This essay, on the criminalisation of solidarity with undocumented migrants, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 16 June 2019, under the headline ‘Are only certain kinds of people deemed worthy of our compassion?’
When is a Good Samaritan not a Good Samaritan? When he or she helps someone undeserving of our humanity
In Arizona on 11 June, a jury was unable to reach a verdict on Scott Daniel Warren, a college lecturer accused of conspiracy to transport and harbour migrants after providing them with food and shelter. He faced up to 20 years in jail. He may still do if there’s a retrial.
Meanwhile, in Sicily, Pia Klemp, the German captain of the boat Sea-Watch 3, was charged with assisting in illegal immigration after rescuing migrants in distress in the Mediterranean. She, too, faces up to 20 years in prison.
Warren and Klemp are the latest victims of a disturbing trend that has gone almost unnoticed: the threat by the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic to put on trial anyone who provides rescue or humanitarian help for migrants.
An investigation by the website openDemocracy suggests that over the past five years at least 250 people in 14 European countries have been arrested or charged for providing food, shelter, transport or other support to migrants without legal papers. Cases include Martine Landry, a 73-year-old Frenchwoman who helped two 15-year-old Guinean asylum seekers, taking them to a police station to register. She was charged with ‘having aided the entry of two foreign minors in an irregular situation’, but was eventually acquitted.
Then there’s Dragan Umičević a retired Croatian army officer and a volunteer with the organisation AYS, which provides help for refugees. In March last year, AYS was contacted by a group of Afghan refugees who had entered Croatia from Serbia. He, in turn, contacted the police and accompanied the refugees to the police station to help them with their asylum claims. Umičević was charged with aiding migrants by helping them across the border. The case fell apart when GPS data showed that he had always been on Croatian territory. Nevertheless, Umičević was found guilty of ‘unwitting negligence’ and fined 60,000 kunas (around £7,000).
Lise Ramslog, a 70-year-old Danish woman, was charged with people smuggling after giving a lift to the Swedish border to two young immigrant couples, with a small child and a newborn baby. She was fined 25,000 Danish krone (£3,000).
There have been similar cases in America. Warren is a member of the faith-based humanitarian aid group No More Deaths. In January, four members were convicted of ‘abandoning personal property’ in a wildlife refuge after they left water jugs in the desert to help migrants. ‘If giving water to someone dying of thirst is illegal,’ said No More Deaths volunteer Catherine Gaffney, ‘what humanity is left in the law of this country?’
In both Europe and America, the authorities claim that aid for migrants acts as a ‘pull factor’, increasing the numbers willing to risk a dangerous journey. The idea that someone treks across the Sahara, through war-torn Libya and into a rubber dinghy to brave a sea that has become the graveyard for at least 30,000 others attempting that same journey, on the off-chance that they might meet a rescue ship, or sets off on an arduous march through Central America and faces the perils of a life-sapping desert because they are convinced they will find a jug of water at the end, stretches credulity. Many studies have, indeed, shown that rescue ships on the Mediterranean do not increase numbers of migrants, but abandoning rescue attempts increases the number of deaths.
The authorities are deliberately seeking to erase the distinction between people trafficking, human smuggling and acts of solidarity; to suggest that providing food and water, or rescuing someone from drowning, is of the same character as coercing people across borders to exploit them as forced labour or sex workers. It’s a perversion of the legal system and a warping of our moral sensibility.
It’s an approach that suggests that only certain kinds of people are deserving of humanitarian aid. Had Warren been helping Americans or Klemp rescuing Europeans, they would have been hailed as heroes. Their crime was to help the wrong kind of human beings – those wearing the wrong colour skin, believing in the wrong God, possessing the wrong passport or no passport at all.
That’s an obscene moral standard and one that would be unacceptable in any other context. Yet so successful has been the anti-migrant agenda of recent years that there is barely a discussion of such practices. It’s important to resist the criminalisation of solidarity, not just to defend migrants’ rights but also because it is corrosive of civil society and, in the words of the lawyer Frances Webber, helps outlaw ‘decency itself’.
The image is from ‘State of Exception’, a collaboration between artists Richard Barnes, anthropologist Jason de Leon and curator Amanda Krugliak which uses objects left in the desert by migrants to tell the story of their experiences.
