We wake up to news every day, every month about yet another refugees and migrants’ crisis. The U.S has upheld a travel ban for many majority Muslim countries, the Algerian government is expelling sub-Saharan migrants and refugees, mostly coming from Mali, Cameroon and Nigeria, and abandoning them in the Sahara desert, recently another scandal erupted over the treatment of members of the Windrush generation who arrived after World War II in the UK, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. In our current times, massive migration itself is not new, nor is it a sporadic event with many people fleeing economic crises as well as political troubles, being forced to seek shelter or more promising life opportunities away from their homes.As the poet Warsan Shire observed, ‘no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land’, it is a choice made by many people who feel stuck between a rock and a hard place. It’s true that the prevalent direction of migration has changed since the 20th century. Early on when Europe considered itself the exporter of “civilization” much of its populations kept being unloaded onto the still “premodern” lands —the two Americas, Africa, and Australia during the height of colonial imperialism. Since then the trajectory of migration has taken a U-turn with people coming from nations that are former European colonies, particularly in the Middle East and in Africa, trying to escape the dozens of civil wars, ethnic and religious conflicts that their former colonizers left behind in nominally sovereign, artificially concocted “states” with little prospects of stability, but enormous arsenals of weaponry that are still supplied by these European nations. Part of the issue with the coverage of the migrants’ crisis is the way in which the political world frames people who are forced to flee intolerable conditions as not worthy to be “bearers of rights,” often characterized with words like “swarms of people” which is dehumanizing, and this leads to xenophobic rhetoric that informs such discriminatory policies that led to Italy not accepting a boat of refugees in need of help, or the deportation of undocumented migrants in the U.S. Forced to depend for their survival on the people on whose doors they knock, refugees are in a way thrown outside the realm of “humanity”. Refugees end up all too often cast in the role of a threat to the human rights of established populations, instead of being defined and treated as a vulnerable part of humanity who seek the same rights of their fellow global citizens.Politicians in modern debate have transferred the migrants’ crisis from the area of universal human rights into that of internal security. Being tough on foreigners in the name of safety from potential terrorists is evidently generating more political currency than appealing for benevolence and compassion for people in distress showingperhaps how we have not evolved out of tribal concern. The refugee has become the signifier upon which many of our contemporary fears and anxieties are projected. What we need to understand though is that the powers, particularly those most heavily influencing the human condition and humanity’s prospects, are today global. We are all interconnected, and what we eschew to be other people’s problems quickly becomes ours. Humanity is in crisis and there is no exit from that crisis other than the solidarity of humans.
