short essay about refugees

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Refugees: A Very Short Introduction

Gil loescher.

Refugees and other forced migrants are one of the great contemporary challenges the world is confronting. Throughout the world people leave their home countries to escape war, natural disasters, and cultural and political oppression. Unfortunately, even today, the international community struggles to provide an adequate response to this vast population in need. This Very Short Introduction covers a broad range of issues around the causes and impact of the contemporary refugee crisis for both receiving states and societies, for global order, and for refugees and other forced migrants themselves. Gil Loescher discusses the identity of refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced persons and how they differ from other forced migrants. He also investigates the long history of the refugee phenomenon and how refugees became a central concern of the international community during the twentieth and twenty first centuries, as well as considering the responses provided by governments and international aid organisations to refugee needs. Loescher concludes by focussing on the necessity of these bodies to understand the realities of the contemporary refugee situation in order to best respond to its current and future challenges.

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"Our inheritance was left to us by no testament" – René Char

“We Refugees” – an essay by Hannah Arendt

There is something powerfully raw and vivid about Hannah Arendt’s essay that came out in the midst of Europe’s darkness in the Second World War, before the worst horrors inflicted upon the Jews were fully unveiled. Originally published in January 1943 as “We Refugees” in a small Jewish journal called Menorah (shut down in 1961), the piece captures what it really means to be a refugee – the endless anxiety, ravaging despair, deluded optimism, jolting absurdity and even the humour of the “refugee.” What it is to be a wandering individual in search for dignity within a larger collective that “fight like madmen for private existences with individual destinies.” Arendt’s larger lesson is poignant: “The comity of European peoples went to pieces when, and because, it allowed its weakest member to be excluded and persecuted.” A message that projects a long arm into the present and can be read in the current global context that sees indifference and outright hostility to refugees, a political and social attitude that can only come at the price of exacerbating tensions and rupturing the moral fabric of the perpetrators of such indifference and hostility. 

“We Refugees”

In the first place, we don’t like to be called “refugees.” We ourselves call each other “newcomers” or “immigrants.” Our newspapers are papers for “Americans of German language”; and, as far as I know, there is not and never was any club founded by Hitler-persecuted people whose name indicated that its members were refugees.

A refugee used to be a person driven to seek refuge because of some act committed or some political opinion held. Well, it is true we have had to seek refuge; but we committed no acts and most of us never dreamt of having any radical opinion. With us the meaning of the term “refugee” has changed. Now “refugees” are those of us who have been so unfortunate as to arrive in a new country without means and have to be helped by Refugee Committees.

Before this war broke out we were even more sensitive about being called refugees. We did our best to prove to other people that we were just ordinary immigrants. We declared that we had departed of our own free will to countries of our choice, and we denied that our situation had anything to do with “so-called Jewish problems.” Yes, we were “immigrants” or “newcomers” who had left our country because, one fine day, it no longer suited us to stay, or for purely economic reasons. We wanted to rebuild our lives, that was all. In order to rebuild one’s life one has to be strong and an optimist. So we are very optimistic.

Our optimism, indeed, is admirable, even if we say so ourselves. The story of our struggle has finally become known. We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings. We left our relatives in the Polish ghettos and our best friends have been killed in concentration camps, and that means the rupture of our private lives.

Nevertheless, as soon as we were saved—and most of us had to be saved several times—we started our new lives and tried to follow as closely as possible all the good advice our saviors passed on to us. We were told to forget; and we forgot quicker than anybody ever could imagine. In a friendly way we were reminded that the new country would become a new home; and after four weeks in France or six weeks in America, we pretended to be Frenchmen or Americans. The most optimistic among us would even add that their whole former life had been passed in a kind of unconscious exile and only their new country now taught them what a home really looks like. It is true we sometimes raise objections when we are told to forget about our former work; and our former ideals are usually hard to throw over if our social standard is at stake. With the language, however, we find no difficulties: after a single year optimists are convinced they speak English as well as their mother tongue; and after two years they swear solemnly that they speak English better than any other language—their German is a language they hardly remember.

In order to forget more efficiently we rather avoid any allusion to concentration or internment camps we experienced in nearly all European countries—it might be interpreted as pessimism or lack of confidence in the new homeland. Besides, how often have we been told that nobody likes to listen to all that; hell is no longer a religious belief or a fantasy, but something as real as houses and stones and trees. Apparently nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.

Even among ourselves we don’t speak about this past. Instead, we have found our own way of mastering an uncertain future. Since everybody plans and wishes and hopes, so do we. Apart from the general human attitudes, however, we try to clear up the future more scientifically. After so much bad luck we want a course as sure as a gun. Therefore, we leave the earth with all its uncertainties behind and we cast our eyes up to the sky. The stars tell us—rather than the newspapers—when Hitler will be defeated and when we shall become American citizens. We think the stars more reliable advisers than all our friends; we learn from the stars when we should have lunch with our benefactors and on what day we have the best chances of filling out one of these countless questionnaires which accompany our present lives. Sometimes we don’t rely even on the stars but rather on the lines of our hand or the signs of our handwriting. Thus we learn less about political events but more about our own dear selves, even though somehow psychoanalysis has gone out of fashion. Those happier times are past when bored ladies and gentlemen of high society conversed about the genial misdemeanors of their early childhood. They don’t want ghost-stories any more; it is real experiences that make their flesh creep. There is no longer any need of bewitching the past; it is spellbound enough in reality. Thus, in spite of our outspoken optimism, we use all sorts of magical tricks to conjure up the spirits of the future.

