Refugee Crisis Quotes

A nation ringed by walls will only imprison itself.

It's strange, how you go from being a person who is away from home to a person with no home at all. The place that is supposed to want you has pushed you out. No other place takes you in. You are unwanted, by everyone. You are a refugee.

While tackling the refugee crisis, we should also get to its roots. Why would anyone want to be displaced if they had a home to return to?

And here is the biggest lie in the refugee crisis. It isn’t the faulty individual stories. It is the language of disaster often used to describe incoming refugees—deluge or flood or swarm. These words are lies.

I wish I could escape my mind, that I could be free of this world and everything I have seen in the last few years. And the children who have survived - what will become of them? How will they be able to live in this world?

Every person who comes is a human being and has the right to be treated as such.

For a start, people who traveled for so many miles through such horrific conditions in order to find work cannot accurately be portrayed as lazy benefit-scroungers

In a sea of human beings, it is difficult, at times even impossible, to see the human as being.

We Have a Chance To Save Lives If We Don't Take It We May Regret It Like We Did With Alan Kurdi

If we think in term of months, we had probably focus on immediate problems such as the turmoil in the Middle East, the refugee crisis in Europe and the slowing of the Chinese economy. If we think in terms of decades, then global warming, growing inequality and the disruption of the job market loom large. Yet if we take the really grand view of life, all other problems and developments are overshadowed by three interlinked processes: 1.​Science is converging on an all-encompassing dogma, which says that organisms are algorithms and life is data processing. 2.​Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness. 3.​Non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms may soon know us better than we know ourselves. These three processes raise three key questions, which I hope will stick in your mind long after you have finished this book: 1.​Are organisms really just algorithms, and is life really just data processing? 2.​What’s more valuable – intelligence or consciousness? 3.​What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?

Home is where you feel more welcome, more secure, have more rights, where you are loved. This place can be any place even away from what you would normally call home.

It's so weird to live in this world. What a bizarre tension to care deeply about the refugee crisis in Syria and also about Gilmore Girls.

Globally, about 145 million people live three feet or less above the current sea level. As the waters rise, millions of these people will be displaced, many of them in poor countries, creating generations of climate refugees that will make today’s Syrian war refugee crisis look like a high school drama production.

My crisis is you, My comfort is you. My courage is you, My cowardice is you.

Compassion, understandings and respects are the key elements of humanity. To grow means, to embrace all - there is no space for hatred, exclusion and discrimination. To grow means more respect, more collaboration, more humanity, more integration and more support.

In this century wars will not be fought over oil, as in the past, but over water. The situation is becoming desperate. The world's water is strained by population growth. There is no more fresh water on earth than two thousand years ago when the population was three percent of its current size. Even without the inevitable droughts, like the current one, it will get worse as demand and pollution increase. Some countries will simply run out of water, sparking a global refugee crisis. Tens of millions of people will flood across international borders. It means the collapse of fisheries, environmental destruction, conflict, lower living standards." She paused for a moment. "As people who deal with the ocean you must see the irony. We are facing a shortage on a planet whose surface is covered two-thirds with water.

From Shore To Shore Our Message of Love & Peace To ALL OUR Kids

Our minds are malleable. Our minds can be possessed - possessed so gradually that we don’t even realize we’ve lost control.

The political imperative to use the Mandate for Palestine as a means to resolve the Jewish refugee crisis overrode the questions of law.

I personally feel more convicted than ever that the plight of the refugees is the defining crisis of our generation….It’s all I care about for the moment as the mother of a child not in need.

FLIES IN DISGUISE Tell me, Have you Really seen Flies in a child's eyes Or heard their hungry cries In the middle Of the night? Don't lie. You can protest all you want About peace And genocide, But unless you are willing To take beatings for your fights, Your display of trendy showmanship Simply ain't right. Go on, Carry your useless signs About an issue the world Already abhors, But it's TRUE Heartfelt actions That will prevent Suits and Senators From creating Any more wars.

Europe, he says, is frightened that an influx of foreigners will erode European values. But what values will there to be uphold if we abandon our duty to protect those less fortunate than ourselves? Wat incentive do we give to refugees to maintain the fabric of our society if that fabric is so ragged in the first place? "If Europe is not able to show a better way of life to them, then they will think that their morality is better than ours." "They need to face some higher standards of morality, " he says. "If not, they will set their own." [Quoting Serbian priest Tibor Varga]

We call on the international community to share equitably the responsibility for protecting, assisting and hosting refugees in accordance with principles of international solidarity and human rights.

...he couldn’t help wondering how it had felt: refugees turning up from concentration camps, from a broken Europe, to find this bleak estate; its squat huts their new homes. There’d been watch towers and barbed wire fences. It can’t have looked like freedom. But freedom was measured, he supposed, by what you were leaving behind.

The choice is not between the current crisis and blissful isolation. The choice is between the current crisis and an orderly, managed system of mass migration. You can have one or the other. There is no easy middle ground

It's so weird to live in this world. What a bizarre tension to care deeply about the refugee crisis in Syria and also about Gilmore Girls. It is so disorienting to fret over aged-out foster kids while saving money for a beach vacation. Is it even okay to have fun when there is so much suffering in our communities and churches and world? What does it say about us when we love things like sports, food, travel, and fashion in a world plagued with hunger and human trafficking?

We think of agents, traffickers and facilitators as the worst abusers of refugees, but when they set out to extort from their clients, when they cheat them or dispatch them to their deaths, they are only enacting an entrepreneurial version of the disdain which refugees suffer at the hands of far more powerful enemies – those who terrorise them and those who are determined to keep them at arm’s length. Human traffickers are simply vectors of the contempt which exists at the two poles of the asylum seeker’s journey; they take their cue from the attitudes of warlords and dictators, on the one hand, and, on the other, of wealthy states whose citizens have learned to think of generosity as a vice. [from the London Review of Books Vol. 22 No. 3 · 3 February 2000]

The story of humanity is essentially the story of human movement. In the near future , people will move even more, particularly if, as some predict, climate change sparks mass migration on an unprecedented scale. The sooner we recognize the inevitability of this movement, the sooner we can try to manage it.

If Syria is to rise from the ashes it needs a united Arab world which has one thing on its agenda, not the falling of a dictator for we have seen many of those fall, but the reemergence of a prosperous Arab nation, one that is not reliant on foreign aid but is self-sustained and set on its way to become powerful once again.

A refugee saved is a world saved.

Today's crisis is tomorrow's crown, you ain't alive till someone frowns. Today's agony is tomorrow's glory, it's an honor to be called a clown.

The enemy of love is not hate. It is indifference. The enemy of love is turning away from those in need. The enemy of love is doing nothing when you can help your fellow man.

Sometimes if you look hard enough at something it will bloom in your eyes &make countries for refugees no one took in.

Humanitarianism may be appropriate during an emergency phase but beyond that it is counter-productive.

Hitler’s Nazi mob didn’t think of themselves as the bad guys. They thought of themselves as the victims of evil foreigners. Just like Trump’s MAGA mob.

The Rohingya legacy is not one of tragedy, but of triumph over silence, fear, and injustice.

America was built by refugees, and as such, if this land can't be a refuge for the subjugated and persecuted, then it is an insult on our very existence as the great land of the free and brave.

That estrangement, that detachment, that distance allow me to buy, without any qualms and with full awareness of what I'm doing, a pair of shoes whose price in my native land would be enough to feed a family of five for one whole year. The salesperson just has to promise me, You'll walk on air, and I but them. When we're able to float in the air, to separate ourselves from our roots -not only by crossing an ocean and two continents but by distancing ourselves from our condition as stateless refugees, from the empty space of an identity crisis- we can also laugh at whatever might have happened to my acrylic bracelet ...

Somehow, not judging has become very much in vogue. When presented with a dilemma, it’s what the progressive-minded are supposed to do. Not judging is great when it comes to superficialities like, “I’m not going to judge your green, bouffant hair,” or civil rights like, “I’m not going to judge your sexual orientation,” but it falls apart when you apply it to moral dilemmas. “I’m not going to judge the Syrian refugee crisis” just makes you sound like an asshole.

Climate change may be far beyond the concerns of people in the midst of a life-and-death emergency, but it might eventually make the Mumbai slums uninhabitable, send enormous new waves of refugees across the Mediterranean, and lead to a worldwide crisis in healthcare.

Redemption (Love Sonnet) My crisis is you, My comfort is you. My courage is you, My cowardice you. My solace is you, my menace is you. My prowess is you, my encumbrance too. You are my curse, my only cure. You are my answer to selfish lure. You are my redemption, my petrification. You're my fearlessness, my chosen damnation.

