I spent last week in Washington DC where I was struck by four words on the wall of the Korean War memorial: Freedom is not free.

The line runs like a multitudinous river, with joining and diverging parts, across the States. It feeds the frenzy, the paranoid patriotism, flags drooped on the dashboards of cars, flaring in wind from buildings.

It is a line that sends military aid to Ukraine and Israel. Freedom is not free is the motto currently arresting pro-Palestinian students across the country.

It is putting guns in the hands of teachers. Yet another bill passed during my short stay, this time in the state of Tennessee — a response by lawmakers to a shooting in a Nashville school last year. Teachers can now carry a concealed weapon following just 40 hours of training. Parents won’t know whether their child’s teacher is carrying a gun. Already, critics worry that teachers may have to turn their gun on their own students.

Freedom is not free serves as a caption for the very many war memorials across the city, from the Mall to Capitol Hill, and on across the water to the vast stretch of white crosses at Arlington. Everywhere in Washington DC there are soldiers remembered. There are veterans too, wheeled around by boys in uniform.

The whole city feels like a beautiful, majestic cemetery, where the living pay respect to the ghosts of the honourable dead, those who gave their lives for the freedom that cannot come freely.

But this is not just a line for America. It is for every rich country currently doing their best to avoid sharing freedom with the less fortunate. A freedom to which they feel naturally entitled. A freedom they will defend whatever the moral cost.

The first news story I heard landing back into Dublin was the postponed meeting between Minister McEntee and British home secretary James Cleverly.

The UK’s Rwanda policy took had an eerie familiarity arriving home, far too close to the story of slaves coming to America. Yet another one-way trip, only back to Africa this time, unwanted rather than stolen. The same misery and abuse again, a tale of moving human bodies around like commodities.

Minister McEntee’s report that 80% of asylum seekers are now coming across the border from the North is infuriating many in Ireland. People are eager to return asylum seekers to our neighbours.

These unwanted people have taken on that word, ‘returns’ as if they are packed in a box, a damaged sticker blaring red and white across the top.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said he is uninterested in an asylum seekers ‘returns’ deal.

“We’re not going to accept returns from the EU via Ireland when the EU doesn’t accept returns back to France where illegal immigrants are coming from.”

It appears nobody wants them — these ‘returns.’ Rich countries wanted them enough to own and trade them in the past. I wonder how Sunak would have felt if he’d been standing beside me in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC this week.

Would he have noticed the similarities between then and now? Between what he is doing now and what was once done by wealthy British slaveowners — the same people who were compensated for their loss of human property up to 2015.

How might Minister McEntee feel in that museum?

Why do we even have these museums? Why do we visit them and bow our heads in communal shame and then treat people in our own lifetime like animals, worse than animals, locked out of Fortress Europe?

On the walls of the museum, England is listed as having transferred the most slaves out of Africa at the peak of the slave trade. Now the Tory government sees no problem with transporting dark or brutalised bodies once again. Still, they function without any sense of duty, any need to compensate the global citizens who have always suffered the fiercest blows of imperialism and hardship.

The Rwanda policy is a means to suit the ends of a comparably rich country, with little regard to the impact on human beings or the impact on Rwanda, where the current unemployment rate is 53%.

I wonder how asylum seekers will be treated on their trip to Rwanda?

I know how they were last transported by the British during the slave trade, the men often shackled to one another — newly-acquired slaves waking up with their wrists shackled to a corpse. The women on the slave ships went untethered and were routinely raped and abused.

Will Rishi Sunak ensure that conditions are improved this time round?

During the slave trade, on arrival, the African diaspora would have their faces licked as a test for disease. They had their mouths pulled open to survey their gums, their eyelids pulled to inspect their eyes, and most brutally, the emblems of companies marked on their chest with burning irons.

This modern cargo is unwanted, however, so I’m supposing the checks won’t be so thorough. And they presumably won’t suffer the same abuse to ensure submission.

Images in the Washington DC museum show men with lacerated backs, lashed into disfigurement, left looking like a mound of worms was crawling beneath their skin. Lashing the backs of black people was a common deterrent against bad behaviour. As was lynching.

Rishi Sunak refers to the Rwanda policy as a deterrent too. For him, the fact that immigrants are entering Ireland through the northern border is a sign that his deterrent is working. It is a means to an end. Freedom, after all, the freedom of British people, just as much as Americans, is not free.

Where does Ireland stand? It is certainly true that we need to establish a workable system to accept asylum seekers. It is true that we have failed to do this effectively. But we must not become monsters to protect our own freedoms.

The UK’s Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) disapplies sections of the Human Rights Act and international law. It has been passed regardless.

On what ground does McEntee’s rushed law to ‘return’ asylum seekers stand? I don’t know. But it feels morally shaky. Morality matters.

It must matter or we wouldn’t spend millions commemorating the victims of the past, the honourable dead, in every rich nation in the world.

The underlying fact of our modern world is that people will keep coming to comparatively safe borders. This is only the beginning. The number of migrants arriving in the UK, despite the Tory government’s protestations and deterrents, is 24% higher than this time last year.

This human crisis will define our future; we must deal with it humanely. Freedom is certainly not free if protecting one person’s freedom means destroying the freedom of another. It is not free if the price of that freedom is our humanity.

Arriving back in Ireland, I got a taxi home, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep. Asylum seekers were being discussed on the radio. My taxi driver quickly adopted the language of Rishi Sunak.

“We should send them all back in their bloody boats; there are thousands of them,” he said.

I was struck by his accent.

“Are you foreign yourself?” I asked.

“No. I’m from England. Unless you consider England foreign,” he replied.

We spent the rest of the journey in quiet.