We are all appalled at the exponential increase in forced migration to Europe. Desperate people will do almost anything to get here, straining political systems and polarising debate, with violent results. Some of us (we in this case being those of us wealthy and secure enough not to spend all our time trying to survive) are outraged. Most people think the response is insufficient, one way or the other. Either there must be walls, security, and respect for borders. Or the response is inhumane and flies against our own conventions and agreements, our cultural, religious and personal moral injunctions to act with compassion. Before we look at which attitude trumps (if you'll excuse the obvious allusion), it's worth exploring the difficulties people have with terminology.
There are two main terms that are used interchangeably. A refugee, under the UN 1951 convention, has a ‘well-founded fear of persecution’ on the basis of their ‘race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion’. They have a right to seek asylum, and asylum is, by definition, a safe place to be. The idea of seeking asylum originates in the religious wars, where churches, for instance, were deemed (on the whole) oases of safety in the seas of conflict that people endured (there were, of course, significant breaches of this convention).
A forced migrant includes all others who leave their country because the political, environmental and economic conditions are so dire they face lives that are “nasty, brutish and short”. People who protest at the corruption endemic in these regimes can be imprisoned or beaten, sometimes to death, even in countries deemed ‘safe’ by international bodies like the UN.
Some say that’s not our problem. We didn’t start the fire. We don’t share the culture or values of other places and it would be wrong to impose our moral codes elsewhere.
And it’s true that intervention has a patchy history, even when undertaken on the grounds of ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’. On top of which, it’s usually accompanied by conditions: we build you roads, you give us access to minerals, or oil, or land.
Then there’s the issue of inconsistency: so called “western democracies” have used their military power to invade some nations, but have left others with toxic regimes well alone.
And, of course, if we intervene there, what’s to stop another nation intervening here?
Pretending that we in the Global North are disinterested arbiters is dangerous and self delusory. We need to wake up to the impact of our interventions, and the obligations that go with extracting goods. This is true not just for democracies, of course: Russia has placed armed militias to protect exploitation of resources all across Africa while the west has looked on, apparently powerless. We cannot call this freedom. We have global institutions, like the UN and The World Bank and the International Court of Justice. Let’s give them teeth.
The second problem we need to examine is whether or not the 1951 convention is sufficient for today’s forced migration crisis. Evidently, it is not. It was designed to reflect the conditions faced by groups (including Jews and gays and communists) specifically targetted by Nazis during the Second World War. It doesn’t reflect conditions that create huge push factors now. If you were working in a factory in Bangladesh for slave wages, living in a sinking, stinking ghetto, your children dying of malnutrition, unable to form a union because you’ll be imprisoned or shot in the night, are you going to pontificate on whether or not your country’s ‘safe’? You do what you have to do.
What really makes a difference, though, is the third problem, because it is actually the easiest to tackle. Or would be, if there was a will, which there would be, if we realised its in all our interests to tackle it. It’s inequality.
The wealth of the world is increasingly and mind-blowingly unfairly, unevenly distributed. This is increasing, even as we speak. The distribution of access to resources has never, in the history of humankind, been so weighted in favour of a tiny elite. Not even in Egypt during the Pharaohs. Not even during the era of slavery. Never before has such a tiny proportion of humanity controlled so much wealth. And it’s getting worse.
Yet at the same time, access to information is increasing. I worked in a refugee camp in Kenya. I came across many instances of malnutrition and disease. But now everyone knows what a good life looks like, from education to fast cars, from Tik Tok to Influencers to scams to dream homes. Because even in a refugee camp, every adult and most children has access to a mobile phone.
It's hard to blame anyone for wanting a better life. Yet the very source of our interconnectedness is itself a minefield of injustice. Mobile phones require rare metals mined by people who are barely more than children in conditions that make slavery look like a picnic. Inequality goes all the way down.
We may feel powerless when we consider how intricately we are bound up in a system that’s this unfair, and that’s creating a problem so vast that we ourselves feel a very real sense of threat to life and livelihood. But there are things we can do.
We need to pressure our governments (through organising and attending rallies, and signing petitions and writing letters, and forming groups) to acknowledge the money trail that runs from tax breaks they give to multinationals to boats fleeing conditions those same multinationals profit from. Our societies’ wealth depends directly on resources sucked from the very countries and societies people are fleeing and that wealth needs to be taxed, and those taxes need to be used to mitigate inequalities between countries and between people within countries.
