What is my responsibility in relation to traveling to the US?
The travel ban and Canadian boycotts
In the executive order issued by US President Trump on January 27, citizens of Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, and Syria cannot enter the United States for three months. Refugees from Syria cannot enter the United States—for an indefinite period. On February 8 the ninth circuit court of appeals upheld the suspension of this executive order.
Some Canadians won’t be traveling to the US, whether for the duration of the ban (even while it’s in legal limbo), or for the duration of Trump’s tenure.
A number of Canadian academics have halted travel to the US for conferences and invited lectures. The reasons given tend to be expressly political: that we should not normalize Trump’s racist, xenophobic rhetoric, that the order undermines the inclusive nature of academic inquiry.
Author Linwood Barclay canceled his upcoming US book tour. In a CBC interview, he describes his action as “a bit” political, but ultimately a personal decision: “I’m not going to tell anybody what to do. But I think at least they need to think about it.”
The South Siders, a fan organization for the Vancouver Whitecaps soccer team, won’t be commissioning buses to the US for Whitecaps games because some of their members are affected by the ban. Their president, Peter Czimmerman, distances himself from a political justification and cites inclusivity within his organization as the motivating reason.
Journalist and professor Mark Bulgutch argues that (most) Canadians should avoid traveling to the US for vacation. Although Bulgutch does cast avoiding travel to the US as a political statement, he also resists making generalizable claims:
“Well, I’m not willing to tell people how to run their lives. [. . .] I think if you’re a retired person with a condominium in Florida, I would say, you know, you’ve been going for so long go, you know. But I think a lot of us actually have a complete 100 per cent choice when it comes to where we take our vacations. And there are a lot of places to take your vacation. And for now, I think crossing the border into the United States 100 per cent voluntarily because you can is wrong.”
Personal or political?
The tension between personal decisions and political acts interests me. Why are we so hesitant to take a stand and say, I have judged that travel to the US is wrong? You should too. Perhaps we think that to judge means that we evaluate a person rather than an idea or an action. But, as Hannah Arendt reminds us, we must formulate judgments, and take responsibility for them. To do otherwise is to deny our agency.
Arendt distinguishes between political and personal responsibility. Despite the above references to “personal” decisions, these judgments seem to be forms of political responsibility. To take political responsibility for something is to take on responsibility even though you, as an individual, have not done something wrong (Arendt 2003, p. 28). Political responsibility emerges from and supports the plural nature of our political community (Topolski 2015, p. 97). For Arendt, if political communities are to flourish (and if human freedom is to be maintained), we need the participation of members with diverse standpoints, with unique, particular perspectives. Put another way, political responsibility supports the world as the space where humans come together to speak and act (see my previous blog post for more on the world).
Judgments that position themselves against the travel ban, in various ways, are acts of solidarity. They affirm the ability of people to speak and act from their particular standpoints as a central part of our political community. These aren’t just personal decisions because they require us to enter into the political community and share our viewpoints with others.
My personal dilemma
The question of responsibility and the travel ban is a live issue for me. I have co-authored a paper on assimilation and ethical responses to the Syrian Refugee Crisis. The paper has been accepted to the North American Society for Social Philosophy session at the Pacific meeting of the American Philosophical Association in April. My co-author, a Canadian citizen, has decided not to go. I will be going to present our paper, and to present the tension this ban raises for us.
I am not a Canadian citizen, nor am I a permanent resident. The US is the country of my birth, and the country of which I am a citizen. My family lives there. Being a citizen of the US (not to mention being white) affords me an incredible amount of privilege in crossing the border.
Arendt notes that, in oppressive systems, participating in public life implicates one in wrong-doing (p. 33). To be given an unearned social advantage based on an arbitrary feature is what it means to have privilege.
She describes personal responsibility in terms of how individuals under Nazism withdrew from public life and refused to take political responsibility as an act of resistance against that oppressive system. But sometimes individuals lack power to make systemic changes. Even in such cases, it becomes important not to fall in line with an oppressive regime (p. 45). Hence, personal responsibility becomes important.
Bulgutch acknowledges that Canadian travelers have little power in relation to changing the travel ban. He says, “No, I don’t think Donald Trump is going to wake up tomorrow and say oh wow look at that, a few Canadians aren’t coming to visit the Grand Canyon. But I can sleep at night.”
Perhaps judgments that Canadians ought not to travel to the US are expressions of personal responsibility too. Political responsibility is about creating “a shared world in which all forms of difference can feel at home” (Topolski 2015, p. 105). Personal responsibility acknowledges that when we are cut off from political belonging, “as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves” (Arendt 2003, p. 45).
It is personal responsibility more than political responsibility that challenges me to think about my position in relation to the travel ban. (I hope it is obvious that) I affirm a shared world where equality is valued because we are different. Nevertheless, the question that pulls at me, as a US citizen living abroad, is whether I can be at home with myself when I travel to the US for the conference in April (and likely for my cousin’s wedding in June). As I ask myself this question, you can ask me, as Arendt asks of those who failed to take personal responsibility, “Why did you support?” (p. 48).
References
I have been thinking about the travel ban in conversation with friends and colleagues, but I was inspired to write about it in relation to responsibility as I read Anya Topolski’s Arendt, Levinas and a Politics of Relationality (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). If Levinas seems to be missing, it’s because I haven’t gotten that far yet! Topolski’s book encouraged me to go back to Arendt’s essay “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship (collected in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn, Schoken Books, 2003), originally published in 1964.
Photo credit: Ashim D’Silva, Logan Airport Terminal C, United States, via Unsplash.
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