I don’t know which memories and which thoughts nightly dwell in our dreams. I dare not ask for information, since I, too, had rather be an optimist. But sometimes I imagine that at least nightly we think of our dead or we remember the poems we once loved. I could even understand how our friends of the West coast, during the curfew, should have had such curious notions as to believe that we are not only “prospective citizens” but present “enemy aliens.” In daylight, of course, we become only “technically” enemy aliens—all refugees know this. But when technical reasons prevented you from leaving your home during the dark house, it certainly was not easy to avoid some dark speculations about the relation between technicality and reality.

No, there is something wrong with our optimism. There are those odd optimists among us who, having made a lot of optimistic speeches, go home and turn on the gas or make use of a skyscraper in quite an unexpected way. They seem to prove that our proclaimed cheerfulness is based on a dangerous readiness for death. Brought up in the conviction that life is the highest good and death the greatest dismay, we became witnesses and victims of worse terrors than death—without having been able to discover a higher ideal than life. Thus, although death lost its horror for us, we became neither willing nor capable to risk our lives for a cause. Instead of fighting—or thinking about how to become able to fight back—refugees have got used to wishing death to friends or relatives; if somebody dies, we cheerfully imagine all the trouble he has been saved. Finally many of us end by wishing that we, too, could be saved some trouble, and act accordingly.

Since 1938—since Hitler’s invasion of Austria—we have seen how quickly eloquent optimism could change to speechless pessimism. As time went on, we got worse—even more optimistic and even more inclined to suicide. Austrian Jews under Schuschnigg were such a cheerful people—all impartial observers admired them. It was quite wonderful how deeply convinced they were that nothing could happen to them. But when German troops invaded the country and Gentile neighbours started riots at Jewish homes, Austrian Jews began to commit suicide.

Unlike other suicides, our friends leave no explanation of their deed, no indictment, no charge against a world that had forced a desperate man to talk and to behave cheerfully to his very last day. Letters left by them are conventional, meaningless documents. Thus, funeral orations we make at their open graves are brief, embarrassed and very hopeful. Nobody cares about motives, they seem to be clear to all of us.

I speak of unpopular facts; and it makes things worse that in order to prove my point I do not even dispose of the sole arguments which impress modern people—figures. Even those Jews who furiously deny the existence of the Jewish people give us a fair chance of survival as far as figures are concerned—how else could they prove that only a few Jews are criminals and that many Jews are being killed as good patriots in wartime? Through their effort to save the statistical life of the Jewish people we know that Jews had the lowest suicide rate among all civilized nations. I am quite sure those figures are no longer correct, but I cannot prove it with new figures, though I can certainly with new experiences. This might be sufficient for those skeptical souls who never were quite convinced that the measure of one’s skull gives the exact idea of its content, or that statistics of crime show the exact level of national ethics. Anyhow, wherever European Jews are living today, they no longer behave according to statistical laws. Suicides occur not only among the panic-stricken people in Berlin and Vienna, in Bucharest or Paris, but in New York and Los Angeles, in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.

On the other hand, there has been little reported about suicides in the ghettoes and concentration camps themselves. True, we had very few reports at all from Poland, but we have been fairly well informed about German and French concentration camps.

At the camp of Gurs, for instance, where I had the opportunity of spending some time, I heard only once about suicide, and that was the suggestion of a collective action, apparently a kind of protest in order to vex the French. When some of us remarked that we had been shipped there  “pour crever”  in any case, the general mood turned suddenly into a violent courage of life. The general opinion held that one had to be abnormally asocial and unconcerned about general events if one was still able to interpret the whole accident as personal and individual bad luck and, accordingly, ended one’s life personally and individually. But the same people, as soon as they returned to their own individual lives, being faced with seemingly individual problems, changed once more to this insane optimism which is next door to despair.

We are the first non-religious Jews persecuted—and we are the first ones who, not only  in extremis , answer with suicide. Perhaps the philosophers are right who teach that suicide is the last and supreme guarantee of human freedom; not being free to create our lives or the world in which we live, we nevertheless are free to throw life away and to leave the world. Pious Jews, certainly, cannot realize this negative liberty: they perceive murder in suicide, that is, destruction of what man never is able to make, interference with the rights of the Creator.  Adonai nathan veadonai lakach  (“The Lord hath given and the Lord hath taken away”); and they would add:  baruch shem adonai  (“blessed be the name of the Lord”). For them suicide, like murder, means a blasphemous attack on creation as a whole. The man who kills himself asserts that life is not worth living and the world not worth sheltering him.

Yet our suicides are no mad rebels who hurl defiance at life and the world, who try to kill in themselves the whole universe. Theirs is a quiet and modest way of vanishing; they seem to apologize for the violent solution they have found for their personal problems. In their opinion, generally, political events had nothing to do with their individual fate; in good or bad times they would believe solely in their personality. Now they find some mysterious shortcomings in themselves which prevent them from getting along. Having felt entitled from their earliest childhood to a certain social standard, they are failures in their own eyes if this standard cannot be kept any longer. Their optimism is the vain attempt to keep head above water. Behind this front of cheerfulness, they constantly struggle with despair of themselves. Finally, they die of a kind of selfishness.

If we are saved we feel humiliated, and if we are helped we feel degraded. We fight like madmen for private existences with individual destinies, since we are afraid of becoming part of that miserable lot of  schnorrers  whom we, many of us former philanthropists, remember only too well. Just as once we failed to understand that the so-called  schnorrer  was a symbol of Jewish destiny and not a  shlemihl , so today we don’t feel entitled to Jewish solidarity; we cannot realize that we by ourselves are not so much concerned as the whole Jewish people. Sometimes this lack of comprehension has been strongly supported by our protectors. Thus, I remember a director of a great charity concern in Paris who, whenever he received the card of a German-Jewish intellectual with the inevitable “Dr.” on it, used to exclaim at the top of his voice, “Herr Doktor, Herr Doktor, Herr Schnorrer, Herr Schnorrer!”

