This personal reflection is part of a series called Turning Points, in which writers explore what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. You can read more by visiting the Turning Points series page.
Turning Point: Voters in the United States presidential election shifted overwhelmingly to the right on immigration.
“Mass deportation now.” This was the slogan on many signs waved at a summer rally for the Republican presidential candidate, and now president-elect, Donald Trump. Not long thereafter, anti-immigrant riots erupted throughout Britain as far-right white mobs rampaged cities nationwide, incited by what they believed to be child murders committed by a Muslim migrant (the alleged assailant was British-born and raised Christian). Migrants and refugees are a crisis for those who feel that their homes are besieged — but what if the problem is not them, the people seeking new homes, but us, those who receive them?
“Us” is an ambivalent word for me to use, because I am also one of “them.” I was a refugee myself, and I am the child of refugees. Even though I own a house and possess American citizenship, I still consider myself one of “them” in spirit, if not in fact. Like many refugees, I have never forgotten what it was like to be displaced and rendered less than human in the eyes of much of the world. Some refugees, however, want to forget that experience so much that they turn against others seeking refuge across international borders. Hence the irony, for example, when some of these refugees, or their descendants, call as loudly as other nativists to keep the newcomers out. “We are the good refugees” is the claim. “These new refugees and migrants are the bad ones and illegal. We came the legal way.”
Set aside how legality can be an arbitrary concept, defined by the powerful for their own advantage. Beyond the difficult details of immigration legislation — how many to admit, temporary visas or guest workers, amnesty or criminalization — the enduring issue driving the call to erect border walls and expel refugees and migrants is the psychology of fear, blame and scarcity.
This heart of darkness inside refugee and migrant phobia distorts any discussion of policy and fairness, denies our own culpability and projects our own worst selves onto these strange others, who supposedly threaten to do to us what we, oftentimes, have already done to them.
Our perception of refugees and migrants has to change before any government decisions can be reached regarding these individuals. This is because what refugees and migrants really represent for those who scapegoat them is the erosion of borders, realized in geographical lines, but ultimately in borders that are internal and related to our identities as selves, cultures and nations.
The impulse found in some groups and nations to dominate people or land and extract resources for their own profit has led to a world of haves and have-nots, with the attendant feeling among many that there is not enough for all. When it comes to migration, the result is twofold: economic, political and ecological catastrophes that have forcibly displaced 117 million people, resulting in the perception that they must be kept out or potential host nations will be overwhelmed.
But if refugees and migrants are the result of past mistakes, they also represent the future. Treating them as a crisis and a problem simply repeats the history that has caused, and will continue to cause, unprecedented levels of displacement. The contemporary difference, for those from wealthier countries, is that they, too, will be forced to migrate. Climate disaster knows no borders, and those displaced by climate change are literally unsettling the comfortable.
What will the response be? When Vietnamese refugees fled their country by sea in the 1970s and 1980s, they became “boat people,” a spectacle arousing global compassion and hospitality. The world knew about the war in Vietnam, and several hundred thousand, even a million, refugees could be absorbed. Likewise, when the body of two-year-old Alan Kurdi was photographed as he lay dead, facedown on a Mediterranean beach in 2015, the image galvanized an outpouring of emotion. But Kurdi, a Syrian refugee, embodied a problem far larger than Vietnamese refugees: how to absorb tens of millions of forcibly displaced people — and how to stop them from being produced in the first place.
Pity, which had worked for Vietnamese refugees, was not enough for Kurdi or the 21 million refugees worldwide around the time of his death. Nine years later that population grew to 43 million, a figure that does not include “internally displaced” people who never leave their country but who are otherwise rendered homeless.
If not pity, would empathy compel hospitality? Diverse religious teachings call for us to welcome the stranger, to feed the hungry, to give without expectation of reciprocity. If not empathy, would logic transform policy and attitudes? Studies indicate that refugees and migrants are good and necessary for the economy, not to mention the less quantifiable ways that they contribute culturally through food, music, dance, ideas and creativity.
Would self-interest, in the end, defeat fear, when we recognize that our national and global well-being would be better served by reducing or eliminating militarism, consumerism, capitalism and colonialism, all forces designed to take from the many for the benefit of the few, and in so doing displace the millions who are then forced to find refuge?
None of this is to idealize refugees and migrants or say that they are better than us through dint of their suffering. Nevertheless, it takes enormous courage to trek hundreds of miles through jungle and hostile territory or to jump onto an overcrowded, unseaworthy vessel, as many Africans are doing now, and as the Vietnamese did then. Many of those Vietnamese knew that the odds of surviving the journey were low, perhaps only one in two.
To recognize refugees and migrants, those of us who have not faced displacement would have to acknowledge that their full complexity is tied to ours, that their plight is shaped by our choices as much as their own, that their fate foretells ours. If they have been forced to act, many of us have had the luxury — so far — of not realizing how serious our own circumstances are. To save refugees and migrants is to save ourselves, but that requires more than pity, hospitality, empathy or even self-interest. It requires courage at the level of action, both individual and collective. It requires an imagination that sees abundance rather than scarcity, if we could only re-engineer our societies to conserve and to share resources that are more than enough to sustain humanity on this planet.
Let us tell a different story in which there is no refugee or migrant crisis, which in any case is a phenomenon that cannot be kept out by walls, any more than the rising sea can be forestalled. What we have instead is a challenge, one in which the faces of refugees and migrants, if we dared to look at them, are actually a mirror of our own. We can refuse to look. We can shatter the mirror. Or we can look into it and see in its reflection our own face, asking us to transform ourselves, for our own sake as much as theirs.
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