Philippe Wojazer/Reuters

French President Emmanuel Macron (r.) and British Prime Minister Theresa May attend a joint press conference at the Elysee Palace in Paris Tuesday.

Last week’s shock election results, robbing Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May of a parliamentary majority and much of her authority just as she starts negotiating Britain’s historic withdrawal from the European Union, have thrown the country into turmoil.

Her failed election gamble will almost certainly force Ms. May to back away from the controversial “clean break” from Brussels that she has sought, with all its attendant economic risks. The opposition Labour Party too is at sixes and sevens on its Brexit policy, with senior leaders contradicting each other on critical aspects.

That could, perhaps, usher in a broad compromise on the most divisive issue facing the nation, and pave a more moderate exit route that would leave some ties to Europe intact. Top Conservatives are already mooting the prospects of an all-party commission to set Brexit policy that would find common ground, and present Britain’s EU partners with a stable and accountable negotiating team armed with a strong mandate.

For the moment such an understanding seems a distant prospect. Indeed, the government has given few signs of how it plans to tackle the momentous Brexit negotiations beyond saying that it will not even be ready to start them, as had been planned, next Monday.

“It is shocking,” says one senior European diplomat here. “The government does not seem to have the shadow of an idea of what it wants.”

The Brexit election, sans Brexit

Nearly a year after Britons voted 52 percent to 48 percent to withdraw from the EU, there is still no plan for what kind of withdrawal London should seek, nor is there any consensus on the matter among the political parties, in Parliament or in the country.

This was not the way it was meant to be. May called the snap election, she said, to give her a solid mandate to negotiate the “hard Brexit” that she had advocated ever since the referendum. The increased majority that the opinion polls had predicted, she said, would strengthen her hand against Britain’s EU partners.

Instead, British voters sent a confused message, forcing the Conservatives to negotiate an ad hoc deal, still being worked out, with a small Northern Irish party to secure a wafer-thin parliamentary majority.

The message was confused partly because Brexit actually occupied little campaign time. Since both major parties are split on the question, neither wanted to go into much detail for fear of alienating potential voters. Nor is the European Union a matter of burning importance to most British voters, who are more concerned with the effects of the government’s austerity policies on health care and education.

But the election results revealed sharp splits in British society; most notably, young people turned out in unexpected numbers to vote for the Labour Party and its unusually radical left-wing manifesto. Polls found that they were overwhelmingly against Brexit, while their parents tilted toward leaving the EU.

A similar divide was visible on the map. Though the English Conservative Party lost seats in Parliament, the Scottish Conservatives gained 12 seats. It was no coincidence that the Scottish party leader, Ruth Davidson, like most of her fellow candidates, campaigned during last year’s referendum battle to remain in the EU.

Up in the air

The weakness of the electorate’s enthusiasm for May – whatever motivated it – has had a devastating effect on her plans for Britain’s future relationship with the EU.

May has staked out an uncompromising policy of “hard Brexit,” arguing that “no deal is better than a bad deal.” She has threatened to crash out of the EU in a disorderly departure if it came to that, which alarms British business.

That approach is no longer tenable. Conservative members of Parliament who favor a “soft Brexit” that maintains as many economic links as possible have been emboldened by the recent election results and are expected to start speaking up.

“The government can’t maintain its Brexit position now,” says Hugo Dixon, editor of InFacts, a pro-European website. “They don’t have the numbers in Parliament to drive it through any more.”

Former party leader William Hague argued in an op-ed published in Tuesday’s Daily Telegraph newspaper – the unofficial house organ of the Conservative party – that “a change both of style and of substance” is called for and that the government “has an opportunity and a duty to tackle intractable issues in new ways,” such as by convening an all-party commission to agree on a Brexit strategy.

Ms. Davidson, meanwhile, has called for “an open Brexit, not a closed one,” that should be worked out with other political forces.

May’s core dilemma, however, is that the ruling Conservative Party remains profoundly split on the issue of Britain’s EU membership. “The more May moves to the middle, the more the hardliners will squawk,” Mr. Dixon points out.

“With her party divided and no majority in Parliament, May will run the constant risk of one side or another rebelling,” predicts Simon Tilford, deputy director of the Centre for European Reform, a London-based think tank. “It is difficult to see how she can pursue any Brexit in these circumstances.”

'A great big gap in the middle'

Fearful of such deadlock, some Conservative cabinet members are reported to be in secret talks with Labour Party leaders in a bid to construct a common negotiating position. But aside from the fact that to do so they would have to outflank their powerful Euroskeptic wing, and the fact that Labour’s position is vague, “you have to wonder why Labour should help the Conservatives,” points out Mr. Tilford.

“It may be unfortunate from the country’s point of view, but it is in Labour’s interest to let the government stew,” he adds.

Divisions in the political parties reflect the broader splits in society. Former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, a pro-European Liberal Democrat who lost his parliamentary seat last Thursday, warned in his concession speech that “we will not pick our way through the very difficult times that our country faces … if MPs simply seek to amplify what divides them."

“We must try to reach out to each other, to try and find common ground if we are to heal the profound divisions,” he urged.

That would require a return to traditional British politics, in which parties of both left and right have generally sought to govern from the center. More recently, however, a clear ideological split has seen the Conservative Party espouse right-wing English nationalism and the Labour Party move further to the left than it has been for decades.