The conclusion we drew from such unpleasant experiences was simple enough. To be a doctor of philosophy no longer satisfied us; and we learnt that in order to build a new life, one has first to improve on the old one. A nice little fairy-tale has been invented to describe our behaviour; a forlorn émigré dachshund, in his grief, begins to speak: “Once, when I was a St. Bernard …”

Our new friends, rather overwhelmed by so many stars and famous men, hardly understand that at the basis of all our descriptions of past splendors lies one human truth: once we were somebodies about whom people cared, we were loved by friends, and even known by landlords as paying our rent regularly. Once we could buy our food and ride in the subway without being told we were undesirable. We have become a little hysterical since newspapermen started detecting us and telling us publicly to stop being disagreeable when shopping for milk and bread. We wonder how it can be done; we already are so damnably careful in every moment of our daily lives to avoid anybody guessing who we are, what kind of passport we have, where our birth certificates were filled out—and that Hitler didn’t like us. We try the best we can to fit into a world where you have to be sort of politically minded when you buy your food.

Under such circumstances, St. Bernard grows bigger and bigger. I never can forget that young man who, when expected to accept a certain kind of work, sighed out, “You don’t know to whom you speak; I was Section-manager in Karstadt’s [A great department store in Berlin].” But there is also the deep despair of that middle-aged man who, going through countless shifts of different committees in order to be saved, finally exclaimed, “And nobody here knows who I am!” Since nobody would treat him as a dignified human being, he began sending cables to great personalities and his big relations. He learnt quickly that in this mad world it is much easier to be accepted as a “great man” than as a human being.

The less we are free to decide who we are or to live as we like, the more we try to put up a front, to hide the facts, and to play roles. We were expelled from Germany because we were Jews. But having hardly crossed the French borderline, we were changed into “boches.” We were even told that we had to accept this designation if we really were against Hitler’s racial theories. During seven years we played the ridiculous role of trying to be Frenchmen—at least, prospective citizens; but at the beginning of the war we were interned as “boches” all the same. In the meantime, however, most of us had indeed become such loyal Frenchmen that we could not even criticise a French governmental order; thus we declared it as all right to be interned. We were the first “prisonniers volontaires” history has ever seen. After the Germans invaded the country, the French Government had only to change the name of the firm; having been jailed because we were Germans, we were not freed because we were Jews.

It is the same story all over the world, repeated again and again. In Europe the Nazis confiscated our property; but in Brazil we have to pay 30% of our wealth, like the most loyal member of the  Bund der Auslandsdeutschen.  In Paris we could not leave our homes after eight o’clock because we were Jews; but in Los Angeles we are restricted because we are “enemy aliens.” Our identity is changed so frequently that nobody can find out who we actually are.

Unfortunately, things don’t look any better when we meet with Jews. French Jewry was absolutely convinced that all Jews coming from beyond the Rhine were what they called  Polaks —what German Jewry called  Ostjuden . But those Jews who really came from eastern Europe could not agree with their French brethren and called us  Jaeckes . The sons of these  Jaecke -haters—the second generation born in France and already duly assimilated—shared the opinion of the French Jewish upper class. Thus, in the very same family, you could be called a  Jaecke  by the father and a  Polak  by the son.

Since the outbreak of the war and the catastrophe that has befallen European Jewry, the mere fact of being a refugee has prevented our mingling with native Jewish society, some exceptions only proving the rule. These unwritten social laws, though never publicly admitted, have the great force of public opinion. And such a silent opinion and practice is more important for our daily lives than all official proclamations of hospitality and good will.

Man is a social animal and life is not easy for him when social ties are cut off. Moral standards are much easier kept in the texture of a society. Very few individuals have the strength to conserve their own integrity if their social, political and legal status is completely confused. Lacking the courage to fight for a change of our social and legal status, we have decided instead, so many of us, to try a change of identity. And this curious behavior makes matters much worse. The confusion in which we live is partly our own work.

Some day somebody will write the true story of this Jewish emigration from Germany; and he will have to start with a description of that Mr. Cohn from Berlin who had always been a 150% German, a German super-patriot. In 1933 that Mr. Cohn found refuge in Prague and very quickly became a convinced Czech patriot—as true and loyal a Czech patriot as he had been a German one. Time went on and about 1937 the Czech Government, already under some Nazi pressure, began to expel its Jewish refugees, disregarding the fact that they felt so strongly as prospective Czech citizens. Our Mr. Cohn then went to Vienna; to adjust oneself there a definite Austrian patriotism was required. The German invasion forced Mr. Cohn out of that country. He arrived in Paris at a bad moment and he never did receive a regular residence-permit. Having already acquired a great skill in wishful thinking, he refused to take mere administrative measures seriously, convinced that he would spend his future life in France. Therefore, he prepared his adjustment to the French nation by identifying himself with “our” ancestor Vercingetorix. I think I had better not dilate on the further adventures of Mr. Cohn. As long as Mr. Cohn can’t make up his mind to be what he actually is, a Jew, nobody can foretell all the mad changes he will have to go through.

A man who wants to lose his self discovers, indeed, the possibilities of human existence, which are infinite, as infinite as is creation. But the recovering of a new personality is as difficult—and as hopeless—as a new creation fo the world. Whatever we do, whatever we pretend to be, we reveal nothing but our insane desire to be changed, not to be Jews. All our activities are directed to attain this aim: we don’t want to be refugees, since we don’t want to be Jews; we pretend to be English-speaking people, since German-speaking immigrants of recent years are marked as Jews; we don’t call ourselves stateless, since the majority of stateless people in the world are Jews; we are willing to become loyal Hottentots, only to hide the fact that we are Jews. We don’t succeed and we can’t succeed; under the cover of our “optimism” you can easily detect the hopeless sadness of assimilationists.

