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“We Are Almost Dead”: The

Politics of Migrants and
Refugees in an Unequal World
By Jonathan Blake

92 0 0

! " # $ % &
City of Thorns

Nine Lives in the

FEBRUARY 21, 2018 World's Largest Refugee
Camp
WHEN ALAN KURDI washed up on Turkey’s
By Ben Rawlence
western shore in September 2015, he immediately
became the symbol of the global refugee crisis. The Published 01.05.2016
image of the lifeless three-year-old in a red T-shirt Picador
400 Pages
face down in the sand sparked international grief
and outrage, and his brief life and watery death
came to represent the horror of Syrian Civil War, the
callousness of Europe, and the growing plight of all
refugees today.

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“We Are Almost Dead”: The Politics of Migrants and Refugees in an Unequal World - Los Angeles Review of Books 23/02/2018, 20)29

Life moved on, and the world forgot. Donations to

aid groups and Google searches for “refugee,” both of
which had surged in response to the photograph,
plummeted within weeks. Charitable giving was
never going to solve the situation anyway. As several
excellent new books make clear, the global migration
crisis is, at heart, a political problem. The political
leaders who were so touched by the toddler’s photo
failed to act decisively or compassionately. One year
a!er Kurdi’s death, the boy’s father lamented, “The
politicians said a!er the deaths in my family: Never
again! […] But what is happening now? People are
still dying and nobody is doing anything about it.” BUY THIS BOOK

¤ AROUND THE WORLD

POLITICS
In 2016, there were over 65 million people who had
fled their homes due to “persecution, conflict,
violence, or human rights violations.” That figure,
roughly the same as the entire population of the Cast Away
United Kingdom, is the highest ever recorded, and
means that one in every 113 people worldwide is True Stories of Survival
currently forcibly displaced. !om Europe’s Refugee
Crisis

Half of all refugees are children and 10 million By Charlotte McDonald-

people were newly displaced during the year — Gibson
that’s 28,300 people fleeing their homes per day, or
Published 09.06.2016
nearly 20 every minute. Two-thirds of the refugees The New Press
under the UN Refugee Agency’s mandate — 11.6 256 Pages
million people — are in protracted situations,
meaning their community has been in exile for five
or more consecutive years. And yet, only 189,300
refugees were resettled in 37 countries.

As a rule, people live and die in their country of

birth. In an equal world, this would not much

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matter. But our world is not equal: some countries

are wealthy, "ee, and stable; others are poor,
repressive, and violent. Thus the accident of birth
behind certain lines on the map determines not only
where you live and die, but how you live and die.
The natal lottery that sets the course of your life is
not a natural development, but the result of political
decisions in the past and present. In the modern
global system, goods and capital cross borders with
ease. People do not. The immobility regime has
created a catastrophe.

Yet, at the same time that the world’s poor are

BUY THIS BOOK
immobilized by the rules of state sovereignty, the
world’s rich are greeted at the airport with
AROUND THE WORLD
champagne and residency papers to sign. This
POLITICS
inequity between rich and poor migrants is most
starkly illustrated by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian in
her superb book, The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the
Global Citizen, which focuses on the buying and
selling of citizenship and the 21st-century truth that The Cosmopolites
people are still arranged according to their nation of
The Coming of the
birth, antiquated as that might seem.
Global Citizen

“There’s a motto in the citizenship industry: You can

By Atossa Araxia
Abrahamian
never be too rich, be too thin, or have too many
passports,” she writes. But superfluous citizenships Published 11.10.2015
are not merely status symbols, they are completely Columbia Global Reports
162 Pages
legal and above-board ways to protect assets, avoid
taxes, and ease international travel, work, and
education. The pitch of passport brokerage firms to
the 0.1-percenters is: “In the modern world, borders
are still very much erect — but they can be
flattened, for a price.” And many governments are
happy to oblige. For a price, one can become a
legitimate citizen of at least eight countries,

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including Grenada, Antigua and Barbuda, Bulgaria,

and Austria. Passports are now St. Kitts and Nevis’s
largest export and generate one-quarter of the
country’s GDP.

