[Where Will the World Find Refuge in 2024? ]
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NOWHERE TO RUN  
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Rebecca Gordon
January 7, 2024
Tom Dispatch [[link removed]]

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_ Where Will the World Find Refuge in 2024? _

Women who fled Sudan after fighting broke out between the Sudanese
army and the RSF paramilitary force queue to receive food at the UN
transit centre in Renk near the border crossing in Renk County in
South Sudan's Upper Nile State., [Jok Solomun/Reuters]

 

Back in 1968, my father announced that, if Richard Nixon were elected
president that November, he was going to move us all to Canada. I’m
not sure who “us all” actually was, since my younger brother and I
were then living with my mother and my parents had been divorced for
years. Still, he was determined to protect us, should someone he
considered a dangerous anti-Semite make it into the Oval Office —
and leaving the country seemed to him like the best way to do it.

As it happened, Nixon did win in 1968 and none of us moved to Canada.
Still, I suspect my father’s confidence that, if things got too bad
here, we could always head somewhere else (Canada? Israel?) was a
mental refuge for him that fit his own background very well. It was,
after all, what his father had done in 1910, when his family was
attacked by Cossacks in what’s Ukraine today. His parents had him
smuggled out of town in a horse-drawn rig under bales of hay. He then
walked across a significant part of Europe and took a boat from
Antwerp, Belgium, to New York City. There, he was met by a cousin who
brought him to Norfolk, Virginia. Eventually, my grandfather managed
to bring his whole family to Norfolk, where he became, among other
things, the president of his local Zionist club, fostering his dream
of refuge. My father grew up in the haze of that dream.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE WORLD WARS

In fact, my father’s reliance on the guarantee that he could go
“somewhere else” accorded well with the post-World War II
international consensus that people in danger of persecution where
they lived had a right to seek refuge in another country. Shortly
after the formation of the United Nations, that view was codified in
the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees
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The Convention consolidated various treaties created by European
nations to address the desperate situation of millions of people
displaced by the two World Wars. It defined a refugee as a person who:

“As a result of events occurring before 1 January 1951 and owing to
well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion,
nationality, membership of a particular social group or political
opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or,
owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of
that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the
country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events,
is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.”

More recent regional agreements have expanded
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definition to include people subject to external aggression, internal
violence, or the serious disturbance of public order, whose lives, in
short, have become unsustainable thanks to various forms of systemic
violence. The Convention also laid out the obligations of nations
receiving refugees — including providing housing, work permits, and
education — while recognizing that receiving countries might need
assistance from the international community to meet those obligations.
It also affirmed the importance of maintaining family unity (something
blatantly violated by the Trump administration under its policy of
family separation
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the U.S.-Mexican border).

With the phrase “events occurring before 1 January 1951” the
Convention’s framers alluded to the two world wars of the preceding
decades. What they didn’t foresee was that millions more refugees
would be churned up in the second half of the twentieth century, much
less what humanity would prove capable of producing in this one.

The trajectory was clear enough, however, when, the year before Nixon
was elected, the 1967 Protocol
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the Convention removed limits on migration-producing events occurring
after 1951 and geographical restrictions of any sort. No matter when
or where people became refugees, they were now subject to protection
in all 148 nations that signed on, including the United States, which
signed and ratified both the original Convention and the 1967
Protocol.

REFUGEES EVERYWHERE

Twenty-first-century conflicts have already created millions of
refugees. In fact, by mid-year 2023, the U.N. High Commission for
Refugees (UNHCR) put the number at 36.4 million worldwide, a number
that has doubled in just the last seven years. Three countries alone
— Syria (6.5 million), Afghanistan (6.1 million), and Ukraine (5.9
million) —accounted [[link removed]] for
52% of all external refugees in 2023.

And keep in mind that those 36.4 million refugees only include
people _officially registered_ with the UNHCR (30.5 million) or with
UNWRA, the U.N. Works Relief Agency for Palestinians in the Near East
(5.9 million). UNWRA was created in 1952, specifically to serve people
displaced in the formation of Israel in 1948. Unlike the UNHCR, it
provides direct service to registered Palestinian refugees and their
descendants in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank (including East
Jerusalem), and Gaza.

