A week ago, on World Refugee Day, the UN placed the number of refugees and internally displaced people worldwide at more than 50 million, an increase of more than six million over the previous year. On average some 30,000 people are forced to flee their homes each day. In 2013 nearly 17 million refugees crossed international borders – many fleeing from conflicts like those in the Central African Republic, South Sudan and Syria – and twice that number remained trapped inside their countries of origin. Taken together, the global refugee population is larger than the entire population of Caricom and more than five times the size of the English-speaking Caribbean.
One striking statistic in the UN report is that the majority of refugees are housed by developing countries – 86 per cent, up from 70 per cent a decade ago. Another surprise, especially given the ferocity of debates over illegal immigration in the EU, and elsewhere, is that the five main host countries are Pakistan, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. (In fairness, it should be added that Germany accepts more asylum seekers than any other, even though its success at assimilation is uneven, to say the least.)
A glance at the FIFA World Cup rosters for most European nations offers plenty of evidence for the complexity of recent mass migrations. Germany’s star midfielder Mesut Özil, is a third generation German of Turkish descent – other “foreign players” include Sami Khedira (Tunisian father), Jerome Boateng (Ghana), Shkodran Mustafi (born in Macedonia to Albanian parents), and Miroslav Klose and Lukas Podolski (Poland). Karim Benzema, who could have played for Algeria, is one of 12 players in the French squad eligible for other national teams. (Italy would lose Rossi and Balotelli; Spain, David Silva; the Dutch would lose three Surinamese players and Portugal could not field Nani and Pepe.) If players with one foreign-born parent were ineligible, Switzerland would lose two-thirds of its squad.
While a World Cup squad of “refugees” could easily win the tournament, the players themselves often play a significant role in reducing xenophobia domestically. Deustche Welle World recently asked the director of the Centre for Turkish Studies at a local university, what he made of Turks’ enthusiastic support for the national team. He noted that even local teams like Borussia Dortmund have several hundred Turkish supporters at their matches, and added that “if Germany becomes the world champion, as many Turks expect it will …Turks will then fully identify (with the victory) and feel that they’ve contributed to it with their enthusiasm.”
A sobering contrast to this spirited assimilation is the United States’ response to the “epic” influx of foreign children currently under way. An estimated 47, 000 children have entered the US during the last eight months, mostly from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Many have been brought into the US by human trafficking “coyotes” who abandon them at the border. Although the Obama administration has spoken of an “urgent humanitarian situation” and tried to reunite children with family members in the US, wherever possible, there is a great uncertainty about the fate of the remaining children. Honduras has asked the US not to return the children and other governments likely feel the same way. Meanwhile, after arriving in the US, the children have been kept, quite literally, in warehouses – under conditions better suited to the detention of terror suspects rather than young, totally defenceless asylum seekers.
Pressed on the issue at a televised town hall meeting, Hillary Clinton said: “Just because your child gets across the border doesn’t mean the child gets to stay” – a response she may well rue when it is time to court the Latino vote in the 2016 election. Nevertheless, her impatience is indicative of the frustration, and confusion that surrounds the politics of immigration in the EU and North America. Until there is bipartisan immigration reform in the US, few improvements are likely.
Emigration from Guyana – legal and otherwise – has taken a huge toll on our society during the last generation. Many of those who left this country have endured fates similar to those of the millions of refugees currently seeking better lives elsewhere. One lesson that might be drawn from the vast collection of harrowing narratives which these experiences have generated is that it is always better to achieve political compromises – however painful, however incomplete – in countries with seemingly irreconcilable racial, religious and political tensions, than to allow temporary triumphs, whether political or military, to strip a country of its human capital. It is a lesson we would all do well to consider.