At the other end of the international citizenship

bazaar are the bidoon, the stateless people of the
Middle East who lack citizenship in any country.
Abrahamian recounts the tragic, absurd tale of the
United Arab Emirates’s quest to end their bidoon
problem, not by granting citizenship to their
residents — many of whom have been non-citizen
residents for several generations — but by
BUY THIS BOOK
purchasing citizenship for them "om the Comoro
Islands, a tiny, impoverished, sovereign state in the
AROUND THE WORLD
waters between Mozambique and Madagascar. With
POLITICS
the stroke of a pen and a large wire transfer, the UAE
got rid of its problem.

Now the Emirates host thousands of “Comorians,”

who just happen to have lived their entire lives in The New Odyssey
the Emirates and have never stepped foot in
The Story of the
Comoros. In fact, the deal stipulated that they
Twenty-First Century
couldn’t vote or even live permanently in Comoros. Refugee Crisis
It was a technical fix that, at $6,000 to $8,000 a head,
By Patrick Kingsley
solved the Emirates’s human rights public relations
problem, funneled much needed money to Comoros, Published 01.10.2017
and provided very little to the new Comorians Liveright
368 Pages
marooned in their homes in the Gulf.

By juxtaposing billionaires with multiple passports

and stateless bidoons, Abrahamian de!ly displays the
interrelation between the seemingly insurmountable
obstacles facing poor migrants and the gilded world
of private jets, tax havens, and citizenship for sale.
The shared story is one of politics. The barriers to

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entry that states erect are not natural; they are a

political choice.

The Cosmopolites reveals the creative and flexible

migration policies that materialize when there is
political will. Given that countless thousands of
people are dying to reach the safety of wealthy
countries, the policy of selling citizenship to the
ultra-rich is an egregious abdication of any state’s
moral responsibility.

BUY THIS BOOK

The image of refugees huddled on a small, barely
seaworthy boat is a powerful one — which is why
AROUND THE WORLD
we find it on the cover of both The New Odyssey: The
POLITICS
Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis by Patrick
Kingsley and Charlotte McDonald-Gibson’s Cast
Away: True Stories of Survival !om Europe’s Refugee Crisis.
Both books aim to describe the experiences of the
people trying to cross the Mediterranean and explain Migrant, Refugee,
why we have seen so many of them since 2011. The Smuggler, Savior
central argument of the books is that ordinary By Tuesday Reitano,
people faced with terrible circumstances will do Peter Tinti
whatever it takes to survive. Denied legal, orderly
Published 04.04.2017
means to reach Europe, people are forced to take Oxford University Press
unsafe voyages aboard skiffs, dinghies, and ra!s to 352 Pages
reach safety. With my American passport, I can book
a flight to France right now and be under the Eiffel
Tower by the time the sun rises tomorrow. A Syrian
seeking refuge in France must enlist the help of a
smuggler and endure a perilous journey across land
and sea. The only difference between us is a matter
of politics: I am deemed worthy to travel by the
relevant governments, the Syrian is not.

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Kingsley follows the harrowing journey of the civil

servant Hashem al-Souki as he flees "om Syria. He
had been tortured six months in secret government
dungeons, along with 11,000 other detained
compatriots. He doesn’t even know why. Upon his
arbitrary release, Souki decided to flee his home
with his wife, Hayam, and their three sons.

The Soukis sell all they have and escape to Egypt,

which is its own nightmare. Work is hard to come
by and the family is regularly harassed by the police.
Finally a "iend offers to pay the $7,000 needed to
smuggle them on a boat across the Mediterranean. BUY THIS BOOK
A!er months of waiting and several aborted
attempts to travel with the whole family, Souki AROUND THE WORLD
embarked alone and survived six days at sea before
POLITICS
the Italian coast guard rescued his boat. “It’s over,”
Souki thinks. “The journey is over.”

