In what continues to be one of the most consequential Supreme Court terms in United States history, the nation’s highest court on Monday once again redefined the meaning of the First Amendment and its dual clauses about the proper place of religion in America. 

In the last of three religious freedom cases decided this term, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of a Washington high school football coach who was fired after continuing to pray at the 50 yard line after games. The school district said the coach’s prayers violated its policies, rooted in a concern that such a high-profile, public prayer by a public employee would entangle the district with religion. 

But echoing views that have been emerging on the Supreme Court for over a decade, Monday’s ruling argued that the school district’s actions did not constitute a proper concern for the separation of church and state: They in fact discriminated against people of faith.  

“Here, a government entity sought to punish an individual for engaging in a personal religious observance, based on a mistaken view that it has a duty to suppress religious observances even as it allows comparable secular speech,” wrote Justice Neil Gorsuch in a 6-3 decision in the case, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. “The Constitution neither mandates nor tolerates that kind of discrimination.”

For conservatives, the Supreme Court, now dominated by the most religion-friendly justices in nearly 75 years, experts say, this term’s three cases have continued to restore the full force of the First Amendment’s protections of the free exercise of religion, even as liberal critics contend that the establishment clause, understood to place a wall of separation between church and state, is quickly losing its meaning.

“As Justice Sotomayor observed, we’ve gone even beyond the place that separation of church and state has been reduced to a slogan,” says Mary Anne Case, a professor at the University of Chicago School of Law, calling the establishment clause “dead.” “Things that used to be seen as establishment clause violations now seem to be free exercise mandates. I’m not sure how the judges in the majority see the separation of church and state, at least if that church is a Christian one.”

Meegan M. Reid/USA Today Network/Reuters

Joe Kennedy, a Christian former public high school football coach in Washington state who sued after being suspended from his job for refusing to stop leading prayers with players on the field after games, poses at Bremerton Memorial Stadium in Bremerton, Washington, March 15, 2022.

Flags, funding, and the playing field

There have been points of agreement, however. In May, a unanimous court agreed that the city of Boston discriminated against a conservative religious group when it refused to allow it to fly a Christian flag commonly displayed by many Evangelical Christians, even as it allowed the flags of a host of other groups and perspectives. Boston’s flag-raising program clearly did not express government speech, wrote Justice Stephen Breyer in the 9-0 decision. “As a result, the city’s refusal to let (the group) fly their flag based on its religious viewpoint violated the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.” 

But the unanimity in which this case was dispatched was short lived. Last week in Carson v. Makin, the sharp ideological divisions between the Supreme Court’s six conservatives and three liberals were once again on full display in a decision that required Maine to include religious schools in a taxpayer-funded tuition assistance program. “Maine’s decision to continue excluding religious schools from its tuition assistance program ... promotes stricter separation of church and state than the Federal Constitution requires,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in a 6-3 decision. 

In her dissent in Monday’s Kennedy case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor returned to observations she’s made in similar cases. The Supreme Court “has consistently recognized that school officials leading prayer is constitutionally impermissible,” she wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Breyer and Elena Kagan. Monday’s ruling “charts a different path, yet again paying almost exclusive attention to the free exercise clause’s protection for individual religious exercise while giving short shrift to the establishment clause’s prohibition on state establishment of religion.”

Free exercise and the Roberts court

When compared to previous eras in the Supreme Court’s history, the Roberts court stands out for its emphasis on the free exercise of religion and its general skepticism of efforts to maintain a wall of separation between church and state, according to a forthcoming study by the legal scholars Lee Epstein and Eric Posner. 

During the era of Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1950s and 1960s, for example, they found the nation’s highest court issued pro-religion decisions 46% of the time in relevant First Amendment cases. The court headed by Justice Warren Burger through 1986 issued pro-free exercise decisions in 51% of its cases, and the court of Justice William Rehnquist favored religion 58% of the time.

Since 2005, however, the Roberts court has issued pro-free exercise decisions in nearly 87% of the cases it’s heard. And at the same time, it has redefined the court’s precedents concerning the establishment clause and the separation of church and state.

For many conservative scholars, the Roberts court is aiming to restore the principle of government neutrality toward religion, correcting what it continues to perceive as discrimination against religion.

“I would say this general trend towards neutrality is the touchstone, the core principle of the First Amendment’s religion clauses, and it predates by many years ... the Roberts court,” says Nicole Stelle Garnett, professor at Notre Dame Law School and former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas.

“So in a sense, the court does appear to be taking more cases to apply this principle than previous courts,” she says. “But I don’t see that it’s more pro-religion than previous courts. I think that trend toward demanding government neutrality towards religion began in earnest in the Rehnquist court.”