With us from Germany the word assimilation received a “deep” philosophical meaning. You can hardly realize how serious we were about it. Assimilation did not mean the necessary adjustment to the country where we happened to be born and to the people whose language we happened to speak. We adjust in principle to everything and everybody. This attitude became quite clear to me once by the words of one of my compatriots who, apparently, knew how to express his feelings. Having just arrived in France, he founded one of these societies of adjustment in which German Jews asserted to each other that they were already Frenchmen. In his first speech he said: “We have been good Germans in Germany and therefore we shall be good Frenchmen in France.” The public applauded enthusiastically and nobody laughed; we were happy to have learnt how to prove our loyalty.

If patriotism were a matter of routine or practice, we should be the most patriotic people in the world. Let us go back to our Mr. Cohn; he certainly has beaten all records. He is that ideal immigrant who always, and in every country into which a terrible fate has driven him, promptly sees and loves the native mountains. But since patriotism is not yet believed to be a matter of practice, it is hard to convince people of the sincerity of our repeated transformations. This struggle makes our own society so intolerant; we demand full affirmation without our own group because we are not in the position to obtain it from the natives. The natives, confronted with such strange beings as we are, become suspicious; from their point of view, as a rule, only a loyalty to our old countries is understandable. That makes life very bitter for us. We might overcome this suspicion if we could explain that, being Jews, our patriotism in our original countries had rather a peculiar aspect. Though it was indeed sincere and deep-rooted. We wrote big volumes to prove it; paid an entire bureaucracy to explore its antiquity and to explain it statistically. We had scholars write philosophical dissertations on the predestined harmony between Jews and Frenchmen, Jews and Germans, Jews and Hungarians, Jews and … Our so frequently suspected loyalty of today has a long history. It is the history of a hundred and fifty years of assimilated Jewry who performed an unprecedented feat: though proving all the time their non-Jewishness, they succeeded in remaining Jews all the same.

The desperate confusion of these Ulysses-wanderers who, unlike their great prototype, don’t know who they are is easily explained by their perfect mania for refusing to keep their identity. This mania is much older than the last ten years which revealed the profound absurdity of our existence. We are like people with a fixed idea who can’t help trying continually to disguise an imaginary stigma. Thus we are enthusiastically fond of every new possibility which, being new, seems able to work miracles. We are fascinated by every new nationality in the same way as a woman of tidy size is delighted with every new dress which promises to give her the desired waistline. But she likes the new dress only as long as she believes in its miraculous qualities, and she discovers that it does not change her stature—or, for that matter, her status.

One may be surprised that the apparent uselessness of all our odd disguises has not yet been able to discourage us. If it is true that men seldom learn from history, it is also true that they may learn from personal experiences which, as in our case, are repeated time and again. But before you cast the first stone at us, remember that being a Jew does not give any legal status in the world. If we should start telling the truth that we are nothing but Jews, it would mean that we expose ourselves to the fate of human beings who, unprotected by any specific law or political convention, are nothing but human beings. I can hardly imagine an attitude more dangerous, since we actually live in a world in which human beings as such have ceased to exist for quite a while, since society has discovered discrimination as the great social weapon by which one may kill men without any bloodshed; since passports or birth certificates, and sometimes even income tax receipts, are no longer formal papers but matters of social distinction. It is true that most of us depend entirely upon social standards, we lose confidence in ourselves if society does not approve us; we are—and always were—ready to pay any price in order to be accepted by society. But it is equally true that the very few among us who have tried to get along without all these tricks and jokes of adjustment and assimilation have paid a much higher price than they could afford: they jeopardized the few chances even our laws are given in a topsy-turvy world.

The attitude of these few whom, following Bernard Lazare, one may call “conscious pariahs,” can as little be explained by recent events alone as the attitude of our Mr. Cohn who tried by every means to become an upstart. Both are sons of the nineteenth century which, not knowing legal or political outlaws, knew only too well social pariahs and their counterpart, social parvenus. Modern Jewish history, having started with court Jews and continuing with Jewish millionaires and philanthropists, is apt to forget about this other trend of Jewish tradition—the tradition of Heine, Rahel Varnhagen, Sholom Aleichemn, of Bernard Lazare, Franz Kafka or even Charlie Chaplin. It is the tradition of a minority of Jews who have not wanted to become upstarts, who preferred the status of “conscious paria.” All vaunted Jewish qualities—the “Jewish heart,” humanity, humor, disinterested intelligence—are pariah qualities. All Jewish shortcomings—tactlessness, political stupidity, inferiority complexes and money-grubbing—are characteristic of upstarts. There have always been Jews who did not think it worth while to change their humane attitude and their natural insight into reality for the narrowness of castle spirit or the essential unreality of financial transactions.

History has forced the status of outlaws upon both, upon pariahs and parvenus alike. The latter have not yet accepted the great wisdom of Balzac’s  “On ne parvient pas deux fois” ; thus they don’t understand the wild dreams of the former and feel humiliated in sharing their fate. Those few refugees who insist upon telling the truth, even to the point of “indecency,” get in exchange for their unpopularity one priceless advantage: history is no longer a closed book to them and politics is no longer the privilege of Gentiles. They know that the outlawing of the Jewish people in Europe has been followed closely by the outlawing of most European nations. Refugees driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their peoples—if they keep their identity. For the first time Jewish history is not separate but tied up with that of all other nations. The comity of European peoples went to pieces when, and because, it allowed its weakest member to be excluded and persecuted.

Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” Menorah Journal 31, no. 1 (January 1943): pp 69-77. 

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“I feel lucky that I do not have anybody in my family who caught the virus so far,” writes Hari C., a refugee from Bhutan who now lives in North Carolina, “but I can feel the fear every second.” His words reflect the challenges of the pandemic for many, but especially those in refugee communities.