Except that it’s not. According to an EU law called

the Dublin Regulation, asylum seekers must claim RECOMMENDED
asylum in the first EU country they arrive in. But
“The Newcomers” Is an
Souki, like most other refugees arriving in Europe, Antidote to Anti-Refugee
did not want to register in Italy (or Greece), which Rhetoric Invading Politics
offered very little for them. His goal was Germany By Jennifer Oldham

or, better yet, Sweden. So Souki had to make it The Bottom Rung of
north, by land, without getting caught. Migrant Hierarchy:
Afghans in Istanbul
By Helen Mackreath
Souki’s European rail adventure has the twists and
turns of a spy film. Three years and one week to the Migrant Vernaculars:
Deepak Unnikrishnan’s
day a!er his abduction by the Syrian government,
“Temporary People”
having survived a “journey of epic heroism — a kind By Jacob Rama Berman
of latter-day Homeric odyssey,” Hashem al-Souki’s
Aleppo Burning: The Ban
train glides into Sweden.
on Immigration and the
Middle East Refugee Crisis
But, yet again, it’s not over. His arrival marks the By Michelle Tusan

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beginning of a bureaucratic odyssey, as he waits in Refugee or Migrant

By Helen Mackreath
“purgatory” for a decision on his asylum application
in a dormitory for refugees in a remote village. The At Home with Syrian
pleasantness of the village only heightens the Refugees and Their Hosts
By Helen Mackreath
loneliness and despair, and the state of limbo wears
heavily on him.

Interspersed between the legs of Souki’s saga,

Kingsley tells the wider story of the refugee crisis.
His sharp reporting "om 17 countries gives him the
scope to cover the issue’s grand trends and dynamics
and its tales of loss and redemption. His reporting
"om aboard the Bourbon Argos, a ship Médicines San
Frontières uses for rescue missions in the
Mediterranean, is especially rich, and unique "om
the other books. In just one morning, off the coast of
Libya, Kingsley witnesses the noble crew of the
Argos rescue 350 Eritreans and Somalis off a wooden
skiff and then, as the Eritreans sit on the deck
singing hosannas to the glory of God, rush to
retrieve another 650 souls “crammed onto every last
plank of the deck, and into every last space in the
hold” of a boat 40 minutes away.

Charlotte McDonald-Gibson’s Cast Away is a similarly

exquisite braid of tragic, heroic stories. Sina Habte
and her adoring husband Dani ran "om the
oppressive dictatorship in Eritrea to give the child
she was carrying the chance for a "ee life, and four
days past her due date took a treacherous crossing
over the Aegean. Majid Hussain sought refuge in
Libya a!er watching his father get murdered in an
eruption of sectarian violence in Nigeria, only to
find himself forced at gunpoint onto a boat in the
Mediterranean by the Libyan military — a flotilla of
human flotsam that Muammar Gaddafi hoped would

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"ighten Europe into ending its bombing campaign

against him. Nart Bajoi, a young Syrian lawyer and
Microso! Certified Solutions Expert involved in the
anti-Assad movement, decided to flee a!er all of his
"iends either joined the armed resistance or
disappeared. Mohammed Kazkji, who aimed “to be
the world’s best electrician,” escaped to Cairo to
avoid conscription into the Syrian military to fight
his neighbors and countrymen yearning for
"eedom. And Hanan al-Hasan, a mother seeking
nothing but safety for her four children as life fell
apart in the midst of Syria’s civil war, “pulled down
the shutters, watered the plants, and locked the
doors of the family home” before setting out.

By skillfully weaving together the details of these

lives as they trudge toward the promise of Europe,
McDonald-Gibson also recounts the crisis "om
multiple lenses. The suspenseful tales of personal
trials portray the humanitarian emergency "om a
ground-level view.