Together the top ten refugee-hosting countries account for only 2.5 percent of global income. 5 They are poor or at best middle-income countries. Turkey has 2.9 million registered refugees; Pakistan, 1.4 million; Lebanon, 1 million; Iran and Uganda, around 1 million apiece; Ethiopia, 0.8 million; and so on. 6 In Lebanon one in four people is a refugee from Syria, Palestine, or Iraq. 7 This is the reality of the global refugee crisis today: it is concentrated in the poorer parts of the world. Europe, accounting for more than 20 percent of global income, has 11 percent of the world’s refugees. The United States, with 25 percent of global income, has 1 percent of the world’s refugees. 8

Republican strategist Peter Wehner says, “Trumpism is not a political philosophy; it is a purposeful effort, led by a demagogue, to incite ugly passions, stoke resentments and divisions, and create fear of those who are not like ‘us’—Mexicans, Muslims, and Syrian refugees. But it will not end there. There will always be fresh targets.” Conservative evangelical Wehner contrasts that with the principles of Jesus, saying, “[A] carpenter from Nazareth offered a very different philosophy. When you see a wounded traveler on the road to Jericho, Jesus taught, you should not pass him by. ‘Truly I say to you,’ he said in Matthew, ‘to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even the least of them, you did it to me.’ . . . At its core, Christianity teaches that everyone, no matter at what station or in what season in life, has inherent dignity and worth.”15 Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter and top policy adviser to George W. Bush, and an originator of “compassionate conservatism,” says, [O]ur faith involves a common belief with unavoidably public consequences: Christians are to love their neighbor, and everyone is their neighbor. All the appearances of difference—in race, ethnicity, nationality and accomplishment

At times it seems as if the whole world has become a refugee and the few of us, who are privileged enough to wake up to the sound of an alarm clock instead of a siren, those of us who are enveloped by a veil of safety many of us fail to appreciate, have become desensitised to the migrating numbers, to the images of the dead, shrugging them away as a collective misery that this ailing part of the world must endure.

In the process, you obscure the actual reasons why people might risk their life to cross the sea – the wars and dictators that forced them from their homes. By denying the existence of these real root causes you simultaneously absolve yourself from the duty of providing sanctuary to those fleeing from them. Acknowledging this duty would prove very problematic: it would be an admission that your own failure to do so previously was the reason why so many thousands then turned in their desperation to smugglers – and why so many of them then drowned in the ocean. It would be an admission that a Syrian boards a boat only when he realises that there’s no realistic means of winning asylum from the Middle East. And an admission that Libya’s current predicament is in part the result of NATO’s (justifiable) airstrikes against Gaddafi in 2011 – and subsequent (and unjustifiable) failure to help Libya’s post-Gaddafi transition.

You may come or not to walk beside me, I won't stand still in silence while the oceans burn and the sun turns dark - I will either right the wrongs or perish in the attempt - and even if I burn to ashes in trying to humanize my surroundings, those ashes of mine will still smoke inclusion, equality and humaneness - I am not born a human to crawl as an indifferent vermin, I am born a human to embrace death for the values, the principles, the virtues that ought to be the foundation of human civilization - I am sleepless and I will stay sleepless till all the children of earth can sleep in peace with a full stomach and a happy heart, without worrying about guns and bombs, without worrying about prejudice and phobia, without worrying about discrimination and deportation - I will stay sleepless till the whole world becomes a family, not in theory, not in philosophy, not in argument, not even in futuristic vision, but in reality and practice.

We must remember that refugees are almost always people whose homes, family members, and everything they once loved and held dear are either destroyed or seriously at stake…They are simply trapped in a zone in which staying under such circumstances and swallowing humiliation in the “host” countries is unbearable; going home is impossible, because often there is no 'home' to go to anymore; and going elsewhere is rarely an option either. This is precisely what “trapped” feels like.

The writer Jeremy Harding made this point best in 2000, writing in the London Review of Books: ‘We think of agents, traffickers and facilitators as the worst abusers of refugees, but when they set out to extort from their clients, when they cheat them or dispatch them to their deaths, they are only enacting an entrepreneurial version of the disdain which refugees suffer at the hands of far more powerful enemies – those who terrorise them and those who are determined to keep them at arm’s length.

The United States in the 1930s was rife with racism and antisemitism and suffering from the devastating effects of the Great Depression. Americans warily looked across the ocean at a worsening international situation and grew concerned about national security. Similar economic and security concerns - valid or not - have echoed throughout the decades in the face of most refugee crises since the Holocaust. No one knew the word 'genocide' until 1944, and few could imagine that a civilized country would systematically murder millions of people based on race or religion. If we don't have a solution to a refugee crisis or genocide today, when the world is far more interconnected and we have the Holocaust and other genocides as precedents, why should it surprise us that Americans didn't do more in the face of the Nazi threat? And indeed, when the war ended and the WRB dissolved, any lessons learned were promptly forgotten. The United States did not change the immigration laws or substantively address the issue of refugees for another twenty years.

At the moment I think it’s fair to say we’re living in a period of historical crisis, and this idea seems to be generally accepted by most of the population. I mean the outward symptoms of the crisis, e.g. major unpredicted shifts in electoral politics, are widely recognisable as abnormal phenomena. To an extent, I think even some of the more ‘suppressed’ structural symptoms, like the mass drowning of refugees and the repeated weather disasters triggered by climate change, are beginning to be understood as manifestations of a political crisis.

If there was any part of the global crisis that the United States owned, it was the chaos that was unfolding in the Middle East. The United States had not played a direct role in the ethnic cleansing that had taken place in Southeast Asia, or the wars that had broken out across Africa. But the United States was directly responsible for the chain of events that led up to the destruction of Iraq and the related dissolution of Syria. If there were any refugees this country might have felt a moral obligation to accept, it would be people from some of the very countries listed in the ban.

An Immigrant's Plight (The Sonnet) With hopes and dreams brimming in my heart, I have traveled across miles and miles. A single desire for a flame of acceptance, Still burns bright in my heart's aisle. You say home is where the heart is, But my heart is accused of difference. Sometimes I'm accused of faith or race, Other times they question my allegiance. Amidst the illusive fog of color and geography, When did humanity cease mattering most! Sentiments and dreams have no borders, Character isn't exclusive to any single coast. We’ve wasted enough time on labels and covers, It's time to be family filling the world with colors.

At a time when travel is for many easy and anodyne, their voyages through the Sahara, the Balkans or across the Mediterranean – on foot, in the holds of wooden fishing boats and on the backs of land cruisers – are almost as epic as those of classical heroes such as Aeneas and Odysseus. I’m wary of drawing too strong a link, but there are nevertheless obvious parallels. Just as both those ancient men fled a conflict in the Middle East and sailed across the Aegean, so too will many migrants today. Today’s Sirens are the smugglers with their empty promises of safe passage; the violent border guard a contemporary Cyclops. Three millennia after their classical forebears created the founding myths of the European continent, today’s voyagers are writing a new narrative that will influence Europe, for better or worse, for years to come.

Another painful irony is that, in exile, many refugees strive to stay alive, while watching an absurd show of fraud politicians, experts, pundits, academics, and journalists on the empire’s payroll fighting about them merely to serve their own careers and fortunes. Some promise to imprison refugees, some promise to build walls to stop their influx, some promise to deny them any human rights, others promise to publicly shame and attack them. Many ask refugees to ‘fuck off and go back to their countries,’ forgetting that their empire left nothing to go back to. Yet, conveniently, nobody promises to stop waging wars against refugees. Nobody promises to stop destroying and economically exploiting the places from which refugees escaped. They discuss everything except the actual solution to the refugee crisis, which is simple: stop waging wars of any sort against other people! Everyone loves hearing themselves talking about the refugee crisis, but almost never talking with refugees in meaningful and honest ways. If they talk with them, it is only to depict them as victims or villains in the unjust courts of the empire’s arrogance. They defend them or hate them, depending on the direction in which they wish to advance their fortunes and careers. It all depends on what they need to put on their CVs at any given time or in any given situation. The last piece of this absurd game is that the careers of every self-appointed mouthpiece for refugees are almost always dependent on paychecks paid by those who directly or indirectly run the military-industrial-complex, the biggest producer of refugees. This last piece is precisely what makes breaking the vicious cycle almost impossible. And such continues the game, all while refugees are sitting and watching in bitter silence.

The Catholic Church also opposes any effort to make it easier to deport children; last week, the archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Francis E. George, said he had offered facilities in his diocese to house some of the children, and on Monday, bishops in Dallas and Fort Worth called for lawyers to volunteer to represent the children at immigration proceedings. “We have to put our money where our mouth is in this country,” said Kevin Appleby, the director of migration policy for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. “We tell other countries to protect human rights and accept refugees, but when we get a crisis on our border, we don’t know how to respond.” Republicans have rejected calls by Democrats for $2.7 billion in funds to respond to the crisis, demanding changes in immigration law to make it easier to send children back to Central America. And while President Obama says he is open to some changes, many Democrats have opposed them, and Congress is now deadlocked.

