people who are dying.So the story gets circles every time again.When people intercept it, return it back, put it into prison, and then pay it and get out.So let's imagine this mechanism.It's a way of profiting.It's a way of trading.It's a way of getting millions of euros.
35:38After I also experienced this situation, I totally understand that this migration management,it would never stop because people...are profiting from this.You often hear that we can't support more refugees due to finite resources.Let's address that. Nathan, how cost-effective is externalisation as a response to the refugee crisis?We had a very early example of this around over a decade ago now in Nauru in Australia,which was kind of the canary down the coal mine for these externalisation deals.Terrible place. Children in cages, suicide in the camp, all of the things that.
36:18we then kind of mainstreamed later down the line.And the total cost of processing a detainee in the Nauru campwas $500,000 Australian dollars per detainee.I mean, again, it's just an absurd figure.And the minister who was responsible for building up this systemthen becomes the independent reporter in Britainon the Rwanda deal that's cut a few years later.So again, none of this is happening by accident, right?
36:44to then cut things the other way, to the extent that reception and looking after people would be a logistics challenge.And of course, you know, it is, of course it would be.But we managed it with Ukraine.And, you know, you could easily deploy all of those resources that we're currently putting into locking people up, intercepting them,dumping them in deserts and go a long way towards solving the problem and ensuring people are being processed and given access to safety in a fair and managed way.And that's kind of what I was saying earlier, right?There is no point at which anyone's checking this.There's no point in which anyone is auditing and saying, you know, not just is this moral,
37:21but are we even getting value for money out of this, asking the basic questions that you would ask of any private or public enterprise.And now hearing that, I think it's interesting because we often think we can't afford as countries to do more than we're doing.But in reality, the world's poorest countries bear the bulk of the burden.68% of people in need of international protection, get that protection from low and middle-income countries, not the wealthy world.Mahamat, you spent years of your displacement in one of the vast refugee camps in eastern Chad, which hosts some of the largest proportion of refugees in the world.How do you feel hearing phrases like, we can't afford this or we can't take everyone common phrases in the European immigration debate?Well, this is selfishness because I have been in Chad. Chad is one of the countries where there is no such opportunities of lives, for example, education and so on, but also afforded to accredit millions of people who fleeing the war in Sudan. So for me, I guess Europe could also able to afford such people, individuals who are really vulnerable, individuals who are subjected to situations like in Libya. So for me, I guess Europe could also able to afford such people, individuals who are really vulnerable, individuals who are subjected to situations like in Libya. So for me,me, maybe the only stories need to be told it where these people are coming from, because now
38:44the policies has manipulated the stories of migration politically, leading us in a way thatmaybe to believe these are criminals who are coming to enter to our Europe countries, and we cannotafford this. But when we understand these people are vulnerable, these people are coming fromwar places, these people are seeking only for safety, I guess we would accept them. So,That's why we continue making awareness events in order to say that we are migrants,but we're also good people.So in that case, we will make a good society to accept everybody.And on that point, let's turn finally to the alternative.
39:26The thesis of this whole episode is that the rich world is pouring more resourcesinto avoiding this problem rather than solving it.And the proof is in one devastating,stating pair of numbers. Nathan, last year, the entire wealthy world resettled just 81,800 refugees.The UN estimated 2.5 million people need resettlement that year. Legal solutions are at theirlowest level in decades. Nathan, what would it look like for governments to take a constructiveapproach to asylum and is anyone actually doing it? Yeah, I mean, we've touched on thisclimate displacement question a couple of times briefly. And at the moment,
40:07most climate-linked displacement is internal, and that may change. But also, interestingly,you know, it gets framed as a southern problem. The US is one of the most significant placeswhere climate-related displacement is taking place. It's going to be, and it is a realityall over the world. And I think those countries that have spent the last few decades buildingup ever more violent enforcement structure may wish to be careful what theywhat they've wished for, as, you know, migration routes may not always be what they are now.To come back to something a bit more practical, creating safer routes is the obvious point.If you want to stop the boats, if you want to end irregular crossing and people making
40:55dangerous decisions about the routes that they take, then you have to give them a viableroute to actually being accepted, which doesn't require dangerous crossings.and also then to make faster decisionsand to ensure that people have the rights to workwhile those decisions are being made,so they are able to start to integrateinto the societies that they've joined.And there's a big question about labour law enforcement as well
41:21because you get resentment among domestic populationsbecause of migration taking place under exploitative circumstancesand pain conditions being driven downbut through the exploitation of migrant labour.and then migrant labour is feeling unable to report violations because they don't understand the law or worse,they might be deported if they raise anything. So there are some, there are quite a few of thesolutions here where you have to look outside of just migration policy and think what else is going on.But also, you know, it's not ideal that so many people are having to or feel they have no other choice
41:57than to flee to seek safety in the wealthy and powerful world in the first place.and a foreign policy that stopped flooding places with weaponsand that addressed the climate emergency rather than ignoring it,that restores rather than slashes aid budgets,and that tackles extractive and exploitative international economic systemsthat push people into poverty and needing to leavewould go a long way towards protecting the right to stayas well as the right to move.
42:31Now finally, and starting with you, Muhammad,a question for everyone listening at home.Is there anything that you would like to ask our listeners to doto help be part of the solution here?Yes, thank you.I always ask these questions, what we can do together.The only thing we can do is having willing to understand the other person.We never understood the people who are coming
42:56because of the so much untruth information that we receivedthrough media, through politicians.So for me, this is the only one thing that I also will demandis please listen to stories like this.Try to understand the realities.The stories that are coming from people who exposedand experienced such situations.Nathan, same question to you.
43:20Is there anything you would like our listeners to doto be part of the solutionand also anywhere that they can follow your workto stay up to date with accurate information?I mean, I think it can often see.all very daunting, right, how bad things have got. The riots a few days ago in Belfast being a goodexample of that. And for the last decade or so, Europe or the European Union, you know, this powerthat's once referred to as the standard of civilisation rooted in the post-war liberal idea of
43:49universal human rights has been abrogating all of those rights in the shadows, all to deal withnumbers of people crossing, the absolute maximum constituted a couple of percentage points of theEuropean population, much less than other countries were holding, an order of magnitude less thanthose displaced around Europe after World War II when the refugee convention was created.And then, you know, I think you have to talk at this point, talk about the elephant in the room,and the way in which degrading human rights in that shadow space paved the way for Europeanbehavior on Gaza and being willing to ship arms into a genocide. And so, you know, we're already inthis state of economic decline, but I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that we're in a stage of
44:34profound civilizational moral decay as well. But I think the good news is that most people aren'thappy about this. Most people aren't cheering it on. A lot of people just don't know about it and wouldbe appalled if they did. And yeah, I think that people can.can talk to people around them and persuade them where they're able. I'm still perhaps naively,but still a big believer in the power of conversation. You can vote, obviously, organize andand canvas for candidates that stand up against this, this horrific direction of travel. And yeah,if you have time on your hands, you can volunteer. Not everyone can go to the Central Mediterranean,let's say some people can. But also, there will be probably some form of community solidarity or
45:21charity activity, there will be something you can do to help make people feel welcome andsupported when they arrive near you. I guess I'll just come back to the book, which is out inNovember along the watchtower and dispatches from Europe's war on migration. And I write for,I guess, Jacobin and the New Mediterranean and various places quite frequently. And so I will becontinuing to cover migration, border violence and externalisation and all of these issues.Thank you for listening.you want to support Media Storm, you can do so on Patreon for less than a cup of coffee a month.The link is in the show notes and a special shout out to everyone in our Patreon community already.
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