Refugee Perspectives on Migration Policy: Lessons from the Middle East (original) (raw)
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The current refugee crisis is one of the most acute issues in Europe, and has become a serious problem. It stems from the Arab Spring movement from December 2011, which resulted in many regional upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), most importantly the on-going Syrian civil war. The eruption of civil war in Syria drew sectarian and terrorist conflict into the country from neighboring Iraq, attracting regional intervention by Turkey and Iran and global involvement by the US, Russia and their allies. The result is that millions of people have fled their homeland to live in neighboring countries, but the unsafely of the whole region, particularly Syria and Iraq due to the advance of Daesh from 2014, has caused most refugees to attempt to move to Europe to avoid the Palestinian trap of living as stateless persons in refugee camps for decades (Independent, 2015).
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Social Europe, 2019
The worrying lack of condemnation from EU politicians in relation to the recent mistreatment of refugees should not come as a surprise. Europe (and much of the western world) finds itself in a period of ‘permanent electoral campaign’. Politicians closely monitor public opinion on their respective records, relying on surveys and polling—even treating their popularity on ‘social media’ as a sign of success.
This paper should be taken as a semi-fictive and critical effort aimed at making the reader feel the refugee ‘other’ and thus battling systematic violence, inequality and discrimination present in the current ‘refugee crisis.’ The particular refugee whose memoirs are recorded on these pages, Ahmad Waleed Rahimi, is in fact a composite, rather than a real person. Ahmad was born out of numerous interviews with refugees of all sorts of nationalities, genders, classes and ethnicities. The narrative follows the commonest themes and concerns I heard in these open-ended and semi-structured interviews. Indeed, the motifs reproduced in this paper have come up in most if not all the interviews. I decided not to use the narrative of a single person for two reasons. First, I wanted to be sure of protecting any one refugee’s identity and security. In the present circumstances, even a record of a refugee passing through a specific place at a specific time could potentially result in push-backs and deportation – no academic would want to be liable for endangering any refugee’s journey and safety. Secondly, my goal was to provoke rather than represent, describe rather than analyse. Thus, I aimed at achieving the great depth of the refugee experience, which can more easily be achieved through multiple voices condensed into one than through the lone voice of a single refugee. I understood and accepted the problematics of such an approach, which reduces the multiplicity of contradictory experiences to a single experience. However, while I would not necessarily take this approach in researching other social groups, I found it strikingly beneficial and constructive in representing the reality of a refugee’s life along the Western Balkan route. Throughout my research, one observation would always dominate the field: in order to regulate and govern movement and migration, the EU turns plurality into a body. Hence the title, ‘Tell Me How You Move, And I Will Tell You Where You Are From’: by channelling the refugee flow in a particular way, Europe establishes refugees as particular types of subjects, as non-European, non-liberal, undocumented and undeserving subjects. Thus, I found that the plurality of refugees can indeed be condensed into a refugee body, the body of an Ahmad Waleed Rahimi, who narrates the everyday situations and events of an average European refugee-citizen. Admittedly, there are clear political reasons behind this kind of work. The EU is, for the first time, reacting to a global impact in an utterly uncoordinated and disintegrating fashion. Some talk about these circumstances as the end of the EU. Nonetheless the chaos of this crumbling system generates a need for new understandings. This, I believe, is the crucial moment in which we can redefine ‘Europeanness’ and accept refugees as the ‘New Europeans.’ In my opinion, the EU remains the most accomplished experiment in economic, social and political integration in human history, and the challenge of the present moment is to accept and integrate refugees as, not the European Other, but Europeans in the making. In this process, moreover, refugees are not Europe’s passive victims, but agents in its construction. It is important how we write history.