Both books heavily feature pointed criticism of

European leaders and media. They repeatedly call
out politicians for giving up values they so long
proselytized to the very people they now deny entry.
Fearing the influx of black, brown, and o!en Muslim
migrants, fearing terrorism (particularly a!er the
Paris attacks), and fearing the rise of xenophobic
rightwing parties, most of the leaders of Europe
crumpled before the challenge. “While politicians
have felt able to lament the nameless dead,” writes
McDonald-Gibson, “they have shown less empathy
toward the nameless living seeking refuge on
European soil.” The so-called tidal wave of people
represents only 0.2 percent of the EU’s 500 million

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citizens, and, Kingsley argues, “the world’s richest

continent” certainly can make room for them easily,
if they cared to try.

Not only have European politicians failed to

implement their values, their actions and inactions
have made the crisis worse and led to more suffering
and more deaths. For instance, in October 2014, the
Italian government ended Operation Mare Nostrum,
the naval search-and-rescue campaign that saved
over 100,000 migrants in its year-long mission. In its
place, the EU launched a much smaller naval
mission mandated merely to patrol Europe’s nautical
boundaries, not to perform search and rescue. The
policy was based on the convenient assumption that
rescue missions only encourage migrants to take to
the sea, leading to more tragedies. Ending Mare
Nostrum did just the opposite. In the months a!er
the mission ended, even more people tried to cross
to Europe, and many more died. “The decision to let
people drown in the Mediterranean had not
convinced people to stay put,” Kingsley finds.
“Instead, it had led to more deaths than ever before.”

The European Union is clear in its ideals: “[T]he

values of respect for human dignity, "eedom,
democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for
human rights.” It’s beautiful and, for millions of
migrants, meaningless. As McDonald-Gibson asks,
“What use would that scrap of paper be in the
middle of the Mediterranean?”

Hannah Arendt, herself a refugee "om Germany,

argued that people without a state are deprived of

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“the right to have rights.”

These rightless refugees “no longer belong to any

community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they
are not equal before the law, but that no law exists
for them.” Outside any political community, refugees
and other stateless people are le! completely
unprotected and vulnerable to those who seek to
exploit them. The multi-billion-dollar global human
smuggling industry that thrives in this space
“outside the pale of the law,” in Arendt’s words, is
brilliantly described and explained by Peter Tinti and
Tuesday Reitano in Migrant, Refugee, Smuggler, Savior
(MRSS). With keen eyes for human details and
impersonal global systems, Tinti and Reitano are able
to explain seemingly unexplainable abuses.

The pivotal insight in MRSS is that human smugglers

are “service providers in an era of unprecedented
demand.” Millions of people are desperate for safety,
safe countries are unwilling to institute legal means
to reach it, and so smugglers fill a capitalistic gap. By
shi!ing the perspective to the individuals and
organizations that move migrants, Tinti and Reitano
reveal a logical, profit-maximizing underworld of
double-entry bookkeeping, supply chain
management, and ruthless violence. Human
smuggling is just like any other competitive
industry: it operates according to the laws of supply
and demand; buyers and sellers respond to
incentives; firms seek opportunities to expand and
professionalize; multiple business models have
emerged and prosper. Stripped of the sensationalism,
human smuggling involves an enterprise providing a
service to a client for a price.

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O!en refugees themselves working to fund the next

leg of their journey, the smugglers are a diverse cast
who evince the complexities of this business. Take
Ibrahim, who drives migrants "om Agadez, Niger, to
the Libyan border. He knows that once his
passengers — who paid $200 to $300 — cross into
Libya, anything could happen to them: robbery,
extortion, forced prostitution, sexual violence. “They
have no morals,” he says of the armed bandits who
prey on the travelers. But what Ibrahim really wants
to tell his interviewers about are his own struggles at
the bleak edges of the world economy. Ibrahim and
his "iends “see themselves on the raw end of a deal
that they never agreed to.”