Pandaemonium 
There were over six hundred comments on this article on the Guardian website yesterday, so I don’t think mine are going to add a great deal of new insight.
However, the piece by Kenan poses the huge conundrum faced by western societies now and for the foreseeable future. You can’t leave people to drown in the sea – while every successful migrant who does this journey and finds some measure of success in Western Europe, is surely going to be an encouragement for half a dozen more young men who are still back in their home countries.
And even without terrible poverty and danger in their own countries, the lure of “the road” and to go off seeking adventure is a really powerful one all by itself. I’ve been doing it for most of the last year and it’s really addictive.
The reason there is resistance to opening up the west to as many immigrants who want to come here, is I think the fear of destabilising those relatively successful and functioning societies. And we have lived with this diversity for long enough for people to have seen how it changes those western countries.
Being in Eastern Europe for the last couple of months lets me see how things can be before a diverse society starts to develop. It’s hugely different. I don’t want to say it’s better. But it’s certainly less complicated.
I write this in a McDonald’s outside the Gara de Nord station in Bucharest Romania, and it’s totally different to its namesake railway terminus in Paris. It’s a bit grimy and scruffy, but nearly everyone, bar a few tourists, is a Romanian of Romanian origin. Unlike in Paris, where most of the people in the vicinity are not of original French origin. It just makes it a different kind of place. For good or bad, I won’t make a strong personal preference, but you can’t deny that that part of Paris has been hugely changed by mass immigration from the African continent.
The kind of open borders that we would have to introduce if we were try to halt this dangerous and crazy migration situation we have right now, could perhaps double the number of ethnic minority people we have now in Europe.
And some will say “So what? There’s plenty of green space in which we can expand cities and build new ones”.
Which is a perfectly good argument in theory. The thing is though, we generally just don’t do that.
Certainly not in the U.K. One of the reasons I’m travelling around all the cheap countries I can find, is that I feel I’ve been priced out of London. I’m from there, but could only afford to live in a room in a shared house.
A one bedroom flat is even too expensive. But our mayor thinks it’s great that London is “A hub city, open to the world”. While it’s great for some, I just can’t compete. Not entitled to any social housing (because there are so many people in greater need) but only earning modest wages – what’s the point of even staying there?
So I’m doing the migration thing in reverse and looking for somewhere I could afford to live ……. and also a place that hasn’t become as horribly violent and “sectarian” as London and parts of England have become.
What Kenan said about migrants being “seen as having the wrong colour skin” reminds me a lot of something I can’t stop remembering from five or six years ago, when political black activist Simon Woolley said in the Guardian that: “Most white people think that black people are inferior”.
I haven’t been able to forget that line since then. When I’m in London, I’m living and working alongside a lot of black people.
And I have this nagging thought that asks if Woolley’s view is widespread amongst black people.
Because if it is ….. then I don’t really want to be living in such a place. With people thinking I’m a racist every day, even when I’m not and am just going about life. It’s not a nice thought to have.
When I’m here in Eastern Europe, I don’t think about things like that at all.
This merry go round of global liberalism and the right to migrate is all very well if human expansionism in one region does not incur ecological, economic and social insecurity and losses in another.
The UK at 60% food security and decreasing with every new house, every new metre of grey infrastructure and every new employment site within an already diminishing green infrastructure is reducing for a national population its ecological means of survival.
This reduction in the quality and quantity of national ecological security requires import dependancies and the continuation of corporate land grabbing that evicts or indentures landed communities and thereby forces urbanisation into poverty stricken cities from which the relative affluent wish to escape.
Liberal immigration regimes therefore require a reduction in national ecological security and corporate market based land grabbing on the basis of rights which primarily concerns itself with the health and well-being of immigrants as opposed to the safe operating space of national communities.
Overpopulation in countries which do not have the capacity to look after their own is the true source of the humanist malaise. Why should western countries which have already transgressed their planetary quotas and function well beyond safe operating limits be made responsibility for the reproductive choices of poor national populations. Similarly why should Western countries be made responsible for the deathly journeys made by the relatively affluence that choose to escape the reproductive choices of their birth determined nations.
Hostility towards tendencies which create overpopulation in relation to the ecological capacity of national territories, whether it be open borders, illegal immigration or supranational economic strategies that refute the case for national sustainability, national sufficiency and national resilience is a perfectly just and moral reaction to the social, economic and most importantly ecological insecurities that they cause.