Through essays, refugees reflect on their experiences. COVID-19 “completely changed everything,” Bhuwan G., a Bhutanese refugee now living in Springfield, Massachusetts, writes. COVID-19 put “a spotlight on the risk factors faced by refugees and immigrants that lead to a high burden of chronic disease and health disparities.”

We celebrated the festival with fear and worries inside.

As a result of risks and subsequent health disparities, refugees have been disproportionately impacted by the virus. Further, language and cultural barriers make navigating the health care system difficult. Writes Bhuwan: “Imagine trying to make sense of directions in a language you don’t understand for which button to press on the phone to speak with a nurse.”

The pandemic affected businesses and tested families. Upendra D. owned a liquor store in Pittsburgh but was forced to sell it when the government classified his work as non-essential. Gopal A. writes that his job continued, but his wife’s did not. When Ganesh G. lost his grandfather to COVID, he relied on traditional values of “self-respect and due diligence” for strength. Despite the pandemic's risks, Hari C.’s family gathered to celebrate traditional Hindu festivals.

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Why accepting refugees is a win-win-win formula

Subscribe to global connection, dany bahar dany bahar nonresident senior fellow - global economy and development.

June 19, 2018

This World Refugees Day, I want to challenge what seems to be the conventional wisdom regarding refugees. Not only are refugees not a burden, rather they are welfare-enhancing assets. Indeed, accepting, protecting, and empowering refugees is a win-win-win formula: for the refugees themselves, for the country of destination, and for the country of origin.

It is a win for the refugees for obvious reasons: The earlier a state commits to protecting refugees, the earlier they can move forward with their lives, without uncertainty blocking the way. Most importantly, accepting them protects the most precious right of all: The right to live. Turning our backs to refugees in many cases could be fatal for them. Thus, accepting refugees—providing the most basic protection—is, in many cases, lifesaving.

Accepting refugees is also a win for the receiving country and the communities that host them. By providing them with the right to work, to health, and to education, refugees can start productive lives in their host countries. The faster they can integrate into the labor force, the faster they can become productive members of society.

Are you worried about all the job opportunities natives could lose to a refugee? Don’t be. Most migration economists agree that the presence of more foreigners in the labor force doesn’t hurt natives, mainly because natives and foreigners typically have a different set of skills and compete for different types of jobs—a fact recently corroborated using data on refugees resettled in the U.S. Moreover, native workers often do better in the presence of more migrants in the labor force because in response to more competition, natives usually specialize in better-paid jobs that migrants cannot always compete in (for instance, jobs that require perfect domain of the local language).

Finally, we know that migrants engage in entrepreneurship at much higher rates than natives . In the U.S., for example, while migrants are 15 percent of the population, they represent 25 percent of entrepreneurs. If you think about it, this should not really come as a surprise. The act of migrating (and even fleeing to further away countries, in the case of refugees) is associated with risk-taking behavior. Thus, migrants are more likely to take risks also in the business sphere, such as creating a new venture. By creating new businesses, migrants also create new jobs for everyone. Small firms, in turn, are the engines of job growth. In the U.S., they create about 1.5 million jobs every year.

Receiving countries can benefit in more ways, too. Refugees could play a fundamental role in fostering international trade and investment . Since they know the business environment quite well, they can mediate between business people in both countries who are willing to invest in the local community and trade with local businesses. Therefore, these refugees can move the needle when it comes to integrating their communities in global markets in robust ways.

What about origin countries? They can also benefit immensely in the medium- to long-term from the resettlement of their citizens as refugees in foreign countries. First, the countries of origin also benefit from the creation of business networks between them and the countries where the refugees were resettled. For developing countries overcoming conflict, the flow of investment could be crucial for recovery. In addition to these business networks, the refugees can play a significant role in transferring technologies and knowledge back home , which translates into more competitive and diversified economies. In ongoing research with several co-authors, we show how, for instance, the nations that emerged from the former Yugoslavia hugely benefited from the knowledge and experience gained by Bosnian, Croat, and Serb refugees who temporarily resettled in Germany during the war of the early 1990s.

More generally, even if a refugee is not a regular migrant (refugees are forced to flee, as opposed to many migrants who choose to do so), the studies have shown that the economic benefits of migration also apply when focusing on refugees. This is because, similarly to migrants—and regardless of the reason that originated their move—they still bring a different set of skills than natives, which can be key to creating business networks and knowledge diffusion.

Naturally, as in any other change that affects the economy (regulation, reforms, external shocks, etc.) integrating refugees into the labor force  might  result in some people being worse-off in the short term, even when the aggregate gains are positive. But that speaks to the need for having proper safety nets in place, and not to rejecting refugees. Overall, if given the right protections and support, refugees can be an asset—not a burden—for all countries involved. Therefore, accepting and protecting refugees is not only morally right, but also the smart thing to do.

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• Afghanistan

The One Story That Captures the Immigrant Experience Like No Other

S ometimes the best take on current affairs is found not in the punditry of the cable shows but in great literature. Watching the horrific scenes in Kabul—the anguish of parents handing their babies to soldiers, the bodies falling from planes—made me reach for something deeper, more profound, that could help me understand the human dimensions. So I re-read ‘Kabuliwallah’, a story written by the Indian Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore in 1892. It’s became a phenomenon in India: it’s a part of school syllabi all across the country, has been made into numerous films in multiple Indian languages, and still shapes popular Indian attitudes towards Afghans. It makes me cry every single time I read it. It is one of the greatest stories about the migrant experience every written, and it deserves a global audience outside India—particularly now. And, come to think of it, it deserves to be re-read in India now, which is experiencing a government-led upsurge of fear and hatred of Afghan Muslim refugees.

