No refuge: ethics and the global refugee crisis

This text confronts the ethical dimension of the global refugee crisis. When most people think of the global refugee crisis, they think of Syrians crossing the Mediterranean in flimsy boats into Europe or caravans of Central Americans arriving at the US border. Yet behind these images there is a second crisis: refuge itself has all but evaporated for millions of people fleeing persecution and violence. Refugees have only three real options - squalid refugee camps, urban slums, or dangerous journeys to seek asylum - and none of these provide access to the minimum conditions of human dignity. 'No Refuge' makes visible to readers the crisis that refugees experience in the 21st century: for refugees, there is no refugee.

Drawing from extensive, eye-opening first-person accounts, No Refuge puts a spotlight on the millions of refugees worldwide who have to leave home but find nowhere to resettle. As political philosopher Serena Parekh argues, this is not just a problem for politicians. Citizens also have a moral duty to help resolve the global refugee crisis and to end the suffering and denial of human rights that refugee are forced to endure, often for years. While the media usually focus on the challenges that Western states have with the arrival of large numbers of asylum seekers and refugees, the real problem is that millions are stuck in inhumane conditions in refugee camps and urban centers, with little chance of finding a more permanent solution. Grounded in powerful testimony from refugees and meticulous research on the conditions in which so many suffer worldwide, No Refuge shows why, as states but also as citizens, we cannot afford to wait any longer to end this crisis.

"In 2015, Sina Habte's limp, pregnant body floated off the coast of Greece. Already past her due date when she boarded a flimsy boat to cross the Mediterranean Sea, Sina, wanted nothing more than to deliver her baby somewhere safe. A chemical engineer and citizen of the small African country of Eritrea, she'd spent 6 months fleeing almost certain life-long imprisonment, if not torture or death, for violating one of Eritrea's draconian rules. In her case, she wanted to live with her husband Dani instead of where the government assigned her. Eritrea is a country so repressive that its considered the North Korea of Africa. After escaping Eritrea, sneaking across borders and living in the shadows of several different countries, she had nowhere else to go. If she returned home, she would be imprisoned, tortured or killed, and if she stayed in a refugee camp in Africa, it was likely that she would be found by Eritrean agents and returned home to the same punishment. So Sina, like tens of thousands of others like her, paid the last of her money to smugglers and boarded a small, over-crowded boat bound for Europe in the hope of claiming asylum. When her boat capsized, as so many boats did, she became one of those refugees that people would see on the news. And for many, images of bodies like hers, drowned at sea or in overcrowded life-boats, struck a nerve. Shock often turned to horror when the images were of the bodies of young children who had drown at sea. People could no longer ignore the plight of asylum seekers and began to demand a response to this crisis. The summer of 2015 marked the beginning of the so-called European refugee crisis. While people had been entering Europe as asylum seekers for a long time, the rate intensified dramatically in 2015 when more than 1.3 million asylum seekers arrived asking for refugee status, tens of thousands more than previous years. The arrival of over a million refugees in a relatively short period of time was seen by many observers as a crisis. Such an unprecedented increase raised many questions for European citizens. Many people wanted to know: do we have obligations to help all these refugees? Is it enough to give them food and send them home or must we let them stay? Do we really have the capacity to help everyone?"--