“There's a great big gap in the middle,” says Jonathan Powell, former chief of staff to Prime Minister Tony Blair. “That gap will be filled – nature abhors a vacuum – but you need someone charismatic in the center who brings people together,” someone like new French President Emmanuel Macron.

There is no obvious Macron lookalike on the British political scene at the moment, he acknowledges. “There will be a healing,” he predicts. “It will just take a bit of time.”

While many nationwide fear the potential loss of the country's newest monument, the leadership of at least one Utah county cheers the Trump administration's decision to reconsider the size of Bears Ears National Monument. 

Former President Barack Obama’s proclamation preserving more than 1.3 million acres of southern Utah’s ruin-filled canyon-maze in San Juan County thrilled many Native Americans, environmentalists, and outdoor enthusiasts. But where some see the protection of relics, others see diminished sovereignty.

The move infuriated community and state politicians, who decried it as freedom-quashing federal overreach. Local residents should get to decide how best to use and preserve the land, they say – not bureaucrats thousands of miles away who may never have seen it.

“I trust people to make good decisions; I don’t trust politicians to make good decisions,” says San Juan County Commissioner Phil Lyman, criticizing the effect of big money on both sides. “Deals are made at a high level and often the currency is more wilderness, and they come to a county like San Juan without even recognizing that there are local people here.”

Monday, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke answered local politicians' pleas with his interim report recommending that President Trump revise, and likely downsize, the monument.

His conclusion reflects a common complaint that the acreage designated was excessive. In his interim report, Mr. Zinke writes that many archaeological sites worthy of preservation exist, but that they are better managed individually than collectively. Moreover, certain officially classified wilderness areas in Bears Ears already enjoyed stronger protections than monument status provides, he writes. 

Environmental advocates and Native American tribes disagree, and will likely sue the federal government if it acts on Zinke's recommendation. 

Extraordinary measures

In December, Bears Ears joined the 156 other national monuments designated since 1906 under the Antiquities Act, which allows the president to name public lands as monuments. The designation restricts new contracts for extractive industries like mining and providing legal protection for the 100,000 cultural and archaeological sites on the land. But if its method of creation was ordinary, the motivation was anything but.

Six years of discussion brought together five Native American groups (Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Zuni, and Ute Indian Tribe) in what Western land law lawyer Charles Wilkinson calls one of the most extraordinary social movements he’s ever seen. “A lot of these tribes have had long-standing grievances against each other, and I mean centuries,” says Professor Wilkinson, who helped draft their proposal pro bono. Their efforts resulted in a landmark agreement establishing co-management of the land between the tribal coalition and the federal government as true partners.

Despite significant national and statewide support for the monument, Zinke’s decision reflects fierce opposition from the local government, as well as the local chapter of the Navajo Nation (although Utah’s other six Navajo chapters support the monument). 

Most specific grievances cluster around themes of land access and economic prospects, with many fearing loss of hunting or firewood-gathering rights and reduced grazing land for ranchers. “If it’s a national monument, [federal agencies] can close whatever they want. If our watershed is in a national monument, they can shut it down,” says San Juan County Commissioner Phil Lyman.

Such complaints baffle legal experts, who insist that proclamation architects made every effort to maintain local rights and access. With few exceptions, federal land remains federal land and state land remains state land. Utah continues to issue hunting and fishing licenses, and all valid existing rights, including water rights, remain unchanged, according to the text of the Obama administration proclamation.

The main legal difference, Wilkinson says, is that in a future land management plan “all decisions will be made with a “much heavier weight given to the value of the natural features and historical and scientific features of those lands,” including rock art, ancient cliff dwellings, ceremonial sites, and wildlife.

But it’s precisely that decision-making process that has Mr. Lyman worried. He sees the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) as an oppressor who closes roads and disregards local opinion, and believes the monument boosts their power: “They’re bad actors and we’ve given them a bigger whip to use against us here locally.”

Bob Strong/Reuters

A view of Bears Ears, the twin rock formations that form part of Bears Ears National Monument in the Four Corners region, May 16.

Language in the proclamation providing for “maximum public involvement” and “consultation with federally recognized tribes and State and local governments” does little to convince Zane Odell, a third generation rancher who grazes more than 300 cattle on monument land. 

“A lot of that input goes in one ear and out the other,” says Mr. Zane, who serves on a number of community committees across the border in Colorado. “What they’ll do is weigh the local input,... but there’ll be way more environmental input from all over the nation.”

Philosophical differences

Such opinions reveal deeper, philosophical hurdles less easily addressed than concerns about who doles out firewood permits. The federal government owns nearly two out of every three Utah acres, a proportion unimaginable in the East. This majority stake has long chafed Western states, with some residents considering the arrangement an affront on their liberties.

Despite almost no land changing hands, Mr. Obama’s pen found its way directly onto this century-old pressure point when it sought to put new rules on what locals consider their land. Lyman, for one, calls the monument designation “the difference between freedom and serfdom.”

At stake is not only mining contracts and ranching land, but also birthright. Utah settlers “brought this land under control. Land that if you looked at it, you couldn’t imagine it being brought under control,” explains Wilkinson. “They do have a sense of ownership over it ... and I personally respect that feeling.”

And with that ownership comes a radically different philosophy of use, one that some locals call conservation rather than preservation, rooted in the belief that only they know best how to protect the land. 

“Preservation would be when they kick anybody out, including any industry, and preserve it for themselves,” argues Mr. Odell. “Conservation would be to use it wisely, and conserve, you know, graze it to help benefit some of the grass species.” 