The most harrowing image from the evacuation of Kabul was the hundreds of people clinging to the giant U.S. Air Force plane as it takes off. At least two of them held on until the plane took off, and fell from it—two tiny black dots crudely circled in red in a Twitter post. What desperation made them cling to a plane taking off into the sky? What do they dream of , who do they love? ‘Kabuliwallah’ provides some of the answers—and also raises other questions, about the complex attitudes of hosts to migrants.

‘Kabuliwallah’ is a story, not about a political refugee, but about someone who has to leave his troubled land to find work and to support his family. On a planet on the move, whether you’re slotted as a refugee, migrant, expatriate, or tourist, can mean, literally, the difference between life and death. Etymology is destiny.

There are no perfect English translations of the story, but read this version first if you’d rather not know the plot. (The story is on p. 113 of this collection, which can be downloaded on Kindle.) Here’s another translation, available online. Last year, the Hindustan Times newspaper and Juggernaut Books organized a readathon of the story featuring 18 of India’s top celebrities.

The story begins with gentle comedy: the narrator, a writer, keeps being disturbed in his study by the prattle of his five-year-old daughter, Mini. Down the lane comes a ‘Kabuliwallah’—Rahamat, an Afghan peddling dry fruits and nuts, a seasonal migrant common all over India when such a thing was possible, coming to sell his wares from the mountains to the dusty plains of British India. Mini finds him the one person willing to give her his undivided attention, and they become friends. He tells her jokes, makes elephant imitations, brings her treats. What does this giant Afghan see in this little girl?

The writer and Rahamat discussed the 19th-century political situation in Afghanistan. “We talked about Abdur Rahman’s efforts to preserve the integrity of Afghanistan against the Russians and the British.”

Around the time the story was written, these two superpowers were busy playing ‘The Great Game’, creating Afghanistan as a buffer between their empires. The Durrand Line , established in 1893—one year after Tagore’s story came out—was a one-page piece of paper that still lies like a giant dagger severing the tribal Pashtun homeland. Then, as now, Afghans were forced to flee or seek work outside their country due to the machinations of great powers.

But Mini’s mother is suspicious of the foreigner, and her fears are reflected in today’s Republican talking points against admitting Afghan refugees: they steal, they kidnap small children. They could be terrorists. They’re untrustworthy.

“If I tried to laugh off her suspicions, she would launch into a succession of questions: ‘So do people’s children never go missing? And is there no slavery in Afghanistan? Is it completely impossible for a huge Afghan to kidnap a little child?’”

Rahamat is not the “perfect refugee.” In a fight with an Indian customer who tries to lie his way out of paying for a shawl he’s bought—a common experience for migrant workers who find themselves cheated out of wages by native employers—he stabs the customer, and is thrown into jail. The family forgets all about their Afghan friend, including the adorable little girl; she could be America after we’ve had our playtime with Afghanistan: “As for the fickle Mini, even her father would have to admit that her behavior was not very praiseworthy. She swiftly forgot her old friend.”

The father, too, has complex attitudes towards the fruit-peddler. He’s never been outside of Calcutta, and lives vicariously through Rahamat, daydreaming of caravans slowly making their way through high mountain passes. But he, too, fears the Afghan: the violence and chaos of his homeland that he might bring into his safe Calcutta existence.

Rahamat reappears at the house eight years later, freshly released from jail, on a day which happens to be Mini’s wedding day. He wants to see her. But her father is afraid of the ex-con, and tells him to leave the house. Rahamat has a gift for Mini: a box of grapes, nuts and raisins. The writer takes the box, and is about to pay him, and Rahamat holds his hand. “Please, don’t give me any money—I shall always be grateful, Babu. Just as you have a daughter, so do I have one, in my own country. It is with her in mind that I came with a few raisins for your daughter: I didn’t come to trade with you.”

“Then he put a hand inside his big loose shirt and took out from somewhere close to his heart a crumpled sheet of paper. Unfolding it very carefully, he spread it out on my table. There was a small handprint on the paper; not a photograph, not a painting—the hand had been rubbed with some soot and pressed down on to the paper. Every year Rahamat carried this memento of his daughter in his breast-pocket when he came to sell raisins in Calcutta’s streets: as if the touch of that soft, small, childish hand brought solace to his huge, homesick breast. My eyes swam at the sight of it. I forgot then that he was an Afghan raisin-seller and I was a Bengali babu. I understood then that he was as I am, that he was a father just as I am a father.”

I would urge every American or European or Indian fearful of the coming Afghan refugee horde to read Tagore’s story. It might confirm your fears—the refugee could, like Rahamat, be violent in the defense of his rights (even though immigrants commit crimes at far lower rates than the native born). But it might also ease them. Because in the end, what changes hearts isn’t statistics about crime rates, or even a news story; it is empathy, which is the province of literature.

Mini has become Rahamat’s replacement daughter. And this too rings true: immigrants, far from their own children, often take care of other people’s children, and love them as their own, as any immigrant nanny will tell you. Alone in the strange land, the parental impulse needs more of an outlet than ever.

I, too, am a parent, of two grown sons, and they are not the same as when they were children. The story of parenthood is one of continuous loss: when you stop being the center of your child’s world and “she even stopped coming to her father’s study”, when she goes to school for the first time, when she’s more interested in spending Saturday nights with her friends than with you; when she leaves home altogether for college, to get married. But most of us experience this loss in stages, over years. The refugee parent fleeing from the tyrant regime loses family all at once, in the space of a five-hour flight to Qatar. He might be forced to leave his children behind—or choose which of them to take with him and which to leave behind. He experiences an exponential version of the loss that all of us feel when our kids go to college or get married and move away.

