Rescue by David Miliband

Author:David Miliband
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

4 Refugees Welcome

Refugees and the countries that host them desperately need our financial support. But we cannot just give them money and turn away. We also need to welcome refugees to our own shores. Help needs to start here, on the home front. We need to expand fair and humane ways of offering sanctuary to people who are fleeing for their lives.

Starting a new life in a new country is hard. But we know from evidence and experience that refugees, who have survived horrendous strife, know deeply the meaning of freedom and are determined to offer their children the life chances they were denied or had removed.

One of the first people to benefit from the IRC’s refugee services after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 was a young refugee named András Gróf. We diagnosed that he needed a hearing aid, because of scarlet fever he had suffered as a child—and bought him one. He went from strength to strength, eventually founding Intel and thereby transforming all of our lives. Few refugees have the impact of Andy Grove, the name he later took, but by virtue of their experience refugees have something special to offer.

So “Refugees Welcome” is not just a slogan; it is a statement of principle and purpose. It is precisely because not everyone can be offered refuge that the rules need to be fair. I know this from my own family history.

After the Second World War, my grandfather went back to Belgium to find his wife and daughter, with the aim of returning with them to the United Kingdom to join my dad, who had returned to student life. The decision lay in the hands of Home Secretary James Chuter Ede. It looked as though we would be lucky. There was powerful support for the application, because my dad’s tutor at the London School of Economics was Harold Laski, then chairman of the governing Labour Party.

The letters from Harold Laski begin “My Dear Chuter” and make the case for the Milibands to be allowed to come and join their outstanding young relative in Britain. Today this would be called “family reunification” and remains important. Yet as seemingly well positioned as my relatives were, the answer was negative. Ede’s replies were friendly but firm: not everyone who wants to come can do so, he said, and there can be no favoritism. He actually used the now-toxic word flooded.

You can see Ede’s dilemma: he had a tough enough job sorting out who could come, so he could not start allocating places to please a colleague. (There is one irony to the story: by an extraordinary twist of fate, Ede was member of Parliament for South Shields, the constituency I would come to represent fifty years later.)

When refugees are given protection in a new country, it gives them a chance to restart their lives. But that’s not the only reason to admit refugees. Welcoming refugees is a symbolic stand with the countries that host the most refugees. And by accepting

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