People have a human right to experience national security and therefore have a right to reject any social, economic or ecological forces that undermines national security. To reject this national human right is at the same time to reject the responsibilities of national reproduction and to reject the responsibilities of national democratic involvement in their countries of birth.
Liberal supranationalism is therefore simply a way of avoiding national responsibilities with a long term view of creating a world of ecological imbalances which can only be compensated for by creating a globalised technocracy in which individual freedoms will slowly but surely be suppressed.
The question therefore, within a world of diminishing ecological security, do we want a global system of national freedoms or a global system that will eventually culminate in no freedoms at all. Each carries with it the risk of death. The former due to the inclusive exclusive dynamic inherent in maintaining national ecological security, the latter because supranationalism in whatever guise always ends in collapse as the sustainability, sufficiency and resilience of its subsystems are eroded to facilitate the centralising tendencies of supranationalism in its quest to consolidate subsystem resources for the benefit of centralised power.
In other words, there is ecological humanism and unecological humanism. The former accepts that life is sustained through a dynamic life death relationship between all life forms, the latter denies the ecological underpinnings of life and deep down unknowingly seeks human collapse. Therefore we are presented with the choice between overt misanthropy which seeks the long term sustainability of diverse human populations which is couterposed with a covert misanthropy that seeks the inevitable collapse of all human populations.
You might want to consider the numbers given by UNHCR: https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/mediterranean/location/5205
According to this the number of migrants who died in italian seas ist down from 2873 in 2017 to 1311 in 2018. This is a decrease of 54%, and it is evidently y consequence of the closing of italian harbours for the ships of the NGOs who asist the Mafia. It is an achievement of Matteo Salvini.
Meanwhile the main route from Africa to Europe ist going through Morocco to Spain. From 2017 to 2018 the numbers of people drowned in spanish waters is up from 202 to 811, which is an increase of about 400%.
Everywhere the NGOs who take up migrants on their ships are active, the numbers of people who are drowning rise. This should be prevented by every repsonsible government.
If you look back over the past 30 years, it’s always been the case that Mediterranean routes taken by undocumented migrants have shifted. The falling numbers on the Sicily route has as much to do with Libyans locking up would-be or thought-to-be migrants in their detention centres at the behest of the EU as with Salvini closing Italian ports. If you want to defend Libyan prisons, their degrading conditions and their practice of torture, please feel free. As for the claim that ‘Everywhere the NGOs who take up migrants on their ships are active, the numbers of people who are drowning rise’, do provide the evidence for that, given that all the studies (including the ones I linked to) suggest the opposite.
It takes some chutzpah for someone who wants to criminalise rescue missions to then suggest that they care about the numbers of migrants drowning. What your argument, and all those similar ones, actually accept is that a minimum of 30,000 drowned migrants is a price worth paying to enforce your concept of immigration controls. At least be honest about your view.
If you cann read spanish you might want to consider this information: https://eldebate.es/crisis-de-valores/espana-recibe-mas-inmigrantes-que-en-2018-y-el-numero-de-fallecidos-en-el-estrecho-sigue-en-aumento-20190520
It says: “No fue hasta 2017 cuando asistimos a un aumento considerable de esta cifra, que casualmente coincide con la presencia de nuevas embarcaciones de Salvamento Marítimo en la zona del Estrecho y el Mar de Alborán, y una menor presencia de oenegés en la zona del Mar Egeo. El año 2017 cerraba con un total de 224 fallecidos, casi un 300% más que en el año 2014.”
English: “It was not until 2017 that we saw a considerable rise in the numbers (of drowned people), which accidentally coicides with the presence of new rescue ships in the zone of Gibraltar and less presence of those NGOs in the egean sea. 2017 closed with 224 dead, about 300% more than in 2014.”
Where ever these “rescue missions” go, more people feel animated to pay the mafia to take them to the sea on inflatable boats, that is evident.
The whole thing is not about saving lives, it is about flooding Europe with as many migrants as posiible, disconsidering the number of people who die on the way.
And by the way: Of course you are aware that the “Libyan prisons, their degrading conditions and their practice of torture” are only there because of the flood of migrants going from the south to Europe. There is a lot of money in this for the Mafia.