Part of the reason the Biden Administration didn’t move quicker on evacuating the Afghans who’d risked their lives to help us during the war was fear of a political backlash at home. The Indian government has, if anything, an even worse record. It was very happy to send advisors and aid to friendly Afghan regimes after the Taliban fell—as part of the new Great Game it’s playing with Pakistan. The Hindu-nationalist BJP government did evacuate Hindu and Sikh Afghans, but reportedly was less enthusiastic about Muslims. Tagore, a firm believer in religious plurality, and writer of both the Indian and Bangladeshi national anthems, would be ashamed.

The parts of the world where people meet immigrants face to face every day—like London, like New York—are also the most open to them. Conversely, the places where migrants are seen as thieves, child-nappers, are also the places with least personal experience of them. You meet the feared Afghan or Salvadoran or Vietnamese refugee, and witness his devotion to family. And you realize, “he is a father just like I am a father.” Literature, in the great humanist tradition of ‘Kabuliwallah’, can be as powerful as a personal interaction.

I have met these Kabuliwallahs in many countries: selling fruit in Calcutta, where I was born; driving taxis in Berlin; cooking kebabs in Queens. And now the global Afghan diaspora is due to increase dramatically—and the countries where they settle will be the better for it. We need to see the people climbing on to the moving planes as more than dots in the sky. They are full and complete human beings, each one of them capable of love and loss, carrying the handprint or photo or locket of their child, their mother, their wife, close, so close, to their hearts.

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Refugee Research Online

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• Critical Scholarship

Essay: How should we define refugees?

“A Proper Conception of refugeehood is an important matter” – Shacknove (1985, 276 ).  

In this piece, I offer a critical look at the scholarly discussion on how to define refugees, prompted by a Deutsche Welle (2020) report on the Moria refugee camp in Greece, which was set on fire in September 2020. Thousands fled from the camp and were left without a roof over their head on the isle of Lesbos. This incident shows that many people who have been resettled as refugees in their host country are still suffering from difficult living conditions.

I foreground that existing academic definitions of refugees, as a response to the curtailed legal understanding, do not yet capture refugees who have settled in the hosting countries and are still bearing unpleasant living condition in refugee camps. I will provide an adapted academic definition after the exploration of different academic conceptions of refugees.

In terms of legal understanding, the 1951 United Nations Convention defines a refugee as any person who, “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country” (Article 1A2). However, this is a narrow legal understanding of refugees and in response,  the 1969 Organization of African Unity Refugee Convention adds that a refugee is also any person compelled to leave their habitual county owing to reason of external aggression such as foreign domination and occupation.

In the academic scope, Shacknove (1985) and Kukathas (2016) share a similar view concerning the narrow definition on refugees by the 1951 United Nations Convention. Both challenge the idea that persecution based on race, religion, nationality and political and social membership and being outside their country of habitual residence should be the only requirements for considering someone a refugee.

An academic definition must specify that refugees often still bear a hazardous life because their basic needs are not fulfilled to allow them to enjoy a better life in the host country.

I first highlight three academic definitions, naming them definition A, B, and C. Definition A emphasizes the unimportance of locational positions as the requirement of valid international protection. Therefore, qualifying as refugee does not necessarily require a person to cross an international frontier ( Shacknove 1985, 227 ). This means that crossing  international borders cannot be a necessary determinant for refugeehood therefore definition A opposes Article 1A2 of the 1951 United Nations Convention, which defines refugees as people who are fleeing from persecution and being outside their country of habitual residence.

Definition A is in line with open border positions saying that “there is really nothing special about the category of refugees […] refugees are the product of the partition of the world into states that control the movement across borders […]” ( Duarte et al. 2018 ). The reason is that if there was no such assumed state right to draw borders, there would be no ‘refugee’ category.

Definition B, provided by Kukathas (2016) , is an endeavour to clear the path for refugees as being unique. Kukathas uses the term ‘asylum seekers’ to describe refugees: “people seeking asylum are […] special enough to be viewed as more substantial concerns in the calculus of value than immigrants of any other stripes” ( Kukathas 2016, 253 ). He contrasts refugees with economic migrants who also want to flee from their home country for economic reasons. According to Kukathas, one qualification for the uniqueness of refugees is to deem the suffering of refugees to be greater than that of economic migrants but this account falls short because the suffering evaluation is a matter of moral judgement and relative to the circumstances.

In my view, if we closely scrutinise a less particular idea of suffering, it could be found that economic migrants often experience suffering that is comparable to the suffering of people seeking asylum. In turn, differentiation based on perceptions of a hierarchy of suffering – where economic migrants are assumed to be less deserving of protection – cannot reliably determine if a person has a legitimate claim for refugee status. After all, one can be both a refugee and an economic migrant.

Kukhatas (2016) argues that an optimal solution is to admit that the plight of refugees is more severe than of economic migrants with the emphasis that “only those outside their home countries fearing persecution for very particular reason might qualify” ( Kukathas 2016, 258 ).  Kukhatas adheres to the conservative reading of the 1951 UN Convention on refugees for those who owe to well-founded fear of persecution and are outside the habitual country.

Definition C says that “refugees are, in essence, persons whose basic needs are unprotected by their country of origin, who have no remaining recourse other than to seek international restitution of their needs and who are so situated that international assistance is possible” ( Shacknove 1985, 277 ). The basic needs referenced here are about the vital subsistence refugees require to survive. This covers not only shelter, food, minimal preventive health service but also other factors that can contribute to the provision of sustenance, such as freedom of movement and freedom of political participation. The latter belongs to the security needs which refer to the need for law, structure and order ( Narvaez 2018, 4 ) – all of which are essential for a good government.

One possible critique could be made that such a definition would lead to disasters because “half of the world will become bonafide refugees overnight” ( Shacknove 1985, 281 ). It might also be viewed as failing to see the real situations where countries have borders and therefore, it will be determined by the host state whether to permit entry or not. It is therefore unrealistic to expect that all refugees who are still residing in their country of origin, and whose basic needs are unmet, will be granted refugee status in a host country.

