Weapons of Mass Migration by KM Greenhill

It's hard to read this book without thinking of Yglesias' "One Billion Americans". When Deng XiaoPing threatened to ship 30 million Chinese to the US, Carter should have been able to say, "Why not make it an even 100 million?"

Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton all were beat up by Castro because unlike Eisenhower, they weren't willing to a) take the political fallout risk, b) tangle with immigration / INS, and c) devote the resources needed to organize it. Since it has happened at least twice, you know some poor analyst somewhere has spent a bunch of days mapping out adaptable response plans (assume 50% are diseased, 50% are criminal, processing workflows that someone in Florida can handle, etc.).

It is exceedingly painful to watch Washington continually fumble these plans due to "political considerations". If you want to be a statesman, there have to be hills that you are willing to die on. Especially if Emma Lazarus' words on Lady Liberty mean anything to you.

On October 11, 2004, the foreign ministers of the European Union met and agreed to lift all remaining sanctions on one-time international pariah state, Libya. This broad array of sanctions, which included a comprehen-sive arms embargo, had been in place since the 1980s following several high-prof i le Libyan-sponsored terrorist attacks within Western Europe. What catalyzed this dramatic shift in EU policy? Although relations be-tween Libya and the European Union had been improving for some time, it was neither the Libyan decision to disband its weapons of mass destruc-tion program nor its public repudiation of terrorism nor even its acceptance of responsibility for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, that was ultimately decisive.1 Instead, sanctions were lifted in exchange for a Libyan promise to help staunch a growing fl ow of North Af-rican migrants and asylum seekers across the Mediterranean and on to Eu-ropean soil. The prime instrument of inf l uence? Not bullets or bombs, but human beings. Simply put, European fears of unfettered migration permit-ted Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddaf i to engage in a successful, if rather unconventional, form of coercion against the worlds largest political and economic uniona form of coercion predicated on the intentional creation, manipulation, and exploitation of migration and refugee crises.

Using a combination of large-N and comparative case-study analyses, this book identif i es more than fi fty attempts at what I term coercive engi-neered migration (or migration-driven coercion) since the advent of the 1951 Refugee Convention alonewell over half of which succeeded in achiev-ing at least some of their objectives. This is an impressive rate of success, given that the U.S. rate of success when engaged in coercive diplomacy, employing conventional military means, lies somewhere between 19 and 37.5 percent.

There are two nonmutually exclusive, yet independently suff i cient, pathways by which would-be coercers can impose costs on targets: (1) through straightforward threats to overwhelm the physical or politi-cal capacity of a target state to accommodate an inf l ux and (2) through a kind of norms-enhanced political blackmail predicated on exploitation of the heterogeneity of interests that frequently exists within polities.8

I further contend that a key (norms-based) mechanism that can enhance the coercive power of the second pathway is the imposition of what I call hypocrisy costsdef i ned as those symbolic political costs that can be im-posed when there exists a real or perceived disparity between a professed commitment to liberal values and norms and demonstrated actions that contravene such a commitment.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, evidence suggests liberal democracies have indeed been the most popular targets of this kind of coercion in the last half century. Nevertheless, for

reasons I outline in chapter 2 and explore further in chapter 5 with specif i c reference to China, illiberal regimes have not been immune.9

In a similar vein, a quarter century has now past since Myron Weiner fi rst asserted that sending states exercise far more control over their out-migrations than was previously thought and may use them like a na-tional resource to be managed like any other.18 Yet this issue has still received remarkably little attention. Refugee expert Michael Teitelbaum has deemed this omission the most striking weakness in migration theo-ries drawn from the social sciencesone that is particularly regrettable because the aggregate number of such outf l ows has been steadily rising since the early 1970s.19 (Indeed, 87 percent of the cases identif i ed in this book transpired after 1970.)

I def i ne coercive engineered migrations (or migration-driven coercion) as those cross-border population movements that are deliberately created or ma-nipulated in order to induce political, military and/or economic conces-sions from a target state or states.4

Coercive engineered migration is frequently, but not always, under-taken in the context of population outf l ows strategically generated for other reasons. In fact, it represents just one subset of a broader class of events that all rely on the creation and exploitation of such crises as means to political and military endsa phenomenon I call strategic engineered migration. In addition to the coercive variant, these purposeful crises can be usefully divided by the objectives for which they are undertaken into three distinct categories: dispossessive, exportive, and militarized engi-neered migrations. Dispossessive engineered migrations are those in which the principal objective is the appropriation of the territory or property of another group or groups, or the elimination of said group(s) as a threat to the ethnopolitical or economic dominance of those engineering the (out-) mi gration; this includes what is commonly known as ethnic cleansing. Ex-portive engineered migra! tions are those migrations engineered either to for-tify a domestic political position (by expelling political dissidents and other domestic adversaries) or to discomf i t or destabilize foreign government(s). Finally, militarized engineered migrations are those conducted, usually dur-ing armed conf l ict, to gain military advantage against an adversaryvia the disruption or destruction of an opponents command and control, lo-gistics, or movement capabilitiesor to enhance ones own force struc-ture, via the acquisition of additional personnel or resources.

