Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense.  I’m Jon Wiener.  Later in the show — Not everything is about Donald Trump.  The Geneva Freeport, for example – where it doesn’t matter who is president of the US. The Freeport is a place where the world’s richest people hide art, jewelry, and other wealth from tax officials, creditors, and sometimes spouses. Atossa Araxia Abrahamian will explain — her new book is The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World.
But first: sanctuary states and cities are getting ready to resist Trump’s campaign against undocumented residents, part of his “dictatorship on day one.” Ahilan Arulanantham of the UCLA Law School will comment — in a minute.
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Trump has promised that a key part of his “dictatorship on day one,” January 20th, will be to issue executive orders to start a massive effort to deport undocumented residents. His side has been preparing for months, for years, but so have we. Democratic states and cities have passed laws to block, or at least delay, Trump’s moves.
For that battle, which will begin in less than three weeks, we turn to Ahilan Arulanantham. He’s co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA Law School, and he has argued three times before the United States Supreme Court, most recently in the fall of 2021 on behalf of Muslim Americans who were targeted by the federal government for surveillance — because of their religion. Ahilan, welcome back.

Ahilan Arulanantham: It’s great to be with you, Jon.

JW:   The easiest way for Trump to get undocumented residents into ICE custody is to get them out of jails and prisons where they’ve already been detained and identified as non-citizens. Almost three quarters of ICE arrests in the interior of the United States are handoffs from another law enforcement agency such as local jails or state or federal prisons. But many blue states and cities passed sanctuary laws, actually at the beginning of Trump’s first term, declaring they will not cooperate with any deportation scheme.
The latest news is that Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, has sent a letter warning elected leaders and employees of sanctuary jurisdictions that they could be, “Criminally liable if they impede federal immigration enforcement.”
But let’s start with what those sanctuary laws actually say. Let’s start with California’s. California has the country’s largest population of undocumented residents and its laws in this area were signed in 2017 by then-governor Jerry Brown. Tell us about that.

AA:   The California Values Act, or SB-54, is the law that you’re talking about, and it was actually the latest in a series of state laws that had begun during the Obama administration, because there’s a long history of state and local law enforcement being entangled with immigration enforcement, and then people seeing the fallout of that. And the resistance to that entangling actually started in the Obama administration, the administration responsible for the largest number of deportations, the number was larger than in the first Trump administration. And people saw the effects of that and were very unhappy about it, and that’s what led to those laws.
The one passed in 2017 that you’re talking about, it primarily does three things. One thing it does is it says state and local law enforcement cannot detain someone after their sentence has expired just because ICE has made a request or federal immigration authorities have made a request and said, “We want you to keep locking this person up.” And that part I think is clearly grounded in constitutional principles, which are pretty obvious principles if you think about it. It’s kind of amazing that people didn’t think about this when the programs first started in the Obama administration. You can’t hold somebody when their sentence is over. And a bunch of jurisdictions actually paid pretty hefty damage award legal settlements, including LA, the county of Los Angeles, and New York also, for holding people under these requests from immigration enforcement when there was no constitutional authority to do it. So that’s one thing SB-54 does.
Another thing it does is it similarly bans the transfer of people from state or local custody to immigration and customs enforcement.
And then the third thing it does is it bans notification. And notification is just telling ICE that this person’s release date is coming up. That part, unlike the other two, I think, does not implicate the same kinds of constitutional issues. There’s not a restraint on your liberty if the government just calls and tells somebody, “Hey, this person’s about to be released.” And there the notification ban in the California statute is not as to all crimes, there’s actually an exception for what are called serious or violent felonies, and then those are defined in the statute. There’s a long list of various crimes over which the state authorities do have authority to call ICE.
And in fact, in a lot of people held in prisons, that does happen even to this day, people call, the prison calls and tells ICE, “This is a non-citizen and they’re going to be released on this day,” because they were convicted of this or that crime. But for people who don’t fall into that “carve out”, there’s a ban on the notification. And that’s one of the things that the Miller letter focuses on. It says not notifying ICE is illegal.