Barka, on the other hand, loves his job. A Chadian

with fake Nigérien papers, Barka also moves people
through the vast Sahel desert between Niger and
Libya. The money is good — certainly better than
any other option — but more importantly,
smuggling is exciting. It gives Barka the opportunity
to be the fast-driving, gunslinging, swashbuckling
hero of his own adventure. “If you ask Barka,” they
write, “he will tell you that his current lifestyle is
the best he has ever lived.”

And smugglers aren’t the only ones making money.

“Many are eating off these migrants,” explains a
municipal o$cial in Agadez. “The drivers, the fixers,
the landlords […] Police are eating, too.” In fact,
bribes "om migrants are one of the few things
keeping Niger’s security forces afloat. In Izmir,
Turkey, an employee of a hotel that is overbooked by
Syrians confesses, “It’s di$cult, but it’s good
business.” Elsewhere in Izmir, Ghaith, a Syrian
refugee who found himself stuck in Turkey a!er a

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smuggler ripped him off, is doing well as a life vest

salesman. Though he le! home with his mind set on
Europe, Turkey is working out fine enough, and
Ghaith says he has no reason to risk death on the sea
to Greece.

Each life vest sale, each forged passport, each bus

journey, each sea voyage adds up. The illicit
movement of people is a big business. Precise
calculations are impossible, but estimates put it in
the billions per year, and its profits now outpace
those made tra$cking drugs. In 2015, the human
smuggling industry in the Aegean alone was making
at least $2 million each day.

As is true of the rest of the global economy, a

privileged few are making a killing (o!en with the
implicit blessing or explicit protection of powerful
state actors). But unlike most licit world markets, the
underground smuggling economy actually trickles
down to some of the poorest places on Earth. In the
slums of megacities and remote desert outposts,
smuggling neighbors and strangers has created jobs
for people seemingly forgotten by the rest of the
world. It’s globalization that can work for the poor.

One of the great strengths of MRSS is how it plumbs

the interconnections of the global economy’s centers
and peripheries. Tinti and Reitano trace how
decisions in European capitals reverberate in
smuggler caravans traversing the Sahara, almost
always incentivizing danger and harm.

In portraying smugglers as value-neutral service

providers, Tinti and Reitano are able to reveal
another, perhaps surprising facet of the industry: for

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many migrants, their smuggler is their savior, even

as he profits "om their trouble. He (and it’s almost
always he) is the one who unlocks the door to safety,
"eedom, and the chance to just live life. The media
may “highlight tales of suffering and hardship,” but
“many of the pictures and posts that populate social
media within migrant and refugee communities are
those of people joyously posing together, having
successfully reached Europe.”

This, too, is part of the ongoing story of mass human

movement. When we only view smugglers as
villains and fail to take in why many see them as
heroes, we foster “bad policies that put migrants at
risk while at the same time empowering criminal
organizations.”

The middle of the Mediterranean, despite all the

attention it attracts, is nowhere near the epicenter of
the crisis. Westerners may only have started to care
when refugees started washing up on the sun-
drenched beaches of idyllic Italian and Greek isles,
but Europe is just a sideshow in a global catastrophe
in which 84 percent of refugees are hosted by poor
countries, and the 40.3 million internally displaced
people are somewhere within their native land.
Turkey leads the world in most refugees hosted for
the third year in a row, followed by Pakistan,
Lebanon, Iran, Uganda, and Ethiopia. That it only
became a “crisis” when Europeans felt directly
threatened tells us a lot about the mindset and
political incentives of the world leaders now trying
to tackle the problem.

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Ben Rawlence’s City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World’s

Largest Refugee Camp offers a glimpse of life for this
majority of refugees, who are far "om both home
and stability. In this haunting book, Rawlence
follows the lives of nine Somali refugees living in
Dadaab refugee camp in northeast Kenya. Though
“camp” doesn’t capture the reality of this place.
Dadaab is a 25-year-old quasi-city, home, at the time
of Rawlence’s writing, to nearly half a million
people. Ten thousand babies have been born in the
camp to parents who were born in the camp —
third-generation Dadaab refugees. Though
“unmarked on any o$cial map,” it is the largest
settlement for hundreds of miles.

