Migration Is an Act of Desperation, Not a Crime

Posted on May 14, 2015

By Sonali Kolhatkar

Immigrants from Myanmar rest at a temporary immigration detention center in Langkawi, Malaysia, on Tuesday. About 1,600 Rohingya and Bangladeshi refugees landed in Malaysia and Indonesia over the course of the day, after human traffickers apparently abandoned their ships and left the passengers to fend for themselves. (AP / Vincent Thian)

A father from Ivory Coast wanted to reunite his son with the rest of his family living in Spain. But the Spanish government denied him a family reunification visa. Desperate, he paid a Moroccan woman to smuggle his 8-year-old onto Spanish soil. On May 7, 2015, she attempted to do so by placing the boy, tightly folded into a fetal position, inside a carry-on suitcase and traveling to Spain. When airport authorities noticed she was nervous, they X-rayed her bag and were shocked to find the child.
Imagine the boy’s ordeal.
Imagine the father’s desperation.

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It is situations like these, multiplied by the millions, that are playing out all over the world, in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and elsewhere. Driven by war and poverty, millions of people are on the move, risking their lives to escape desperate circumstances. Unfortunately, the response from elites is to trap them, by putting them in jail or criminalizing traffickers and militarizing sea routes.
The Norwegian Refugee Council and Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre released a report in early May revealing that there were 38 million internally displaced people last year alone, nearly 5 million more than the year before. The record-breaking number includes 11 million refugees who were newly displaced and clustered in the Middle East and Africa, including Syria, South Sudan, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Council Secretary-General Jan Egeland said, “These are the worst figures for forced displacement in a generation, signaling our complete failure to protect innocent civilians.”
The number of people living outside their home countries is even higher. In 2013, the latest year for which statistics are available, the United Nations found that 232 million people are migrants or refugees, or, in effect, “externally displaced” people.
In the case of the boy smuggled into Spain in a suitcase, authorities simply arrested the father and placed the boy in protective custody, dashing any hopes for reunifying their family. This is a typical response. Instead of exploring what drives the desperation of migrants, authorities lock them up or threaten them with force.
Each week there is news of migrants stranded at sea, dying in large numbers, or locked up in prisons. In recent days, about 2,000 migrants were found off the shores of Indonesia and Malaysia, hailing from Bangladesh and the Rohingya community in Myanmar. They were rescued from several boats. The Rohingya are a community of Muslims from the northern region of Myanmar called Rakhine. They have been persecuted to such an extent that many consider them the victims of attempted genocide. The migrants had apparently been stranded by traffickers and told to swim ashore. In interviews, they said they had been at sea for two months and were extremely hungry and weak. They were headed to Malaysia and Thailand to find work. Thailand has been rocked by the recent discovery of mass graves of migrants, and in fact has been cracking down on immigration over the past several years.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, about 25,000 Bangladeshis and Rohingya from Myanmar attempted to migrate by sea during the first three months of 2015, twice the number from last year. Very little coverage of the persecution of Rohingya people in particular makes it into the U.S. media. President Obama lauded Myanmar as a “success story” during his visit there last year, effectively dismissing concerns over Rohingya persecution.

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/migration_is_an_act_of_desperation_not_a_crime_20150514