Although the US State Department has not officially designated the MB [Muslin Brotherhood] as a terrorist organization, Egypt did so in 2013; and in 2015, a British government review “concluded that membership of or links to it should be considered a possible indicator of extremism.” However, in 2003 the FBI uncovered the MB’s multifaceted plan to dominate America through immigration, intimidation, education, community centers, mosques, political legitimacy, and establishing ‘interfaith dialogue’ centers in our universities and colleges. A document confiscated by the FBI outlines a twelve-point strategy to establish an Islamic government on earth that is brought about by a flexible, long-term ‘cultural invasion’ of the West. Their own plans teach us that ‘the intrusion of Islam will erupt in multiple locations using mulciple means’. But near the top of this strategy is immigration. To be more specific, the first major point in their strategy states; ‘To expand the Muslin presence by birth rate, immigration and refusal to assimilate.’ This strategy transformed Indonesia from a Buddhist and Hindu country to the largest Muslin-dominated country in the world. As Europe has discovered, open borders for refugees may be viewed as a compassionate response to a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, but it has long-term risks and consequences.

Late in the nineteenth century came the first signs of a “Politics in a New Key”: the creation of the first popular movements dedicated to reasserting the priority of the nation against all forms of internationalism or cosmopolitanism. The decade of the 1880s—with its simultaneous economic depression and broadened democratic practice—was a crucial threshold. That decade confronted Europe and the world with nothing less than the first globalization crisis. In the 1880s new steamships made it possible to bring cheap wheat and meat to Europe, bankrupting family farms and aristocratic estates and sending a flood of rural refugees into the cities. At the same time, railroads knocked the bottom out of what was left of skilled artisanal labor by delivering cheap manufactured goods to every city. At the same ill-chosen moment, unprecedented numbers of immigrants arrived in western Europe—not only the familiar workers from Spain and Italy, but also culturally exotic Jews fleeing oppression in eastern Europe. These shocks form the backdrop to some developments in the 1880s that we can now perceive as the first gropings toward fascism. The conservative French and German experiments with a manipulated manhood suffrage that I alluded to earlier were extended in the 1880s. The third British Reform Bill of 1884 nearly doubled the electorate to include almost all adult males. In all these countries, political elites found themselves in the 1880s forced to adapt to a shift in political culture that weakened the social deference that had long produced the almost automatic election of upper-class representatives to parliament, thereby opening the way to the entry of more modest social strata into politics: shopkeepers, country doctors and pharmacists, small-town lawyers—the “new layers” (nouvelles couches) famously summoned forth in 1874 by Léon Gambetta, soon to be himself, the son of an immigrant Italian grocer, the first French prime minister of modest origins. Lacking personal fortunes, this new type of elected representative lived on their parliamentarians’ salary and became the first professional politicians. Lacking the hereditary name recognition of the “notables” who had dominated European parliaments up to then, the new politicians had to invent new kinds of support networks and new kinds of appeal. Some of them built political machines based upon middle-class social clubs, such as Freemasonry (as Gambetta’s Radical Party did in France); others, in both Germany and France, discovered the drawing power of anti-Semitism and nationalism. Rising nationalism penetrated at the end of the nineteenth century even into the ranks of organized labor. I referred earlier in this chapter to the hostility between German-speaking and Czech-speaking wage earners in Bohemia, in what was then the Habsburg empire. By 1914 it was going to be possible to use nationalist sentiment to mobilize parts of the working class against other parts of it, and even more so after World War I. For all these reasons, the economic crisis of the 1880s, as the first major depression to occur in the era of mass politics, rewarded demagoguery. Henceforth a decline in the standard of living would translate quickly into electoral defeats for incumbents and victories for political outsiders ready to appeal with summary slogans to angry voters.

Diplomats sitting inside their cozy air-conditioned offices most profoundly utter, you must have patience to have peace on earth. To them I say, how dare you preach on peace, you ignorant snobs - tell that to the innocent little kids who are suffering in warzones, without any clue as to whether they'll live to see the next day - while the capitalist circle of the developed world keeps getting richer by getting the shallow masses hooked on nonessential technology, these children of war have one question in their mind - whether starvation will kill them first or explosives. Shame on you - shame on us - who despite having a roof over head and food on the table, have not the slightest bit of concern for these innocent lives forgotten by destiny. There is no time for patience - there is no time for diplomacy - there is no time for policies, legislations and meaningless paperwork. It's enough already. Either stand up and rush to the aid of these war-stricken communities through whichever means possible or keep your mouth shut for the rest of your life.

There is more to the resettlement of men, women and children than fronting an airplane ticket and hustling refugees, who just survived war and genocide, to the lowest paying job sites. Refugees are human beings, they are not objects, cases, documents or the crisis they escaped. The intention to rescue the whole human, not just the laborer, requires compassionate response to their compounded trauma, experienced violence and the cultural shock of a new country.

Then by chance Mother learns sponsors prefer those whose applications say, "Christians." Just like that Mother amends our faith, saying all beliefs are pretty much the same.

People living on other's goodwill cannot afford political opinions.

The first problem with the “how can we help the refugees” question is the question itself. The premise of the question is flawed and problematic at two levels: first, it draws a clear boundary in power relations by assuming more power to the ‘we’, the Western people doing the ‘helping’, and therefore simultaneously grants them the power of choosing to deny refugees this ‘help’, if so they choose.

Should we then be surprised that when Western powers destroy a certain country that there will be an influx of refugees? Do we expect these wars to happen and for their effects to simply stay 'over there'? How can we really expect all this to happen while people here carry on doing business as usual? Do Westerners expect to just relax and enjoy a cold crisp beer on their porches on a warm summer night and see no refugees before their eyes after all these wars waged by their governments?

The few powerful Western elites…benefit from wars twice: first, by destroying other countries and stealing their resources under different pretexts. Second, by bringing millions of refugees to Western countries and using them as cheap labor. This is where the strong connection between the military-industrial-complex and the refugee-industrial-complex precisely lies.

Before you hate refugees, remember that ideally, most people wish to live peacefully and with their dignity intact. Remember that many of these refugees would rather come to you as ‘tourists’ with cameras in their hands under much better circumstances rather than as people with no options but to put up with the hate and humiliation awaiting them in the often not so hospitable ‘host’ counties. Before you protest refugees, protest your governments that are either intervening militarily in their countries or arming different groups and factions in their territories to kill each other. The refugee crisis is a deeply political crisis for all actors involved. Before you go in the streets demanding ‘no more refugees,’ rest assured, that these people would never have chosen to come all the way here to take your menial job offers while see you protest their very human existence. Likewise, before you extend your benevolence to these refugees by ‘tolerating’ them, as if doing them a favor, remember, that you actually can really love them because there is so much you can learn from their stories. There is so much work that can be accomplished when you hold hands with these refugees towards mutual human goals.

In today’s world, a refugee from a war-torn country is a messenger carrying an important message to all Western people. That message is: 'I am here because of what the warmongers in your so-called ‘democratic’ governments have done to my country and my people.' And so, read the message and work with the messenger rather than shoot them.

So what does that mean in a world where some of us find being locked down a minor nuisance while others are still crowded in refugee camps or in third-world cities where ‘social distancing’ is about as easy as flying to the moon? We need to think globally and act locally–but, in doing both, to work with Church leaders from around the world to find policies that will prevent a mad rush back to profiteering with the devil taking the hindmost. Of course, in the middle of that, we need to strengthen the World Health Organization and insist that all countries of the world stick firmly to its policies and protocols. There are, no doubt, big questions to be asked of some of the world’s superpowers who have used the current crisis as an occasion for grandstanding or other political game-playing. The electronic rumour mills and the ‘fake news’ channels have been working overtime as well.

Senior Wal-Mart officials concentrated on setting goals, measuring progress, and maintaining communication lines with employees at the front lines and with official agencies when they could. In other words, to handle this complex situation, they did not issue instructions. Conditions were too unpredictable and constantly changing. They worked on making sure people talked. Wal-Mart’s emergency operations team even included a member of the Red Cross. (The federal government declined Wal-Mart’s invitation to participate.) The team also opened a twenty-four-hour call center for employees, which started with eight operators but rapidly expanded to eighty to cope with the load. Along the way, the team discovered that, given common goals to do what they could to help and to coordinate with one another, Wal-Mart’s employees were able to fashion some extraordinary solutions. They set up three temporary mobile pharmacies in the city and adopted a plan to provide medications for free at all of their stores for evacuees with emergency needs—even without a prescription. They set up free check cashing for payroll and other checks in disaster-area stores. They opened temporary clinics to provide emergency personnel with inoculations against flood-borne illnesses. And most prominently, within just two days of Katrina’s landfall, the company’s logistics teams managed to contrive ways to get tractor trailers with food, water, and emergency equipment past roadblocks and into the dying city. They were able to supply water and food to refugees and even to the National Guard a day before the government appeared on the scene. By the end Wal-Mart had sent in a total of 2,498 trailer loads of emergency supplies and donated $3.5 million in merchandise to area shelters and command centers. “If the American government had responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn’t be in this crisis,” Jefferson Parish’s top official, Aaron Broussard, said in a network television interview at the time.

In March 1949, Israel resubmitted its application for UN membership. It had not resolved the Palestine refugee crisis nor established permanent borders.