Those searching to reassure nervous ranchers point to the nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, which faced similar opposition when then-President Bill Clinton created it in 1996 and joins Bears Ears on the list of large monuments under federal review. More than two decades later, ranching time has declined by a nearly imperceptible amount, and the community has enjoyed a tourism-supported boom in employment and income across the board.

But such facts and figures only play into residents’ other fears: an increase in tourist traffic that could damage their land. As such, emotions have flared into what Lyman calls “scorched earth politics.” In recent months, a BLM guard station burned under suspicious circumstances, fake fliers with misinformation stoked local anger, and vandals allegedly scraped anti-monument stickers from cars and targeted Odell’s cattle. 

With local leaders blaming monument activity on agenda-motivated outsiders and monument supporters suspecting extractive-industry tainted opposition, suspicion runs high in San Juan, and few expect a simple resolution when Zinke's final report comes out later this year. 

For now, a skeptical Odell plans to keep participating in local consultation while he awaits presidential and congressional response to Zinke's recommendation. “I don’t have much faith in that process,” he says. “But I’m thankful we do have that process rather than nothing at all.”

When she was inmate 5770102414 in a Thai prison, Prontip Mankong had ample opportunity for despair. Each night she slept with 70 to 80 other women, mostly drug offenders, on the linoleum floor of her cell. Her sleeping space was just over a foot wide; not enough room to lie on her back, so she slept on her side. For bedding, she had three sackcloths: one for a pillow, one for a blanket, and one to cover the floor. The fluorescent lights stayed on all night. 

Daytime wasn’t much better. The inmates were awakened early and herded into open showers, where they stood under a pipe with holes in it for 30 seconds. Then they ate a rushed breakfast of rice, vegetables, and some tough chicken. “It was like animal food,” Ms. Prontip recalls. After that they worked in sewing factories, earning as little as 8 baht (23 cents) a day. They were punished if they didn’t meet their production quotas.

Months after seizing power in a 2014 coup, Thailand’s military government – the National Council for Peace and Order – had convicted Prontip of criticizing the Thai monarchy, a serious crime in Thailand. 

Damir Sagolj/Reuters

Supporters and friends of Patiwat Saraiyaem and Prontip Mankong sing a song under a picture of Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej (left), after the two were imprisoned for criticizing the monarchy.

So every day in prison, she did what was required. She kept her head down. She endured. But all the while she had a secret. In quiet moments, when the guards weren’t looking, she was keeping a diary. She stole pens and wrote on pages of Genesis that she tore from a Bible. She found ways to smuggle them out. If she had to be in prison, Prontip resolved to use the experience as research. 

In 2016, after two years and 10 days behind bars, Prontip was let out. Today she is using her freedom to champion reform. And she’s using her illicit diary to write a book about Thai prisons.

“I wanted to keep my memories,” she says, four months after her release. “I wanted to keep everything I learned, all of the stories. I had to write something.”

As a woman, Prontip was more likely to end up in prison in Thailand than anywhere else in the world. No country incarcerates women at a higher rate. Thailand’s total population of women prisoners – 39,336 at the beginning of 2017 – ranks fourth in the world, behind the much larger countries of the United States, China, and Russia (though women are still only about 13 percent of the overall prison population in Thailand). 

Yet prison was the last thing on Prontip’s mind when she arrived at an airport in southern Thailand on Aug. 15, 2014. Prontip, then a 26-year-old political science graduate, had saved her money and obtained a visa for Australia, where she planned to spend a yearlong working holiday. Her future was a blank page.

Then an airport immigration officer inspected her passport and told her she couldn’t fly. Two police officers escorted her to Bangkok. Her crime, she learned, was directing a satirical play almost a year earlier about a fictional kingdom. 

Prontip had staged it on a Bangkok university campus with a political theater troupe. Now the new military government was accusing her and another actor of insulting Thailand’s monarchy – a crime punishable by 15 years in prison under Thailand’s century-old lèse-majesté law. Since the 2014 coup, the Thai government has prosecuted more than 60 lèse-majesté cases, which are handled in military courts. The military has used the 2007 Computer Crime Act to compound the sentences in some of these prosecutions. In 2015, a man in northern Thailand was sent to prison for 30 years for posting comments on Facebook that were deemed critical of the royal family. 

As is typical in lèse-majesté cases, Prontip was denied bail, so she remained incarcerated during her trial. Finally, four months after her arrest, she pleaded guilty to insulting the crown. She was sentenced to 2-1/2 years at Bangkok’s Central Women’s Correctional Institution. 

By then she was already accustomed to her thin, clay-colored uniform. She had memorized her prisoner number. And she was already learning the unspoken rules of survival in Thailand’s prison system. 

“I knew I had to learn,” she says. “So I learned. I learned for life. I’m a survivor.” 

Thailand imprisons 130 women for every 100,000 women in the population, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit based in Northampton, Mass., that opposes mass incarceration. The US has the second-highest rate at 127 per 100,000. India, by comparison, incarcerates just
3 women per 100,000.

Dave Martin/AP/File

Inmates sit on their bunks in a dorm at Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka, Ala. Female incarceration rates have been rising sharply in the United States.