JW: We’ll get to the Miller letter in a minute. I understand the Trump administration challenged California’s law and tried to get the Supreme Court on their side.

AA: Correct. The Trump administration sued that law, SB-54, the one you were talking about, and said that it violated federal law making basically the exact argument that is in letter that you opened the show with from America First Legal — and they lost. They lost that in the Ninth Circuit. They sought Supreme Court review. The Supreme Court did not grant review in that case.
And actually I think that the arguments in defense of the legality of that law are very, very strong. The law explicitly says that it doesn’t bar people, state and local officials from sharing immigration status information, but what it does do is it bars them from sharing a whole bunch of other kinds of information, including your release date. And it is pretty clear that the state has the authority to regulate what kinds of cooperation state officials have with the federal government.

JW: Now, immigration activists say California law is good, but there are better laws protecting undocumented residents, especially in Oregon, and in Illinois. What do those states do that California doesn’t?

AA: The core difference concerns that carve out that I mentioned for serious or violent felonies — both Illinois and Oregon have no such carve out. California’s law allows local jurisdictions to eliminate that and go more broad. And the LA County Sheriff actually has done that. So the LA County Sheriffs, which runs the largest jail in the country, the Men’s Central jail, they never report to ICE regardless of what a person has been charged with or convicted of.
And I think that reflects two kind of core ideas. One idea is that it’s very simple to tell your local law enforcement officials to say, “Look, what you do is public safety, non-immigration enforcement. And if this person is a citizen, we wouldn’t be calling ICE and so if they’re a non-citizen, that doesn’t make them any more dangerous. You’re not more dangerous of where you were born. And so we have the same system for everyone.” It’s just a basic equality idea, and it’s really simple that way. They don’t have to get in the business of line drawing, was this crime too serious? Is this crime not serious enough? They’re like, “Look, we do public safety state level law enforcement, and we do it all the same for everybody regardless of status.”
The other idea behind it is actually that there’s a huge amount of empirical evidence now on the question of whether cooperation with immigration enforcement decreases crime and makes people safer. Because the issue was studied extensively in the Obama administration when they started to increase state and local law enforcement, and then it was studied again when the sanctuary policies came and they rolled those back. And there’s now a number of very rigorous empirical studies which compare crime rates in jurisdictions from before and after you had these sanctuary laws put in place. 
And what they found overwhelmingly is that immigration enforcement does not make us safer. Crime happens for a variety of reasons. It goes up and down because of economic conditions and demographics and all kinds of things, but the idea that you can just deport your way out of crime, make people safer by just deporting the “bad apples”, it turns out not to be true, and there’s overwhelming evidence of this.
So I think for both of those reasons, both Illinois and Oregon and many local jurisdictions opted for just clean breaks with federal immigration enforcement. California has not done that. Activists have tried a number of times to get California to go farther and adopt Illinois model, but the state government has never been willing to do it.

JW: Okay, now to Stephen Miller’s letter.  He’s still a private citizen so this came from his organization, the America First Legal Foundation. He wrote, “Federal law is clear, it is a crime to conceal, harbor or shield aliens unlawfully present in the United States. It is also a crime to prevent federal officials from enforcing immigration law.” And they named 249 elected officials in sanctuary cities, states, counties, who it said could face legal consequences over their immigration policies, and this included the California Attorney General and the mayor of Los Angeles, along with officials in San Diego County. What is this law that Stephen Miller says you guys are violating?