But for many liberal scholars, this emphasis on the free exercise clause has in fact been far from neutral. Like all three cases this term and most of the cases during the Roberts era, the court’s decisions have focused nearly exclusively on a specific religious point of view.

“The Burger Court got free exercise claims mostly from a variety of religions that nobody had really heard of until they went to court,” says Mark Graber, professor of law at the University of Maryland’s Carey School of Law in Baltimore. Other decisions before the Roberts era, too, included “Native Americans who used peyote, Seventh Day Adventists who didn’t want to work on Saturday, the Amish – not religions that could be said to exercise any political power.”

“What is winning with the Roberts court, especially this term, are white Evangelicals, who are crucial members of the Republican coalition,” he says. “Christian Republicans in Maine just got their religious schools paid for. But again, in how many of these cases has this court protected the freedom of religion for a group that isn’t associated with the Republican Party?”

In Monday’s decision, the court’s conservative majority also dismantled a traditional test that has served as an analytical framework for establishment clause cases. The so-called “Lemon test,” which since 1971 has been used to determine whether the government is violating the establishment clause, held that government conduct must have a secular purpose, must not advance or inhibit religion, and should not foster an excessive government entanglement with religion.

Justice Breyer relied in part on the Lemon test in the 9-0 decision that declared Boston’s flag program a violation of the free-speech rights of the Evangelical group that wanted to fly a Christian flag in front of City Hall. But that “endorsement”-based test is now gone, the Supreme Court said today – and, the majority claimed, it has been gone for some time.

Erin Schaff/The New York Times/AP/File

Members of the Supreme Court pose for a group photo at the Supreme Court in Washington, April 23, 2021. Seated from left are Associate Justice Samuel Alito, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John Roberts, Associate Justice Stephen Breyer, and Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Standing from left are Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Associate Justice Elena Kagan, Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, and Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

“This court long ago abandoned Lemon and its endorsement-test offshoot,” Justice Gorsuch wrote, citing opinions dating as recently as 2019 back to roughly 1990. Despite that assertion, the Supreme Court had never formally overturned the Lemon test, including in that recent 2019 decision, which determined that a 40-foot cross could be considered a secular symbol.

In its ruling on Monday in Kennedy, the court explains that the Lemon test is being replaced – and it’s being replaced with what is becoming a popular focus for this Supreme Court: history.

Now the establishment clause “must be interpreted by ‘reference to historical practices and understandings,’” wrote Justice Gorsuch.

“The court says it’s not adopting a new test, but rather making clear that history and tradition ought to be the guideposts for determining what the Establishment Clause prohibits,” says Professor Garnett, in an email. “I think it’s fair to say that the application of this ‘history and tradition’ / ‘coercion’ test in public schools is something new, and I predict that it will take time for courts to figure out how [it] works.”

This historical test will allow governments a lot more leeway to allow religious exercise when it comes to establishment clause issues, says Ken Paulson, director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University.

“Where the court once tried to assess whether there is excessive entanglement in religion, now it seems to be whether there is an actual endorsement of religion,” he says. “That’s an important distinction, and it’s a far more conservative point of view. You certainly could have excessive entanglement without those who are sponsoring legislation or allowing practices believing that it somehow endorsed a religion.”

“This distinction goes to the intent of government officials, when in fact it probably should go to the actual impact,” Dr. Paulson says.

For critics, the Roberts court has again and again expressed concern about government discrimination against a person’s “religious status,” but little concern about the “religious use” of the taxpayer dollars that must now be given to religious schools, like those in Maine, that exclude LGBTQ employees and students from their ranks.

In her dissent in Kennedy, Justice Sotomayor said the majority decision ignored the impact of religious coercion when a highly visible public employee led his team in prayer in front of a crowd of people. 

“The play in the joints”

And in his dissenting opinion in Carson, Justice Breyer said the conservative majority was paying almost no attention to the establishment clause while giving almost exclusive attention to the free exercise clause, adding that it also “fails to recognize the ‘play in the joints’ between the two Clauses.”

The expression, which first emerged in a Supreme Court opinion by Chief Justice Burger and was later echoed by Chief Justice Rehnquist, gave states some room to address establishment concerns, even when it involved curtailing certain religious expressions. But this “play in the joints” has become more and more rigid, and more protective of religion than a separation of church and state, critics of the Roberts court say. 

“There’s no play in the joints left. They’re mandating what used to be seen as problematic,” says Professor Case. “And when I say ‘used to,’ I don’t mean just in the last 50-100 years of jurisprudence – I’m talking about the Framers.”

