The global crisis of people forcibly displaced by conflict or persecution is expressed in many ways — in faceless numbers, always millions more than in the previous year; in the images of desperate people crowded onto rickety boats; in the pictures of endless tents on a barren, dusty field. Around the world, at least 50 million people either have been displaced inside their countries or have fled to foreign lands. Some, like Palestinians, have lived as refugees for generations; some, like Syrians and Ukrainians, are fleeing more recent conflicts; some, like the Rohingya of Myanmar, run from systematic persecution.
Once away from their homes, they become a “problem” — wards of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency or the countries in which they take refuge, usually as an unwanted and resented burden. In the many conferences and diplomatic discussions about refugees, their own voices are rarely heard. But when they are, as in the poetry of the Somali-British poet Warsan Shire, it is a cry of desperation: “You have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.”
On World Refugee Day, June 20, the U.N.H.C.R. is expected to issue another report, which is certain to point out the appalling global growth in the number of refugees and that the overwhelming majority, 86 percent, live in developing countries, which are least able to support them. Unfortunately, it is only when the human tide overflows its Third World boundaries, like the boatloads of Africans trying to cross the Mediterranean into Europe or the Syrians trying to cross from a refugee-saturated Turkey into Greece or Bulgaria, that the rich nations begin a panicky search for remedies.
The discussions in Europe about assigning refugee quotas across the Continent or about combating the unscrupulous people smugglers do at least raise awareness of the issue and its Europewide ramifications. But the flood of immigrants also feeds the growth of xenophobic fringe parties, making all politicians wary of opening their doors wide. In Australia, Prime Minister Tony Abbott has virtually closed the doors to boat people, shunting them off instead to countries like Cambodia or Papua New Guinea on the argument that allowing refugees into Australia would only encourage more refugees to take dangerous risks with the smugglers.
In the United States, a country proud of its tradition of welcoming “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” fewer than 1,000 Syrian refugees, of the almost four million who have fled the country since 2011, have been accepted. Efforts by the State Department to nudge the figure up a notch have been resisted by legislators claiming, as did Representative Michael McCaul, the Texas Republican who heads the House Homeland Security Committee, that this would create a “federally funded jihadi pipeline” for Islamist militants.
It is clear that the United States and other developed countries must find more room for refugees and must distribute the burden equitably, and it is equally clear that the U.N.H.C.R. and other agencies dealing with the millions of refugees must be amply funded. But these improvements alone will not solve the problem. Nor will building higher fences. So long as there is conflict and persecution, people will risk losing all in an effort to reach safer shores. In the words of Ms. Shire, “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.”
But it should not take mass drownings in the Bay of Bengal or the Mediterranean for governments to take action. It’s possible for wealthier nations to anticipate the continuing waves of displaced people and to shape long-term, orderly ways to help them weather the upheavals in their homelands or, if it becomes necessary, to help them settle in new lands, the way many of our parents and grandparents did.