AA: The legal argument in that letter is borderline frivolous, at least under existing law. The law could change, but under existing law, that is not a sound legal argument and the failure to cite the controlling legal authority on that question, if this were filed in court could give rise to sanctions against the lawyer who signs the letter at the bottom. There is a lawyer who signs… Stephen Miller is not a lawyer, as I understand it, but there’s a lawyer who signed the letter at the bottom, but of course it was just sent to a bunch of officials.
But there’s two laws that are in play here. One is a federal law from 1996. It’s codified at 8 U.S.C. § 1373.  And that law prohibits any state from stopping its own officials from sharing federal immigration-related information with federal immigration enforcement. So it’s the federal government’s attempt to say, “You can’t pass a law that bans cooperation over immigration status information.” That law, though the law, we were just talking about, the state law, SB-54, was very carefully written to specify that it doesn’t prohibit that, it prohibits the sharing of other kinds of information like your release date. But this was the subject of that lawsuit that we talked about earlier. The Trump administration sued California over this law, and their argument was that the Values Act violates 1373 and they lost.
The other law which the letter talks a lot about, is the federal criminal law prohibiting harboring undocumented people, and the provision, the second provision, which they also cite, is actually encouraging or inducing people to violate the immigration laws, basically like encouraging or inducing people to come to the United States in violation of immigration law, for example. And that law was also just construed by the Supreme Court just, now, I guess it’s two years ago in 2023, in this case, the United States V. Hansen.
The court read the law very, very narrowly to say it really requires that there be an intent to further the persons being shielded or concealed from federal immigration authorities. And they even gave an example in the opinion of a minister who welcomes undocumented people into their parish. And they say, “Well, that wouldn’t be covered by this law because it doesn’t include an intent to actually further the person’s illegal activity.”
And there’s a whole host of immigrant-inclusive policies — from the health insurance program that California runs, the driver’s licenses, of course, undocumented students being admitted to the university and having different tuition rules so they can get federal financial aid, and all these things. And under the theory advanced in that letter, all of that is illegal. All those people running all those programs are subject to criminal prosecution. But like I said, the courts have not read it that way. The courts have read those provisions much more narrowly and have said to harbor someone really is to shield them from federal immigration enforcement with the intent to allow them to remain in hiding, as opposed to just welcoming people because you want them to be able to live their life like everybody else.

JW: We’ve been talking mostly here about undocumented residents who are in custody, in prison, in jail. That’s the easiest way for ICE to get people into custody who they’re interested in. The second approach would be workplace raids. Now, employers are sort of in the front line of this battle. They don’t want their employees taken away and put in custody. It would destroy the poultry industry. It would destroy the meatpacking industry. And of course, we wouldn’t have any more strawberries in the supermarkets if they rounded up workers in agriculture. So I’m sure employers will be seeking exemptions. But there are also textile factories in downtown LA and places like that that might be raided.

AA: There is a very long history of worksite raids as a form of immigration enforcement in this country kind of ebbing and flowing. And in California, the last large work site raids were actually late in the Bush administration, the Bush II administration. I was actually involved in representing about 130 people who were arrested in a raid of a printer manufacturing factory in Van Nuys in 2008. But in that particular case, almost none of those people ended up getting deported — because the way they conducted the raid was blatantly unconstitutional.
And it’s very difficult in general to do efficient immigration enforcement in raids, because there’s no way to know in advance when you’re arresting somebody what their immigration status is.
If you have particular information about a particular person, as you might in the jail context, like we were talking about, then you can say, “Oh, we have reason from these documents to believe that this particular individual who we are now arresting is in fact unlawfully present.” But when you just come to a work site, just like what they did in Van Nuys, military style, they come in, put all the people up against the wall, line them all up, and then demand documents from them, you’re violating the Fourth Amendment — because the Fourth Amendment is not a “show me your papers” kind of country. The government has to have a reason to stop you, rather than you having to justify your presence to the government.
And as a result, many of those cases were thrown out of court. The Ninth Circuit ruled eventually that the worksite raid was unconstitutional and struck down, terminated the removal proceedings of one of the people who had been arrested in that raid. And that’s actually the reason why, for the most part, there hasn’t been large scale worksite raids in cities where there’s a lot of legal resources.
And the Trump administration, the first time they did them, but they did them in places like rural Mississippi where they hit a number of poultry factories and very quickly detained and arrested and deported almost 700 people. There’s very, very few legal resources there to be able to get on the ground and raise these kinds of arguments like we raised here in California. 
So it’ll be interesting to see how they approach that. I think it’s very good theater. They’re scary, but it also is terrible politics. Like in Van Nuys, there were kids who didn’t get picked up from school because the parents didn’t get home in time to pick them up. And when those kids hit the social service systems, people get really upset.  And not just kids, all kinds of ways. Your parents don’t come home for dinner, these are people who are living in communities for decades, they’re deeply interspersed with the community, and people get very, very upset by it. So it’ll be very interesting to see how this plays out and how the Trump administration uses worksite raids. They said they’re going to use them. How they do it will be interesting to see.

