Here is what happened: the United States, needing a place to dump people it no longer wants inside its borders, has arranged with Costa Rica to accept up to twenty-five deportees per day. Here is how it is being described: “a cooperative immigration enforcement partnership.” The gap between these two sentences is the subject of this analysis.

“Cooperation” is the first euphemism that must be excavated. Cooperation implies mutual benefit, shared goals, equal standing. What we have is a transaction between a superpower and a smaller nation: one pays, the other receives. The money - undisclosed, but certainly not negligible - buys not just space but plausible deniability. The United States gets to claim it is “enforcing the law” while shifting the physical and moral burden abroad. Costa Rica gets funds, and the diplomatic appearance of being a responsible actor in a global crisis it did not create.

“Enforcement” is the second. It suggests order, procedure, fairness. But enforcement without due process is merely removal. The migrants in question - many of them asylum seekers, some with pending claims, most without legal representation in Costa Rica - will be handed over to a country whose own migration infrastructure is strained, whose legal protections for foreigners are thin, and whose capacity to provide humane reception is unproven. Twenty-five a day is a small number - less than one per hour - but multiplied over months, it becomes a stream. A stream of people whose fates will be decided not by the merits of their claims, but by the availability of a receiving state willing to say yes to a price.

The left’s response so far has been muted, which is telling. When the same logic was applied by the European Union to Turkey or Libya, critics were quick to warn of outsourcing cruelty. Yet when the United States does it - when the buyer is Washington, not Brussels - the criticism often softens, or disappears. Why? Because the left, like the rest of us, is vulnerable to the siren song of tribal loyalty. If the United States is doing it, it must be necessary. If it is necessary, it must be justified. This is not principled pragmatism; it is moral surrender disguised as realism.

I have stood on the docks at Wigan and watched men queue for work that does not exist. I have seen how power moves, not in grand decrees, but in quiet arrangements - deals struck behind closed doors, numbers chosen to look modest, language chosen to sound reasonable. This deal is not modest. It is not reasonable. It is the same old machinery, repainted in the colours of international cooperation. The only difference is who gets to pull the lever.