Nor will there be freedom of movement without border checks throughout the EU while Britain, Denmark, and Ireland retain their controls. Brexit might resolve the British exception, and possibly the Irish one too, although this will depend on the post-membership arrangements for free movement on the island of Ireland. However, the Danish referendum in 2015 that confirmed its opt-out status makes it very unlikely that this will change, especially given the (increasingly protracted) ‘temporary’ suspensions of Schengen provisions by various states in the wake of the refugee crisis since 2016.

British society has always been deeply divided about its links to Europe, to the point that Prime Minister Cameron felt he had to promise a referendum on staying in Europe as part of the Conservative election manifesto in 2015. Historical circumstance meant that the June 2016 referendum took place in the midst of the refugee crisis, which tipped the balance in favour of leaving. Today the result might be different, but in point of fact half of British society has always been hostile towards Europe and always will be.

The Dark Cloud Is the danger women face every day and that is why many of them cried Is the stranger you were attacked by while walking outside Is the unfortunate stoicism of refugees who are told that what they have to offer is not smart or new Is the power that a group can have even if they are few

Several meters in the next fifty to 150 years,” said James Hansen, the planet’s premier climatologist, who added that such a rise would make coastal cities “practically ungovernable.”20 As Jeff Goodell (who in 2017 wrote the most comprehensive book to date on sea level rise) put it, such a rise would “create generations of climate refugees that will make today’s Syrian war refugee crisis look like a high school drama production

they’d just load him up with opium so he’d fall asleep.” DeLay pointed out that although few refugees are rejected for medical reasons, it is a terrible crisis for the ill person’s family when this does happen, especially because once an applicant is “medically excluded” by one potential country of asylum, he is unlikely to be accepted anywhere else. “All of this means that the refugees have one more reason to be afraid of doctors,” said DeLay.

But of all the refugees Juan observed at La Clínica, the ex-soldiers tended to be in the worst shape. Most of them had become addicts. They lived on the streets and kept to themselves. As a doctor, Juan took an analytic view of their profiles. Many lower-level soldiers had been conscripted and were often tortured if they were caught absconding or disobeying orders. Some of them were campesinos themselves, not so much sadists as cowed conformists who’d been indoctrinated during their military service. Juan wasn’t naive about the savagery of their past acts. He just felt that the war had victimized everyone in different ways.

All of us inpatient for the sunrise, all of us in dread of it. All of us in search of home.

Traditional immigration countries such as Australia, Canada, and the United States have always emphasized the importance of economic self-sufficiency. Therefore, providing refugees and immigrants with equitable access to the labor market even before they learned English had always been a number one goal of integration efforts. Ideally, newcomers would also receive a thorough orientation to the social mores, laws, and legal systems of their new country but understanding these traditions is not a substitute for decent employment, vocational training, and opportunities for upward mobility.

The populist tendencies to present refugees and immigrants as a threat to ‘European values’ and traditions of tolerance, freedom, and democracy are misplaced. There is a need to change misperceptions that members of the host society and newcomers have of each other. Bridging the gaps that separate different groups would strengthen communities, mitigate divisive social tensions, and, of course, position immigrants to participate more effectively in the wider society.

It is important to counter these misperceptions and inform the general public that most of the terrorists that launched attacks on European cities were born and raised in Europe. This begs the question: why were they radicalized? Perhaps they were easily lured by terrorist organizations because we failed to provide them with opportunities to thrive in society?

Ulbricht began pressuring the Soviet leader for a solution to the growing problem of the refugee crisis, too. On June 15, 1961, in an international press conference, he uttered the prophetic words “Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten!” (“No one has the intention to erect a wall!”) Perhaps he was telling the truth, but in reality he had, in January of that year, already set up a secret commission on finding a way to close the borders. It was also the first time the term “Mauer” (“Wall”) had publicly been used by anyone.

I thought how the lives of exiled people are like being on a flight. They are up in the air, between land and sky, not knowing when and whether they will ever land somewhere…I thought how transits are like the lives of many dislocated people like myself. The storyline from my experience often goes like this: a disaster befalls the place you call ‘home.’ You leave for another place hoping it will be just a temporary wait. Sometimes, the second destination is so harsh and unforgiving that you think of it as a ‘temporary transit’ and keep looking for a ‘final’ station that can grant you at least the basic human rights with some dignity. Over time, the temporary becomes permanent. But, deep inside, your feelings, senses, and existence may not cooperate with your new permanent reality. And so, you may find yourself in a state that can be best described as ‘permanently temporary.’ You become divided and torn deep inside constantly hearing two voices: one voice tells you that it is all temporary no matter how long it takes; and a second voice tells you not to believe the first one as this is your permanent destiny.

Syria in particular emerged as an example of what could go wrong: hundreds of thousands of Syrians had lost their lives and more than half the population had become internally displaced or refugees, in the process threatening to overwhelm not just Syria’s neighbors but Europe as well.

Today's crisis is tomorrow's crown.

Refugees & Colonizers (The Sonnet) Refugees carry culture, Colonizers carry infection. Colonizers are the virus, Refugees are civilization. Refugees live on hope, Colonizers thrive on greed. Refugees dream of acceptance, Colonizers dream supremacy. Refugees are the true free and brave, they carry within the silver lining. There's nothing brave about genocide, no matter the whitewashed thanksgiving. Refugees are practicing healers, living testament of wounds to ointment. Colonizers are proof of darwinism, that from monkeys comes the human race.

Refugees carry culture, Colonizers carry infection. Colonizers are the virus, Refugees are civilization.

Refugees are practicing healers, living testament of wounds to ointment. Colonizers are proof of darwinism, that from monkeys comes the human race.

Germany’s was a failed hegemony. During the euro crisis, the natural leader refused to act benevolently to stabilise the system and so the European Central Bank had to step in. During the refugee crisis, on the contrary, Germany decided to assume fully the role of benevolent hegemon and was willing to shoulder most of the burden. Its actions, however, were openly rejected by the principals in the drama. In the first crisis it turned down the role of stabilising the euro, and in the second it was not strong enough to get its partners in line for a Community response to the refugee problem. The reality is that the leader failed in both cases, albeit for different reasons.

Better a refugee to the sea than prisoner of the pond.

Refugees carry culture, Colonizers carry infection. Colonizers are the virus, Refugees are civilization. Refugees are practicing healers, living testament of wounds to ointment. Colonizers are proof of darwinism, that from monkeys comes the human race.

causing a refugee crisis rated at ten thousand katrinas. One

Nearby, towers of bottled water were staged near the runway awaiting distribution. Sure, some bottled water is necessary after a natural disaster, but in general I think it’s one of the least sustainable methods of addressing a water crisis. Once that water was consumed, the bottles simply became mountains of litter covering the already trashed streets of the capital. Without enough bottled water to go around, many earthquake survivors resorted to drinking water from the street gutters. More than one million folks were being exposed to deadly waterborne diseases such as cholera and typhoid. Reusable water filters were what the Haitians needed most. That was exactly where I chose to direct Wine to Water’s response. We partnered with FilterPure, a nonprofit organization out of the Dominican Republic that builds water filters. The filters were ceramic, simple things made much like clay flowerpots. Before the firing process, the clay is mixed with sawdust and a small amount of fine-grain silver. The sawdust burns in the kiln, leaving tiny porous holes for the water to trickle through. The silver mixed throughout kills any bacteria making it through the tiny pores. These pot filters, sitting inside a simple five-gallon plastic bucket, are capable of filtering water for a family of eight to ten people for up to five years. Some folks from FilterPure picked me up at the airport in a truck loaded with filters. Together we started handing them out throughout the city, in refugee camps and at orphanages in the area.

What a privilege! I don’t feel like we are in a crisis. God is giving us the chance to welcome people and it is blessing our church with a new spirit!

Despite experiencing the horrors of war, despite the suffering of displacement, despite the pains and traumas of crossing the sea in old boats, despite the difficulty of adapting to new customs and cultures, the uncertainty about what the future holds, the constant anxiety about my children and my family - despite all this, I have learned many things. First among them is that there are many people who will always give you the hope and determination to plough on through the darkness." - Hashem Al-Souki

Agadez has only a handful of multi-storey buildings. The main ones are the mosque and, next door to it, the palace of the Sultan of Aïr, who still retains a role in the local judicial system. But the houses overlooked by this pair are mostly single-storey courtyards, each enclosed by a windowless wall. These are the compounds, and perhaps fifty of them are used by smugglers – though no one knows the exact total. And that’s the point: they’re the perfect places to hide a hundred migrants until they head north to Libya. Once inside, the haggling starts. The going rate between Agadez and Libya is thought to be about 150,000 West African francs (CFA), or £166. But one traveller said he paid as much as €500 (£363), while Cisse claims he charges each of his thirty passengers as little as 50,000 CFA (£55). With such big numbers, it is no surprise that the business continues in full force despite a recent ban.

