Immigration doesn’t have to be a partisan issue. But the terminology also has a dialectical significance, an implied “good immigrant” and “bad immigrant.” It is much easier to dismiss an economic migrant as someone who’s merely opportunistic, as opposed to someone escaping the jaws of a shark. That determination is legally important in the United States and Europe because the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees prohibits the deportation of someone with a valid claim to refugee status. In Europe, there is an ongoing debate about whether the people washing up on the shores of Greece and Italy are economic migrants or refugees. Yet immigration is much broader and more encompassing than just the question of refugees. But when our country takes in refugees, we’re giving people refuge from the Islamic State and the other “evil” forces that we claim to be trying to fight, bolstering our allies in the region that struggle to host millions of Syrian and Iraqi refugees and demonstrating that our projection into the Middle East is not myopically militaristic. When President Donald Trump issued the first travel ban in January, the Islamic State referred to it as a “blessed ban” because it reinforced the group’s narrative of an anti-Islam West. It cannot be aptly understood or addressed in 140 characters. The forced displacement of humans, and how to handle it as a global community, is an incredibly nuanced and complicated issue. Oversimplifying and politicizing our understanding of forced global migration is a handy but dangerous political tool. In order to believe that a lot of people are going to be displaced by climate change, you have to believe that climate change exists. It calls into question fundamental assumptions. The United States must continue taking in refugees, and we should be taking in a lot more than we are now.īut this is not an issue that lends itself to simple political messaging. This may be the year that the tradition falters. The United States has historically resettled more refugees than every other country combined. ![]() In the next five or 10 years, there will be huge swaths of individuals displaced by climate change. ![]() That’s more than at any time since World War II, and it’s only going to grow. There are in the world, right now, more than 65 million displaced people. And in the increasingly politicized debates within “destination countries” over what to do with those arriving seeking safety, we have failed to examine the root causes that drive people from their homes in the first place. Whatever the inciting forces are that propel people to undertake what is inevitably a dangerous, expensive, and arduous journey from their homeland into the unknown - the kind that rips apart families - they must be grim. The Somali-British writer Warsan Shire begins her poem “Home” with the line, “No one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark.”
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