Indeed, it is a phenomenon that for many observers has been hiding in plain sight. For instance, it is widely known that in 1972 Idi Amin expelled most Asians from Uganda in what has been commonly interpreted as a naked attempt at economic asset expropriation.7 Far less well understood, however, is the fact that approximately 50,000 of those expelled were British passport-holders, and that these expulsions happened at the same time that Amin was trying to convince the British to halt their drawdown of military as-sistance to his country. In short, Amin announced his intention to foist 50,000 refugees on the British, but did so with a convenient ninety-day grace period to give the British an opportunity to rescind their decision regarding aid.

After Carter asserted that the United States could not trade freely with China until its record on human rights improved and Chinese were allowed to emigrate freely, Deng smilingly retorted, Okay. Well then, exactly how many Chinese would you like, Mr. President? One million? Ten million? Thirty million?17 Whether Deng actually intended to inf l uence U.S. behavior remains unclear, but, in point of fact, his rejoin-der reportedly stopped Carter cold and summarily ended their discussion of human rights in China.18

Nevertheless, as the data in table 1.1 demonstrate, there has still been on average at least one attempt at coercive engineered migration per year since the Refugee Convention came into force. And although the poten-tial signif i cance of this phenomenon has been underappreciated by many migration scholars, the same cannot necessarily be said for potential tar-get states.20 For example, U.S. National Intelligence Estimates have included warnings of U.S. vulnerability to this kind of coercion and have recom-mended taking steps to guard against future predation.

Similarly, in 2007 Australia shut down the Pacif i c Solution in no small part to guard itself against future coercive attempts by the tiny island of Nauru. Likewise, in 2003 alone the European Union committed to spending 400 million euros to increase border security, at least in part to deter future migration-driven coercion; and in 2006, China constructed a fence along part of its border with North Korea to impede cross-border movements.22 Some states have even conducted military exercises designed to leave them better prepared to respond to potential massive inf l uxes across their borders.23

A relatively effective, if morally dubious, method of mobilizing such support is to behave in ways anticipated to stimulate repressive govern-ment responses that catalyze outmigration. One prominent historical ex-ample is the Algerian Front de Libration Nationale (FLN) insurgents, who during the 1954 1962 French-Algerian War undertook actions they fully anticipated would provoke brutal, and refugee generating, responses by the French military (case 3 in table 1.2).25 In the late 1990s, the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) adopted a similar strategy in its struggle for independence from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (case 50).26 In both instances, the insurgents operative premise was that the humani-tarian catastrophes precipitated by their actions would persuade interna-tional actors to intervene on their behalf.27

For instance, during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bosniak forces reportedly did not defend the safe area of Gorazde in the express expectation that the humanitarian, and refugee-generating, con-sequences would catalyze greater NATO involvement in the conf l ict (one incident within case 42).

Likewise, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire in the early 1990s (case 45) and Gen-eral Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan in the 1980s (case 18) both exploited refugee fl ows generated by others to transform themselves from international pariahs into respectable statesmen.42 Indeed, as one scholar noted, the Afghan refugees provided the best public relations Zia ul-Haq could have imagined for a regime created by a military coup and internationally mar-ginalized after the hanging of [former Pakistani president and prime min-ister] Zulf i kar Ali Bhutto.

Fourth, the potential for blowback can be great and the intended con-sequences quite costly. For instance, not only did the U.S.-instigated mass migration of North Vietnamese southward following the First Indochina War fail to achieve its stated objective of deterring Ho Chi Minh from pushing for reunif i cation elections, but it also inadvertently further weak-ened the sitting regime in South Vietnam while simultaneously increasing the U.S. commitment to propping it up (case 2 in table 1.3).50 And although Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire benef i ted signif i cantly from the concessions he was granted in exchange for his agreement to host Rwandan refugees in the mid-1990s, the decision to allow said refugees to use the camps as bases to launch attacks back across the border provoked enough ire within Rwanda that its government subsequently helped engineer his ouster.