But you would still have 100,000 people piling through Niger every year – and no one particularly interested in stopping them.

smuggling is a vital financial lifeline for many local people – and officials. Just look at the numbers. In a single trip, a smuggler might make as much as 4.5 million CFA (a little under £5000). In a year, he could take in as much as £250,000, in a country where the average annual household income is less than £500. In that time, the smugglers of Agadez will collectively make between £16 and £17 million. And that’s before bribes worth, by my calculation, somewhere in the region of £1 million for the police.2

As a phenomenon, this isn’t new. For centuries, Agadez has been an important crossroads for travellers and traders trying to make it through the Sahara. In the Middle Ages, salt and gold merchants picking their way between Timbuktu and the Mediterranean often had to pass through the town. By the fifteenth century, Agadez had its own sultan, its famously imposing mosque, and a knot of winding streets that still exists today.

Different people have always come here,’ says Tuwara. ‘But in the olden days we didn’t know what migration was – it’s only in the last four or five years that the word “migration” appeared in our speech.

That normality goes like this: on arrival in Ajdabiya, you’re locked in a compound until your extended family cobbles together the cash to pay the smugglers. Wherever your relatives are, be it Israel, Sudan or even the UK, the smugglers will have a contact your family can pay in person. No refugees will pay the money themselves before they reach Ajdabiya, because the smugglers might not take them all the way. And no one carries cash to pay on arrival, because it will be stolen. So your family will have to find $1,600 in retrospective payment for the desert journey. And if your family hasn’t got that money, the smugglers torture you while your family listens on the phone.

In a typically vicious remark, Miloš Zeman, the Czech president, warned that the influx of refugees would deprive Europeans ‘of women’s beauty since they will be shrouded in burkas from head to toe, including the face’.

Like Katie Hopkins, prime minister David Cameron described migrants as a ‘swarm’. Foreign secretary Philip Hammond called them marauders bent on overrunning European civilisation. Home secretary Theresa May frequently scoffed at any suggestion that they might simply be seeking safety. Interviewed on Today, BBC radio’s flagship current affairs programme, May said, ‘People talk about refugees, but actually if you look at those crossing the central Mediterranean, the largest number of people are those from countries such as Nigeria, Somalia and Eritrea. These are economic migrants.

He escaped a second time, was caught a second time, returned to prison, and then sent for yet another spell of military service. By the time he finally fled to Sudan, aged fifteen, he had been jailed twice, and forced to become a child soldier three times. After being kidnapped and tortured by Libyan smugglers, he finally reached Italy by boat in May 2015.

But for pragmatists on both sides of the debate, this very reductive picture of an economic migrant is ultimately not a particularly useful one. For a start, people who travel for so many miles through such horrific conditions in order to find work cannot accurately be portrayed as lazy benefit-scroungers. Ironically, they instead display qualities that would be prized in indigenous Europeans – the kind of on-yer-bike resourcefulness that conservatives wish was intrinsic to every native jobseeker.

Until 2011, the business was a comparatively low-level affair. In the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the smugglers of Libya and Tunisia might collectively send around 40,000 people2 each year to Lampedusa, the southernmost Italian island, and the Italian mainland beyond. Spain had built not one nor two but three fences around its pair of enclaves in north-west Africa, so Morocco was finally no longer the best option for those trying to reach Europe. The

What is certain is that there will be increasing numbers of refugees if rapid climate change continues. People have to live somewhere. High-income countries such as in North America and Europe may in fact initially feel the effects of climate change most strongly in pressures from refugees wanting to immigrate. This will present a real moral challenge: since it is the high-income countries historically who have been largely responsible for causing rapid climate change, how can they refuse to help those from low-income areas such as sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia who will suffer the consequences most?

Carlton Church: Japan Finally Acknowledges Negative Nuclear Effects One of the leading sources of news and information, Thomson Reuters, has just reported about Japan’s acknowledgement of casualty caused by the Fukushima nuclear power plant wreckage. However, it may be too late for the victim as the young man, an unnamed worker in his 30s working as a construction contractor in Tokyo Electric Power Co’s Fukushima Daiichi plant and other nuclear facilities, is already suffering from cancer since 2011. The ministry’s recognition of radiation as a possible cause may set back efforts to recover from the disaster, as the government and the nuclear industry have been at pains to say that the health effects from radiation have been minimal. It may also add to compensation payments that had reached more than 7 trillion yen ($59 billion) by July this year. It can also cause a lot of setbacks from a lot of nuclear projects which were supposed to be due in the succeeding years. A streak of legal issues and complaints are also to be faced by Tokyo Electric, mostly on compensations for those affected. According to further reviews, it is estimated removing the melted fuel from the wrecked reactors and cleaning up the site will cost tens of billions of dollars and take decades to complete. Despite the recognition, a lot more people are still anxious. The recognition would mean acknowledgment of possible radiation effects still lingering in Japan’s boundaries. When it was once denied, the public are consoled of the improbability of being exposed to radiation but now that the government has expressed its possibility, many individuals fear of their and their families’ lives. Hundreds of deaths have been attributed to the chaos of evacuations during the crisis and because of the hardship and mental trauma refugees have experienced since then, but the government had said that radiation was not a cause. Yet now, it is different. The trauma and fear are emphasized more. Anti-nuclear organizations, on the other hand, are happy that their warnings are now being regarded. Carlton Church International, one of the non-profit organization campaigning against nuclear proliferation, spokesperson, Abigail Shcumman stated, “I don’t think ‘I told you so’ would be appropriate but that is what I really wanted to say”. She added, “We are pleased that at last, we are being heard. However, we continue to get worried for the people and the children. They are exposed and need guidance on what to do”. - See more at: carltonchurchreview.blogspot.com

The shared deadlock faced by all our cases is of course that created by our global capitalist order. Part of the challenge of a universal politics is precisely keeping an eye on this target, given the overwhelming ideological tendency today to focus on the symptom (climate “change,” refugee “crisis,” patriarchy, etc.) rather than the cause (market-created inequalities, unevenness, environmental destruction). The insidiousness of neoliberal capitalist universalism is that it manifests in multifarious ways—police racism and brutality as the embodiment of state violence aimed at protecting and reproducing the status quo; anti-immigrant racism as a displacement of popular revolt against austerity; Islamophobia to justify brutalizing Palestinians or invading Iraq and Afghanistan to take over their oil and gas fields; and so forth—making it difficult to connect the dots. Systemic contradictions always manifest in specific ways, and the test of a universal politics, as we have been claiming, is bringing out the universal-antagonistic dimension of each particular.

The Christian right, driven by what it claimed was the undermining of Christian values during the Obama era, began looking toward the very same autocrats who had captivated the alt-right. These political figures were also using “family values” such as opposition to abortion and LGBTQ rights as a means to merge Christian nationalism with ethnic nationalism, creating a potent bloc against European Union “elites.” These two parts of the bloc were further drawn together by the migrant crisis that escalated in 2015, which was caused, the alt-right claimed, by the needless wars in the Middle East launched by their ideological enemy, the neoconservatives. Because many of the migrants were from Muslim countries, the situation seemed to embody long-standing conspiracy theories in the Christian right about invasions of the West by Muslim hordes. For both the Christian right and the alt-right, the reaction of Europe’s xenophobes to an influx of refugees and asylum seekers served as a template for what Trump portrayed as an “invasion” on the U.S. southern border.

Curar las heridas del cuerpo es mi trabajo. Hacer todo lo posible para aliviar el dolor. Una de mis preocupaciones, sin embargo, es no tener las herramientas para sanar las heridas del alma. Cuando pensamos en los miles de refugiados que llegan todos los días a nuestras costas, nos resulta difícil darles una identidad, enmarcarlos como personas, no reducirlo todo a simples números. Sea como sea, sentimos pena cuando sabemos que sufren agonías atroces o mueren antes de alcanzar la meta deseada. Lloramos cuando vemos a un niño sin vida en los brazos de un socorrista. Podemos conmovernos, incluso llorar, pero es como si viéramos una película. Son sensaciones que duran un tiempo limitado. Todo se simplifica, se trivializa. No existe complejidad en nuestro modo de enfrentarnos al problema. Casi nunca nos planteamos la cuestión de la debilidad, de la fragilidad emocional, de los traumas de quienes llegan a nuestro país en busca de ayuda.

Shertok explained why the Zionist cause was so important: “Jews cannot possibly conceive that anything of that sort could have happened if those fugitives had belonged to a nation which has a government—be it even one in exile—to stand up for them.”2 As bad as the refugee crisis was, the Nazi menace soon reached Palestine itself.

the forces that had blighted the America of a century earlier would be dramatically visible yet again: rage against immigrants and refugees, racism, Red-baiting, fear of subversive ideas in schools, and much more. And, of course, behind all of them is the appeal of simple solutions: deport aliens, forbid critical journalism, lock people up, blame everything on those of a different color or religion. All those impulses have long been with us. Other presidents, both Republican and Democrat, have made dog-whistle appeals on the issue of race. The anti-Communist witch-hunting of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his imitators would prove far more influential in American political life than the country’s minuscule Communist Party, putting people in prison, wrecking careers, and causing thousands to leave the country. The American tendency to blame things on sinister conspiracies has found new targets; instead of the villains being the pope or the Bolsheviks, in recent times they have included Sharia law, George Soros, Satanist pedophile rings, and more.