JW: And the third possibility, one of the most upsetting and scariest is the door knock, going door to door in immigrant neighborhoods, knocking on doors, asking for papers. What’s the activist stance there?

AA: Well, there’s been some very good litigation done to assert the Fourth Amendment rights of people in the context of street level enforcement — because there too, it’s similar to the work site raid context in that you might know the particular address, there’s a person who lives at that address, but there could be other people living at that address too, and of course everybody has Fourth Amendment rights, as a general matter. So one interesting thing is police don’t have the right to come to your doorstep to arrest you. The ACLU of Southern California actually won an important case establishing that ICE officials do not have the right to… If they’re just, not coming to investigate, but they’re just coming to arrest someone, they don’t have a right to actually come onto that doorstep.
Similarly, one way that ICE officials often would get people to open the door is by saying that they’re police. And the police don’t like that very much, because they want people to answer the door when it’s actually the police and where they’re doing public safety enforcement, as opposed to immigration enforcement. And there too, they won an important ruling establishing that essentially ICE can’t lie and call themselves police when they’re not. The rulings only applies really to Southern California, as I understand it. These will be important issues to see how they play out.
The other thing I would add is there are millions of people in this country who are actually living in the country with a final deportation order that the government has not enforced. In some of those cases, many of them, actually, I think the deportation order itself is legally defective because it was not issued with proper notice or it was issued when they were children. There’s thousands of people who were children and unrepresented and have final deportation orders that they don’t… They were kids, they don’t even know about it.
But in other cases, they had their day in court and there is no legal avenue left for these folks, but still the government hasn’t deported them and they’re just around. If ICE officials can identify that person, and, say that person’s driving a car, they can stop that car and then can arrest that person. And if they walk out their front door, they can arrest them when they walk out the front door, without a warrant. So this is another method that we could see Trump administration officials use. There’s a lot of people who’ve already had their day in court, as the law sees it, and many of them really have actually already had their day in court and they’ve lost, and those people are very, very vulnerable to deportation.

JW: Joe Biden, of course, will be president until noon of January 20th. What can he do in his last couple of weeks in office to protect undocumented residents? What should he do first?

AA: Well, advocates have been pushing the Biden administration since the election on a number of issues, probably more than we can discuss here. I think a few low-hanging fruit that I know the administration is seriously considering now concern the Temporary Protected Status program, or TPS, that’s a program that allows people from countries that are unsafe to accept the return of their nationals, to stay here to live and work lawfully in 18-month increments. The Biden administration has designated about 16 countries, by last count. Some of the big ones, yes, included Haiti, El Salvador, which has been designated for a very long time, Venezuela.

JW: And I understand that this has also been litigated. It was Trump who tried to return Haitians — and the courts didn’t let him.

AA: Yes, I know a lot about that because I represented those people. About 400,000 TPS holders from Haiti, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Nepal, those were six countries that had TPS in 2016, and the Trump administration tried to terminate all of them, and they were quite implausible decisions because those countries are having a lot of problems. I mean, Sudan and Haiti, these are countries in the midst of real war and instability and violence, but all of them, I think they were quite implausible. And we litigated that in court, and actually the court struck down those attempts to terminate TPS and all the people who had TPS in 2016 remain eligible for it today.
But since then, in some cases, the ground conditions have changed, obviously some have gotten worse, but some have gotten better. And then also you have these new TPS designations, Venezuela has now something like almost half a million people, actually, Venezuelans, who are eligible for TPS protection. Many more Haitians are eligible for TPS protection now than were in 2016, and Haiti unfortunately has gotten worse, I think if anything from then.
So one thing the Biden administration could do… It’s actually due to make the decision on El Salvador under the normal schedule of the statute, they should make that decision actually by tomorrow. So I’m hopeful that we’ll see a decision extending TPS for El Salvador. Many of those people have had been living here lawfully for 20 years actually, and it’s a big problem in general because these people lived here for 20 years, they have kids in school, and I don’t know what, you can’t really… It seems to me quite inhumane to strip them of status now and say, “Oh, fine, just go home,” after you’ve lived here for 20 years. But the statute doesn’t actually give them a path to adjust their status.
In other cases, they’re more recent, but I think the problems are very acute. The administration could protect Venezuelans, it could protect Haitians, it could protect people from Cameroon. I mean a number of the other countries where there remain very serious problems, and Nicaragua is a huge one, problems are still very serious there. Several hundred thousand Nicaraguans who would be protected if the Biden administration were to Redesignate and update the date for Nicaragua. I don’t know if they’re going to do that. In general, they have done the bare minimum for the most part, I feel, from my perspective, when it comes to these kinds of issues. But who knows, maybe they will.

