No Refuge: Ethics and the Global Refugee Crisis

"In 2015, Sina Habte's limp, pregnant body floated off the coast of Greece. Already past her due date when she boarded a flimsy boat to cross the Mediterranean Sea, Sina, wanted nothing more than to deliver her baby somewhere safe. A chemical engineer and citizen of the small African country of Eritrea, she'd spent 6 months fleeing almost certain life-long imprisonment, if not torture or death, for violating one of Eritrea's draconian rules. In her case, she wanted to live with her husband Dani instead of where the government assigned her. Eritrea is a country so repressive that its considered the North Korea of Africa. After escaping Eritrea, sneaking across borders and living in the shadows of several different countries, she had nowhere else to go. Ifshe returned home, she would be imprisoned, tortured or killed, and if she stayed in a refugee camp in Africa, it was likely that she would be found by Eritrean agents and returned home to the same punishment. So Sina, like tens of thousands of others like her, paid the last of her money to smugglers and boarded a small, over-crowded boat bound for Europe in the hope of claiming asylum. When her boat capsized, as so many boats did, she became one of those refugees that people would see on the news. And for many, images of bodies like hers, drowned at sea or in overcrowded life-boats, struck a nerve. Shock often turned to horror when the images were of the bodies of young children who had drown at sea. People could no longer ignore the plight of asylum seekers and began to demand a response to this crisis. The summer of 2015 marked the beginning of the so-called European refugee crisis. While people had been entering Europe as asylum seekers for a long time, the rate intensified dramatically in 2015 when more than 1.3 million asylum seekers arrived asking for refugee status, tens of thousands more than previous years. The arrival of over a million refugees in a relatively short period of time was seen by many observers as a crisis. Such an unprecedented increase raised many questions for European citizens. Many people wanted to know: do we have obligations to help all these refugees? Is it enough to give them food and send them home or must we let them stay? Do we really have the capacity to help everyone?"--
Syrians crossing the Mediterranean in ramshackle boats bound for Europe; Sudanese refugees, their belongings on their backs, fleeing overland into neighboring countries; children separated from their parents at the US/Mexico border--these are the images that the Global Refugee Crisis conjures to many. In the news we often see photos of people in transit, suffering untold deprivations in desperate bids to escape their countries and find safety. But behind these images, there is a second crisis--a crisis of arrival. Refugees in the 21st century have only three real options--urban slums, squalid refugee camps, or dangerous journeys to seek asylum--and none provide genuine refuge. In No Refuge, political philosopher Serena Parekh calls this the second refugee crisis: the crisis of the millions of people who, having fled their homes, are stuck for decades in the dehumanizing and hopeless limbo of refugees camps and informal urban spaces, most of which are in the Global South. Ninety-nine percent of these refugees are never resettled in other countries. Their suffering only begins when they leave their war-torn homes. As Parekh urgently argues by drawing from numerous first-person accounts, conditions in many refugee camps and urban slums are so bleak that to make people live in them for prolonged periods of time is to deny them human dignity. It's no wonder that refugees increasingly risk their lives to seek asylum directly in the West.Drawing from extensive first-hand accounts of life as a refugee with nowhere to go, Parekh argues that we need a moral response to these crises--one that assumes the humanity of refugees in addition to the challenges that states have when they accept refugees. Only once we grasp that the global refugee crisis has these two dimensions--the asylum crisis for Western states and the crisis for refugees who cannot find refuge--can we reckon with a response proportionate to the complexities we face. Countries and citizens have a moral obligation to address the structures that unjustly prevent refugees from accessing the minimum conditions of human dignity. As Parekh shows, there are ways we as citizens can respond to the global refugee crisis, and indeed we are morally obligated to do so.