Exclusion series: The impulse to exclude, at home and abroad
Inclusion and exclusion – the story of humanity?
The issue of social exclusion in its various forms has been on my mind lately. The contrast between the liberal rhetoric to promote greater social and economic participation on the one side, and the countervailing rhetoric about walls and keeping people out, on the other, seems to be starker than ever. However, I don’t think it is a stretch to say that these dueling tendencies – to band together or to fend off outsiders – are both timeless aspects human nature.
Today’s entry will mark the beginning of a new blog series devoted to exploring the vast subject of exclusion.
Why talk about exclusion in a blog devoted to evaluation and international development topics? For one, because the contrast between the recent extremist exclusionary talk and behavior in politics (in the U.S. as well as globally) and the more inclusive rhetoric pervading the development aid world is so striking. Another reason is related to domestic, U.S. attitudes. A significant share of U.S. society doesn’t seem to believe in inclusion, in helping others get in. Given the support for President Trump’s rhetoric on building walls and keeping out migrants (88 percent of Republicans approve of the job he is doing, according to the August 1-14, 2019 Gallup poll), what does this portend for a foreign aid policy that, up until now, has pointed mostly in the other direction?
Rhetoric spills into action
Exclusion manifests itself in many ways: moats, walls, xenophobia, nationalism, nativism, racism, sexism, tribalism, ethnic cleansing, genocide. It can range from the relatively passive — such as barring “others,” like migrants, from entering — to the active, such as expelling members from a group, to the awful, destroying those perceived as not belonging.
What prompted these reflections — which I will expand on in this and posts to follow — is the extreme form that this will to exclude has taken in the U.S. In the recent El Paso mass shooting a young white man killed 22 Hispanics at a Walmart store, and injured even more. His purported motive was to kill immigrants, and defend the country against an “invasion” by immigrants, i.e. outsiders.
This was but the most recent of a spate of U.S massacres targeting minorities. African Americans, Jews and gays have all been slaughtered on U.S. soil in recent years because of who they are, and because their existence posed a problem.
The shootings can be seen as an extreme manifestation of the desire, as expressed by white nationalist groups and their sympathizers, to rid the U.S. of those who don’t conform to their retrograde vision of who is allowed to be here.
Huddled masses need not apply
Ridding the U.S. of ethnic minorities has a long and ignominious history. As Michael Luo writes in the August 17, 2019 issue of The New Yorker, the U.S. Senate passed a bill back in 1882 to bar Chinese immigrants from entering the U.S. The Chinese Exclusion Act, as it came to be called, was not repealed until 1943. Now the government is at it again, with new regulations to deny permanent legal status, or green cards, to immigrants likely to need government services.
This is but the latest in ongoing efforts to reduce migration flows to the U.S. It has been accompanied by rhetoric and full-blooded condoning of these views. This exclusion rhetoric has risen dramatically under President Trump. It started with his announcement of his candidacy and its blatant anti-immigrant message, calling Mexicans criminals and rapists.
The logic may appear infantile and full of holes, but it resonated with enough Americans to win him the election. And now there are those who have reached the conclusion that, if Mexicans are coming here to rape and commit crimes, then they don’t deserve to live, ergo it is okay to kill them. It is a vision of keeping the U.S. homogenous, and pure, and returning to a (relatively small) window in time when most of the settled population was white — having killed or enslaved “outside” groups such as native Americans or people brought over from Africa.
The El Paso killer’s statements on social media conformed closely to attitudes and language used by Trump supporters and Trump himself. In July 2019 Trump launched verbal assaults against four Democratic Congresswomen: “Hey if you don’t like it, let them leave.” Soon after, supporters at Trump rallies were chanting “Send her back,” although the President has tried to distance himself from the chant, if not the sentiment.
Is it simply human nature to exclude others?
First of all, it is true that the phenomenon of one group keeping outsiders out is neither new nor particularly remarkable. I suppose it has been with us as long as we’ve been a species. The formation of tribes and nations is as much about outsiders as it is about members.
I will go further, and argue that exclusion of the many by the few, or of the few by the many, of casting out and keeping out, is one of humanity’s leitmotifs. The Bible’s key events often center on exclusion in one way or another: the fall from Paradise, the Great Flood, the Exodus out of Egypt, the Chosen People. And the history of the 20th century is full of myths which fed genocides against minorities, facilitated by modern organizational capacities of the Nazis in Germany and Central Europe, of Serb nationalists in Bosnia, of Hutu power in Rwanda, and so on.