On Memorial Day 1927, a march of some 1,000 Klansmen through the New York City borough of Queens turned into a brawl with the police. Several people wearing Klan hoods were arrested, one of them a young real estate developer named Fred Trump. Ninety years later, his son, with similar feelings about people of color, would enter the White House. During Donald Trump’s presidency, the forces that had blighted the America of a century earlier would be dramatically visible yet again: rage against immigrants and refugees, racism, Red-baiting, fear of subversive ideas in schools, and much more. And, of course, behind all of them is the appeal of simple solutions: deport aliens, forbid critical journalism, lock people up, blame everything on those of a different color or religion. All those impulses have long been with us. Other presidents, both Republican and Democrat, have made dog-whistle appeals on the issue of race. The anti-Communist witch-hunting of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his imitators would prove far more influential in American political life than the country’s minuscule Communist Party, putting people in prison, wrecking careers, and causing thousands to leave the country. The American tendency to blame things on sinister conspiracies has found new targets; instead of the villains being the pope or the Bolsheviks, in recent times they have included Sharia law, George Soros, Satanist pedophile rings, and more.

Israelis are frustrated that resettlement of Palestinian refugees has not been seriously pursued in the over seven decades of this crisis. One reason for that lack of pursuit is that Palestinians are not seeking resettlement, but repatriation to the land that was taken from their families in 1948 and 1967.

I saw now why the angry young men on the boats around us were so afraid of that derelict refugee boat: that tiny vessel represented the overturning of a centuries-old project that had been essential to the shaping of Europe. Beginning with the early days of chattel slavery, the European imperial powers had launched upon the greatest and most cruel experiment in planetary remaking that history has ever known: in the service of commerce they had transported people between continents on an almost unimaginable scale, ultimately changing the demographic profile of the entire planet. But even as they were repopulating other continents they had always tried to preserve the whiteness of their own metropolitan territories in Europe. This entire project had now been upended. The systems and technologies that had made those massive demographic interventions possible – ranging from armaments to the control of information – had now achieved escape velocity: they were no longer under anyone’s control. This was why those angry young men were so afraid of that little blue fishing boat: through the prism of this vessel they could glimpse the unravelling of a centuries-old project that had conferred vast privilege on them in relation to the rest of the world. In their hearts they knew that their privileges could no longer be assured by the people and institutions they had once trusted to provide for them. The world had changed too much, too fast; the systems that were in control now did not obey any human master; they followed their own imperatives, inscrutable as demons.

Today, most countries fail to comply with the 1951 Convention. Signatory states in the developed world find ever more elaborate ways to disregard or bypass the principle of non-refoulement, adopting a suite of deterrence or non-entrée policies that make it difficut and dangerous for refugees to access their territory: carrier sanctions, razor wire fences, interception en route. Signatory states in the developing world do tend to admit refugees more because of geoghraphical necessity and international pressure than law, and when they do, they still almost universally fail to implement the socio-economic rights in the Convention. And, yet, paradoxically, many of the most generous host countries in the world are not even full signatories: Jordan, Lebanon, Thailand, Nepal, and Turkey, for instance.

UNHCR staff numbers grew from 500 to over 9,000 between 1950 and 2016. Camps provided jobs: just not for refugees.

Fragility is the single most salient cause of displacement around the world today. Even factors that may become increasingly common drivers of flight like climate change and natural disasters are only likely to cause mass cross-border movements if they affect fragile states. When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans it did not require people to leave the United States. In contrast, when the earthquake struck Haiti many people fled to the neighbouring Dominican Republic because they could not find a domestic remedy or resolution to their situation.

The conferences convened to 'do something' about the refugee crisis - from the World Humanitarian Summit to the UN High-Level Meeting on Addressing Large Scale Movements of Refugees and Migrants - are ritual re-enactments that changed times have drained of real consequence.

Refugees are not like other migrants: they are not moving for gain but because they have no choice.

There is a striking correlation between the levels of fragility and levels of displacement. Fragile states are those that have no defence against mass violence. They are not invariably beset by mass violence: but each state is a house of cards.

Refugees - as refugees - need and should be entitled to expect three things: rescue, autonomy, and an eventual route out of limbo. Currently, the majority of refugees are not getting any of them.

Ukraine is worth aiding, but not Afghanistan, Tourists are worth saving, but not refugees. Loss of any life is indeed a moment of tragedy, Then why this double-standard and hypocrisy!

Creating opportunities for self-reliance is not in itself a long-term solution for refugees, but it is an important step towards all of the main long-term solutions: repatriation, local integration, or resettlement. This is because offering people autonomy and economic opportunity is likely to empower them to better contribute to whichever society into which they are ultimately assimilated. It can make refugees' eventual return more sustainable because they will return with the skills and motivation to rebuild their country of origin. It can make people better equipped to contribute to a new society once resettled. And it can make them a more desirable resettlement prospect because of their ability to find work and live autonomously.

Development' means many things to many people but it can be broadly understood as an approach that attempts to enhance long-term human welfare, whereas 'humanitarianism' is simply about the short-term alleviation of suffering. The humanitarian toolbox offers food, clothing, and shelter; it focuses exclusively on refugees and their vulnerabilities. The development toolbox offers employment, enterprise, education, healthcare, infrastructure, and governance; it focuses on both refugees and host communities, and it builds upon the capacities of both rather than just addressing vulnerabilities.

Ideally refugees should be allowed to fully participate in the socio-economic life of the host state. But even when full participation is politically blocked, we should at least be able to reimagine geographical spaces that can empower people, and allow them to become self-reliant pending a longer-term solution.

The imagined needs of refugees have almost universally been reduced to two basics - food and shelter - and it has become assumed that the most viable way to provide such rights is through camps.

To achiveve this vision, host communities must share in the benefits.

Indefinite dependency on aid has gradually become the default long-term response to refugees.

International responses to refugee crises cannot get by on being well-intentioned: they need to be smart, too.

The institutions created to protect the world's refugees are failing.

Living and working alongside host nationals, refugees can make a positive economic contribution to the national economy.

The way we treat refugees in exile shapes their capacity to contribute to their countries of origin.

Different approaches are needed for different contexts.

Refugees need havens: where do they find them?

Only those who cross the border qualify for the legal designation of 'refugee'. International agencies and the international media tend to focus mainly on those who cross borders. But those people displaced from their homes who seek sanctuary elsewhere in their country should not drop off the international agenda, and their practical needs of sanctuary often go unmet. Since mass violence occurs in states that are fragile, even though much of a country may remain safe the state is unlikley to have the capacity to cope.

Sonnet 1178 Five little rich tourists sink in a sub, Wallets open without limit on a search-n-rescue op. A 1000 migrants die each year tryna cross the sea, Borders tighten in sheer fear with no show of mercy. People are only worth saving if their savings is super healthy. 50 Shades would be a Hitchcock film if the sicko had no money. Empathy is a far cry, life is never the issue. While next-door-neighbor cries of hunger, Netflix wets more tissue.

Five little rich tourists sink in a sub, Wallets open without limit on a search-n-rescue op. A 1000 migrants die each year tryna cross the sea, Borders tighten in sheer fear with no show of mercy.

Today, the world spends approximately $75bn a year on the 10 per cent of refugees who moved to developed regions and only around $5bn a year on the 90 per cent who remain in developing regions.

It is in these host countries where most of the world's refugees are that we should concentrate the bulk of our focus and resources.

The current system for refugees who remain in their region of origin is a disaster. It is premised upon an almost exclusively 'humanitarian' response. A system designed for the emergency phase - to offer an immediate lifeline - ends up enduring year after year, sometimes decade after decade. External provision of food, clothing, and shelter is absolutely essential in the aftermath of having to run for your life. But over time, if it is provided as a substitute for access to jobs, education, and other opportunities, humanitarian aid soon undermines human dignity and autonomy.

For the period that refugees are in limbo, we should be creating an enabling environment that nurtures rather than debilitates people's ability to contribute in exile and when they ultimately go home. This should involve all of the things that allow people to thrive and contribute rather than merely survive: education, the right to work, electricity, connectivity, transportation, access to capital.

The humanitarian silo model is increasingly out of touch. It fails against almost any metric. It doesn't help refugees, undermining their autonomy and dignity. It doesn't help host governments, transforming potential contributors into a disempowered and alienated generation in their midst. It doesn't help the international community, leaving people indefinitely dependent upon aid, less capable of ultimately rebulding their countries of origin, and with onward movement as their only viable rout to opportunity.

The catch-22 is that urban refugees are expected to help themselves and yet cannot freely access the labour market.

As we have seen, the geographical reality is that the overwhelming majority of the world's refugees are in countries that neighbour conflict and crisis. These 'countries of first asylum' in developing regions today host 86 per cent of all refugees, up from 72 per cent a decade ago. In consequence, it is the countries with the least capacity to host refugees that bear the greatest responsibility.