The understanding of refugees explicated in the definition above forgoes those who have already been granted refugee status and have been abandoned either in the host country or detained outside their habitual country. In my opinion, there is one crucial element for qualifying as a refugee which is missed in academic definitions A, B, and C. An academic definition must specify that refugees often still bear a hazardous life because their basic needs are not fulfilled to allow them to enjoy a better life in the host country. This not only places emphasis on those who are already residing in their host country, but also subsumes those who have been legally admitted as refugees but are still facing lengthy waits in detention centres, before they can be resettled in the community.

The case of the refugees in Moria is a good illustration of this as they are left unsheltered in the host country and seem to be left out of the academic definition of refugees. This critical eye leaves us with a new outlook – that the understanding of the refugee cannot just vanish when a refugee is already residing in a host country where they might still be suffering. This adapted definition of refugees can have practical implications in relation to the treatment of refugees in the country where they are relocated.

About Author/s

Mikael M. Soge

Mikael Migu Soge comes from the Island of Flores in the eastern Part of Indonesia. He is alumnus from the Catholic Institute of Philosophy in Ledalero, Indonesia. Currently, he is taking his Master’s in Philosophy of Contemporary Challenges at Tilburg University, The Netherlands (2020-2021).

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Community, History, Imperialism, Literary World, Literature, Race, Refugees, Oral History

Literary Spotlight: “The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives”

September 23, 2021

By Nithya Rajan

The Displaced is a collection of seventeen short stories by writers who are refugees. Edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, each story narrates the writers' experiences of displacement from many countries—Việt Nam, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Ukraine, Mexico, Ethiopia, Bosnia, fleeing varied circumstances— genocide, poverty, war, state repression, and civil war, of their journeys through different routes, transit points and destinations; journeys that, as one of the authors, Maaza Mengiste, puts it, “break a human being and rearrange them inside” (135). Together these stories challenge singular narratives about displacement and “of perpetual crisis and suffering” in the Global South (Tshuma, 160). The collection compels the reader to see beyond the monolithic figure of the refugee and past alarmist tropes about the “faceless masses” (Hemon 92) who are perpetually breaching “our” borders. It presents complex portraits of our times, in which displacement is no longer an anomaly but omnipresent. And yet, very rarely do we get to hear stories of displacement from refugees, unmediated by the agendas of humanitarian organizations, states, media, or the global refugee regime. The Displaced testifies to the power of storytelling and argues for the need to read and listen to these stories, which retell the circumstances or the journeys of becoming a refugee and what they have lost or left behind, but also, of the pained and continued violences of the new home. 

While the collection embodies the deep diversity of refugee experiences, the contradictions, paradoxes, or impossibilities of being a refugee is a thread that runs through many of the stories. In “New Lands, New Selves,” Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, writes about the impetus placed on refugees to be exceptional, as the “crime of being deemed ordinary or mediocre” makes you unworthy of entry/refuge (168). However, Dina Nayeri insists in her story, 

“The Ungrateful Refugee,” that refugees also have to be “less capable than the native, needier; he must stay in his place” (149). In his story, “Last, First, Middle,” Joseph Azam writes of becoming Joseph from Yousaf when he enrolled in school in America, and that while it had liberated him from the immigrant self-gaze that consumed him, “it also felt like death” (31). In “Refugees and Exiles,” Marina Lewycka attests to the kindness shown to her by British people who had, nonetheless, also marked her as not “one of them” (127). Listing many such contradictions of being a refugee, Vu Tran concludes, “that space between what is real and imaginary is ultimately where the refugee resides” (155). What powerfully emerges through these stories is that one never ceases to be a refugee, even long after refuge has been found. Reyna Grande sums this up poetically in her story of crossing the US-Mexico border as a child, “for the rest of your life, you carry the border inside of you” (77). 

      In the context of Trumpism, Brexit, the resurgence of right-wing nationalisms across the world, anti-immigrant sentiments, and refugee-phobia, this collection offers storytelling as a political act. In The Displaced , writing and remembering are political because the stories are told not only to convey the sufferings and irrevocability of being a refugee, but also, as Nguyen writes in the introduction, to allow those of us who were once refugees “to feel for those now displaced” (18). In these acts of remembering, authors acknowledge how drastically the terms and conditions of refuge have changed, globally. For example, as Grande recounts the trauma of family separation and “illegally” crossing the US-Mexico border, in “The Parents Who Stay,” she acknowledges, “If I arrived at the border today seeking asylum, I would have the door slammed in my face” (79). Ultimately, the question that Tran takes up in his contribution to the collection– “What is a refugee?” (152) –is answered in various ways by the authors in the volume, but also left unanswered and unsettled for interrogation. 

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October 10, 2021 • 11:21 PM

Good article.sums up in a nutshell the innermost feelings of a refugee.

June 2, 2022 • 1:40 PM

I have read the Sympathizer, so it is interesting to see the same author releasing short stories. This will be monumental for refugee communities as you are getting to hear their own stories narrated by them, instead of sob stories produced by political media and humanitarian efforts. Its the raw stories produced by the refugees themselves and highlights their own experiences after being silenced for so long.

Jonathan Cruz

June 3, 2022 • 8:50 PM

Amazing blog post! I feel you did a phenomenal job in explaining the significance of unveiling “forgotten history.” One thing emulated in your post that I could not ignore, mentioning Yousaf changed his name to Joseph. From seeking refuge and having to change your name to avoid any stigma. That stuck with me in particular as a student at a University, I encounter many students from different countries. Although they may not be refugees, many adopt an “American” name in order to be “accepted,” Who are we to take anyone’s name, livelihood, or culture away?

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February 16, 2023 • 11:08 AM

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