Upheaval by Navid Kermani

Author:Navid Kermani
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509518715
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2017-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

It’s true that there is no magic wand we could wave to make the refugee crisis vanish into thin air; war and poverty have advanced too close upon Europe, to say nothing of the other, deeper causes of flight, such as spreading aridity – primarily a consequence of climate change – which year after year destroys arable land totalling the area of Switzerland. Yet there have long been feasible proposals that would at least provide some control of the migrational movements and make them more manageable. One part of the solution which is overdue is to separate immigration and political asylum. But another is to extend the Geneva Refugee Convention by supplementary protocols to recognize conditions such as environmental degradation among the causes of flight. Immigration could be regulated according to the needs of the admitting countries while asylum remained available only to those in danger. That too would significantly reduce the pressure on Europe’s external borders – which is necessary if they are to be secured again at all – since those who can hope to immigrate legally will invest their time and money, not in costly, dangerous clandestine travel, but in acquiring qualifications and language skills. Still more urgent is the need to support refugees closer to their home countries, in the camps around Syria and in northern Iraq for example, since many are waiting to return home, or would prefer to spend their exile surrounded by a familiar culture and language if the neighbouring countries offered any prospects at all. Rejecting or deporting people who are neither threatened nor have prospects of finding work is hard to accept – especially for a child of immigrants like myself – but would probably also be part of any realistic policy.

What is unrealistic, on the other hand – irrational in fact, since it has repeatedly been disproved by empirical evidence – is the notion that the refugee crisis could be solved by isolation. As long as there is virtually no chance of applying for legal immigration, and refugees cannot apply for asylum at any of Europe’s external borders, both immigrants and refugees will continue to board the boats; and if Europe tries to stop them with military ships, as it did before, the boats will go back to using the longer, still more dangerous routes, hundreds of kilometres right across the Mediterranean Sea, or across the Atlantic to the Canary Islands. And immediately the news of the drownings will startle us again – two hundred here, six hundred there, several thousand dead every year at our borders – among them children, of course, whose pictures we will see in the news. We will never get this reality back out of our consciousness.

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