From a refugee's perspective, long-term encampment has described as a 'denial of rights and a waste of humanity'.

Imagine if, instead of the humanitarian silo, we could conceive of an approach that could support refugees' autonomy and dignity while simultaneously empowering them to contribute to host communities and the eventual reconstruction of their country of origin.

One way of grounding how we should identify refugees in a changing world is through the concept of force majeure - the absence of a reasonable choice but to leave. More specifically, the threshold for refuge would be: fear of serious physical harm. And the test would be: when would a reasonable person not see her- or himself as having a choice but to flee? In other words, if you were in the same situation, what would you do?

A new approach to safe havens that is radically more supportive is urgently needed in order to address this dysfunctional imbalance, and to simultaneously meet the concerns of donors, hosts, and refugees.

There is an alternative. And it starts with recognizing that refugees have skills, talents, aspirations. They are not just passive objects of our pity, but actors constrained by cruel circumstance. They do not have to be an inevitable burden, but instead can help themselves and their communities - if we let them.

But generosity of spirit is not enough: our responses must be grounded in wisdom. The headless heart may lead to outcomes little better than the heartless head. So we need to be a little more specific about what generosity of spirit implies. What shoud it mean in the context of Syria, and, by extension, what should it mean more widely in the global context of refugees?

Historically, on average international wars have lasted only six months. In contrast, the average civil war has been much longer, with estimates ranging from seven to fifteen years. If a family are going to be refugees for over a decade, their priority is not emergency food and shelter. It is to re-establish the threads of normal famiy life, anchored materially by a capacity of whoever is the breadwinner to earn a living. The camps run by UNHCR met the basic material needs of refugees, but they provided few opportunities to earn a living. Consequently, they left families bereft of autonomy.

Around the world, refugees are effectively offered a false choice between three dismal options: encampment, urban destitution, or perilous journeys.

The world simply has not created a refugee assistance model compatible with a world of global cities.

Although UNHCR has an Urban Refugee Policy, it offers very little assistance in practice, with most urban refugees receiving no tangible help. By moving to cities, most refugees relinquish all formal support but also end up locked out of the formal economy.

Over half of the world's refugees, including 75 percent of Syrians, live in urban areas in neighbouring countries. But, in cities, assistance is limited and the formal right to work is usually restricted.

The cooperation problem in the refugee regime can be thought of as what game therorists would describe as a 'suasion game': one in which weaker players are left with little choice but to cooperate and stronger players are left with little incentive to cooperate.

Since the Syrian refugee situation was just one of many, the approach was completely unfeasible. Financially, the only reason it did not break down earlier was itself a devastating critique: refugees overwhelmingly bypassed the camps. Since the Syrian refugee situation was just one of many, the approach was completely unfeasible. Financially, the only reason it did not break down earlier was itself a devastating critique: refugees overwhelmingly bypassed the camps.

The inability of refugees to earn a living within the standard UNHCR approach was not only psychologically diminishing for the refugees, but also highlighted the lack of viability of the financing model. Paying for 4 million refugees to live without work for ten years was manifestly unsustainable. Even at a cost of only $1,000 per refugee per year, which would have implied a drastic reduction in lifestyle relative to Syrian pre-refugee conditions, the bill would have amounted to $40bn.

Maybe moving through this world, in your body, is enough to make you feel constriction in your chest. Maybe you're holding someone close to you who is struggling and suffering. Maybe you are reeling from the latest mass shooting, or the refugee crisis at the border, or the looming threat of climate change, or the blistering pain of the global pandemic. Maybe, like me, you are breathless from all of the above. I thought my breathlessness was a sign of my weakness, until a wise friend told me what I wish to tell you: Your breathlessness is a sign of your bravery. It means you are awake to what's happening right now: The world is in transition.

Unavoidably, the Rio Grande became ground zero for political posturing, attracting the conservative firebrand Sean Hannity, who taped his Fox News show on the banks of the river. Republicans including Rick Perry, the Texas governor, blamed the “border crisis” on DACA, the program that gives temporary legal status to undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. But as congressional Democrats and the Obama administration pointed out, the unaccompanied minors did not qualify for DACA. What they did quality for, according to human rights experts, was refugee status—something President Obama was careful not to give them. The politics of immigration was so poisonous even helpless kids couldn’t be seen as kids. When Hillary Clinton, a longtime champion of children’s rights, was asked to weigh in, she said tens of thousands of children and teenagers should be sent back to their home countries. “We have to send a clear message: just because your child gets across the border doesn’t mean your child gets to stay,” Clinton said at a CNN-hosted town hall.

Nobody wants to leave their homeland illegally out of their heart's desire, they are compelled to do so as the last resort due to utter degradation of life there.

And no single issue animates modern populism as much as these waves of uncontrolled migration and the sense that they are causing anarchy. It is not too strong to claim that Syria’s refugee crisis accelerated the rise of Europe’s populist Right. As the writer David Frum put it, “If liberals insist that only fascists will enforce borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals refuse to do.

Under the torn tarpaulin for a roof and the broken plastic sheets for the four walls, they looked at the stars in the sky and dreamed!

The global refugee crisis is as devastating as a volcano, and it is creating havoc in the lives of millions of people worldwide.

Where others might see students with limitations, or students who were lagging behind their peers, Mr. Williams saw a room filled with kids who had lived through titanic experiences, teenagers who could do anything at all, once they accepted whatever sort of history they had brought with them and grasped the full extent of the opportunity lying ahead. He often told me that he felt lucky to work in a room like this one— a room that spoke of just how big the world was, and how mysterious. Meanwhile, I started visiting some of his students at home, and that was when I began to appreciate more fully how illuminating Room 142 was going to be, for the room quickly began to serve as an almost perfect microcosm of the global refugee crisis as a whole. Once I began meeting with particular families, I started hearing about every kind of journey a refugee family could survive. The stories that intersected in this one classroom brought to life the global crisis in a way that I never saw represented in the daily papers. The kids were at South to learn English, but in the process they were sharing with me and with the school’s staff and with their American- born peers all kinds of lessons— about fortitude, about resilience, about holding on to one’s humanity through experiences nobody should have to witness. About starting over, and about transformation.

Commenting on these passages, Mark Gornik, a theologian, pastor, and community developer in the United States, says, “Here then from both James and Paul is a central witness drawn from all of Scripture: God has sovereignly chosen to work in the world by beginning with the weak who are on the ‘outside,’ not the powerful who are on the ‘inside.’”9 The claim here is not that the poor are inherently more righteous or sanctified than the rich. There is no place in the Bible that indicates that poverty is a desirable state or that material things are evil. In fact, wealth is viewed as a gift from God. The point is simply that, for His own glory, God has chosen to reveal His kingdom in the place where the world, in all of its pride, would least expect it, among the foolish, the weak, the lowly, and the despised.

While many Europeans made world headlines when they rolled out the red carpet for refugees and migrants fleeing war and economic deprivation, the influx of arrivals also provided the hardline right with a renewed voice. “People coming from this war will act a certain way, so it’s not just the fault of Germans. But we aren’t animals.” Ramadan, like hundreds of thousands of others, waited eagerly to find out if his family would be able to join him. In the meantime, he spent each day waiting for his wife to call, waiting for another temporary assurance that none of his relatives had died.

An accidental smuggler, he fell into the trade because the demand suddenly spiked in 2014, as Syrians realised that Egypt would never offer them the long-term future that they need. Providing alternatives to smuggling communities should be part of any sensible response to the migration crisis. But, in the end, where there is a demand for their services, there will always be smugglers.

In the aftermath of the Vietnam war, America led the international resettlement program – taking 800,000 of the 1.3 million people resettled in the global north. In the aftermath of the Syrian crisis – a crisis partly stoked by American support for Syrian factions and by its earlier meddling in Iraq – the US promised to take just 10,000, amid alarmism about immigrants.

The mess reached its nadir in the aftermath of the Paris attacks in November 2015. Two of the nine assailants were revealed to have probably arrived in Greece a month earlier in a boatload of refugees.

The EU promised to pay Turkey €6 billion, in exchange for their policing their borders better and readmitting all those landing in Greece.

Nizar claims, complicit officials are paid up to 100,000 Egyptian pounds (about £8,900) a trip. By agreement with the smugglers, police arrive after most of the migrants have managed to leave the beach. At that point, the remaining passengers are arrested and taken for a few days’ detention in police cells, to maintain the pretence that Egypt is playing its part in ending the smuggling trade. ‘It’s normal that if I want to smuggle three hundred [migrants],’ says Nizar, ‘the authorities will take fifty and let two hundred and fifty go, to show the Italians that they are doing some work.

The figure 850,000 sounds like a lot – and in terms of historic migration to Europe it is. But this is only about 0.2 per cent of the EU’s total population of roughly 500 million, an influx that the world’s richest continent can feasibly absorb, if – and only if – it’s handled properly

The most obvious example is Lebanon, which houses at least 1 million Syrian refugees within a total population of roughly 4.5 million.6 That’s around one in five people – a ratio that Europe should have been embarrassed by.

