Refugees Will Always Exist, and Not Always from Third-World Countries
Dispelling a false mental image
When you hear the word ‘refugee’ a lot of people picture brown immigrants from so-called ‘third world’ countries.
That’s the image built in our minds after decades of propaganda and charitable ad campaigns online. Poverty Porn is a surprisingly handy tool at shaping our cultural expectations and beliefs. When you scratch the surface and actually look into the imagery that it presents, you find out that it rarely ever shows the full picture.
By the same token, the constant depiction of refugees as being from ‘other’ places in the world completely ignores reality as well. For example — what if I told you that one of the largest refugee crises in modern American history wasn’t due to immigrants coming in from other countries?
Rather, it was desperate white Americans fleeing unlivable conditions in their own home states. It took place during the Dust Bowl, when huge swathes of the U.S. and Canada became completely uninhabitable and hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee their homes and migrate across the country.
There was another refugee crisis here in Canada only a few years ago, when British Columbia dealt with severe wildfires that quite literally wiped entire towns off of the landscape.
We weren’t equipped for either of those calamities. Resettlement and rebuilding is hard, and takes a lot of time and money. The poor and marginalized always get the worst of it.
I was inspired to talk about this today by what’s happening in California right now. Over the past few days, around 50,000 people were rapidly evacuated from an area surrounding a chemical plant that was in danger of exploding.
Today, the danger has significantly reduced and so has the size of the evacuation zone. Still, this is just one example of a very real refugee situation from our own proverbial backyard.
It just isn’t talked about as a refugee situation, because it’s Americans staying within America. We define refugee as a person who has fled their home country, typically for fear of persecution and oppression.
But recently, a new term has become more and more common. ‘Climate Refugee.’
It’s exactly what it says on the tin.
Climate Refugees have always existed; fleeing your home due to violence has exactly the same impact as fleeing your home due to a natural disaster, we just think of it differently when it’s a so-called ‘act of God’ versus an act of human cruelty.
But now that man-caused Climate Change is creating unlivable conditions worldwide, how can we continue to define Climate Refugees as victims of nature?
Isn’t it now clear that this is also a form of human cruelty? We could have prevented a lot of this, and we chose not to because the profit potential in the short term was too high to pass up.
I think ‘Climate Refugee’ is a bit redundant. I think if you’re fleeing your home because the situation is completely untenable and you simply can’t stay, you count as a refugee. I think we need to tweak our definition and our cultural imagery to match this.
Until we make it real and personal, I think people who have the power to take action on these issues will keep on pretending it isn’t a problem.
As long as it’s happening to other people somewhere else, then they don’t have to care.
But we should all care. It’s only a matter of time before we become refugees ourselves in this crazy, fucked-up world we live in. The more we prepare to provide aid when needed, the better off we’ll all be.
No matter where we come from, we’re all equally human and deserve compassion.
Solidarity wins.