JW: One last thing — we’ve been talking here about the policies of the sanctuary states, but of course there are many states that are the opposite of sanctuary states, that have laws mandating the state to help in deporting people, or even take the initiative in deporting people, starting of course with Texas and Florida. I understand Arizona is pretty bad on this score too.  But those states, of course, are also subject to legal challenge about what’s likely to happen there.

AA: Yes. This is a really interesting point, Jon. In fact, I thought it was very funny that the America First Legal letter opens by saying, “Immigration law is federal law, and the federal government is supreme and the states don’t have the authority to make their own immigration policy.” Then I was thinking, did you send this letter to Texas when they passed a law that basically authorized the state to deport people and made it a crime to be unlawfully present? Because that’s what that Texas law did, SB-4. So that law got sued by the Biden administration and that suit was successful thus far, and the law has been enjoined, and as a result, Texas is not currently running the full deportation policy that law authorizes, although Texas is doing some amount of immigration enforcement on its own, I would argue.
But one option available to the Trump Department of Justice would be to abandon those lawsuits. So that’s another area I think will be very interesting to watch and see if the Trump administration continues to assert federal power, you can imagine them saying like, “Hey, we agree with you substantively, but it’s our job, not your job, and so we’re going to continue to oppose these laws even though we agree substantively that we want to deport everybody,” or something, which is sort of what they’re saying. But you could also imagine them being more result-driven perhaps, and saying, “Hey, this is a force multiplier. This is another way in which there can be even more immigration enforcement happening if we just let the states kind of do it themselves.”

JW: We’ve talked about a lot of possibilities, there’s a lot more, starting with the military, but I think we should save that for another time. We’ll have other opportunities when things are in the news that we need to talk about. Ahilan Arulanantham — he’s co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA Law School. Ahilan, thanks for all your work, in the past and in the coming months and years, and thanks for talking with us today.

AA: It’s great to be with you again, Jon. Thanks for having me.
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Jon Wiener: Not everything is about Donald Trump. The Geneva Freeport, for example, where it doesn’t really matter who is president of the United States. The Geneva Freeport is a place where the world’s richest people hide art, jewelry, wine, and gold bars from tax officials in the countries where they live and from creditors or plaintiffs who might be pursuing their assets. And Geneva isn’t alone in offering these freedoms. Caribbean tax havens, city-states like Singapore and Dubai, other places have special economic zones or free trade zones that exist outside the nation-state, free of tariff requirements and tax regulations.
For that story, we turn to Atossa Araxia Abrahamian. She’s a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, the London Review of Books and The Nation. Her first book, The Cosmopolites, explored the buying and selling of citizenship. It was a New York Times Book Review editor’s choice. We talked about it here.
Now, she’s got a new book out, The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World. It’s one of the Washington Post‘s top 10 best books of 2024 and a New York Times’ Notable Book of the Year. We reached her today at home in Brooklyn. Atossa, welcome back.

Atossa Abrahamian: Hi, Jon. Great to be back.

JW: You were raised in Geneva, and you say you realized at a young age that there was something strange about that city, not just that it was kind of boring — and very clean.