Five years ago, in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer, the court ruled that Missouri could not exclude a church daycare from a public grant program for nonprofits. And two years ago, in Espinoza v. Montana, the court said that private religious schools could not be excluded from a Montana tax credit program simply because they were religious. Chief Justice Roberts called these “‘unremarkable” principles that justified his majority opinion in Carson. 

In her dissent, however, Justice Sotomayor wrote that “[the] court for many decades understood the establishment clause to prohibit government from funding religious exercise.” The ruling in Trinity Lutheran, “veered sharply away from that understanding,” she added. And with its ruling in Carson, “the court leads us to a place where the separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation.”

Justice Breyer echoed those concerns, worrying that when the religion clauses are interpreted too rigidly, as if separated by clear, bright lines, this could have severe consequences. When the government promotes religion in its public school system, he wrote, there is “increased risk of religiously based social conflict.”

“We are today a nation with well over 100 different religious groups,” he wrote. “And with greater religious diversity comes greater risk of religiously based strife, conflict, and social division.”

What prayers are welcome on the 50-yard line?

Leaders of other faith traditions echoed that concern Monday.

“Although we strongly believe that public school employees have the right to pray and visibly practice their faith in many circumstances, we are concerned that schools will not extend this right equally to employees of all faiths and that some students may feel coerced to participate in certain acts of worship,” said Edward Ahmed Mitchell, deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Mr. Mitchell said that today’s ruling would mean that, for example, a Muslim coach observing Ramadan would have the right to pray on the field after breaking their fast.

“Public schools implementing this ruling must ensure that all employees, including followers of minority faiths, receive equal treatment for similar acts of devotion and that their religious observances do not directly or indirectly coerce students to participate.”

Taylor Luck

Young Saudi innovators using office space at Monsha'at, an incubator and support center for small to medium-sized businesses in Saudi Arabia's growing non-oil private sector, at the edge of the desert on the outskirts of Riyadh, May 31, 2022.

Mohammad Hashboul has not looked back since he left oil behind.

Since leaving a promising career at state oil company Aramco for a management job at Uber in 2016, the young chemical engineer helped establish Academi, a Saudi e-learning start-up, a year before the pandemic hit.

Sitting at his desk in a leafy office park at the edge of Riyadh, he says giving up the gold standard in Saudi careers for the uncertainty of the private sector was actually an easy risk to take.

“At the time I saw great opportunity in Saudi Arabia; there was an untapped market, a rapidly evolving economy, and a real desire for change,” Mr. Hashboul says.

“I saw these changes as a high-potential opportunity that we should not miss out on. And now we are living it.”

Here in the world’s largest producer of crude, oil is increasingly regarded as old news, passé, even a career dead end.

Mr. Hashboul’s career shifts, and the seized opportunities by many like-minded young Saudis, are part and parcel of a wildly ambitious plan by Saudi leadership to transform the economy. After years of false starts, the move away from a reliance on oil is finally in full swing.

The government reports that non-oil activities accounted for 40% of gross domestic product in the first quarter of this year, narrowly surpassing oil at 38.5%, with hotels and restaurants, finance, and services driving growth.

The transition away from oil is doing more than grow the country’s non-energy economy, it is transforming how Saudis live, commute, meet, and spend holidays, and even changing how they see, and what they expect from, their kingdom.

But as the kingdom accelerates its dash to a post-oil future – powered by a sudden surge in oil revenues and a rosy economic outlook – a critical question arises: Can people, and an entire society, keep up with such rapid change?

Benchmarks to achieve a vision

The changes underway were outlined in Vision 2030, launched by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2016. The series of reforms and benchmarks included mega-projects dismissed by media and critics as castles in the sky: a futuristic, $500 billion, solar- and wind-powered linear city, an outdoor skiing mountain in the desert, flying cars.

Taylor Luck

A suburb under construction in the desert at the northeast edge of Riyadh, May 31, 2022. Driven by an economic and demographic boom, new neighborhoods are being erected every few months in the Saudi capital.

But beneath the grand projects are detailed benchmarks to create a functioning non-oil economy:

• grow the private-sector contribution to GDP from 40% to 65%.
• lower unemployment to 7.6%.
• raise women’s participation in the labor force from 22% to 30%.
• and, perhaps staggeringly, raise non-oil GDP from 16% to 50%.

The engine of the vision is the Public Investment Fund, or PIF, a reservoir of state assets and oil revenues that has become one of the world’s three largest sovereign wealth funds. Founded and chaired by the crown prince, it has been pumping billions of dollars yearly into local industries, start-ups, renewable energy, tourism sites, and transportation and housing projects to spur the economy and create more sustainable cities.