Globally, these rates are rising. The US imprisons eight times as many women as it did in 1980. Thirty percent of the world’s incarcerated women are in US prisons. Analysts point to America’s war on drugs to explain the increase. The mandatory minimum sentences and tough-on-crime law enforcement policies have had lasting social consequences and escalated incarceration rates for both men and women.

The total world prison population has increased by about 20 percent since 2000, but that growth has disproportionately affected women. According to a report from the Institute for Criminal Policy Research, a London-based research and advocacy group, more than 700,000 women and girls were held in prisons throughout the world in 2015. That number has increased by about 50 percent since 2000. (In that same time period, the world’s population grew by just 18 percent.)

Female incarceration rates rose highest in Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, with dramatic increases in Guatemala, El Salvador, Brazil, Colombia, Cambodia, and Indonesia. The offenses that send women to prison are often closely linked to poverty, with many women resorting to low-level, high-risk crime to support their families.

Thailand’s high female incarceration rate is rooted in some of the same causes as other countries. “The reason is probably our drug laws,” says Chontit Chuenurah, a policy analyst for the Thailand Institute of Justice, a government agency that oversees the prison system. “We got that model from the United States. We base the charge on the quantity of drugs.”

Thailand has long been a hub for drug trafficking. The country was once part of the opium-growing Golden Triangle. Now synthetic drugs are king. Methamphetamine tablets called ya ba, or “crazy medicine,” are rampant. Thailand’s 14-year-old war on drugs has filled its prisons, but failed to decrease drug use. Seventy percent of Thailand’s male prisoners and 82 percent of female prisoners are serving sentences for nonviolent drug offenses, according to a recent report by the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights.

“Most of the time they’re not big-time drug dealers,” Ms. Chontit adds. “We have harsh laws for drugs, but at the end of the day we have small-time drug dealers in prison.” 

According to the Thailand Institute of Justice, the vast majority of women prisoners are mothers and the primary caregivers for their children. Most are first-time offenders serving two- to five-year senten­ces. Few have finished high school.

Imprisoning women creates ripples throughout Thai society, but is most keenly felt by children. “When women go to prison, the men often leave,” Chontit says. “Children leave school early. They are vulnerable to abuse. Some end up in prison themselves.”

As a result of high incarceration rates, Thailand’s prisons are at 224 percent capa­city, according to the International Federation for Human Rights. 

The staff-to-prisoner ratio in Thailand’s women prisons is 1 to 20, far worse than the internationally recommended level of 1 to 3. And while the International Committee of the Red Cross advises at least 37 square feet of personal space per prisoner, the Thai Department of Corrections mandates less than 12 square feet for women. In practice, many prisoners get only half that.

Overcrowding was just one of the realities Prontip chronicled during her time in prison. The crowded conditions made for easy transmission of disease, but health care was limited. Prontip says she saw three people die from untreated conditions.

“Some people die and nobody knows,” she says. “There’s no value. They just die.” 

Prontip’s cell had two ceiling fans, but in summer it got so hot that the inmates smeared themselves with camphor to stay cool. In winter the cold seeped up from the floor. And in the wet season, rain swept into the cell through the barred windows. 

Her fellow inmates were women of all ages. The youngest was 14, although her paperwork listed her as 20 so she could stay with her mother, who was also in prison. The oldest was 88. She couldn’t move. Prontip says other prisoners had to carry her wherever she went. 

Prontip quickly learned that although the guards controlled the prison officially, the real power rested with the meh bahn, or “mother of the house,” the lead prisoner who served as an informant to prison staff. Prisoners who crossed her could lose their visitor privileges or access to the doctor. 

“She treated us like slaves,” Prontip says. “We couldn’t walk up to her to ask something. We had to crawl on our knees and sit like we would at a temple. If we wanted to go to the toilet, we had to ask her first.” 

Prontip saw fights between prisoners. Occasionally the guards would tell one prisoner to beat up another. There were also love triangles. Some women set up little families and played roles of father, mother, and children. When women were caught having sex, guards would pour water on them and make them stand in direct sunlight all day.

In accordance with prison policy, Prontip could only receive visits from a list of 10 approved people. Prisoners are often incarcerated far from their hometowns, making family visits time-consuming and expensive. Prisoners are strip-searched before and after visits, a practice discouraged by prisoner rights groups. All inmate correspondence is censored. 

Prontip’s life improved when she learned that she could buy better treatment. If she paid 500 baht ($14) a month to the right prisoner, she could shower longer. She could get a foot and a half of sleeping space. She could go to the toilet when she wanted. And if she gave coffee to the prisoner who oversaw the washroom, she would get enough water to wash her clothes. 

Prontip’s other survival mechanism was mental. “I gave myself a mission every day,” she says. “Maybe I needed to learn something, or find something. Maybe I had a meeting. Some days I’d steal a book from the library. Some days I’d take a pen or a paper cutter. If you have a pen or a paper cutter, no one wants to have a problem with you.”

Ironically, Thailand is credited with helping draft the first international standards for the fair treatment of women prisoners. 

That effort began when Princess Bajrakitiyabha Mahidol, granddaughter of the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej, visited the Central Women’s Correctional Institution in 2001. The visit inspired her to start charitable programs to improve conditions for women inmates. Those programs became the basis for 70 rules outlining the humane treatment of women prisoners, which the United Nations adopted in 2010. Because of the princess’s work, the guidelines are called The Bangkok Rules.