AA: Yeah. Geneva is a strange place to grow up, and you wouldn’t think so just by the sight of it. I grew up in a particularly unusual enclave of Geneva, and that’s the sort of real-life international community —  that is, the people who work in and around the UN and its agencies. And so there were a lot of kids whose parents were diplomats, a lot of kids who were leaving every three years because their parents were moving. It was pretty transient, and it didn’t really feel like it was part of Geneva proper. It definitely didn’t feel like it was part of Switzerland.  And so I always felt a little bit like I was moving without moving or traveling without traveling or on the go. Even though I lived in Geneva 18 years and actually never moved — so much as moved apartments. My mom still lives in my childhood apartment. But there was something unsettling about Geneva.

JW: I’m especially interested in the Geneva Freeport. This warehouse complex, I read in the New York Times, with floor space equivalent to 22 football fields. Most notorious for the incredible collection of art there. Tell us about the Geneva Freeport.

AA: The Geneva Freeport is not a secret. You think it would be, but it’s not. If you drive on the highway in Geneva, you’re going to see signs for the free port. Growing up, I assumed it was part of the airport, or the train station, or just some logistics hub. I don’t know. I didn’t think about it. Most people don’t think about it. But in reality, it’s a place where there’s just vast amounts of wealth between these walls.
What’s interesting about it is that, like other free ports or free zones, its initial function was to store physical commodities that were actually transient, that were traveling. So take for example, a merchant is traveling with grain. Stashes it in a silo. I think there’s still a silo. There were lots of silos there. And then a day later or a week later he moves on and takes his wares elsewhere. That was the idea–to have a place where goods could go without going through the bureaucratic process of imports and exports and taxes.
The thing is that now, there isn’t a grain of grain in the whole damn thing. Its function has evolved, but the sort of legal regime that governs it hasn’t evolved to the point that it’s actually regulating what’s going on in there. And so you can put a Picasso in there, say it’s in transit, avoid all manner of taxes and regulations, and never take it out. In fact, you could sell it to someone else in the free port and this transaction will not even have occurred in Switzerland. It will have occurred outside of the confines of Swiss law. So it’s a really interesting case of where the technology and the law and the use case kind of diverge over time.

JW: It’s called “a place where some of the most beautiful paintings known to man are locked up in a place where no one goes.” Have you ever been inside the vaults at the Geneva Freeport?

AA: No. The irony of the book is that I was able to go to all kinds of places. I went to a border town between Laos and China. I went to a port in Dubai. I went to the Arctic. The one place I could not go was the Geneva Freeport, which is a 15-minute walk from my mom’s house.

JW: I understand the free port offers secrecy not only from tax collectors but also from people like business partners or spouses.

AA: That’s correct. Say you’re a really rich person and you want to maybe not advertise some of your assets, that’s a good way to do it. It’s a secrecy jurisdiction. Every free port is special. It’s its own thing so each one. So the Luxembourg one has different rules. The Swiss one has different rules. There’s free ports in Singapore and Hong Kong. So you can pick and choose depending on your secrecy needs, the level of secrecy, and the level of illicit activity, shall we say. But yeah, it’s a pretty good way to keep your ex-spouse’s lawyers at bay.

JW: When it comes to secrecy, Switzerland of course is famous for inventing bank secrecy. I learned that this started in 1934. What’s been illegal in Switzerland was not to have a secret account—what was illegal was to disclose the owners of accounts to anyone. Now, what I always thought was the Swiss invented this to protect Jews who were trying to get their money out of Nazi Germany.

AA: Au contraire. They got you there, Jon. So Switzerland started off as a tax haven not because they decided to get rid of taxes. It was because the countries around them were starting to raise taxes. And so back in the beginning of the 20th century, beginning or first third, these sort of tax-averse professionals from neighboring states would drive their money to Geneva or Zurich and put their money in the bank and keep it there.  And at the time, it was a much more physical business. You didn’t have bank transfers online. Maybe you were bringing suitcases of cash or gold bars or their bonds or any… You could touch these things and deposit them and go on your way.
So Switzerland didn’t invent this for the Jews. Maybe some of them benefited from it, but so did plenty of non-Jews, and in fact, Nazis. So yeah, it wasn’t a do-gooder initiative.

