No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

by Naomi Klein

Hands are wrung about the “migrant crisis”—but not nearly so much about the crises driving the migrations. Since 2014, an estimated thirteen thousand people have drowned in the Mediterranean trying to reach European shores. For those who make it, safety is far from assured. The massive migrant camp in Calais, France, was nicknamed “the jungle”—an echo of the way Katrina’s abandoned people were categorized as “animals.” In late 2016, just before Trump was elected, the Calais camp was bulldozed. But it’s the Australian government that has gone the furthest in treating human desperation as a contagion. For five consecutive years since 2012 migrant boats headed for Australia’s coastline have been systematically intercepted at sea and their occupants flown to remote detention camps on the islands of Nauru and Manus. Numerous reports have described the conditions in the camps as tantamount to torture. But the government shrugs. After all, they don’t run the camps—private, for-profit contractors do (of course). Conditions are so degraded on Nauru that in one week in 2016, two refugees set themselves on fire in an attempt to awaken the world to their plight. It hasn’t worked. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull continues to refuse demands coming from many Australians to welcome the refugees into their vast country. “We cannot be misty-eyed about this,” he says, asserting that Australians “have to be very clear and determined in our national purpose.”