Disruption: the 19th Oxford Human Rights Festival

 

For further details and to book to attend any of these events, please click here.

CENDEP webinar on durable solutions

 

Never-ending displacement has become the norm and the so-called durable solutions of return, local integration and resettlement are out of reach for most forced migrants. Yet, most refugee hosting governments and international organisations are still using the language of ‘solutions’ while people all over the world are stuck in displacement without a solution in sight. At the same time, people living with displacement continue to get on with their lives and develop their own solutions albeit with limitations on access to rights and resources. Durable solutions must always be understood in the particular context of where displacement takes place and in this webinar we situated the discourse of durable solutions in four different situations of displacement.

 

The upcoming webinar is one of a series on durable solutions organised by CENDEP. It is FREE and registration will be required via Eventbrite to access Zoom meeting link

 

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/durable-solutions-webinar-tickets-140271089605

Moving Minorities: COVID-19 and the Boy with Two Hearts

Rhiannon Croker is a student on CENDEP's Masters in Humanitarianism and Peacebuilding (HAP). She reflects on COVID-19, refugees, the role of literature in helping us rethink our moral imagination - and Hamed Amiri's "love letter to the NHS."

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the number of people forcibly displaced around the world has doubled in the past decade and is estimated to have passed 80 million in mid-2020. Since 1 January 2021, the IOM has recorded 144 migrant fatalities worldwide with 87 of these occurring in the Mediterranean Sea. Yet, and even closer to home, new research from the Institute of Race Relations has revealed that in 2020 almost 300 asylum seekers, including 36 children, died trying to cross the Channel to the UK in the past 20 years. 

 

Quantitative data has the ability to group individual migrants into large homogeneous groups based on country of origin, ethnicity, cause of death, economic status, political affiliation, skill sets, means of travel, and fear of persecution amongst others. These figures are fundamental in understanding the scale of the present world refugee crisis, and they help us to compare migration today to mass exoduses of the past. However, with these figures come people; individuals with stories to tell. It is time that we listened.

 

Britain is often heralded as a country in which the rights and welfare of survivors of conflict and persecution are well embedded, and where the standard of living conditions of those seeking asylum is relatively high. However, the UK’s hostile environment agenda is about making borders part of everyday life. Government policy ensures that a hostile dichotomy of ‘self’ and ‘other’, that fuels anti-migrant sentiment, is entrenched within the national imagination; an ideological counterpart to the construction of oppressive border infrastructure. Yet, migrant literature can help us to re-think our moral imagination through understanding the social and personal contexts which prompt individuals to leave their homes and seek refuge elsewhere. There is a rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment in the UK, and this often stems from hyperbolic rhetoric utilised by the Home Office, politicians and the media who market asylum seekers as economic migrants. Such rhetoric is leading UK citizens to believe that an increase in migration is putting extreme pressure on our resources such as food, housing, jobs, and social services. Dina Nayeri, author of The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You, poignantly expresses the truth of this sentiment:

 

Unlike economic migrants, refugees have no agency; they are no threat. Often, they are so broken, they beg to be remade into the image of the native. As recipients of magnanimity, they can be pitied. (...) But if you are born in the Third World and you dare to make a move before you are shattered, your dreams are suspicious. You are a carpetbagger, an opportunist, a thief. You are reaching above your station. 

 

The question is, a thief of what? The truth is, the COVID-19 pandemic has fuelled an unprecedented exodus of migrant workers that has caused the UK population to drastically drop – potentially resulting in profound damage to our economy. These men and women have helped to build the UK and to make it a better home for us all. What we are witnessing now is no migrant crisis. Arguably, in the UK at least, there never was one.

 

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