JW: Swiss bank secrecy came to an end in 2014 when 47 nations agreed to an automatic exchange of bank account information to prevent tax cheating, and Switzerland joined that agreement. So is it all over now for Swiss banks? Do the ultra-rich have to hide their ill-gotten gains elsewhere?

AA: I think if you ask anyone who has studied the Swiss system, they’ll say there’s still ways around it. You can have an attorney go in your name and make a shell company. I mean, I’m not going to get into details because frankly, I don’t know the exact details. It is true that it is harder, and it is true that Swiss banks are much more particular about their clients. For a while, it was actually very hard to open an account if you were an American because the IRS was being really strict about going after people abroad, about US citizens abroad who were maybe not reporting their tax returns. So it has changed. You got to give them credit where it’s due. Are there ways around it? Critics would say yes.

JW: It isn’t just wealth that often needs to find spaces outside of national borders. The existence now of asylum seekers is an international phenomenon that has led to the creation of spaces for them.

AA: We have a huge number of people in the world who don’t want to live where they live for whatever reason. And I think, if you ask me, any reason you want to move is a valid one. And a lot of the time, people are under immense pressure, economic, safety, it’s bad out there, and people want to move. And the shocking thing is that there is but one place where anyone can just show up, and the one place is in the High Arctic and most people would not want to live there if they can even get there at all.
What really strikes me to this day, even having written a book about it, is that there isn’t any free space for anyone to just show up and seek shelter. There are places where you can try but these are few and far between.
What has also happened at the same time is that countries who are reluctant to take in asylum seekers have fashioned third spaces for them in other countries. The US had a program called Remain in Mexico where people had to stay in Mexico before coming in. The UK had a plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. That was about to happen until the Labor government took over and nixed it. And Australia, for years was sending people off to the island of Nauru, which is an independent nation in the Pacific, and Manus Island, part of Papua New Guinea, where people were just left to languish indefinitely in these really horrible refugee camps. Not called that because these people were asylum seekers. They were not all found to be refugees, but bad places, not good. So we really have a lack of space for people who want to move.
The origins of these offshore manipulations, at least when it comes to migration, they go back to… Well, guess what? The US came up with that too. Before Guantanamo Bay was prison, was sort of a tool for the war on terror, it was a migrant detention camp for Haitian asylum seekers. Where in very much the same way, the US was reluctant to admit them. There was a big panic in the ’90s, and the US so kept them detained in Guantanamo instead. And the operative thing there, much like in the war on terror, is that because Gitmo is not part of the US–It’s leased, against Cuba’s will, from Cuba–the American government can say, “Well, the Constitution doesn’t apply. It’s not in our territory.” And so they can sort of pick and choose what rules apply, what rules don’t apply, how badly to treat people, and really get away with it because there’s nothing binding them to any kind of responsibility there.

JW: And then, during that recent presidential campaign, Donald Trump came up with what he thought was an original version of this extranational space. He said he wanted the United States to “steal jobs from other countries” by “creating special zones of federal land with ultra-low taxes and relaxed regulations.” And these would be “ideal spots for relocating entire industries,”  he said, “from overseas.” Would that be a first in the history that you’re sketching out here?

AA: If he is proposing a special economic zone or sort of a gated enclave where there are different rules in order, that’s not new at all. The US has had FTZs for almost a hundred years. There’s hundreds of them. They’re uncontentious technocratic thing. That’s really nothing new. I mean, I think what Trump is probably proposing is the taxes that would even lower and the regulations even looser. And I think that you could probably, in his mind, improve on what we already have.
The thing is that US companies have made ample use of special economic zones in other countries. So it would really just be bringing these things back onshore. But the economics just don’t make sense. I mean, there’s no way that they’re going to be able to pay people as little as they would in India or another country where wages are much lower. So it seems misconceived, and maybe the math is not going to add up in Donald Trump’s favor here.