After six years, hundreds of projects are taking off, and the International Monetary Fund is forecasting the Saudi economy to grow by 7.6% this year even as others around the world contract.

At one of the PIF’s projects, Monsha’at, an incubator and support center for SMEs – small to medium-sized enterprises – young Saudi businesses and innovators are developing technologies in health, cybersecurity, logistics, and artificial intelligence at an office park at the edge of the Riyadh desert, near Microsoft and Amazon local headquarters.

In the incubator’s Thakaa lab, surrounded by shelves of drones and robotic odds and ends, Mohammed Alhassan shows off the latest updates to his Shttle, an app-powered, pickup-and-delivery storage locker and logistics solution that employs 25 Saudis and counts UPS among its customers.

He swipes his phone and the demo locker pops open.

“With the rise of online shopping during the pandemic, businesses of all sizes need storage solutions. We revamped the locker model to fit their needs,” Mr. Alhassan says.

“The only way to move forward in this economy, or any economy, is to come up with solutions.”

Wijadan Alruwaili, innovation technology team leader at Monsha’at, says these nascent Saudi businesses are now attracting Saudi and regional investors who once put their billions abroad.  

Taylor Luck

Wijadan Alruwaili, innovation technology team leader at Monsha'at, a semi-official agency that encourages young businesses, at the organization's Thakaa Laboratory in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 31, 2022.

“There is a Silicon Valley in the U.S. Perhaps one day we can have our very own valley right here in Riyadh,” Ms. Alruwaili says.

Meanwhile, to help Saudi Arabia feed itself, Red Sea Farms, a Jeddah-based Saudi ag-tech start-up, is farming in the scorching desert.

Four years since it was founded, the firm is now using its saltwater cooling process and plant science to grow saltwater tolerant tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers in the Riyadh desert – and is set to expand across the kingdom and region in a bid to decrease the country’s reliance on imported produce.

“I think there is a shift from only looking internationally to looking locally for innovation in Saudi Arabia now,” says Simon Roopchand, chief operating officer of Red Sea Farms.

“There is a recognition that they don’t need to go for international knowledge all the time when they are building up their own expertise within the kingdom.”

City life transformed

But perhaps the most visible symbol of this transformation is Riyadh itself.

With the expansion of business opportunities and the loosening of entertainment and social restrictions, the once-closed conservative city in the Najd desert is no longer the stuffy administrative capital that Saudis and foreigners alike fled in search of relaxation.

Businessmen and women once flocked to the Red Sea coastal city of Jeddah, the more easygoing and open port city that served as a trade center and the beating heart of the Saudi economy.

Now a reverse migration is taking place: Companies, entrepreneurs, and individuals are picking up and moving from Jeddah to Riyadh to make it big.

“There are funds, there are investors, there are international companies, there are tons of cultural events and activities,” says Omar Mohammed, a 27-year-old Jeddah entrepreneur in marketing data whose colleagues next door recently moved to Riyadh. “For the first time in my lifetime, Riyadh is the happening place to be. It’s incredible how quick this has happened.”

With the capital sporting a Times Square-like entertainment center, shopping malls, and a cafe culture, Western diplomats and business people who once bristled at the thought of a posting in Riyadh now describe it as “an American city without the alcohol.” 

Entire neighborhoods are rising from the desert on Riyadh’s northern edge every six months, complete with gyms, salons, and spas. Desert that was valued at a few thousand dollars per acre is now the site of condos going for $250,000 a pop.

A slick, $22 billion metro snakes across the city and is set to open this fall with 86 glassed-in, air-conditioned stops – an increasingly attractive option for residents who now face hour-plus commutes.

“If I can leave my car at home and go to work and back in air conditioning, I will ride the metro every day,” says Mohammed, a Riyadh clerk. “I can’t stand driving in traffic anymore.” 

In Riyadh and Jeddah, men and women in their 20s sit at tables, writing essays and preparing business proposals on laptops at cafes staffed by Saudi baristas. Across the country, the number of specialty cafes has grown from 5,000 to 20,000 the past four years, emerging as the go-to place for meetings.

Taylor Luck

Young Saudi men and women work on their laptops at Ash Cafe, a specialty coffee roaster and cafe in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, May 22, 2022. Once the beating heart of the Saudi economy, Jeddah is increasingly facing competition from Riyadh, which is shedding its image as a stuffy administrative capital.

Six years ago, such a public mixing of the sexes would not have been allowed.

The change in the economy is also fundamentally reshaping how Saudis are spending their leisure time.