“I think it’s a good initiative,” Pornpen Khongkachonkiet, chair of Amnesty International Thailand, says over a bowl of noodles in a Bangkok shopping mall. “But it’s cosmetic, and the implementation has no substance.” 

Damir Sagolj/Reuters

Female prisoners sing the national anthem as they are released from Bang Kwang Central Prison in Bangkok, Thailand, in 2011. More than 2,700 prisoners were released after being given royal pardons by the king of Thailand.

Thailand’s women’s prisons currently violate many of The Bangkok Rules. Because they were never adopted into Thai law, the rules have no legal teeth. And when the Thailand Institute of Justice interviewed senior prison staff in 2014, some didn’t fully understand what The Bangkok Rules were. 

Ms. Pornpen says Thai prisons have very little oversight from nongovernmental organizations. Access to prisons became even more difficult after the 2014 coup. More transparency would help, she says, but the surest way to improve conditions in women’s prisons is to imprison fewer women. 

Thailand has yet to implement recommendations to reduce its population of women prisoners, such as substituting fines for lesser offenses, using electronic monitoring for pretrial detainees and parolees, or giving judges more discretion in sentencing. 

“The court has limited options,” says Chontit, from the Thailand Institute of Justice. “They follow the law. That’s why we need to change the law.”

Eventually, Prontip benefited from the one method Thailand does use to reduce its prison population – the royal pardon. Every year on royal birthdays, the sentences of eligible prisoners are commuted. Prontip received a pardon and was released five months early. 

Last August, Prontip walked out of prison conflicted. She was free, but her friends inside were not. In January, I met her in a gated house in north Bangkok. As we sat on cushions on a tiled floor, she told me about her imprisonment. 

Prontip doesn’t look like an ex-con. She has shoulder-length black hair, a bright smile, and a playful nature that makes her seem younger than her 28 years. She is an artist and a playwright. And now she’s a vocal campaigner for prison reform in Thailand. She recently submitted a report on Thai prisons to the United Nations Human Rights Committee. It was based on her own all-too-personal experience.

Even as a former political prisoner, Prontip continues to advocate democratic changes in Thailand, in spite of the risks. Besides writing a book about Thai prison conditions, she’s started a group to support women inmates after they are released. Prontip is also active in pro-democracy social movements. She recently spoke at the Asian Youth Leadership Forum for Democracy conference in Gwangju, South Korea. 

“The democracy movement is a marathon,” she told the audience. “I plan to help prepare young activists to be effective political prisoners, productive political refugees, and also to support those who are released. I have to tell them that imprisonment can’t destroy our ideologies and spirit.”  

Prontip’s own prison sentence may be behind her, but she’s not turning her back on the women in prison in Thailand. 

“I have many friends in there,” she says. “I can’t leave them behind.”

Gregory Bull/AP

Haitian migrants receive food and drinks from volunteers as they wait in line at a Mexican immigration agency in Tijuana with the hope of gaining an appointment to cross to the US side of the border. Many Haitians arriving at the Mexico-US border are unaware of a new US policy of putting them in deportation proceedings and detaining them while making efforts to fly them home.

Dusk is falling on the trash-strewn dirt road that leads up to the Ambassadors of Jesus Church on a recent weekday afternoon. A few clusters of young men stomp their way up the path, past muddy hogs and a dog racing up and down a fence line.

The men’s dark skin and foreign tongue make it easy to identify them as outsiders, but strangers are nothing new here.

Each week, Tijuana receives thousands of people fleeing violence or seeking opportunity, including Mexican deportees, Central American migrants, and refugees from around the globe. Its border with the United States is the most trafficked international crossing in the world.  

Many residents have grown accustomed to the long-term challenges that come with Tijuana's transitional nature, like deportees living in canals along the border, or migrants being recruited into criminal gangs. But a recent group of arrivals drew a new kind of attention – and action – from locals. Starting last spring, thousands of Haitians descended upon Tijuana on their way to the United States.

“People were arriving in the middle of the night, looking for help,” Pastor Gustavo Banda Aceves says, standing inside his church, The Ambassadors of Jesus, on the outskirts of the city. The periphery of the sanctuary is covered with mattresses, cots, and drying clothes, signs of the some 200 Haitian men, women, and children sheltered here. Last December, the space was filled with nearly 600 people.

“These are different kinds of migrants,” he says.

Outpouring of support

The perception that these migrants had distinctive needs drove an outpouring of support. Almost overnight, the number of Tijuana migrant shelters jumped from roughly 12 to more than 30. Locals fundraised to deliver clothes, food, and trainings to Haitians in need. Pastor Banda and his wife donated land in hopes of building arguably Mexico’s first “Little Haiti,” and local businessmen started passing by shelters, offering jobs specifically for Haitians.

That mobilization of support echoes a phenomenon seen around the globe, amid some of the worst refugee crises in decades. Yet along with the eager helping hands comes a glimpse of an unpleasant reality: Consciously or not, communities sometimes prioritize certain types of refugees or migrants over others, making the decision that some groups are more “worthy” of help and attention.

From Germany to Lebanon and Kenya to the United States, how migrant or refugee groups are accepted or rejected can come down to language, how they look, religion, and cultural practices. Even the legal labels used to describe them – whether refugee or migrant – can play a part in how newcomers are welcomed by host communities.

Although the attention Haitians have garnered in Tijuana has at times been controversial – with some reprimanding locals for prioritizing them over fellow citizens – it has also sparked renewed interest in other groups in need here.