There is nothing ‘evident’ about it. Where more migrants are, there will inevitably be more rescue missions. But nothing you’ve linked to suggests that rescue missions increase migrant numbers. All the studies suggest otherwise. What you’re actually doing is beginning with your conspiracy theory assumption (‘The whole thing is not about saving lives, it is about flooding Europe with as many migrants as posiible, disconsidering the number of people who die on the way.’) and then pretending that some sentence picked out of a random Spanish article makes your assumption ‘evident’ when the article is neither evidence nor even justifies what you claim it does.
Incidentally, while the numbers of migrants have dropped on the Central Mediterranean route since 2017, the proportion of migrants dying has shot up, from 1 in 48 in 2017 to 1 in 19 so far this year. Which is the unsursprising consequence of banning all rescue missions. So don’t give me all this guff about you caring about migrants drowning.
Actually, the prisons for would-be or thought-to-be migrants were created because the EU, from the days of Gaddafi onwards has paid millions of euros to Libya (and a host of other countries from Niger to Eritrea) to lock people up. It’s effectively created a kidnap-and-detention industry right across North Africa, the Sahel and the Horn of Africa.
“Where more migrants are, there will inevitably be more rescue missions.”
Or the other way round. Which was first, the hen or the egg? Of course people know about the presence of these so called rescue missions waiting to take them to Europe and feel animated to go, which most of them wouldn´t do otherwise.
“since 2017, the proportion of migrants dying has shot up”
But the total numbers of people dying are down by 54%, even obviously you don´t deny that, and it is more important. And of course you don´t lose a word about the Mafia involved in people smuggling and their enormous profits.
That information in that link is very interesting El_Mocho, but I still don’t think it’s going to be persuasive to the people who have said we should have dozens of rescue ships sitting just off the Libyan coast.
For them it’s more about the principle than the actual numbers. You can’t let people drown so much, that even the cruel people smugglers start to have second thoughts about sending more people out.
I’d like to see people who are for open borders just spell it out a lot more clearly, instead of so often sniping at everyone else who “just doesn’t get it”. How many extra people from sub-Saharan Africa would the EU have to allow in every year to make this migrant route across West Africa just stop?
Would 100,000 extra visas a year be enough? Probably not, so maybe 200,000 – or even up to 500,000?
If it was half a million a year, just from Africa, that would “only” be pushing up the EU’s population by 1% a year.
Hardly enough to make any huge difference overall, and might barely make up for Europe’s declining birth rate.
So why is no one seemingly arguing for this openly every week in the Guardian?
It’s not like they’re not discussing race and diversity every other day in the opinion section.
And I’m sure, like the good bureaucrats that the EU are, that they could work out some quota systems for each country, based on population and GDP.
The problems might start in the implementations though – as English speaking Nigerians who want to go and live in Woolwich in south London, are probably not going to be too impressed when they find they’ve “been allocated” to go and live in Ruse Bulgaria (which is a really nice place by the way).
So how this would actually work, I have no idea. I don’t think you can thwart what people are determined to do.
You can’t make them live in Bulgaria if they don’t want to.
So perhaps you have to persuade these yet to be diversified countries that they have to make an effort to make themselves immigrant friendly. People in Budapest have to be shown how their city can become more like Birmingham UK. And that will start off by allowing communities of these new immigrants to start forming in particular parts of the city. Where there’s cheap available housing and provision for new immigrants from Africa.
Including new African churches and mosques. It will be quite chaotic and “messy” for quite some time, until the situation stabilises to a degree.
Once those communities are established, there will be no problem attracting newer immigrants to those areas, because people will already have heard of them.
Like this story from Portland Maine in the USA.
It’s about African immigrants/asylum seekers who’ve come across the Mexican border into Texas.
Two cities, San Antonio and Portland are saying they can’t cope with the numbers.
People from the DRC and Angola have heard good things about Portland Maine and want to go and live there.
And if Portland, with a population size of only 67,000 says it can’t cope with a few hundred new people, then the obvious answer for them would be to just get building and make the city a bit bigger.
This is Fox News, and I can see how they are enjoying a bit of trolling here and think the whole situation is a somewhat funny. However, I thought I’d go with it and do this link, as they tell the story pretty simply.
Is “the answer” for Portland just to get busy and get some builders to put up some new housing units?