While Saudis once flocked to Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco, and Europe to beat the summer heat, the Saudi leadership’s promotion of unheralded tourism gems in surprisingly diverse climates is encouraging local getaways.

In late May, thousands of Saudis flocked to the city of Abha in the misty pine-dotted mountains of Asir, many escaping 105-degree heat and dust storms in Riyadh.

One pair of sisters at Abha Airport awaiting a return flight to Riyadh told the Monitor they took a budget flight to the mountain area for a “girls’ weekend out” – a reward after a hard month of work.

Four years ago, they would not have been able to travel between cities without a male guardian’s permission. Now, none of the few hundred travelers in the airport appeared to bat an eye.

“We used to just serve the local community, but now we are meeting people from across the kingdom,” Um Amran, a local merchant in Abha, says from her stand selling local red-and-white baskets at the farmers market. “Young women, young men are exploring the country. Times are changing, and so must we.”

Range of challenges

But Saudi Arabia’s transformation is by no means a straight line nor smooth.

The economic opportunities and social freedoms come with a cost:

• Housing prices are up 20% in Riyadh and 10% in Jeddah over the past 12 months.
• A universal 15% value-added tax (VAT) on all goods remains in place four years after it was first introduced to a nation not accustomed to taxes.
• Inflation hovers at 2.5% to 3%, but the cost of living is up for Saudis, who no longer have vast subsidies or state-guaranteed jobs to rely on.

“It’s too expensive to live here,” says one Riyadh resident who is struggling to find an apartment, a precursor to getting married. He complains of working two jobs. “I feel like I am working nonstop to make ends meet. When do I get to start my life?”

And Saudi Arabia’s human rights track record and the fallout from the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi continues to keep some American firms away due to optics back home. But, say several longtime observers and members of the international business community in Saudi Arabia, European companies and American investment firms increasingly are overcoming these concerns, swayed by the vast business opportunities.

Then there is the question of whether Saudi work culture can catch up with the ambitions of its Silicon Valley-inspired entrepreneurs and CEOs.

Foreigners who have set up businesses in the kingdom say some Saudi employees come into work late, leave early, do not complete their tasks, and see their job as an entitlement rather than a service – an attitude carried over from the pre-vision public sector bureaucracy that was long the main employer.

“There are limits to how fast an economy can pivot on its axis,” says Chris Johnson, ex-officio of the American-Saudi Chamber of Commerce in Saudi Arabia, who has been involved in the Saudi private sector for four decades.  

“You can’t take a rentier economy where money grows on oil platforms and all of a sudden flip a switch and have everyone be productive in the office.”

Some older conservatives hint, but never say out loud, that they disapprove of gender mixing and a “loss of family values.”

Flush with oil funds, the government says it is looking to cut the VAT, and is set to expand a program to help Saudis achieve affordable homeownership. Social openings are here to stay.

The transformation is set to gain pace for all Saudis, whether they are ready for it or not.

“Saudi Arabia today is full of opportunities and it is growing,” says Mr. Hashboul, the chemical engineer turned entrepreneur. “All you need to do is catch up.”

On a slice of sandy beach tucked under one of Dakar’s coastal cliffs, Harvest-Spring Kibonge runs a modest, open-air smoothie shop. The crashing waves play a melodic rhythm, and each evening the sunset paints a pink and orange sky over the Senegalese capital.

Though he’s far from home in the Republic of Congo, immigrating to Senegal has worked out for him. In Dakar, he got an education and started a prosperous business – a cookie-cutter immigrant success story. 

“I go where the money goes,” he says, a mantra familiar to emigrants the world over. 

While Western headlines on African migration often fixate on people entering Europe illegally, Mr. Kibonge is a different sort of African migrant – the majority. 

He is one of around 25 million Africans who had moved to another country on the continent by 2017, a number that’s steadily grown from 13 million since 2008. Despite alarmist headlines in the West, fewer than a fifth of Africans who leave their country make their way to Europe. 

“If you’re talking about a drop in the bucket and not looking at everything else that’s happening, you’re not really understanding the whole context,” says Caroline Zickgraf, a migration researcher at Belgium’s University of Liège. “I really don’t see how you can really understand or design policy or discuss it when you’re not discussing the most common forms of movement.”

In the West, the immigration debate has been stirred in recent years by the flow of migrants from Syria, Libya, and, most recently, Ukraine. Africans crossing from Libya dominated the 2015 “migrant crisis” in Europe, and the United Kingdom is currently wrangling with a plan to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda. Some migrants will continue to make their way to Europe, which is increasingly responding by hardening its border controls.

