While much of the West started paying serious attention to the refugee crisis in 2015, it’s been an ongoing issue for decades, with Europe becoming the place where people from across the Middle East and Northern Africa flee in the homes of finding sanctuary. The sheer volume of refugees has increased radically in the last year thanks to troubling and escalating political trends, but let’s not…
The issue here, though, isn’t that refugees are creating political pressure and pushing Europe to the right as people react to those who are seeking shelter. The problem is that right wing politicians who have been patiently lining up the dominos for decades are seeing an opening through xenophobia, especially Islamophobia, and they’re taking advantage of it to push their agendas…
Refugees never had a chance in Europe, and now, they’re becoming the sacrificial lambs of a right that isn’t just hoping to exclude refugees. It’s also hoping to roll back social policies ranging from open borders to healthcare to measures to improve diverse representations in government. And the same phenomenon is playing out in the United States, where many extremists are taking lessons from Europe’s playbook to slowly but steadily build a case against refugees, and to use it to take down other rights as well. We are living in an era where it is considered not just acceptable but necessary to discriminate against those most in need.
Today, it’s refugees being used as a fig leaf for promoting and successfully pushing through horrific social policies. And we should be rising in defense of refugees, because dehumanising people is wrong. But tomorrow, it’s going to be other vulnerable social groups as well — the same ones the right has been attacking all along, now made even easier to attack by the fact that attacks on refugees will strip social protections away.
Italy is attempting to impose a code of conduct on NGOs operating ships in the search and rescue zone off the coast of Libya, which is now the main launching point for migrants trying to reach Europe on smugglers’ boats.
Humanitarian groups have argued the code will impede their workby banning the transfer of refugees to larger ships, which allows vessels to continue rescues, and forcing them to allow police officers on board.
Aiming to deter migrants from crossing the Mediterranean, the EU and its member states pulled back from rescue at sea at the end of 2014, leading to record numbers of deaths. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) were forced to deploy their own rescue missions in a desperate attempt to fill this gap and reduce casualties. Today, NGOs are under attack, wrongly accused of ‘colluding with smugglers’, ‘constituting a pull-factor’ and ultimately endangering migrants. This report refutes these accusations through empirical analysis. It is written to avert a looming catastrophe: if NGOs are forced to stop or reduce their operations, many more lives will be lost to the sea.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 