“Haitians have felt like a priority,” says José María García Lara, who runs the shelter Movimiento Juventud 2000, which for nearly 25 years has served deportees, homeless people, drug addicts, and migrants from around the globe. Last year, the shelter set up a makeshift camp in a muddy lot next door to house the influx of Haitians.

But, Mr. Lara says, “many here have started standing up and saying, ‘Wait, we can’t forget our own.’ ”

Gregory Bull/AP

Haitians make their way towards the border crossing in Tijuana, Mexico on Sept. 27, 2016. US officials say about 5,000 Haitians showed up at San Ysidro from October 2015 through late last month, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Sarah Saldana said at a recent congressional hearing that officials told her on a trip to Central America that 40,000 more were on their way.

'Unprecedented and unexpected'

The Haitians arriving here – most of whom traveled overland from Brazil, where they’d fled after Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake – drew residents’ attention for a number of reasons. Perhaps the most pressing was the United States’ decision last September to resume deportations for Haitians entering the country without proper documentation, who had previously been allowed to stay in the country for several years under a humanitarian parole policy. The shift essentially left thousands of Haitians stranded in Mexico, where they hadn't planned to put down roots. 

They arrived poorly dressed for the weather, with young children in tow, after months-long journeys through up to eight countries. They experienced robberies, injuries, hunger, and, in some cases, witnessed deaths along the way. About 3,500 are still here.

“This was an unprecedented and unexpected migratory event,” Rodulfo Figueroa Pacheco, a delegate from Mexico’s National Immigration Institute, told the Tijuana weekly magazine Zeta earlier this year.

Tijuana was once a central hub for migrants heading to the US. But starting in the mid-1990s, when border controls tightened, migrants moved east to cross via the desert, where they were less likely to be detected. Today the city’s migratory population is mostly made up of deportees and people seeking asylum in the United States. 

But throughout Tijuana’s long history of receiving people in transit, “I’ve never seen this kind of reaction [to migrants in need] before,” says Soraya Vázquez, a human rights lawyer.

In part, the way Haitians physically stand out means it’s easier to identify the hardships they face: only about 1 percent of Mexicans are black. Central American migrants often come into the country without applying for transit visas, meaning they not only blend in physically in Mexico, but they’re invisible in the eyes of officials, as well. That can mean less public awareness and more abuses along their journey north, says Lara.

“You can’t confuse who [the Haitians] are or where they are from,” says Ms. Vázquez. “And their needs are clear. This has been an emergency that is impossible to ignore.”

Last September, Vázquez helped found the Strategic Committee for Humanitarian Aid Tijuana, which connects the outpouring of donations for Haitians with shelters across the city. Even before the surge, there was limited government support for these hubs, making donations and volunteerism key.

'What do you lack?'

But amid the food, blankets, clothing, and know-your-rights training courses disseminated at shelters here, and the international media attention garnered by the Haitians’ arrival, a hierarchy of perceived needs emerged, with Haitians at the top.  

Last December, a group of locals set up a table of food and drinks to give to Haitians in limbo. But when a Mexican got in line, a local taxi driver told the man he wasn’t welcome to eat this food, PBS reports: “I told him, you’re Mexican. What do you lack?”

Criticism is also aimed at deportees from the US, caught between categories of “native-born” and “newcomer”: after years away, the return to Mexico hardly feels like coming home.

“We’re treated differently because of our time in the US,” says Sandra González, who was deported six years ago, after more than three decades in the US. The first few years back in Mexico, she was homeless, selling bubble gum on the street.

“People don’t want to give deportees work,” she says, waiting in a doubled-back line of hungry men and women outside Tijuana’s Desayunador Salesiano “Padre Chava” soup kitchen on a recent Wednesday morning. Padre Chava serves breakfast for up to 1,200 people every day. “They think you’ve been in jail or you can’t be trusted,” Ms. González says.

Commentary along those lines is found across the city – and on social media. But it’s not just those seeking help who might be criticized. Mr. Banda and his wife, for example, have been working to get the needed permits to build scores of single-family homes for Haitians near their Evangelical church. A comment on the church’s Facebook page reprimands the pastor for this work when there are kids in the streets and so many “people in misery” across the country. “Mexicans first,” the commenter chides.

“Those out helping [Haitians here] are people who have helped or have wanted to help others in the past, but didn’t know how,” Banda says. When he’s criticized for aiding Haitians at the expense of Mexicans or others in need, he says it’s people “seeing what my right hand is doing, but not the left.” 

Gregory Bull/AP

Haitian women and children get ready to sleep on the floor of the Padre Chava migrant shelter in Tijuana, Mexico on Oct. 3, 2016. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Haitian men, women and children regularly spend the night just outside the busiest U.S. border crossing.

Powerful public impressions

Images of poverty and destruction from Haiti’s myriad earthquakes and public health crises over the past several decades no doubt accompany its citizens wherever they arrive, from Tijuana to Rio de Janeiro to Miami. But the way a refugee or migrant is treated doesn’t always come down to the situation he or she is fleeing. In 2015, certain nationalities, like Syrians and Iraqis, were allowed to migrate through the Balkans, while those deemed “economic migrants” were turned away at the border. Yet many of the countries those individuals were fleeing are not considered uniformly peaceful.