Nevertheless, politically liberal states share certain vulnerability-enhancing tendencies in common. For one thing, not only do opposition parties in democracies tend to have strong incentives to criticize and publicize missteps by sitting govern-ments, but they also face powerful political incentives to adopt positions that run counter to those embraced by incumbents, whether or not those policies are currently viewed as problematic.

As Alexis de Tocqueville long ago observed: "Foreign politics demand scarcely any of those qualities which are peculiar to a democracy; they require, on the contrary, the perfect use of almost all those in which it is def i cient. . . . a democracy can only with great diff i culty regulate the details of an important undertaking, persevere in a fi xed design, and work out its execution in spite of serious obstacles. It cannot combine its measures with secrecy or await their consequences with patience"

Likewise, despite the fact that Cubans were a generally well-regarded migrant group within much of the United States, wielded signif i cant lob-bying power before and during the 1980 Mariel and 1994 balseros crises, and benef i ted from the existence of special legislation designed specif i -cally to protect them, the U.S. government still found itself vulnerable to coercion by Castro and the Cuban government in both 1980 and 1994.170

Even so, it is worth noting that Castro too softened his position over time, probably for two reasons: (1) it became increasingly clear that by embar-rassing Jimmy Carter, he had increased the chances that Ronald Reagan would soon become the U.S. president,157 and (2) as often happens, Castro had generated a larger outf l ow than he envisioned or desired. According to Llovio-Menendez, Fidel had been interested in getting rid of a few thousand, perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 of the disaffected, but he had never suspected the volume of delinquents would be so great.

It is instructive to note the disparity in the speed within which the Johnson and Carter administrations developed policy responses to their Cuban migration crises, as well as the differences in their approaches. First, be-cause the policymakers in the Johnson administration fi gured out quickly the potential scale and negative domestic salience of the problem, they developed a response within days after Castro announced the opening of the port at Camarioca.1

Specif i cally, on August 16, when Clinton discovered the nature of the State Depart-ment proposed resettlement plan (under which Cuban asylum seekers would be distributed at military bases throughout the country), he report-edly went ballistic, yelling Are you nuts? Do you think I am going to do th[at] again?189 Other White House insiders conf i rm that Clintons thinking on the August 1994 crisis was guided by two mottos: No More Mariels and Remember Fort Chaffee

What Clinton feared most intensely was a repetition of the personal humiliation and defeat he had suffered while governor of Arkansas after the last massive Cuban refugee resettlement in 1980.191 Dissatis-f i ed with their long-term detainment, Marielitos had sparked riots at several of the military bases where they were being held, including Fort Chaffee.192 Shortly thereafter, then Arkansas Governor Clinton lost his bid for re-election.

Thus, on August 18, by which time it had become clear to Chiles that the administration was willing neither to recognize the escalating crisis as an emergency nor to implement Distant Shores proposed resettlement plan, he decided to force Washingtons hand.194 In a domestically driven political move that led to a further escalation of the crisis internationally, Chiles declared a state of emergency in Florida. This move gave him the right to mobilize the Florida National Guard and to temporarily detain those refugees released by the INS

In the course of examining Milosevics failed gambit (as a generator), I also explore two other, rather more successful, attempts at coercive engineered migration underway during this same period: one by the independence-seeking KLA (acting as agents provocateurs) and another by neighboring Macedonia (in the role of opportunist). The KLA and its sup-porters were aided in their endeavor by the hypocrisy costgenerating behavior of some NATO members, whose rhetoric and poor track rec-ord in Bosnia a few years before drove the alliance inexorably toward an intervention that inadvertently precipitated a far greater humanitarian disaster than almost anyone anticipated at the outset.14

As KLA General Agim Ceku put it, The cease-f i re was very useful for us, it helped us to get organized, to consolidate and grow. . . . We aimed to spread our units over as much territory as possible, we wanted KLA units and cells across the whole of Kosovo.22 By early 1999, large areas of Kosovo were again occupied by KLA forces. The Serbs witnessed a return to the situation they had faced prior to their offensive a year before.23