Dadaab and its residents have a liminal existence,

caught between war and peace, Kenyan sovereignty
and foreign aid, international assistance and
international indifference, between a rock and a
hard place. (In etymology that is a bit too on the
nose, Dadaab, in the local language, means “the
rocky hard place,” a reference to the layer of rock
just beneath the sand.) In this di$cult setting,
refugees endeavor to live their lives. Based on five
months of research in the camp, Rawlence tells us
how they fared during a particularly di$cult period
that saw renewed war and famine, the rise of al-
Shabaab, and Kenya’s invasion of Somalia.

Overcrowded, without adequate water or shelter, and

a “public health emergency,” Dadaab “was a
groaning, filthy disease-riddled slum heaving with
traumatized people without enough to eat.” Crime
and violence were endemic; “rape was routine.” It is
illegal for refugees to work in Kenya, so the entire
economy in Dadaab — which accounts for one-

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quarter of its province’s economic output — is a

black market. This further exposes the population to
exploitation by the police and others with the means
to do so.

Western aid dumped in the camps and the wider

region o!en didn’t help, as the intentions of donor
countries do not always match the needs of the
refugees. White House o$cials saw the camp as
nothing more than a terrorist recruitment ground —
never mind the fact that the refugees are the ones
who have actually suffered "om terrorism.

About once a week, illegal convoys of trucks took

people back to Somalia. The civil war there was still
raging, but at least “it’s only the bullets that are the
problem back home,” according to one refugee. Still
others decide to gamble it all and travel over land to
the Mediterranean and then across the sea to Europe.
But for the hundreds of thousands le! languishing
in Dadaab, the least-bad option was to try to imagine
a life outside the camp, to mentally escape what they
physically could not. The refugees coined their own
word for this condition: buufis, “the longing for
resettlement out of the refugee camps. It is a kind of
depression rooted in an inextinguishable hope for a
life elsewhere that simultaneously casts the present
into shadow.” This despair, City of Thorns insists, is
the product of politics — the result of political
choices made in Nairobi, Washington, and Brussels.
Dadaab is a purgatory hosting populations exiled by
a civil war at home and “a world unwilling to
welcome them.”

A!er years of poverty and war, of torture and

degradation, of rejection by those who could help,

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people lose themselves in despair. As Sina says in

Cast Away, “We are almost dead.” It is a feeling that
pushes people onto rickety boats with their children
to give their fate to the swell of the sea. People who
“consider themselves dead,” as a Syrian in The New
Odyssey puts it, will not be stopped by walls,
warnings, stormy waves, or even military attacks
against their boats (something Europe has
considered). They will keep going because, as each
book demonstrates again and again, human beings
all seek the same basic things: we seek to live with
"eedom and dignity and to live without fear. We
seek safety and quiet comforts. We seek better lives
for our children. And to achieve them, we will push
ourselves to our limits, and then push further.
Because when you already feel dead, you have
nothing to lose.

And yet, even at this point, the migrants remain

active sculptors of their own lives. When war comes
to town, or there simply is no food, or the
fundamental elements of one’s being — God, sex,
politics — invites violence, options are limited. But
the books are keen to show that even in these dire
circumstances, people make choices. Some choose to
flee, but others to fight, hide, collaborate, or die at
home. Some even do all of them, and more. Through
it all, as McDonald-Gibson maintains, they are “not a
passive mass.” Casting migrants as victims in a
morality play strips them of their agency, and
provides an incomplete analysis. Amid the constant
slander of migrants and refugees spewed by
politicians and aped by the press, these books
provide a re"eshing reminder that migrants are not
a mindless horde, but thinking and thoughtful,
caring and careful, utterly normal, all-too-human

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human beings. For this alone all of these books are

worth reading.

