pledoo casino To Save Refugees and Migrants Is to Save Ourselves

Updated:2024-12-11 02:06    Views:189

This personal reflection is part of a series called Turning Pointspledoo casino, 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.

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