And outdated assumptions can influence public acceptance in other ways. In the United States, for instance, the conversation around migration tends to center on one specific group: Mexicans. Yet Mexican migration to the US has fallen in recent years, and is now outpaced by other groups, like Chinese and Indians. 

“Labels and perceptions play a big role in how [migrants and refugees] are treated, not only by a community, but by a government,” says Kevin Appleby, senior director of international migration policy at the Center for Migration Studies in New York.

Central Americans, for example, “are often not perceived as refugees because they aren’t fleeing a declared war, or they’re fleeing ‘bad guys,’ which feels more manageable,” he says. As a result, they’re often seen as economic migrants in Mexico and the US, and the dangers they are fleeing become less important from the public's point of view. In Europe, meanwhile, Syrians and Iraqis seen as escaping war are often welcomed in a way that Afghans, who may also be fleeing violence but are more commonly labeled economic migrants, are not.

“Often the perception at the community level is that a refugee suffered something terrible and deserves a helping hand, and a migrant maybe is just there to take a piece of the pie,” says Amali Tower, founder of the NGO Climate Refugees, who previously worked with the United Nations’ refugee resettlement program. 

That makes who “counts” as a refugee hugely consequential. Often, it’s governments who set the national conversation about a certain group, or make decisions about which nationalities are more worthy of refuge or aid, even if officials don’t talk about refugee hierarchies in those blunt terms, says J. Olaf Kleist, a senior researcher at the Institute for Migration and Intercultural Studies at the University of Osnabrück in Germany.

“There can be political interests on top of stereotypes,” he says. Take Germany, for example, which has started group deportations for Afghan asylum-seekers who do not qualify as refugees, despite concerns about their safety upon their return. That could be attributed to the fact that Germany is involved in the NATO mission in Afghanistan, Dr. Kleist says, and that by deeming Afghans unworthy of asylum, the country sends a message that Afghanistan “is now a safe country.”

Renewed awareness

But an increase in interest and attention toward one specific group of refugees or migrants doesn’t always mean long-term discrimination against others, Kleist notes. 

“The Syrian refugee movement really stirred something in German society that other groups haven’t,” he says. “But, after a couple of years, the people who started volunteering with Syrian refugees in mind got to know people from Afghanistan, East Africa,” he says. The kind of discrimination about who belongs here “disappeared once people got to know them. The differentiation between nationalities became much less.”

Something similar may be happening in Tijuana, according to Vázquez, from Tijuana’s Strategic Committee for Humanitarian Aid. In recent months, the group’s Facebook page was increasingly filled with posts about not just Haitians, but Central American migrants, asylum-seekers from other backgrounds, and deportees.

Vázquez says she is motivated by this renewed awareness of the needs of all types of migrants and refugees, even amid ongoing concerns that Haitians could take local jobs or burden public services. 

“I tell them we can’t replicate the conversation going on in the US” about immigrants, many of them Mexican, she says. “Tijuana is a city of migrants. We need to help all groups in need.”

Joan Marcus/The Public Theater/AP

Tina Benko (l.) portrays Julius Caesar's wife, Calpurnia, and Gregg Henry (center l.) portrays Caesar during a dress rehearsal of The Public Theater's Free Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar in New York. Teagle Bougere (center r.) plays as Casca, and Elizabeth Marvel (r.) is Marc Antony.

It began even before opening night Monday of the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park production of “Julius Caesar.” In this version, Caesar is a President Trump lookalike. There’s the hair. The red tie. His wife even speaks in a Slovenian accent.

This won’t spoil the play for anyone who has seen or read it (as many of us did in middle school), but Caesar is murdered. And it’s not pretty. But as word spread of the Public Theater’s version, the backlash mounted swiftly. Conservative commentators cried foul and corporate sponsors dropped their support. And now Shakespeare has become the latest subject of an increasingly bitter and often vitriolic war of words playing out between partisans on social media, news shows, and political blogs.

The Public Theater’s “Julius Caesar” adds kindling to the national shouting match that’s become characterized by outrage and insults. Some online headlines have suggested that The New York Times (a Shakespeare in the Park sponsor) is “sponsoring an assassination depiction of Donald Trump.” Social media posts have characterized the play’s critics as literary dolts and supporters as liberals without morals who advocate violence against the president.

The theater has long been a place for political commentary and reflection. Previous productions of Caesar have included sitting presidents, including Presidents Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan, without the same kind of anger directed at the Public Theater and its artistic director Oskar Eustis. In 2015, a female Caesar was murdered in Act 3, wearing a white pantsuit. In the 1930s, Orson Welles staged a version with a Mussolini-like Caesar.

Mr. Welles obviously didn’t have to deal with social media. But today's outrage comes amid a national dialog that appears to become more driven by backhanded tweets by the day. And in a time when the very idea of civil discourse about politics, the arts, and media seems nostalgic. When all the world's a stage for outrage, how do the arts hold up a mirror to society without becoming a magnifying glass?

“If Shakespeare becomes a means of public debate, that’s a good thing,” says Peter Holland, a Shakespeare professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. “Of course it provokes us. But if it’s a good production, it provokes us to think but not to passively agree.... To me, it’s the only real reason to be doing the play.”

And for anyone who knows the play, it doesn’t promote assassinating a sitting president. If anything, it’s a stark warning against turning to political violence. After the Roman senators succeed in killing Caesar, they're unable to take back control of Rome and the city eventually falls. “The idea that Caesar is a play that advocates political assassination is just bizarre,” he says. Instead, the message is that if you “choose political assassination, it may be the destruction of what you want.”