The global North has “succeeded in demonizing African migrants, and selling to the world an idea that nothing good works in Africa,” says Samuel Okunade, a postdoctoral researcher who studies migration at South Africa’s University of Pretoria. “That sends a signal to receiving countries to say if the only hope for an African is to leave the African continent, then they can treat them anyhow, make policies that would stop them.”

“The truth of the matter is [Europe] needs hands … but they shy away from that, capitalizing on some of the stereotypes that have been presented to the public,” Dr. Okunade points out. 

Increase in migration within Africa expected

By 2050, the United Nations predicts that a quarter of the world’s population will be African, meaning the biggest questions for global migration will likely play out on the continent itself.

Migrants across the continent have a range of backgrounds and motivations, says Dr. Okunade, himself an immigrant to South Africa from Nigeria. They’re students, white-collar professionals, seasonal workers, or even just curious dreamers with cash to spare and a desire to strike out on their own abroad. But one thing unites many of them: With more money circulating in their home country, the thinking goes, comes more means to leave. It’s a counterintuitive trend that some economists say doesn’t taper off until gross domestic product per capita hits about $10,000, roughly that of Russia. In Africa, only the island nations of Mauritius and Seychelles have hit that mark. 

“As poorer people gain more economic opportunity, they will be more likely to leave their home country,” wrote Michael Clemens, a director at the Center for Global Development, in a CDG blog post comparing African migration to that of Europe before World War I. “Rising education, demographic shifts, and structural change from an agricultural to an urban economy … explain a large part of the pattern.”

Between African countries’ growing economies and populations, and disruptions from the climate crisis, the numbers will keep ticking upward. 

That reality can be seen in Senegal, part of the Economic Community of West African States regional bloc that allows free movement among member citizens. The relatively prosperous capital of Dakar – whose roughly 140,000 African immigrants range from doctors to hospitality staff to informal street vendors – is a melting pot of different cultures, languages, and nationalities.

Nick Roll

Idrissa Morgo, from Burkina Faso, sells coffee on a quiet street in the Ngor neighborhood of Dakar, Senegal, March 27, 2022. Other migrants from Burkina Faso typically gather on this street each night – swapping stories, holding court, drinking coffee, and eating at Mr. Morgo's sister's restaurant.

Nearly every night, under the light from Odil Morgo’s attiéké (cassava) and fish stand on the northern edge of Dakar, fellow Burkinabé immigrants hold court, eating dinner, drinking coffee, and laughing. 

Ms. Morgo’s brother, Idrissa, a coffee vendor next door, is often there too, serving hot drinks and lending a hand in his sister’s kitchen. Their customers often come from neighboring West African countries including Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Togo, and Benin.

“You should know about your neighbors, what’s happening, whether it’s like home or it’s better,” says Mr. Morgo, whose curiosity has taken him across West Africa, from Quranic school in Ghana to gold mining in Mali. 

In 2014, the East African country of Tanzania granted the largest ever mass citizenship, turning 160,000 people who had fled conflict in neighboring Burundi into citizens overnight. South Africa, the continent’s most developed economy, is powered by 2.8 million migrants, many from across the border in Zimbabwe. And the world’s biggest cocoa industry, in Ivory Coast, is largely propped up by 2.5 million immigrants.

Still, migration in recent decades has been fraught with tensions, especially as nations that are themselves developing struggle to integrate newcomers.

An often-uneasy assimilation

In Senegal, in the lead-up to a war with Mauritania in the late 1980s, many Mauritanians and those of Mauritanian descent were driven out of the country as both countries engaged in mass expulsions. In 1983, amid an economic downturn in Nigeria, 2 million West Africans lacking permanent legal status were deported from the country on two weeks’ notice, half of whom were Ghanian. 

And in South Africa, xenophobia constantly simmers under the surface, periodically erupting into violence against immigrants as politicians stoke fears that foreigners are taking scarce jobs. But even before reaching that point, integration is often elusive.

“‘Why are you talking to me? You don’t speak my language.’ There are times when you witness those kinds of things,” says Dr. Okunade, the University of Pretoria researcher and Nigerian immigrant, of his personal experience in South Africa.

The consequences can be far-reaching. In Kenya, the government wants to close the country’s massive Kakuma and Dadaab refugee camps by the end of this month. It ordered the closure last year, but questions remain how the half-million refugees will either be integrated into Kenya, returned to their home countries, or resettled elsewhere. Things have been complicated further as newcomers, driven by drought in East Africa, continue to arrive.

On the continentwide level, bigger-picture ideas like plans for an African Continental Free Trade Area, which would allow freedom of movement and goods much like the European Union, have languished for decades.

