The labels vary, refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, but these labels are usually badges of misery. People, human beings, uprooted forcibly, or fleeing hurriedly, in fear and desperation. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, in 2017, 65.6 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide because of persecution, conflict, violence, or human rights violations alone. Think of that figure, approximately the population of the UK hurriedly uprooted and moved on, usually in fear and desperation.
A river of misery flows from Africa and washes over the graveyard that is the Mediterranean Sea, the inscription “We are not all there – The drowned are missing” is a bitter one. Those who survive that passage find themselves locked in groups at various borders, living in deprivation or in detention centres. Held at the vagaries of the autocratic states, who see them, not as suffering human beings, but as a problem of control.
The lot of the refugee, asylum seeker, migrant, is one of being stalked, and if found to be lacking the necessary piece of paper, locked up in some inhumane detention centre, with the constant threat of being thrown back into the hell that they tried to escape. A hell, in most cases, caused by the foreign policy of the host nations, who treat them like cattle. They will be stalked by uniformed gangs of thugs, paid members of the state's protection squad, whose duties are to protect the rich and powerful. These paid minions of the state with complete lack of morality will always obey orders, they are part and parcel of this corrupt and dying system.
The so called "refugee/asylum seeker/migrant" crisis will only disappear when we end this system of capitalism, that sees humans as productive units or surplus to requirements. This system that spawns wars as a means of profit, that destroys vast swaths of the planet for control of resources, creating that 65.6 million "displaced persons". History tells us a bitter story written in letters of blood, of the dismal failure of this man made system. The future is yet unwritten, we can write that future, a future of humanity, mutual aid, co-operation and sustainability. A future where no one is a refugee, or an asylum seeker, where those power drawn lines known as borders, melt and fade into the dust of history. Only the ordinary people of this world can write that future, but only when they discard the man made cancer that is capitalism and abandon any belief in "leaders" and party "messiahs" who offer to guide them to that "pie-in the-sky" illusion of the promised land.
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