The letter began by noting that, there are not only cracks in the Contact Group but funda-mental differences in opinion on the crisis and the possible solution and proceeded to argue that: The perspective on Albanians cant be the same from Washington where they arrive with pockets full of dollars intended for certain senators and other in-dividuals, and the perspective from lets say Rome where you can see boats full of desperate and aggressive Albanian immigrants along with Shiptar maf i a, which is according to the documentation of Italian authorities already overpowering some Sicilian clans. The situation is similar in Germany, France and even Great Britain where . . . The Economist reports under the alarming headline Tirana on Thames that Albanians organized by their narco-bosses are fl ooding the Proud Albion under the pretext of political asylum.73

when the KLA agents provocateurs launched their armed challenge they also fully expected it to provoke massive Serbian retaliation in the form of a military offensive against the province. As Zymer Lubovci, KLA fi ghter, acknowledged, We saw them [the Serbs] coming, so we prepared and opened fi re. . . . [I]t was guaranteed that every time we took action they would take revenge on civilians.162 Furthermore, Hashim Thai, KLA leader and later prime minister of the province, subsequently admitted, we knew full well that any armed action we undertook would trigger a ruthless retaliation by Serbs against our people. . . . We knew we were endangering civilian lives, too, a great number of lives.163

The 1990s were a tough decade for the North Koreans. In 1991, they lost their superpower patron with the fall of the Soviet Union, and in 1994, they lost their patron saint with the death of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung, who had ruled North Korea since its founding shortly after World War II. For not wholly unrelated reasons, the 1990s were also marked by a series of devastating famines, which resulted in the deaths of between several hundred thousand and several million North Koreans1 and the fl ight of several hundred thousand more across the Tumen River and into the Yan-bian Prefecture of northern China.2

After brief l y trying to make Pyongyang pay like a normal nation, Beijing changed tack and began offering large quanti-ties of aid (both overt and covert), for fear that otherwise famine might precipitate a collapse of the countrycreating millions of refugees and perhaps bringing U.S. troops in a unif i ed Korea to its border.3 More or less concomitantlywith the country now under the control of Kim Il Sungs eccentric and rather less popular son, Kim Jong IlNorth Korea also suc-cessfully leveraged its structural weaknesses into a lucrative agreement to freeze its nascent nuclear program in return for U.S. aid and assistance in building civilian nuclear reactors.4 In short, U.S. fears of a nuclear North Korea coupled with Chinese (as well as South Korean and even Russian) fears of a massive North Korean outmigration granted this relatively weak actor noteworthy bargaining strength against its signif i cantly more power ful international counterparts.5

In 1989, Hungary opened its barbed-wire border with Austria and al-lowed thousands of East Germans vacationing in Hungary to escape com-munism. This tide turned into a fl ood, hastening not only the collapse of East Germany but also the fall of the Iron Curtain.

According to some estimates, Beijing returned 80,000 of the 100,000 300,000 who had fl ed to escape the famines of the 1990s.104 The Chinese also tightened border security (via the installation of infrared cameras and increased patrols), stepped up arrests and prosecutions, and denied entry visas to activists known to have attempted to publicize the North Koreans plight.

Through large-N analysis, I have demonstrated that, although ex-ceptions exist, the majority of coercive attempts in the developing world rely primarily ( but not exclusively) on swamping, whereas most attempts in the developed world focus more directly on agitating. The data have further revealed that, although the objective dangers posed to targets tend to be greater in the case of swamping, the prob-ability of coercive success tends to be greater in the case of agitating. In-deed, the data have shown that coercive engineered migration tends to be most often attempted (and most often successful) against generally more powerful, liberal, democratic targets.

Conf i dent of their superior strength and position, powerful targets fail to recognize until late in the game that they might lose. The added tragedy is that not only does this lead to more migrant victims but it also leads to suboptimal outcomes for both sides. Because it is so easy for generators to lose control of outf l ows, and because the costs associated with absorbing large numbers of unwelcome migrants clearly exceed those of absorbing few or none, it seems self-evident that both sides should avoid such an outcome. Yet often they do not.

With the issue of fl ow size in mind, it is also worth noting the critical role that the displaced themselves can play. When refugees and migrants cooperate with challengers (as the majority of Kosvoar Albanians did with the KLA), the probability of coercive success increases signif i cantly. In contrast, when the displaced pursue their own agendas (e.g., leave in greater numbers than is preferred, choose a different destination than is desired, or fail to do what is expected of them on arrival), they can under-mine the strategy of coercers and doom their attempts to failure. (See, for instance, case 2 in the appendix, which details the failed U.S. attempt to use engineered migration against North Vietnam in the mid-1950s.)

Consider, however, that in the midst of the Kosovo crisis aid workers estimated that, during the last week in April 1999 alone, 1,000 refugees per day were successfully transported across the Adriatic and then helped to claim asylum or to disappear within Italy.51 It has been esti-mated that Albanian smugglers made DM 10 million by smuggling Koso-var Albanians in the initial weeks of the war.52 What would governments have paid to discourage them from doing so? And at what political cost?