Still, such obstacles are unlikely to seriously deter would-be migrants across the continent. Back at his smoothie shack, Mr. Kibonge surveys the crowded beach as yet another sunset paints Dakar orange. 

“The energy, the people, the beaches, the vibe,” he says. “That’s what keeps me here.” 

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought back memories.

The Soviet army invaded western Ukraine in September 1939, three months after I was born. During its 2½-year occupation, my father was interrogated twice by the Soviet secret police, and he realized he was on their list of “enemies of the people.”

Before being forced to retreat by the German army’s advance, the Communists rounded up people on their list of suspects and, as has been their custom since the inception of the Soviet regime, had them shot. My father saved his life by hiding in a village.

When the Soviet army was about to return in 1944, my father had to decide whether to stay – and probably be shot or sent to a gulag in Siberia – or to flee for his life. My parents and several other families left everything and began a dangerous journey to the West. At age 5, I became part of the large wave of World War II refugees called displaced persons.

My experience was similar to that of current refugees from Ukraine: Running to a bomb shelter. Not knowing where the next meal would come from. Learning new languages and finding one’s way in new environments – in my case, in Slovakia, Austria, and eventually Argentina.

One day in Argentina, my mother sent me to buy rice. I was 8 years old. I did not know how to say rice in Spanish and could not explain what I wanted. The grocery store owner tried to help by showing me different food items, but I returned home without the rice.

Courtesy of Oleh Wolowyna

Oleh Wolowyna was 5 years old when he fled Ukraine with his family during World War II. "My experience was similar to that of current refugees from Ukraine: Running to a bomb shelter. Not knowing where the next meal would come from. Learning new languages and finding one’s way in new environments," he says.

The war also recalls a more recent experience. The siege of Mariupol, with the systematic destruction of the city and the blockage of all attempts to assist people trapped there, reminded me of my study of the use of famine as a weapon of terror. The Russians used hunger in Mariupol just as Josef Stalin did in Soviet Ukraine during the 1930s.

The New York Times reported on Mariupol residents’ deprivation in late March:

She read fairy tales to distract the children, but once they got hungry, “the fire was gone from their eyes,” said Kristina. ... “They had no interest in anything.” 

“We ate once a day,” she said. “It was mostly in the morning or the evening that the children cried out, saying, ‘I want to eat.’” 

I heard in those words echoes of thousands of testimonials by survivors of the 1932-1933 famine in Ukraine, called the Holodomor, or death by starvation. Many countries, including the United States, recognize it as genocide. Pavlo Makohon’s description of the famine is one of many posted on the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium’s website:

I had younger brothers – Ivan, Wasyl, Anatoliy, and a younger sister, Maria. All of them, and my grandmother, died in front of my eyes from starvation. I would run around and collect any food I could get – porcupines, meat from dead horses – and bring it home to them. When there wasn’t anything left, and everyone had died of starvation, I saw that I would die as well. So I left and started wandering around the farmsteads. 

Diving into Holodomor data

My encounter with the Holodomor started in 2008 with my first Fulbright grant at the Ptoukha Institute of Demography and Social Studies in Kyiv, Ukraine. There, I met Omelan Rudnytskyi, a senior demographer who had spent a good part of his professional life collecting, at great personal risk, data and documents on the demographic history of Ukraine and the Holodomor. He also had access to the scholarly legacy of Ukraine’s original Institute of Demography, which operated from 1918 until 1938, when the Soviet government shut it down.

Working with Mr. Rudnytskyi presented a unique opportunity, so I abandoned my original research plan and started to study the Holodomor, working with a group of institute demographers.    

For many years, the Soviet regime denied the existence of the famine. Mentioning the famine was a criminal offense. As a result, people could not process the trauma it caused. When I asked my Ukrainian colleagues if their surviving family members had ever talked about the Holodomor, many said no.    

But that began changing the year I was there.

Maxym Marusenko/NurPhoto/Reuters

Light rays and candles are featured at the memorial to Holodomor victims in Kyiv, Ukraine, during a commemoration of the 88th anniversary of the famine, Nov. 27, 2021. The unveiling of the monument on Nov. 22, 2008, helped break the silence about the trauma of the Holodomor.

A monument breaks the silence

November 22, 2008, marked the 75th anniversary of the Holodomor. Cold and windy, wet with snow, the weather provided a somber background to this sad day. Events culminated in the evening with the unveiling of the Holodomor monument in Kyiv. Snow had changed to sleet, but thousands of Ukrainians from all over the country gathered by the monument with candles under a sea of umbrellas. The names of hundreds of victims of the Holodomor were read, one village at a time. For some, it was a family member; for others, a neighbor. I could see the event’s impact on people’s faces illuminated by flickering candles.    