Quite to the point. The fact is that a declining birth rate is not a bad thing, on the contrary. Less people means less pollution, less energy consuming and less overbuilding of green spaces.
https://gefira.org/en/2018/06/26/28011/
This highlights the problem for me. A piece on the very left wing “Majority Report” YouTube channel where they tear into one of the Fox News hosts, Tucker Carlson.
He’s the guy you might remember, that the “Vox” reporter Carlos Maza calls “a white supremacist”.
It seems there’s no conversation across ideological lines, just mutual loathing.
I don’t know who’s worse. Tucker Carlson and Fox News, or those ultra-leftists.
Maybe they are about equally as bad as each other.
They are downplaying the crisis on the southern border and more or less saying “what’s the problem?”
Or if they agree that there is a problem, they’ll just blame it all on Trump and his government.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said that they are running “concentration camps” down there.
Personally, I’d be OK with allowing as many refugees and migrants who wanted to come to western countries to come. But only if people who advocate open borders would then admit to what might happen with large scale demographic change. You can not insist that it will all work out well or will have little consequence.
It might make some places actually worse. Just saying “Hope not Hate” isn’t good enough, as it’s pretty easy to run through what some of the scenarios might be. We’ve already had plenty of experience of introducing diversity into new places. The great African American migrations from the rural south to the northern cities is just one.
In Europe we’ve had a lot of experience of diversity too. And if we were to greatly increase that, we could expect more of the same, with both the good and the bad sides of that.
New migrants from Africa might not as easily slot into the U.K. economy as the three million Eastern European workers who came to Britain did. And they might not disperse so widely either and be so versatile in going and finding where the work was.
Also, as we’re constantly told that Britain is a racist country and most whites think that black people are inferior, then that’s going to cause it’s own problems too. I don’t think guys who’ve come from Nairobi’s slum districts are going to be too pleased to find out that the white English look down on them.
The population of the USA has doubled since World War Two, mostly due to immigration, so maybe Europe can do that too. But let’s not pretend that it wouldn’t cause a great upheaval. Or just change places from like what they have been. Pretending that nothing of consequence changes – (at least from a negative point of view) is something that advocates of open borders will have to try to stop doing. And at least be honest.
The concept and idea of “White Privilege” is already out there and can’t be unlearned. And identity and group politics will probably increase for some time more. And not everyone is going to be happy with that.
Brushing things under the carpet and pretending things didn’t happen, will only entrench resentment amongst people who have never supported increased diversity from the beginning. And that means things like the incident in Oldham last month when a small mob of Muslim youths travelled from Halifax and went to a mostly white Oldham housing estate and attacked people there, because Tommy Robinson had shown up to do an election speech.
It wasn’t hundreds of Muslims that showed up, but it was enough for it to have at least been acknowledged for what it was. A really bad example of community sectarianism. They were even chanting “Allahu Akbar” – which isn’t a great sign.
Something else happened in Stratford East London on Saturday, when just on a normal early evening near the shopping centre, an excitable crowd of “a hundred” young people, clashed with and initially chased a group of police officers who were arresting somebody there. Stratford is that diverse with so many young black people around at any time of day, that a mob can form up pretty quickly if something happens, and the police (who are widely presumed to be racists) try to do their jobs and might be arresting someone.
Admittedly, a majority the crowd filmed running after the police officers, I guess are actually just excitable teenagers who all rush over to anything that seems noteworthy – and get their phones out and start filming it.
And it might be a dozen youths amongst them that actually squared up to the police – but it is an example of how modern diversity has changed a place like that from what it once was to what it is now.
And let’s just admit that this is something that sometimes happens in modern and very diverse places.
Damon. I would tend to agree. Universalists, cosmopolitans, global liberals or whatever their given progressive identity consists of need to imbue their magical thinking with a good dose of hard reality.
Forever creating ideologically spurious schisms is not the way forward but a realistic appraisal of contemporary human nature and the very real fact that decreasing economic prosperity and a world which is increasingly being degraded by human expansionism is not amenable to magical diversity thinking.
The best we can hope for with a globalised civilisation that is intent on ecological and environmental collapse is to create a global system of cooperating national sufficiency economies. Failing this, the inherent resilient flaws of supranationalism which will likely end in systemic collapse, means a world of conflict and a war of all against all.