Still, Mr. Holland adds, directors and playwrights have taken to modernizing Shakespeare’s work with contemporary political figures to compel audiences to think critically about today’s political landscape.

'Art has something to say about the great civic issues'

In a spirited defense of his version of Caesar, Mr. Eustis said before Monday’s performance that “art has something to say about the great civic issues of our time.... Like drama, democracy depends on the conflict of different points of view. Nobody owns the truth, we all own the culture. “But art's ability to provoke constructive cultural conversation is often lost in the endless stream of social media posts and attention-grabbing headlines that glorify scandal and conflict.

“It’s become much more widely accepted that we can talk in crass, crude, and personalized forms to vilify our opponents,” says Jeffrey Berry, a political science professor at Tufts University and coauthor of “The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility.” This kind of language attracts eyeballs to tweets and to headlines, he says. “In terms of politics, this coincides with the rise of polarization and the division of Americans into two camps with firmer and firmer boundaries.”

Certainly, the Trump-like Caesar isn’t the only recent cultural flashpoint that has ignited this kind of verbal warfare. After photos surfaced of comedian Kathy Griffin holding a fake severed head in the likeness of Mr. Trump, she was fired from CNN. She also received death threats. Singer and actress Jennifer Holliday was similarly threatened after she announced she would perform at Trump’s inauguration. She canceled her performance.

Incivility as a 'national crisis'

Some political and cultural observers say they haven’t seen this kind of bitter divide and hatred over politics since the Reconstruction Era after the Civil War.

“We’re eight months after that election, and eight months later people who voted for Hillary are still demonizing people who voted for Trump, and people who voted for Trump are still demonizing people who voted for Hillary,” says Carolyn Lukensmeyer, executive director of the nonpartisan National Institute for Civil Discourse. “It’s a tragedy of our commons at this point.”

In many ways, says Ms. Lukensmeyer, the 2016 political campaign legitimized the kind of base language, outrage, and vitriol that’s commonplace on social media. “We have come to a place where it’s almost a social norm – where it’s legitimate – to use language that’s very disrespectful.... That phenomenon did get legitimized by people running for the president of the United States of America.”

To be sure, the president hasn’t held back when going after his opponents on Twitter. Just this week he called former FBI Director James Comey “cowardly.” He’s called women unattractive, made fun of disabled reporters, and early on regularly questioned whether President Obama was an American citizen.

“He made it legitimate for people to say whatever is immediately on their minds,” says Lukensmeyer. And that kind of communication, she says, where everything is delivered without filters and is raw and emotive begins to erode the very foundation of a society “that is capable of collaboration in a way that’s productive.”

It’s also beginning to affect the public. According to a new poll from Weber Shandwick and Powell Tate that attempts to measure national civility, three-quarters of Americans say that incivility is such a problem that it’s become a national crisis, so bad that the vast majority of respondents say that it’s causing the country to lose its international stature.

In an effort to curb the tide of incivility,  the National Institute for Civil Discourse launched its Revive Civility and Respect Campaign. It’s starting off in Maine, Ohio, Arizona, and Iowa with events that bring together people who hold different views on the same topics. The aim, according to the organization, is to help communities begin changing “the tone of our democracy.”

REUTERS

Salvadoran soldiers participate in a ceremony for the Tri-National anti-gang task force in Nueva Ocotepeque, Honduras, November 15, 2016.

For several decades, the United States has found it easy to answer the biblical question “Who is my neighbor?” Recent presidents have offered money, trade, and advice to three impoverished nations of Central America – Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Now President Trump plans to continue the tradition. His administration will hold a high-level conference in Miami on June 15-16 aimed at uplifting the so-called Northern Triangle.

The longtime US focus on its most-troubled neighbors is partly benevolent, partly self-interested. The three countries are a major source of gang violence, drugs, and unauthorized migrants, especially children. In Congress, a bipartisan consensus still supports spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year to address the root causes of these problems by creating economic opportunity and rule of law in Central America.

“The idea of us coming alongside Central Americans themselves to try to improve their own conditions, their own democracy, or their own markets I think is an important use of the United States’ political will,” says Sen. James Lankford (R) of Oklahoma.

The US effort is similar to a recent attempt by the European Union, led by Germany, to create jobs and better governance in Africa in order to stem the flow of migrants into Europe.

The three Central American countries have shown progress in reforms, especially in tackling corruption. Outside donors are also better able to hold each country more accountable for any aid spent. “We’re pushing on a more open door than we were before,” says the former US ambassador to Honduras, John Negroponte. “The political convergence at the moment is quite good in terms of the governments of those countries wanting to work with us, which has not always been the case.”

The barriers to success, however, are still high. About 50 percent of Central Americans live in poverty while some 60 percent of the population is under age 30. On average, 19 out of 20 murders remain unsolved. And the size of armed groups exceeds the size of the countries’ armed forces.

The US holds itself partly responsible for these woes. Its high drug use has turned the region into a prime transit route for criminal traffickers, which only worsens corruption and an exodus of people fleeing violence.

Mr. Trump’s priorities for Central America differ from those of his predecessors. His budget proposal would reduce the amount of aid and put a focus on creating better conditions for investment. He also wants to apply more rigorous conditions to aid. And he has asked Mexico to better assist its southern neighbors.

The US emphasis may change. But the neighborliness should not.