Nine Moments of Real Talk About Refugees and Immigration
It’s all over the news: the refugee crisis, immigration status, asylum, Paris, Belgium, Syria, Turkey. The movement of hundreds of thousands of people is the story of now. It’s part of why we’re working on Ghost Boat—but it’s a bigger, more complicated conversation than can be captured in any one project.
Luckily, there’s a wealth of great material on Medium to pick through. We thought we’d share some of the most interesting things we’ve seen.
Let’s start in Eritrea, where most of the people on board the Ghost Boat were from—in fact, where a large proportion of all the world’s refugees are from. Peter Schafer explores the country in a Vantage photo essay.
Many of Eritrea’s refugees go to Europe, as we know, and the stories there—form Eritrea and beyond—are fascinating. Not Numbers published this piece by Waseem Khrtabeel on a complicated journey from Syria to the Netherlands.
We gathered food and some blankets. She started to talk about where she had come from. She had to flee from her home in Iraq. She told me which countries they crossed: from Iraq they walked to Turkey, from Turkey they continued by boat to Greece. Because they were poor, they weren’t able to take a flight or a train to Germany. So they walked.
Meanwhile, in Dutch, Nathalie Wendt explores the story of refugees in the Netherlands by looking back at the movement of people fleeing the Nazis.
Across the Atlantic, Ghost Boat’s own Rachel Glickhouse has been building a terrific series on immigration called My Time In Line, in which people are telling stories about their own experience of trying to get into the U.S.
There’s a ton of great storytelling to be found there, but start with Dan-el Padilla Peralta explaining how he came from the Dominican Republic in 1989, and had the support of Princeton and even Bill Clinton—and remains mired in green card hell. Ben Huh wrote about how—even though they reached the U.S. legally—his family was almost deported.
Back in the Mediterranean, Captain John Dalby—courtesy of Maritime Executive—asks the question of whether search and rescue money is being spent in the right ways. We explored the different approaches that Italy and other European governments have used in the most recent episode of Ghost Boat. Is deploying five more warships the right thing to do? What are the other options?
Just one suitably equipped intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition aircraft such as available through Globalert can patrol, locate, identify even the smallest target; sweeping a sea level footprint of around 130,000 square miles at any one time. It can locate, identify, track and predict waterborne and land movements (up to 70+ miles inland) whilst remaining safely and legally in international airspace. It could co-ordinate waterborne deployments rapidly, effectively and with maximum humanitarian success via the Rome Maritime Co-ordination Centre; at a cost of around $70,000 a week.
In Germany, meanwhile, Jens Reineking explores the situation of asylum seekers and refugees in Germany—and the disparity between different reasons people have for migrating.
“Only” looking for a better life on the other hand is something we have a harder time wrapping our heads around. Perhaps because we Germans tend to play it safe, on average preferring a predictable tomorrow to taking a risk for a better one. Perhaps a luxury born out of our wealth and generally well working social net. Perhaps born out of mentality that often rather seeks consensus than risk standing out.
In Italian, Rossana de Michele has a beautiful little story about love across the Mediterranean. And finally, here’s another beautiful Vantage piece by Brendan Seibel, about the work of the photographer Raphaël Lucas and his series of images looking at the situation of Afghan refugees in Paris.
For years, migrants had found refuge in the neighborhood, a place where volunteers ran soup kitchens all winter long and the cops ignored the encampments sprouting up outside métro stations and along the edges of parks. Things changed in the winter of 2009 and 2010. Afghans were entering France illegally, and immigration officers finally came around to lay down the law. A few caught in the dragnet were deported, some were accused of human trafficking and thrown to the courts. The luckiest were already in the system after applying for asylum and released. Slowly they returned to their old stomping grounds, numbers swelling as new faces emerged from the thousands of miles journey, but now the threat of arrest was added to the checklist of headaches dogging those living in Paris without papers.
Onward.
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