JW: You’ve mentioned the way, although wealth can exist outside of national borders, people can’t. People everywhere on the globe have to be citizens or residents or subjects or refugees or asylum seekers. You said there is one place, one place in the world where that is not true: Svalbard.  We used to call it Spitsbergen. You said this was a big island in the far north of the Arctic, far north of Sweden, the only place in the world where anyone from anywhere can live. It’s a free zone not for wealth but for people. And you went there. Tell us about Svalbard.

AA: I went there. I wrote about it for The Nation in July of 2019. It feels like a million years ago because of COVID. But yeah, I went to Svalbard on an art residency because I wanted to see this place for myself. I’m obsessed with borders. I’m obsessed with migration. I needed to go to the only place with actual open borders. And boy were they open. I mean, it’s just an expanse. It’s really cool. It’s really beautiful. So at the time, I assumed, and this was the narrative that I had read, that Svalbard had open borders because it had been unclaimed territory until the early 1900s. And after World War I, the nations of the world got together and decided on this cozy arrangement where Norway could have it but they had to let anyone who wanted to be there be there. And I was like, “Oh, what a lovely triumph of internationalism.” And maybe there was a bit of a grain of that.
But what really happened was that when Svalbard was terra nullius, there were all of these competing coal mining interests and whaling and just various business interests there, mostly extractive. And one of the coal miners was a man named John Munro Longyear from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The town in Svalbard is still named after him, Longyearbyen. And Longyear had some coal mines and was very, very, very concerned that once Norway would…
The writing was on the wall. It seemed like Norway was going to be given this territory. He was very worried that once Norway took over, his property would be expropriated. And so together with his lawyer on K Street he came up with this plan to just lobby the State Department and stake their claims and document everything. They were meticulous to make sure that their work was accounted for, that their claims were public, and that they wouldn’t have their coal mines taken away from them.
Fast forward to the Treaty of Versailles, the powers meet. They’re talking about Svalbard and what comes out of this Svalbard Treaty includes a non-discrimination clause, which stipulates that anyone can open a business, anyone can live, work on Svalbard. So it’s interesting that what was quite a mercenary effort to hold on to property ended up in this really quite utopian regime.

JW: And who lives there now?

AA: There’s a couple thousand people who live there. I would say maybe… I haven’t looked at the most recent numbers, but about half Norwegian, half international. There’s a Thai grocery, a small Thai community. There’s a lot of backpacker types who pass through, a lot of scientists doing research on environmental stuff on Arctic, and you can see Russia from your house, as they say.

JW: But these are not asylum seekers from Central Africa or Haiti or someplace.

AA: Not to my knowledge. I mean, there might be a handful of people who wanted to leave and were really creative about finding a place to go to. But it’s not a big hub for refugees. Also, Norway is known for the pretty generous welfare state. That doesn’t apply in Svalbard either. It’s not the whole package. It’s Norway but it’s not Norway.

JW:   I want to end up with Geneva. Geneva is the world headquarters of Doctors Without Borders, the world headquarters of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. It’s headquarters of the World Health Organization and the UN High Commissioners for Refugees and for Human Rights. But you say in your book, “More than a quarter of the world’s offshore fortunes are managed in or from Switzerland. There are 13,600 shell companies in the city of Geneva.” The New Yorker quoted you saying that the town where you grew up “exemplifies how a haven for money and wealth and things can also be a haven for people and justice and order.” Please explain this seeming paradox.

AA: Geneva is, I’d say, a microcosm of the bigger world that it exists in — because you do have these initiatives for humanitarianism. But really, the thing that speaks the loudest is money. And you can imagine a Geneva without the organizations, but you certainly can’t imagine a Geneva, or a world, without these moneyed interests. So I don’t think it’s all that surprising, but it does feel very paradoxical when you have a place that gave us the Geneva Conventions against torture, and you have war criminals hiding their money a hundred feet from the place where that might’ve been signed.

JW: Atossa Araxia Abrahamian — her new book is The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World. Atossa, thanks for talking with us today.

AA: Thank you. Really fun. Thanks, Jon. Take care.