Too many idealistic cultural politicians operate in a bubble of abstract thought and thinking which seeks to obscure or deny basic human and ecological facts.
Steve, mostly what I’m really for is people just being honest.
If you pushed me hard, I would come out as a “universalist” myself. But only with my “philosophical hat” on and my very amateurish thoughts on big picture stuff. About space and time. About the earth being one small planet in a huge universe etc.
So, in that frame of mind I say: rescue everybody and let everyone come here.
Selfishly though, I’ll be having my own escape strategy and have found some peaceful corners of Eastern Europe that I’d like to retire to. I really don’t fancy being an OAP in Croydon or East London.
And to Kenan, can I say, I was impressed that you let that last post of mine through.
It didn’t show up at first and I thought I’d gone too far. Some other people on the left would surely have hit the “dump the racist” button and deleted it. It’s hard to get it right and know how far you can go in just describing reality or doing projections on likely outcomes.
But increasing diversity does change societies – and particularly certain localities.
If you bring millions of new people into a country like Britain, they don’t just disappear.
The right and the left can’t have a conversation about it though, as it’s too polarising.
If we did have open borders in the U.K. and let in as many people from Africa as was needed to halt the clandestine smuggling routes, most of those people would show up in about a dozen different English boroughs. Basically, mainly where there are already African communities living.
As most of them would have to fend for themselves in the private housing markets, there would be a bit of destabilisation and issues of overcrowding (and ghettoisation) right away.
It’s no good saying that more social housing must be built, as it just won’t be.
With some effort, new migrants could be steered to new areas, and some would even go to places like Cornwall if they didn’t think they’d be the only African person there.
It’s a tough sell trying to convince people that their new life in Britain will be one mostly of poverty and doing unpleasant menial jobs. It’s pretty obvious that some of them will get fed up of that low wage existence pretty quickly. Their numbers will grow as they start families. We’ll need lots of new infrastructure and schools etc. There will be social problems to do with BME people feeling they’re living in a racist society.
This was something that Katie Hopkins tweeted about. The Daily Mail did the story.
How are we supposed to describe what’s happened here? Ignore it or downplay it?
What’s happened is that a crowd of unruly black teenagers, have filmed the scene of some of their friends (I guess) robbing a moped pizza delivery guy. It’s happened in East Ham in East London.
One response would be to say: “So what? The East End has always been rough. There was even worse trouble in that same area at West Ham football matches every other week for decades”.
That’s the way I think modern day leftists would dismiss it as being nothing more than another bit of hooliganism. The kind of thing that’s always happened around there.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7160127/Pizza-delivery-driver-40s-attacked-seven-strong-youth-gang-east-London-street.html
And someone else could write half a book on that one incident alone and the story it tells.
That indeed was a pretty rough white working class area once. It’s changed to something else now obviously. What’s the matter with those young people? Do they have no empathy for a probably hard working immigrant guy trying to earn an honest living? Maybe they don’t see him as someone like them.
Matin Luther King was a bit of a hero of mine and he said not to judge people on the colour of their skin, but on the content of their character. And I believe that strongly. The thing is though, that all those young people in that video have got very poor character.
The only allowance I’d make for them is their age. But still, it’s a problem to do with extreme diversity too somewhere. Something about it doesn’t work properly.
The left ignore it and the right worry about it (or highlight it).
Yes an universalist perspective is easy to impose on others whilst having the means to escape the consequences of it. This is exactly why the liberal intelligensia and globalists are so happy to apply it and impose it on others. Call it middle class privilage.
My concerns are deeply ecological with the understanding that territories, however small or big, each have their safe operating space in which to provide the survival needs of its human and nonhuman occupants.
This is how ecosystems naturally regulate. Humans can overcome these ecological/environmental limits through imports which by their nature deprives other regions, other ecosystems, and consequently shrinks their safe operating space. This dynamic then forces migration.
The choice therefore, from an universalist perspective, is to either ignore the underlying cause or solely address the symptoms. The contemporary way is to ignore the causes and thereby sustain them and only be preoccupied by the symptoms which in turn continue to fuel the cause.
As such, the contemporary universalist perspective is irrational, without reason and is purely guided by emotive irrationality which is why the problem is getting worse not better.
The challenge therefore is how do you convince an irrational universalist that they are being irrational when they are convinced that they are being rational.