Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection

At first, this project intended to uncover a link between massacres of minority populations in the United States and the idea of Great Replacement Theory (GRT), sometimes known as White Genocide Theory, which originated in Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints. GRT is an offensive aimed at eliminating Black and Brown people and their cultures before they, according to the thought process of the theory, eliminate the white race and Western culture through mass immigration, insurgence and interracial breeding, which is depicted in vivid and disturbing detail in The Camp of the Saints. There exists a clear trail in which the theory spawned in French Catholic circles then was exported all throughout the Western powers during the second wave of globalization with particularly devastating impact in the United States. Raspail’s work coincides with a 1972 French hate law that was decried as authoritarian and overprotective of minorities by putting in strict standards to prevent hate speech but was accused of being too lenient about what is defamatory of whites and Catholics (2003, Bleich, pp. 56). Because of this interaction in the French legal system, this project seeks to find out if there is a correlation between GRT and the United States Supreme Court, the American cultural equivalent of the French legal system, by finding frequency of five key words associated with GRT within Supreme Court syllabi and opinions then performing general linear regression in search of statistical significance between the phrases and whether the court cases are associated with race, a variable purely independent of the five key words being monitored.

The deadly shipwrecks of migrant boats in the Mediterranean brought international attention to the plight of migrants in the mid-2010s but the focus soon shifted from humanitarian assistance to capturing smugglers and preventing migrants from reaching the shores of Europe. The step towards a humane migration policy was a short-lived diversion from the project of “Fortress Europe” undertaken since the passing of the Schengen Convention. This project seeks to harden the external borders of Europe and prevent refugees from accessing the asylum system by enlisting neighboring non-European states to prevent migration at the point of departure. Deals such as the EU-Turkey deal of 2016 and the Spanish-Moroccan deals have resulted in migrants being funneled into increasingly dangerous corridors, such as Libya, as the safest and shortest paths are cut off. Although these deals are problematic in their own right, they pale in comparison to the egregious Italy-Libya Memorandum of 2017, which in practice enables Libyan militias to enforce Italy’s migration policy within the Libyan “rescue zone.” The human rights abuses perpetrated by these Libyan mercenaries in makeshift detention centers and on the Mediterranean are well documented, yet the Italian government continues to renew the deal and continue supplying these criminal groups. This literature review examines the issue of European border externalization in the Mediterranean and its impact on the internationally recognized rights of migrants and the stability of African governments. Using a systematic review of existing research, I analyze the key themes and trends that have emerged in the literature on this topic, including the legal and ethical implications of border externalization policies, the impact on African economies and governments, and the human rights implications for migrants. The review concludes that international courts are becoming increasingly ineffective in enforcing the rights of refugees and recommends a reform of the international refugee protection regime to favor autonomous movement.