And that figure doesn’t even include the majority of people fleeing
war and other systemic and climate violence, who are “internally
displaced persons.” They are not counted as refugees in the legal
sense because, while they’ve lost their homes, they still remain
inside their own national borders. There were — take a breath —
62.2 million internally displaced persons when the UNHCR issued that
mid-2023 report.

Where do we find the majority of internally displaced persons? More
than 90% of them have been uprooted by events in seven key countries
or regions: Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, various
Latin America and Caribbean countries, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, and
Ukraine.

Which countries are taking in refugees? According to the UNHCR,
“Low- and middle-income countries host 75% of the world’s refugees
and other people in need of international protection.” Furthermore,
“the Least Developed Countries provide asylum to 20% of the
total.” Despite Donald Trump’s histrionic claims
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asylum-seekers pouring into the United States and “poisoning the
blood” of this country, the United States is not, in fact, a major
recipient of international refugees.

Nor is the United Kingdom, whose Tory government has come up with a
perverse scheme to potentially ship any asylum seekers
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Great Britain by boat to Rwanda for “processing” in return for
financial support of various kinds. (In November 2023, that
country’s supreme court nixed the plan
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but in December the government signed a new agreement
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Rwanda, which it claims will satisfy the court’s objections to the
agreement.)

In fact, Americans may be surprised to learn that the two countries
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refugees at the moment are Iran and Turkey, at 3.4 million each,
followed by Germany and Colombia at 2.5 million each and Pakistan at
2.1 million.

Let me highlight just two areas where, at this very moment, refugees
are being created in enormous numbers with no apparent end in sight.
One of them people around the world just can’t take their eyes off
right now (and for good reason!), while the other seems almost
entirely forgotten.

GAZA: Since Hamas’s vicious and criminal October 7th attack on
targets in Israel, the world has focused intently on events in
Israel-Palestine. The UNHCR’s 2023 report was compiled before the
attack and Israel’s subsequent and ongoing genocidal destruction
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Gaza, which has seen the deaths of more than 21,000 Gazans
(a majority
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them women and children) and the loss
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more than half of its housing stock and three-quarters
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its 36 hospitals. In one sense, Gaza’s residents are
not _new_ refugees. More than 85% of its pre-war population of 2.3
million are now “merely” considered internally displaced. Yes,
they have been starved
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of medical care
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water
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by bombs and missiles
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homes and temporary shelters from one part of that 25-mile-long strip
of land to the other, and forced into an ever-shrinking area near
Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. Still, for now they remain in
Gaza with nowhere else to go.

It’s no secret, however, that the Israeli government intends to
change that. On Christmas Day 2023, Prime Minister Netanyahu told
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Israeli newspaper _Hayom Daily _that he is seeking the “voluntary
migration” of Palestinians from Gaza. A week earlier, Trump’s
former U.N. ambassador and now rival for the Republican presidential
nomination, Nikki Haley, had opined
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“the Palestinians should have gone to the Rafah crossing and Egypt
would have taken care of them.” Even if Egypt were willing to accept
more than two million displaced Gazans — which it is not — it
would be hard to see such a migration as anything but a forced
population transfer, which international law considers a crime
against humanity
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SUDAN: While the world has watched Gaza’s decimation in horror, an
even larger refugee crisis in the African nation of Sudan has gone
almost unremarked upon. In 2019, a massive nonviolent movement of
Sudanese civilians led to a military coup against longtime dictator
Omar Bashir. While the military initially agreed to hand power over to
civilian rule in two years, by October 2021, its leaders had declared
their intention
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power, while the United States, despite rhetoric supporting civilian
rule, stood idly by. Since then, war between the military government
and a paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces, has displaced
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million or more within Sudan, while another 1.2 million have fled to
neighboring countries.