Energy – particularly oil – is a key example of the disparity between what multinationals take from often desperately poor societies, and what they give back in terms of sustainable jobs, resource management and the mitigation of the effects of their resource exploitation and removal. Entire regions of west Africa, including the Niger Delta where people experience birth defects, increased mortality of women and children, and huge societal deprivation, and of South America, have borne the brunt of our capacity to access relatively cheap fuel for holidays, transporting food, and even the commute to the sports club.
EU governments need to address inequality in tax laws, inequality in the distribution of resources, inequality in access to political institutions (lobbying by business groups and access to political decision makers is clear across EU), transparency and accountability in spending, as a matter of urgency. Unless we address inequality within the EU, we will be in no position to negotiate on addressing inequality as a key factor in forced migration.
If we need to respect the sovereignty of states, we cannot conform to the principles of a superstate. But we do need international bodies with bite. States need to be allowed to come up with their own solutions to the problems that create forced migrations. And it needs to be in their interests to do so. More tax breaks for countries that create safe havens, deal with people humanely, and create legislation that tackles inequality.
Internationally, then, there’s a huge onus on bodies to create and enforce systems that address inequality and corruption. Nationally, we need to lobby our governments to change tax laws, to address corruption both here and there, to create safe zones in countries of origin and, at least temporarily, in countries of asylum, including our own. Across civil society, there needs to be much more done to support host communities, both by investing in infrastructure, health, education, sports and cultural facilities (hugely important) and employment opportunities that will allow people to experience the net benefits of accommodating incomers. And individually, we need to be given opportunities to contribute to integration efforts, and also to benefit from them, to have access to a wide range of personal development programmes that will allow us to deal with the inevitable internal tensions that go with change.
None of these are easy solutions. It’s a nice sound bite to call for ‘Ireland for the Irish’ or ‘White Lives Matter’. The fact is, history makes clear that divide and conquer works in the favour of the elite, and that social collapse will always put the most vulnerable at greatest risk. The great Amartya Sen said that all famines are caused by political decisions. I’d go further - all scarcity is. There’s plenty for all of us so-called ordinary, but actually extraordinary, people who just get by, if the proportion siphoned off by an increasingly tiny, but increasingly wealthy elite is reclaimed and taxed and shared fairly.
Finally, a reality check: refugees and asylum seekers are people, and among any group, there will always be people who take advantage of any system, who exploit and abuse. The more desperate people are, the more disenfranchised they are, the angrier they get and the more extreme their reactions to the unfairness will be. Requiring ID is a relatively simple way to identify those who will stop at nothing to destroy political and social systems: nihilism is a threat we need to tackle now, whether from within or incoming.
Damaged people are dangerous. But many can and have been rehabilitated when they’re given access to systems that operate on principles of fairness, and justice. We need places and spaces where people can learn what the rules are here, projects that allow people here and people from elsewhere to learn trades, start businesses, get access to education, restore environmental degradation. These people can be the best of us, given half a chance.
There needs to be massive investment in countries of origin. The Loss and Damage Fund for ecological degradation could be expanded to include Historical Reparations for Former Colonial States. This needn’t be a net cost, if projects in countries of origin have opportunities for investment.
Much of what we fear about migration is what we have always feared - the new, the different, change. But people will travel at the first opportunity they have. Most systems, human and natural, are hugely resilient. Historically, societies have recovered from appalling tragedies, from wars and genocides, from famines and mass migration. But systems do have tipping points.
Inequality is the key factor in making systems more vulnerable. Marginalised and angry people here are pitted against marginalised and angry people from elsewhere. This lets those who really benefit entirely off the hook.
The EU still has enough space for us to accommodate the extensive number of refugees among our communities across the EU, and this can be worked out in economic and in social terms. But this is a finite measure, dealing with the consequences of a problem that, at its root, will keep creating the conditions for forced migration, unless we grasp what is feeding the problem.
Let’s fight the real enemy.
Biographical note: Lucy works as a researcher, a yoga and meditation teacher, and a writer. She studied forced migration at the University of Oxford, under Barbara Harrell-Bond, at postgraduate level, completed a PhD in Environmental Philosophy at UCC, and has published three books. Please feel free to comment or to leave a tip.
Forced Migration: fight the real enemy