Seven decades before the current deluge, my

grandmother boarded the Nieuw Amsterdam in the
Port of Rotterdam and sailed to the United States.
The date of her escape — June 2, 1938 — means that
my 13-year-old grandmother, Eva, her older brother
Walter, and my great-grandparents, Hans and Irma
Monasch, missed the worst of it. Five years a!er
Hitler came to power, and nearly three years a!er
being stripped of their German citizenship by the
Nuremberg Laws, the United States granted the four
of them visas, sponsored by one I. Hilb, of Denver,
Colorado. Upon arriving in New York a!er the
seven-day voyage, my grandmother, or one of her
parents, must have handed an American agent her
passport — the two o$cial swastikas stamped in
blue ink over the corners of her photograph giving a
rough outline of her fate had she remained at home.

Five months a!er their flight, during Kristallnacht,

the synagogue in their hometown of Stettin, where
the family celebrated Walter’s bar mitzvah two year
earlier, was burned down, along with 42 other
Jewish-owned shops and buildings in town. The next
day, my great-grandfather — a!er whom I am
named — would have likely been rounded up along
with most Jewish men in town and taken to the
Sachsenhausen concentration camp, about 85 miles
away, where they were held for several weeks before
being allowed to return home. Fi!een months later,
over the night of February 11–12, 1940, Jewish life in
Stettin ended.

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In the Nazi government’s first experiment with

deportations "om the Third Reich, “the Jews of
Stettin […] were roused "om their beds, forced to
sign away all their property except one suitcase, a
watch, and a wedding ring, and taken to the "eight
station by SS and SA men,” according to Christopher
Browning’s authoritative The Origins of the Final
Solution. Had my family still been there, there would
have been four more Jews added to the 1,114 sent to
occupied Poland, where most were eventually
murdered in the camps at Bełżec, Treblinka, and
Auschwitz. But my grandmother, great-uncle, and
great-grandparents were in Chicago, safe across the
sea.

My grandmother’s story is, of course, not unique. It

is little different that Hashem al-Souki’s — except
that my grandmother’s journey was far easier. People
move, and always have moved, in search of better
lives for themselves and their children. Why else
would someone leave everything behind and brave
the seas? What else is worth the risk?

But in the final analysis, the sentimentality of

heritage should not matter. Hazy memories of
ancestral exoduses — memories that so many
repress, and that too easily relieves the responsibility
of citizens with pedigrees unblemished by
persecution — are a poor guide for policy. All that
should matter — regardless of your ancestry — is
that people need refuge today. The books covered
here make this need visible for any who wish to see.

Jonathan Blake is an associate political scientist at the

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“We Are Almost Dead”: The Politics of Migrants and Refugees in an Unequal World - Los Angeles Review of Books 23/02/2018, 20)29

nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation. He is the author

of Contentious Rituals: Parading the Nation in
Northern Ireland, which is forthcoming !om Oxford
University Press.

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Laura Wrzeski • 2 days ago

Well, noble Prof....YOU find room in YOUR house for some of those huddled masses and YOU feed them
and YOU pay for their medical care. The trouble with your moral call to welcome ME and African (and
other) refugees/economic migrants is that people blessed with your position are not the ones obliged to
share low-wage jobs, overburdened social services and overcrowded public schools and tight low-rent
housing markets with indigent newcomers. If we in the west really want refugees/economic migrants to be
welcomed with open arms then those (like you) who are able to afford and/or avoid the economic and
social burdens must make certain that those least able to afford those burdens are NOT the ones suffering
the consequences of your generosity.
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JP > Laura Wrzeski • 12 hours ago

Well, noble Laura Wrzeski...if YOUR governments stopped messing things up for African youths,
they wouldn't be called upon to exercise moral responsibility over the consequences of their actions
and decisions. See, e.g., https://theconversation.com...
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