GOOD “REFUGEES” AND BAD “ECONOMIC MIGRANTS”

Human beings have always moved around the world, beginning with our
first forays out of Africa 60,000 to 70,000 years ago. However, it is
only within the last two centuries or so that countries have attempted
to control human transit across their borders. International law
concerning refugees is even newer, first forged, as noted, in the
critical period immediately following World War II.

One perhaps unintentional consequence of those laws, created half a
century ago to protect refugees, is the relatively new distinction
between them and “economic migrants.” Refugees able to demonstrate
a “well-founded fear of being persecuted” have the right to seek
asylum in any country that’s signed the U.N. refugee convention.
Anyone else, however economically desperate or deeply endangered from,
say, increasingly fierce climate-change-induced weather extremes, has
no actual right under international law to move to a safer country.
That legal reality hardly makes the existential desperation of such
migrants any less genuine, as evidenced by the fact that they risk —
and lose — their lives daily in perilous sea crossings
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thousand-mile treks like the one that passes through Central
America’s deadly Darien Gap
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a bid for survival. At present, however, international law offers them
no special protection.

This will have to change, and quickly, as global warming makes ever
more parts of the world increasingly uninhabitable, often in the very
areas that are the least responsible
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the actual burning of fossil fuels. We all live on one planet, and no
country or individual
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no matter how rich, can hope to remain insulated from the ever more
devastating effects of the continued record burning
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fossil fuels and the desperate overheating of our planet.

BAD NEWS AT THE BORDER

My father was pretty sure that the Canadians would be glad to receive
him and his kids in the event of Nixon’s election. I don’t know
what the rules were back then, but today Canada allows
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Entry for skilled immigrants,” presumably including people from the
U.S. wishing to cross that country’s southern border.

It’s not so easy, however, for immigrants, skilled or otherwise,
hoping to cross the southern border of the United States these days.
Despite our signature on the Convention on refugees, people seeking
refugee status in this country now face almost insurmountable
barriers. And those designated mere “economic” migrants have
little hope of ever gaining legal residence in the United States.

Despite his promise [[link removed]] to take
“immediate actions to reform our immigration system,” three years
after his election and the defeat of the man who had promised to build
that “big, fat, beautiful wall
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on our southern border, President Biden has done little to alleviate
the situation. While he did end the Trump family separation plan and
allow Covid-era restrictions
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migration to expire, he’s kept in place a version of another Trump
policy: denying asylum
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the United States to migrants who fail to first request it in another
country they’re passing through on the way to this one. So, as many
as 10,000 immigrants a day now cross illegally
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the United States. Since May, almost half a million of them have been
caught and deported
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As of this writing, 11,000 are living in camps on the Mexican side of
the border, having applied for asylum using the Biden
administration’s cell phone app. No one knows how long they will be
there while this country’s overburdened asylum system limps along
and election 2024 fast approaches (along with Trump’s proposed plans
to create vast border deportation camps
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To be fair to Biden, with the exception of President Obama’s
creation of a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
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status for immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally as children, no
administration or Congress has done much of significance over the past
40 years to address immigration issues in this country. What
institutions do exist, including immigration courts, remain
desperately underfunded, leading to staggeringly lengthy waiting times
for asylum applicants.

The situation at the frontiers of wealthy countries like the U.S. will
undoubtedly only get worse. Nations like ours can’t hope to keep the
human urge for survival forever bottled up on our borders.

My father said he’d go to Canada if Nixon were elected. Recently,
I’ve heard a few friends echo that intention should another
dangerous authoritarian — Donald Trump — regain the White House in
January 2025. If that were to happen, people around the world,
citizens and migrants, the sheltered and unsheltered alike, can expect
things to get so much worse. For us in the United States, emigration
won’t be an option. Like it or not, we’ll have to stay and fight.

_Copyright 2024 Rebecca Gordon.  _Cross-posted with permission. May
not be reprinted without permission from TomDispatch
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_Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular
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taught for many years in the philosophy department at the University
of San Francisco. Now, semi-retired from teaching, she continues to be
an activist in her faculty union. She is the author of Mainstreaming
Torture
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and American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for
Post-9/11 War Crimes
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* refugees
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* Global warming
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* conflicts
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* poverty
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