The trauma produced by the Holodomor, suppressed for many years, finally came out in the open. Hundreds of Ukrainians searched the stone plates near the monument for the names of family members. People began to speak about the Holodomor, too. When riding the bus by the monument, I heard many passengers point it out. Hundreds of interviews with survivors were recorded, and many memoirs were published. 

According to our estimates of the famine’s impact, about 4 million people, or 13% of Soviet Ukraine’s population in 1933, were starved to death between 1932 and 1934, and 600,000 children were not born.

A unique characteristic of the Holodomor is that 80% of the 4 million deaths happened in six months. There was an explosion of mortality during the first half of 1933, with the number of deaths caused by the famine increasing 10 times between January and June of that year. At the height of the famine in June 1933, there were 28,000 famine-related deaths per day, or 1,167 per hour, or 19 per minute. Mortality levels of this magnitude are not found in other human-made famines. According to French historian Alain Blum, “Rarely, in all of the demographic history of Europe, will a famine have caused losses of such proportions” (Mr. Blum’s emphasis).

Why inflict such torture?

The French historian Nicolas Werth provides the following summary of Stalin’s objectives: “Choosing to instrumentalize the famine, Stalin intentionally amplified it in order to punish the Ukrainian peasants who rejected the ‘new serfdom’ and to break ‘Ukrainian nationalism,’ which he saw as a threat to his goal of constructing a centralized and dictatorial Soviet state.” 

Ninety years later

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is an updated version of Stalin’s deliberately manufactured famine. Stalin denied the famine’s existence; Mr. Putin claimed he had no intention of invading Ukraine. Mentioning the famine was punishable by law, as is the case today with describing the invasion as war. Ukrainians starved to death during the Holodomor because Stalin took away most of the grain produced by Ukrainian peasants; Mr. Putin is stealing hundreds of thousands of tons of Ukrainian grain. In terms of Ukrainian identity, though, Mr. Putin has in some ways gone a step further than Stalin by denying the very existence of Ukraine and claiming that all Ukrainians are Russian.

When the war is over, I will probably return to Ukraine and, with my colleagues there, face the task of documenting a second genocide. We will try to determine how many civilians were killed, how many children were not born because of the war, and what proportion of future generations has been lost forever.

In the meantime, Ukrainians are fighting for their existence, driven in part by the collective memory of the Holodomor. The present reminds them of what their parents and grandparents experienced. They fight to honor them and to prevent what they know Russia is capable of doing.

Oleh Wolowyna, Ph.D., is a fellow at the Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. An article he co-wrote on the Holodomor received the 2021 Huttenbach Prize for the best paper in the journal Nationalities Papers.

AP

A worker in Romania oversees the unloading of Ukrainian cereals from a barge in the Black Sea port of Constanta, June 21.

Four months into Russia’s war, the campaign for Ukraine’s freedom has now been joined by two other campaigns: freedom for global food markets and freedom for an estimated 47 million people around the world who could go hungry as a result of the invasion.

On Monday, the leaders of the G-7 club of leading industrial powers pledged at a meeting in Germany to counter a Russian naval blockade of Ukraine’s ports and the destruction of the country’s highly valued grain exports. A similar message was sent last week at a special “food summit” in Berlin and is expected at a NATO meeting this week.

Russia’s use of food disruption as a weapon of war – considered a war crime – has evoked a global response almost as intense as that against the war itself. Last year, Ukraine was the fourth-largest exporter of grain and seeds. But with Russian forces killing Ukrainian farmers, blowing up storage silos, and obstructing Black Sea ports, those exports have dwindled, raising fears of shortages for many of the world’s most vulnerable nations.

The G-7 countries – Britain, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States plus the European Union – decided to coordinate their assistance to Ukraine agriculture and to dozens of countries facing acute food insecurity. The goal is not only humanitarian. Russia has described its food tactic as a “quiet but ominous” way to weaken world resistance to the war.

Since March, both Poland and Moldova have opened land routes for exports of Ukrainian wheat, barley, corn, and vegetable oil, lessening the crisis to a degree. So-called grain trains are now reaching safe ports. Still, Western countries may need a greater effort – akin to the 1961 Berlin airlift during the Cold War – to ensure more exports.

Ending Russia’s naval blockade by force has been ruled out by the U.S. Instead, both the United Nations and a few leaders of developing countries are beseeching Moscow to allow shipments out of Ukraine – to save Russia’s reputation among countries it has long courted.

The fight for Ukraine’s future is now a global struggle for free markets and freedom from hunger. The war is no longer just about a country’s self-determination. It is also about world self-sufficiency in food.