If you’re not protecting me, I will not protect you,’ Hajj himself had warned the EU, back in April. ‘I am the guard protecting your outer gate. If you neglect me, then anyone can get in.

This belief, tragically, turned out to be completely wrong. In the spring that followed the end of Mare Nostrum, more people attempted to cross the Mediterranean from Libya than during the equivalent period in 2014, which itself was a record year. And around eighteen times as many people died. Between January and April 2015, 28,028 people tried to reach Italy from Libya, according to the International Organization for Migration – compared with 26,740 in the first four months of 2014.2 And more than 1,800 died, compared with 96 the year before.

The ship looks like a complete community, with families and individuals, young and old, white and black,’ he writes that day. ‘It’s a small mixed community where everyone cooperates with everyone else.

People turn their heads. A Greek plane? Are they still in Greek waters? It’s another cruel setback. Greek waters mean Greek coastguards and a Greek rescue mission, and no one wants to go to Greece. As absurd as it sounds in retrospect, given the thousands of refugees who would arrive in the Greek islands later in the summer, Greece is still largely an unknown route for Syrians, full of potential pitfalls. To get to Germany from Greece would mean walking through two countries that lie outside the EU (Macedonia and Serbia) and then a third that is in the EU but behaves as if it isn’t (Hungary).

The Greek government has spent the last few months simultaneously begging the EU to ease up on its austerity measures, and contemplating whether to leave the EU entirely. It has no time or energy to devote to the secondary crisis in its islands, which worsens by the day. The number arriving in places such as Kos and Lesvos is now four times higher than the entire 2014 total, causing a huge logjam. When the flow was slower, refugees would be given temporary documentation within a couple of days – paperwork that would then allow them to change money, buy a ferry ticket to the mainland, and then work their way towards the Macedonian border.

Why do we keep going by sea?’ Abu Jana asks me. ‘Because we trust god’s mercy more than the mercy of people here.

Building relationships helps us to avoid lumping all refugees into one category of our understanding.

When you know someone personally, writes psychologist Mary Pipher, “that person stops being a stereotype and becomes a complex human being like oneself.”1

No one really knows how widespread this kind of fraud is. Inevitably, though, it casts doubt over the precision of UN data, which is the main source of information about the origins of refugees. If the UN gets its statistics from the Greek police, and if the Greek police themselves rely on people’s identification documents (and sometimes just on people’s word), then how can we be sure that so many of the refugees are from Syria?

This is something that Europe’s chief border guard refuses to grasp. Fabrice Leggeri is the head of Frontex, the agency that patrols the borders of the European Union. Frontex sends agents to some of the land borders, and patrol boats to the maritime ones. A square-jawed former head of the French frontier police, Leggeri is ideal for the job. When the EU decided not to replace Mare Nostrum in October 2014, it claimed that Leggeri’s teams were more than able to pick up the slack in the southern Mediterranean, thanks to a Frontex operation there known by its codename of ‘Triton’. This was an inspired piece of window dressing. Unlike Mare Nostrum, Triton’s mandate was not to search for and rescue people. Its role was merely to patrol the continent’s nautical borders – in waters far to the north of where Italian ships used to station themselves during Mare Nostrum. It had fewer ships at its disposal, and a budget that was just a third of its predecessor’s. The assumption was that a smaller-scale border-patrol mission would indirectly save more lives.

It is, however, the likes of Fico who need to wake from their fantasies. Europe’s isolationists may not feel the ethical need to protect people who’ve fled from Paris-style attacks that occur every day, rather than once a decade. It’s nevertheless time for them to recognise the practical problems with the security solution they seek.

To deport refugees from Greece to Turkey, Europe has therefore ridden roughshod over the 1951 convention – a charter created in the aftermath of the Second World War, partly to ensure that the continent did not repeat the mistakes of the Holocaust. Just as we did in the 1930s, Europe is once again sending thousands of people back to places where they risk considerable danger and hardship. We risk unravelling the progress we have made as a continent since 1945. The very identity of post-war Europe is at stake.

There are two obvious conclusions. First, whether we like it or not, people will – to some extent – keep coming. Second, given this fact, Europe’s current approach to migration benefits no one. Not the refugees, who’ll keep on drowning at sea and suffocating in the back of smugglers’ vans. And not the Europeans, who in their refusal to admit the inevitability of the situation are making things far more chaotic than they need to be.

The number of refugees walking through the Balkans has exploded. Back in June, around 1000 people were landing every day on the Greek islands, which was itself unprecedented. Now in mid-September, the average is 5000, and later in the year, it will rise to as high as 9000.

The first is in late August, when seventy-one refugees are discovered dead in the back of a smuggler’s truck parked at the side of a road in Austria, with putrid juices dripping from the door. The second comes a week later, when the body of a Kurdish toddler, Alan Kurdi, is photographed face down on a beach in Turkey, having drowned with his brother and mother in a failed attempt to reach Kos. Suddenly Europe cares.

Firstly, it’s more accurate. When you’re describing a large group of people whom you don’t know, it makes sense to define them by what they’re doing (which you can be reasonably sure of) rather than why they’re doing it (which you can’t). Migrant is the most efficient way of achieving this: in its purest sense it simply means someone on the move – and casts no aspersions, positive or negative, on why they set out in the first place. Secondly, many of those who push for the use of ‘refugee’ do so by defining refugees in opposition to migrants. Refugees, they say, deserve rights, whereas migrants don’t. Refugees had good reason to leave home; migrants did not. This is a problematic differentiation. In attempting to separate the two groups, we imply that it is easy to distinguish between them. In reality, as I’ve attempted to explain in earlier chapters, it is increasingly hard to do so. There is often overlap, and many people’s experiences might fit the definitions of both categories.

The point of delineating between different kinds of migration is to draw a line between who has the right to move and who doesn’t – and in turn to identify which people should be prevented from moving in the first place. But, in reality, history proves that prevention may not be possible, and so too does the current crisis. People have always moved. The story of humanity is essentially the story of human movement. In the near future, people will move even more, particularly if, as some predict, climate change sparks mass migration on an unprecedented scale. The sooner we recognise the inevitability of this movement, the sooner we can try to manage it.

after a series of bad-tempered meetings, the countries of the EU finally agree in September to share 120,000 of the refugees who’ll land in Italy and Greece over the next two years, and to resettle 40,000 of those still languishing in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. Britain opts out of the agreement, but promises to admit 4000 refugees every year for the next five years. Wonks in Brussels hail all this as a huge step forward, given Europe’s previous intransigence.

When I’d previously asked Syrians where they wanted to end up, I drew a range of answers: Holland, perhaps, or Sweden, Austria or the UK. Now almost everyone says they just want to reach Germany. The pragmatism of the lower Balkan countries is also increasingly apparent. Having previously tried to block the path of refugees, or slow them down, Macedonia, Serbia and Greece have now bowed to the inevitable and created a de facto humanitarian corridor to Hungary.

And Merkel is certainly courageous, promising to welcome any Syrian, regardless of whether they’ve already been fingerprinted in Greece, Hungary or any other EU country.

Big profit’, as Vasilis the activist would later summarise. But the barwoman is having none of it, keen to foster the impression of Simos as the worst businessman of all time. ‘Profit?’ she says. ‘You can’t make a profit here. Yes, he takes more money, but he also has to pay more staff. He’s just the wrong person at the wrong place at the wrong time.’ I’m almost convinced, until I remember the missing receipts.

Just as Hashem al-Souki found, the sheer act of leaving Syria was exhausting and financially depleting. Fattemah and Nasser headed north towards Turkey, which required going through a litany of regime checkpoints. At each, the soldiers always wanted bribes – sometimes as much as 1000 Syrian pounds. At the last one, Nasser had only 450 left, and the soldiers were satisfied. Others who had less were beaten till their teeth fell out. The Isis checkpoints weren’t any better: if the jihadists found any women who were travelling alone, they arrested them, perhaps to keep them as slaves. Travelling as a family, Nasser, Fattemah and Hammouda made it through – and reached Turkey in November 2014. Turkey shoulders a bigger burden of

Fleeing your home isn’t just physically draining, says Nasser, who knows better than most. It’s emotionally exhausting too, and no one does it unless they absolutely have to. ‘My father went out of Palestine, we had to leave another time from Kuwait, and now we’ve left Syria,’ Nasser says. ‘Every time you travel from one place to another you have to make new friends, find new houses, new memories.

If a member of the military can be killed and left in the road, in front of his own house, then who will be safe in this country?

The sky was as dark as it had ever been. Frozen, exhausted, and out of breath, they fumbled forward together once more. In the end, all they had done was cross from one kind of desolation to another.

The global refugee crisis is indeed global. It isn’t a question of whether we should respond here (in the West) or there (at the crises’ points of origin), nor if we should address immediate needs or root causes. We can and must do all of the above.