Yet as ancient as it is, and as horrific as the 20th century was for millions of people, it feels like we live in a time where the rhetoric around social exclusion has entered the political mainstream. Accounts of political leaders demonizing others feature prominently in the daily news. In both the U.S. and Europe, rightwing parties have galvanized supporters with anti-immigrant rhetoric. It has become acceptable again for sizable minorities to, if you’ll permit the oxymoron, openly embrace the exclusion of others.
Development efforts to promote inclusion
Flipping the coin over to the other side, many of the international development projects I evaluate aim, among other things, at increasing inclusion. It is part of their underlying rationale.
Increasing access — to things which many of us in the “developed” world take for granted — is seen as the key to lifting people out of poverty, and opening up opportunities they wouldn’t have otherwise. In other words, development assistance is about inclusion, and not just economic growth. In recent decades, economists have come to the realization that growth isn’t sufficient if the gains are not sufficiently dispersed through society.
The World Bank’s mission is “shared prosperity”. The UN Sustainable Development Goals are replete with the terms “inclusive” and “access to.” Inclusive growth is now a term. Investing in modernization is at the core of development efforts in poor countries striving to catch up with rich ones. It is about reducing the gap between the haves and have-nots. It is about letting more people in on the fruits of civilization and modern society. It doesn’t always work out, and the rhetoric is often far ahead of the reality, but the rhetoric matters. Project goals refer to it and, at least in part, are often linked to it.
The mechanism for reaching these goals are investments and policy reforms which expand access to, for example, electricity, healthcare services, clean water and sanitation, markets, education, and political and civic inclusion, by way of voter registration programs. The expansion of access is generally aimed at those who have been left out: the poor, women, youth, disabled persons, etc.
It is true that development aid will not generally help people join the most, shall we say, “exciting” tribes that humanity divides itself into, i.e. those which are defined along ethnic, racial, or religious lines. That would be antithetical to development aid’s raison d’etre. It is also true that there are probably not enough resources for the many currently excluded to access. For example, in 1994 when Malawi adopted a policy of free primary education by abolishing tuition fees, one unintended consequence was a severe drop in educational quality, as the system was overwhelmed. There simply were not enough teachers and schools to handle the influx.
Even when ineffective or focused on issues other than access, however, international development never aims at exclusion, at keeping groups of people down and out. After all, the point is to invest in public goods, which by definition are both non-excludable and non-rivalrous.
On the whole, development programs do try to increase capacity to participate in society and its rewards, by reducing some of the most basic obstacles.
Don’t expect the rhetoric on exclusion to disappear
Now contrast international development policies with the prevalent desire, among certain outspoken parts of country populations and their political leaders, to exclude others. Even leaving aside the violent and genocidal tendencies displayed by fringe groups, and some mass shooters, the basic desire to keep others out appears to be fairly widespread in the U.S. and many other countries. Fully one third of the U.S. population believes that migrants do more harm than benefit to the country. That’s less than the 39 percent who believe the opposite. But it still amounts to a view held by over 100 million Americans.
Populist parties in Europe rail against immigrants. Hungary’s populist and self-proclaimed illiberal Prime Minister Victor Orban has said that “countries that don’t stop immigration will be lost,” and keeps winning elections. The UK’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, as an MP, based part of his pro-Brexit rhetoric on fears of 80 million Turks invading the UK. Fallacious, but effective.
It is clearly human nature to think in terms of us and them. There are just too many people for everyone to be “us.” Someone has to be “them.” There will always be insiders and outsiders, those who belong to a group and those who don’t.
It seems that Republicans and Democrats have staked opposing positions on this terrain. I find it curious how many U.S. Democratic party positions focus on inclusion, on expanding rights and access for those marginalized. Consider where Democrats stand, not just on migration, but on health insurance, abortion rights, voting rights. It’s about bringing people in, not kicking them out. Social inclusion, in other words.
Republican focus on helping small businesses might be described as promoting economic inclusion. In my view the effort is a bit desultory, given Republican handouts to corporate America. And how feasible economic inclusion is without social inclusion is a matter for debate.
In any case, it is a safe bet that the tension between allowing more people in and keeping them out will never disappear. If those of us who believe in inclusion can at least prevent exclusionary tendencies from turning into genocidal tendencies, that is worth something worth fighting for. And as climate change reduces the ability of populations in some regions to manage, or even survive, you can bet there will be a fight.
Will U.S. foreign aid now succumb to exclusionist impulses? Stay tuned.